The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First of all, I would like to express my warmest greetings to you, who have come here as the teachers from our immediate neighborhood. I am convinced that those who take an active interest in our Goetheanum and everything , will join me in wholeheartedly welcoming you on behalf of this Goetheanum and its workers and in expressing our great joy at having you here as our guests.

It has been suggested that I should discuss a few things that have emerged, and in some cases already been put into practice, in the wake of our spiritual scientific endeavors for the pedagogical arts and for the school system, before our eurythmic performance.

But before that, let me make a more general comment.

You see, what is to emerge from our anthroposophically intended spiritual science in pedagogical and didactic terms still has, in principle, few truly understanding representatives in the world today; it has all the more uncomprehending opponents and just as many people who, due to the general state of mental sleep of humanity today, are indifferent to such endeavors. But just in the very last days, things have happened that may be considered as, I would say, a sign, as on the one hand, so to speak, through lonely personalities from the whole breadth of our civilized life, the outlook is opened up to what is to happen from this Goetheanum building in Dornach. I must describe it as an important fact, even if only as a symptom, that the old professor Spitta in Tübingen, who is so well known to us, and who has concluded his teaching activities in these days, has given his last lecture in such a way that it culminated in a discussion of the most eminent spiritual-scientific truth: the truth of repeated earth lives. But not so much that this university teacher, at the solemn moment of the conclusion of his university career, once again professed what he had actually held all his life – that does not even seem as significant to me as the other thing, that he said at this lecture: Gentlemen, just imagine what it would mean for human knowledge and, above all, for human action in the future if this view were to become more widespread. It is a significant mark of a man who has grown old in science and in the philosophy of the present day when he concludes his teaching career with such a confession! For one can well imagine that the terrible events of the time have made a very deep impression on such a personality and that precisely such a personality, in lonely thought, feels the need to say what could help today's declining humanity from the spirit, from the soul, which in turn could lead to a revival.

You see, that is what I would like to say from one side: wherever there are discerning, feeling souls, the views that are represented here in a scientific context and that are also expected here to flow into all civilizational life of our time, can be seen at least as intuitions, which from here want to be represented in a scientific context and which are also expected here to be able to counteract the decline with a new dawn.

But these are flashes of light that arise in isolated places. Those who observe them will perceive them as rare flashes of light, but they will recognize from them the striving, especially among the best of our time, for a renewal of spiritual life from very, very deep sources of the soul. This is, however, opposed by what arises today out of a certain not only drowsiness, but, to put it mildly, out of an enormous superficiality of our time; which arises out of a superficiality that often leads to frivolity, especially in circles that are publicly active in journalism, with regard to the great questions of existence and human life. And after I have shown you a flash of light, I would also like to show you, so to speak, some of the shadows, which, however, do not occur in isolation, but are widespread. I could cite hundreds of facts in support of the last assertion; but I will now present only one particularly characteristic one.

One of our English friends has endeavored to arouse interest in London for what is to take place here in Dornach. He tried to place a very truthful and objective little article in what appears to be a respected journal – there are many such journals and newspapers at present. The journalist, who listened to the matter, with whom the gentleman in question was, a journalist from London, was very friendly and extremely accommodating. He promised to advocate the matter in such a way that a visit from about as many people as are here today to give us the pleasure of being here should be arranged from London. The journalist in question then said something about how transformative what he had been told was. I would like to read you something about this transformation as a document of the frivolity with which people speak today of that which they do not know — for the journalist naturally had no idea of what is going on here in Dornach. Something like this shows how little people today are inclined to respond at all when something wants to assert itself from a source that honestly believes it can counter decline with an ascent. So the following appears in a London magazine as the result of this interview, which the journalist conducted favorably:

Remarks and comments

A School of Spiritual Science

A School of Spiritual Science has been established at the Goetheanum in Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland. The building itself exemplifies a new concept of art initiated by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. It is planned to organize a trip to Basel to visit it, and Dr. Steiner has promised to personally instruct the participants during the ten-day visit, which is to take place in August. Assuming that the trip takes four days, it will be possible for the participants to recover from the shock of the first sight of Dr. Steiner's creation during the remaining six days. Assuming that no one who can make the journey wants to miss out on what we expect will be an interesting experience, we will provide an illustration of what awaits participants at the end of their pilgrimage, and if any of our readers are going to travel, we hope that they will do us the favor of sharing their impressions with us upon their return.” [«The Architect», No. 34, London July 16, 1920]

So you see, this is how you treat something you don't know. This is the mood of the world today, these are the difficulties we have to fight against.

Now, my dear attendees, spiritual science is there for many and it should – this will be shown above all in our autumn course, which is to open on 26 September – exert a fruitful influence on all possible branches of spiritual life. In spring, a more limited course here already showed how the medical-therapeutic field can be enriched by spiritual science. And it is the same for the most diverse fields. The outer form of the building itself is intended to bear witness to what can be artistically attempted through spiritual science that can be absorbed into our perceptions. But today I want to speak to you about the consequences that spiritual science can have in the field of education and teaching. I am not speaking to you about some kind of program that we would not give a damn about, nor am I speaking to you about some kind of theoretical pedagogical discussion. I am speaking to you about something that has already been put into practice during the school year at our “Freie Waldorfschule” in Stuttgart. This Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded by Emil Molt. Its initial aim was to bring to life in practice what can arise from a development of what can be found in our spiritual science, above all, for a real understanding of man and thus also of the child.

You see, it is particularly important to me that we already have a year of real school practice behind us. I attach particular importance to this because all of this spiritual science, as it is to be brought into the world from the Goetheanum in Dornach, would basically be nothing more than just another sectarian movement or some worldview theory or the like — there are already many such beautiful things in the world — if something else were not there; if this spiritual science, in particular, did not want something completely different from everything that comes into the world in this way. This spiritual science does not want to produce ideas for a new world view; this spiritual science does not want to be some kind of theory or even a new religious confession, as it has been slanderously accused of — the latter least of all. What it wants to be was not originally conceived with reference to any religious confession, but rather it was conceived with the scientific way of thinking and attitude of our time in mind. It was conceived as that which can be brought forth by the human spirit and soul in the form of knowledge, just as natural science, which has been so fruitful for our time, has been brought forth as knowledge for physical life. And this spiritual science is based on the fact that if one applies the right methods, which I have described in my books “The Secret Science in the Outline” and “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?”, one is able to gain just as certain knowledge, so enclosed, contoured knowledge about soul and spirit, as one can gain through the scientific methods of the present for the physical world.

However, the work that needs to be done to arrive at spiritual scientific knowledge in a truly methodical way is no more comfortable or easier than the work that needs to be done in a chemistry or physics laboratory, at an observatory, or in a clinic. Just because people imagine that anthroposophical researchers are people who conjure up all kinds of ideas that can be had quickly, that are quickly drawn from the imagination - just because people imagine this, that is why they misunderstand the paths that are to be taken from anthroposophy into the spiritual world. If one familiarizes oneself with the way in which man, in a self-education of his entire being, can alone come to open up within himself views of the spiritual world that are just as exact and certain as the results of natural science; only if one informs oneself about how long it takes to research relatively small, insignificant truths that are added to external-physical knowledge - let us say, for example, for the doctrine of human sense, for human anatomy or the like; only if one realizes how decades of research are often necessary for the most trivial little things in the field of spiritual science: then one will learn to understand that research in this field is by no means more convenient and easier than research in the clinical field, in the observatory, in the physics or chemistry laboratory. But today one does not yet have the will to accept that there can be such research into the mind and soul.

The intentions that have emerged over the last three to four centuries, and particularly in the 19th century, for scientific knowledge have been great and powerful. And I do not need to tell you what this scientific knowledge has brought to the world. But there is one thing I would like to mention: that anyone who stands firmly on the ground of our anthroposophically-based spiritual science will be the very last to disparage anything legitimate in scientific research. Because that is the first thing to be considered: that only those who are not dabbling or even lay in the scientific work of today can stand firm in the field of our spiritual science. Only when one has acquired scientific conscientiousness and scientifically rigorous research methods in the laboratory, in the observatory and so on, when one has educated oneself to the exactitude of research, only then has one awakened in oneself the inner moral world-view that is necessary to become a spiritual researcher. In the outer world, as one says, one always has the rough reality before one, which corrects one. If I am a bad bridge builder in theory and calculate a bridge badly, then the falling train will teach me that I have built my bridge badly. And so the correction is always there if one wants to apply the laws seen by the spirit in the outer physical reality. However, the further we ascend from the lower foundations of physical reality and approach the actual research of mind and soul, the more precarious its exploration of reality becomes. And if you were as strict in judging a doctor who has to rebuild destroyed health as you are in judging nature when it corrects a bad mechanic by means of a crashing train, you would not be able to proceed in the same way according to today's view. Because as a mechanic you can be checked by nature. Whether someone has died despite or even because of medicine - that's where things get a little shakier! And when one reaches the spiritual and psychic spheres, one must bring with one's inner conscientiousness and, above all, the most earnest and strict sense of truth if one wants to conduct supersensible research, for then it is easy to mistake fantasy for reality.

But something very special happens when one acquires the method for spiritual research in this way through inner soul education and soul training. What happens is that one comes closer to the things of the world than one does as an external naturalist. For you see, that is precisely the remarkable thing about the more materialistic natural science of modern times: on the one hand, it places itself before the world of facts of the outer senses, but, by creating ideas for itself in natural laws, this outer sense world, it has increasingly become more and more intellectualized, theoretical, and divorced from reality, so that the newer researchers of worldviews no longer know how to connect the ideas they concoct with reality. They often research whether the ideas that man carries in his soul still have anything to do with external reality. This is the tragedy of the modern, scientifically oriented worldview: people may profess this worldview; they want to deal with reality, with mere external reality, and they come away from this external reality precisely through their ideas. They no longer have the living connection, the connection of the whole human being with living reality. They want to go for reality and grow out of reality. One arrives at abstract intellectualized soul content. And so it happens that the more man grows into materialism, the more he grows out of reality.

If one now sets out on the path of spiritual research, one immediately has the inner experience: you immerse yourself in reality; you do not just stand there looking at your object, but you immerse yourself in this reality with your entire soul life; you become one with reality. That is why spiritual science, as it is meant here, can never exist without one beginning to love and loving more and more the thing one wants to know. Spiritual science is at the same time something that, when it asserts itself in our soul, permeates us with love for the world; which cannot be at all, even though it strives for mathematical clarity in the formulation and shaping of ideas, without seizing the whole human being, the feeling and the will. Therefore, I may say: the practical testing of what follows pedagogically and didactically from spiritual science is actually the only thing that can be valuable to us. Because talking about something, no matter how beautiful the theories are, when you are alienated from what you are talking about: that is basically easy and is the task that numerous world-view people and confession founders set themselves today. What is wanted here has nothing to do with that. Rather, it is precisely this immersion in reality and especially human reality that arises quite naturally in the wake of this spiritual science through nature, through the essence of this spiritual science.

And so it comes about that, above all, what arises through this spiritual science is a more intimate knowledge of the human being itself. Such a recognition of the human being that the one who now stands before the developing human being, the child - before this wonderful world riddle that is born, that in the first days of its external existence shows us the wonderful construction of a physical organism out of the spiritual and soul in every moment , and then, as it grows up, shows us how everything is formed out of the inner being, out of the soul and spirit, that the person who is now confronted with this living mystery of the world, this developing human being, as a teacher or educator, grows together with his task in such a way that one can truly say: Spiritual science is then the fire through which love for education and teaching is directly awakened. That is the goal of all our striving here: to get to know the human being.

But we cannot get to know the human being without getting to know him as he is becoming. And if we really want to get to know the human being as he is becoming, then we even have to enrich our language with a new word. For those who look a little deeper into the reality of life, all the languages of European civilization have only one word for the fundamental fact of life, and there should be two! They have one word. Now, if we go back to primeval times, to those times of human life that only old documents speak of in a mythical way, then we find something similar to what we need again: when we speak of the eternal, of the indestructible in the human being, as opposed to the destructible, perishable body. We need another word to accompany our word 'immortality', which points to the physical end of life; we need the word 'unborn'. For just as we pass through the gate of death with our eternal, spiritual part and live on in the spiritual world – a different life that can be seen through by spiritual research – we also step out of the spiritual world before we are born or conceived here, down to this physical embodiment on earth. We not only pass through the gate of death as immortals, but also come through the gate of birth as the unborn. We need the word 'unborn' in addition to the word 'immortal' if we want to fully grasp the human being in his essence.

What I am hinting at here can be found in my writings, explained from all sides. I can only give you the main features, so to speak, because I want to show you what becomes of human life and human feeling if we want to make such a view fruitful.

Imagine a teacher who, like our Waldorf teachers in Stuttgart, has gone through everything that can be experienced when spiritual science is allowed to take effect on the soul. Imagine him standing before the developing human being, the child. He has not only a gray theory, he has this as a living purpose in life: he says to himself, “The souls have descended from spiritual worlds, these souls on which I now have to work.” And now, from the pedagogy and didactics that follow from spiritual science, knowledge is imparted to him about how these souls can be treated from year to year, from month to month. And I may perhaps give you an idea, since you are all educators of young people, based on a small detail, which in my case is the result of more than three decades of research. This idea, if it does not remain an idea, does not remain a thought, but when it becomes a living activity in the educator and teacher, it evokes a remarkably stimulating relationship between the teacher and the pupil, between the educator and the child to be educated. You see, today in psychology there is much talk about the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. And there are theories that say how soul and body are to interact. But these things are not studied. We do not have the method of spiritual science by which one can study these things. Because one has to study them in detail. You cannot talk about the relationship between the human soul and the body by rambling in generalities, but you have to know all the details. Details of the soul affect details of the human body. I will only hint at which of the individual ideas around which the matter revolves I actually mean.

We first observe the child before they start school. We know that they initially have what are known as milk teeth. From the age of six to eight, they then produce their permanent teeth. This is an extraordinarily important period in the life of someone who does not just observe the outer human being, but observes the whole human being through spiritual science. It is no coincidence that this period coincides with the one in which the child is handed over to the primary school. For what finally pushes through as teeth comes from forces that are present in the whole human being and are active in the whole human being; and that is, so to speak, the final point; when these second teeth appear, an end is put to something that has been active in the human organism until then. That which was active there has gone as far as the emergence of the teeth.

Now, anyone who observes human life more deeply will find that, from a certain stage of human life onwards, memory, and in particular the ability to combine and to imagine, takes on a very specific structure. What later becomes intellectual life particularly emerges from this stage of life onwards. And if we now follow what takes place in the soul and spirit of the child up to the point in time when the second teeth mainly shoot out, if we follow this quite appropriately, as one follows a natural object under the microscope, what becomes of the soul when the teeth are out? then you discover that it is the same power that first flooded and permeated the organism and then emancipated itself from the organism and became free in the soul to become the intellectual faculty.

You observe the child from the age of seven or nine, his life of soul and mind, and you say to yourself: What now emerges as mind has previously, when it was still in the subconscious, worked in the organism. That was active as soul in the body.

I will now summarize something for you that, as I said, is the result of more than three decades of research. You have observed in a very concrete way how the soul works in the body, although it does not appear in its original, natural form until the first seven years. This is how it is everywhere with our spiritual science. Based on strict research principles, it talks about the relationship between soul and body, not philosophically and rambling, but according to concrete results, how the individual soul, in this case the mind, first worked on the body. We follow how the mind works inside the body and gradually organizes the body until the teeth have erupted.

And so it can be done over and over again, and one can come to an understanding of the whole human body from the spiritual-soul realm. Here, theories are not constructed about the interaction of soul and body. Here, not only the human being present in a particular period of time is observed, but the whole human being is followed. One cannot ask: How do soul and body interact from birth to the change of teeth? For that which has been working there only appears externally from the seventh to the fourteenth year of life. Then a new epoch begins. And so, step by step, spiritual science is used to study what this human being actually is. This does not result in the abstract, grey theory of man that we are accustomed to finding in the usual textbooks and manuals; it gives us something that fills us with the realization of how we are filled with something in an individual, personal relationship with what we encounter in life and what interests us directly from life.

This opens our eyes to the development of the human being, the child: how the soul of the child develops more and more in the outer body. And this ignites the will to approach this developing child in the pedagogically correct way. Then one acquires the ability to say how the developing child actually stands in relation to what is to be offered to him.

You see, we teach our children to read and write. If we disregard certain primeval times of humanity, when reading and writing was still very close to human perception – I am only thinking of the old pictographic scripts – and look at our times, at our times of civilization – and we must, after all, live in them and educate ourselves in them – yes, what are our characters, what are our letters, if not something that is very far removed from the original, elementary, childlike experience! The child is actually introduced to a world that is quite foreign to him if he is to learn to read and write. It is not the same with arithmetic, because that is more human. Counting is much more closely related to the original and elementary human soul than reading and writing. Writing has developed further, and pictures have become signs through which one enters a foreign world.

Now, based on our essential insights into human nature, we have planned for our Waldorf curriculum that the child, by being educated and taught in the primary school in the beginning, learns to write from the artistic comprehension of writing and then learns to read from writing. So we do not introduce the child to foreign characters, but we seek out the way from the child's nature – which gives us spiritual scientific guidance to recognize it more precisely: How does the hand want to move? What does the hand experience when it makes a stroke, an action? We let the child draw. We let the child develop what is connected with its elementary nature; and only from that do we develop the written characters. So we start from life and lead to the abstract. We avoid bringing the intellectual element to the fore in any way. We start from life.

And we also start from life in such a way that, for example, we do not bring into the curriculum the kind of alternation that some people find so beneficial, where something different is done in every lesson. Instead, we work on a particular subject in the main lessons until the child has mastered it, until the child has understood it. Therefore, we do not have a curriculum of lessons, but for the main school subjects we have a curriculum that remains the same for about three months. Of course, this excludes languages and so on.

And then we try to fit everything that needs to be learned into the time when the child can develop the subject of its own accord. For example, we try to study everything that follows from the fact that what has been working in the organism at first, then stops working when the teeth change, coming to fruition from year to year in the eighth, ninth, tenth year. We observe what we can teach the child in a particular year, starting from the very first rudiments of observation of nature and historical life. We try to put into practice what is often said today, but which must remain abstract. The pedagogy that we have today is not to be criticized. I have the highest regard for what is available in the way of theoretical education and pedagogical instructions. I do not believe that we can add anything essential to that. But in what we can add from spiritual science because it is a living thing, that is in awakening the pedagogical approach, the didactic, in the utilization of precise human knowledge in the child. Thus, if guided by the insights of spiritual science, one can carefully study how around the age of nine a very important phase takes place in the child's soul. Until then, the child is actually always in such a state that it does not differ significantly from the environment. Around the age of nine, the child begins to differ from the environment to such an extent that from then on we begin to talk about plants and animals quite differently than before. And history lessons should only be taught in a fairy-tale or legendary way, in a pictorial way. They should only be taught at all – even in the very early stages – after the child has learned to distinguish itself from its environment, so around the age of nine.

Thus, through spiritual science, we strive to understand the human being in principle – not only in general pedagogical and didactic terms – and this shows us what we have to accomplish for the developing human being day after day. But all this still has something of thinking, of the conceptual, about it. Something much more important is the other.

Just think about what it means for education if you take the view that we have before us in man only the highest being in the animal series, and we have to develop in him what he receives through physical birth. Through spiritual science, on the other hand, the teacher starts from the basis that A spiritual being has descended from the spiritual world; it has embodied itself in a physical human being. It has brought spiritual substance from the spiritual world and combined it with what comes from the hereditary stream. We have this whole living human puzzle before us and have to work on its development. — How one is overcome by a tremendous reverence for the developing human being! For awe-inspiring stands before us, what the gods have sent down to us from heaven to earth.

And the second feeling that creeps up on us when we face the child is an enormous sense of responsibility; but a sense of responsibility that carries us, that really gives us strength and will to educate and teach. It is therefore something that can enter a person alive. I do not want to be misunderstood. What I mean is that what enters the human being as life – not as theory, not as theoretical pedagogy, not as doctrinaire pedagogy – that is what comes to us through spiritual science. For spiritual science does not just want to reflect the general life of the world in ideas; it wants to enable human beings to partake in this general life of the world. That is why things that arise from spiritual science play a role in educational activities that are based on it, and that we only really notice when we engage with this spiritual science.

We often find ourselves in a position where we have to say something to children that initially goes beyond their understanding when we teach it to them in concepts. Let us assume that we want to teach a child about the nature of the immortal human soul. Those who have experience know how difficult this is if we want to take the matter responsibly and reverently. Let us assume – I want to start from a comparison – we look at a butterfly pupa. We say to the child: Look, the butterfly will fly out of this chrysalis; you will see the butterfly when it comes out of the chrysalis. It is the same with the human soul; the human soul leaves the chrysalis of the body at the moment of death. You just cannot see this soul. An image presents itself to the children.

People often think that if someone does something in this way, it is the same as if someone else does it. Spiritual science shows us that this is not the case. If I have to think about it first to realize that the butterfly pupa with the butterfly flying out is an image for the immortal human soul, if I, because the child is more stupid than I am, I cobble together the image and bring it to him so that he can understand immortality – if you approach the child with this attitude, you are not teaching the child. Only if you believe in the image yourself, you are teaching the child the right thing. And I will be quite honest with you: for me, based on spiritual science, this is not a pieced-together image, but a fact; the human soul goes through what the butterfly shows in the image. And it is not my intellect that has found in this butterfly the image for immortality, but rather: at a lower level of nature, the same process is present. The image is made by nature, by the spirit of nature itself. I do not create the image, but I believe that in the butterfly emerging, nature's creative powers represent the same as the human soul leaving the body. I do not believe that the child is stupid and I am clever, but I place myself on the same level because I have honestly gained what I say to the child in consciousness. I must believe it to the same extent and in the same way that I want to teach it to the child. Then there is something imponderable, then it is really my soul and the child's soul, which at that moment are still connected by quite different forces than by the words that live in concepts and thoughts and theories. This connection with the developing child's soul through such things is often what matters.

And again we see how, in recent times, many things have been misunderstood in a one-sided way. People have striven more and more to teach children only what they can understand. But in so doing they descend more and more into the most dreadful triviality. Just think how banal and ordinary things would have to be presented in order for a child to understand them! And when you look at the method books that describe how to teach children, you will be horrified at the banalities you are supposed to inflict on children.

There is one thing that is so important and meaningful for human life that we simply do not know. When we get to know human life, it is like this: sometimes, perhaps at the age of thirty-five, we remember something we may have learned in the eighth year. If we have learned it correctly, from the right spirit, we know it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. You also remember: You did not understand that, you accepted that on authority. — You felt that: I am younger, the teacher is older, he understands it, I do not understand it. Now, at thirty-five, the whole thing comes up again. Now you understand it because you have matured. Once people appreciate what it means when, in later life, you feel empowered by your own maturity to understand something that you used to believe only because you respected the person who told you, because he was an authority — if people would only grasp this, then they would also be able to appreciate what it means when spiritual science says: you have to look at the child as it develops up to about the age of seven, and you will find that the child is above all an imitator. It does everything that those around it do. This is a basic law of human nature developing during these years. You cannot educate by admonishment, but only by example, right down to the thoughts. Those who have impure thoughts in their childhood have a bad effect on children. For the souls have a subconscious connection. So, right down to the thoughts, everything is experienced by the child up to the change of teeth in an imitative way and is incorporated into the whole human being by imitation.

But then, with the change of teeth, with the entry of the intellectual part of the soul, begins what the human soul wants until sexual maturity: devotion to an honored authority. This should be said especially to our time, that it corresponds to a human law of development. The child can absorb truths during this time because it sees that the honored authority depends on these truths. Those who have not experienced absorbing truths out of a sense of authority, roughly from the ages of seven to fourteen, can hardly stand on their own two feet in life as independent and free human beings, for they have not developed the right relationship between people in their humanity!

Therefore, our educational philosophy is based on the fundamental principle that up to the age of seven, education and teaching should be based on imitation. The teacher in the primary school up to the age of fourteen then finds himself so isolated that he is the only authority. It has an enormous significance for life if one can later remember: Through your own maturity, you have now achieved something that was instilled during your school days. This gives a special strength. In this way, schooling and education have an effect on later life, when the teacher, through the authority that is taken for granted, teaches the child what he will only understand later. In general, it is easy and plausible for superficial observation: one only wants to teach the child what he understands. But then one makes people old early. One destroys life. One does not give the human being the right earthly substance for later life.

With these truths, I only wanted to make it clear how, not from theoretical pedagogy, but through what a person can become by permeating themselves with spiritual science, in the human relationship, that is achieved for the child, which we would like to add to what the pedagogy of the 19th century has produced in terms of the magnificent, in terms of very magnificent principles. Spiritual science wants to fertilize life out of the need of our time, because it is a recognition that permeates the human being completely in his innermost being. Therefore, this must be carried out in every detail. Our teachers and educationalists should work from the direct knowledge of the human being. Therefore, anyone who says that we want to introduce a new confession, a world view, into the school is judging us badly.

At our Freie Waldorf School in Stuttgart, whose top management I am in charge of and which I have to inspect from time to time, I said from the outset: It is impossible for us to bring the content of a world view into the school. Protestant children are taught their faith by Protestant pastors, Catholic children by Catholic pastors. Dissident children can remain dissident children. When a whole number of these children or their parents came to us and said: Yes, what you teach the children awakens in them the feeling that they should also receive a religious impulse - so the dissident parents came, not just those who belong to any confession; the present confessions do not manage to create such a strong religious need. We were forced to set up general religious education classes because the children educated in the anthroposophical tradition had a religious need arising from the spirit of our teaching and because the children of dissident parents did not want to send their children to religious education classes within a confessional framework. The children who receive these classes would otherwise have received no classes at all. And as I said, Catholic children receive Catholic religious education and Protestant children receive Protestant religious education. We can, because we do not want to bring a particular worldview into the school, be tolerant in the true, genuine sense in this regard. And this tolerance truly bears good fruit in practice. For what we are seeking is not to bring a worldview or confession into the school, but a practical pedagogy and didactics that can come from spiritual science and only from spiritual science. We have a purely objective educational interest in setting up our school and not in promoting any particular worldview. And anyone who claims that we promote a worldview out of our spiritual science, anyone who claims that, is lying. Only someone who knows how we want to serve nothing but practical life through that which, in the face of this life, does not stand in unworldly distances, but precisely through this knowledge, as I have just described to you, is connected with practical life, judges what we want correctly.

That is why we have included eurythmy in the curriculum as a compulsory subject. You will not think me so foolish as to object to the beneficial effects of gymnastics, which were rightly emphasized in the 19th century. But the time will come when people will think more objectively about these things. Then it will be found that gymnastics does correspond to human physiology; it introduces those physical movements into the child, into the human being, that correspond to the study of the human body. But we do not add to this, by contesting gymnastics – our eurythmy.

What is this eurhythmy? It is, first of all, an art, as presented here in public performances. But in addition, it also has a hygienic-therapeutic element and, furthermore, a strong pedagogical-didactic element. It is not based on some invented gestures - through random connections between external gestures or facial expressions and what is going on in the soul - but on what can be gained through careful study by what I would like to call, in the spirit of Goethe, “sensual-supersensory observation”. If we study the human speech organ more from within and see with our senses what takes place, not in movements or modulations, but in the potential for movement, then we can apply this to the whole human being, entirely in keeping with the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Goethe sees the whole plant only as a more complicated leaf. What Goethe explained with regard to forms in his morphology and what will only be appreciated later, we try to apply functionally in human activity in an artistic way. We move the whole human organism or groups of people in such a way that it is derived from spoken language. That is, we make hands, legs and heads perform movements that correspond to the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs. We make the whole human being into a larynx, so to speak, and thus create a soundless but visible language – not a sign language that comes from the arbitrariness of the imagination. We create a language that we transfer to the human being and his movements. It is formed just as lawfully – only formed through study – as it is formed by nature, which is carried out by the larynx and neighboring organs.

And when we have a short demonstration by children after a short break, so that the pedagogical-didactic element is also expressed, you will see that this eurythmy is not only an art but also, at the same time, soul-filled movement. Every movement is not performed out of physiological insight, but out of an understanding of the connection between body and soul. Every movement is inspired, as the sound is inspired. The whole human being becomes a speech organ. That is why it also reveals what can be artistically shaped in poetry. Today people have no idea that the content of prose is not the main thing in poetry. Ninety-nine percent of poetry today is superfluous! What poetry is based on either the shaping of language in the Goethean manner or on the rhythm of language – one need only refer to Schiller; many other examples could be cited. Schiller said that poems such as 'The Diver' or 'The Walk', for example, did not first live in his soul in prose, but rather something like music, something like a picture, something visionary lived in him. And it was only from this wordless-melodious, from the wordless-pictorial that Schiller and also Goethe formed the words, added them, as it were, to the wordless or musical or inwardly plastic. And so we are also compelled, when recitation is required, for example, to fall back on the rhythm of ordinary speech. For you will hear that the eurythmic presentation — as I said, the human being as a living larynx on the stage before you, moving — will be accompanied on the one hand by recitation and on the other by music. It can also be accompanied by what is not expressed with the poetry. But then it must not be recited in the way that reciting is done in our unartistic age, when the content of the poetry is simply taken from the depths of the soul. Rather, it is precisely the beat and rhythm and the connections that are formed in rhyme, that is, the actual artistic element, that must be expressed in the recitation. For eurhythmics could not be accompanied by the usual unartistic reciting of today. Therefore, eurhythmics will also have a healing effect on what is declining in our other arts.

Above all, you will be interested to know that eurythmy has an educational and didactic element. Gymnastics are excellent for people, but they only develop the outer, physical organism. As a compulsory subject in schools, eurythmy has an effect above all on what I would call the initiative of the will, the independence of the human soul. And this is what we actually need for the next age of humanity. Anyone who looks into the chaos of our social conditions today knows that, above all, people lack this soul initiative.

I have already said that the teacher and the educator cannot manage without the consciousness that can fill them with reverence, but also with responsibility: that they have to work on the souls that come from the spiritual world, but in such a way that the next generation enters the world in the right way. Anyone who looks at the world today already feels how important it is what we, as the next generation, bring into the world. And that is why one has such inner satisfaction when one can see how, without bringing a worldview into the school, our teachers, for example, treat anthropology in the fifth grade: not in a dry sense, not anthropological-theoretical knowledge, but in such a way that what one brings to the children as a first anthropology is permeated and warmed by the spirit. If you teach the children in this way, they begin to be present in a completely different way during the lessons; they establish something in themselves that will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

Likewise, I had the deepest satisfaction when our seventh-grade teacher developed history in this spiritual-scientific way in front of the children – but as I said, not spiritual science, but history treated in a spiritual-scientific-methodical way. In this way, what would otherwise remain more or less foreign to the children is transformed into something that the child knows directly related to its own being. And in this way a bridge can be built everywhere between what the child experiences from the developmental process of humanity and what can inspire the child to become a useful member of the future of humanity.

I wanted to begin with these few words before the eurythmy performances. And now, at the end, I would like to say once more: when I look at people like Spitta, at what can flow from a renewal of spiritual life, when I look at this and am moved to express a value judgment about spiritual science, let me express my joy. This joy is certainly shared by those here at the Goetheanum and those working from the Goetheanum who have set themselves spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical tasks. And I do not hope that it could be absolutely the only right thing to wish you, after you have had the kindness to listen to me for five quarters of an hour and after you will still have the kindness to watch the eurythmic performance and listening to what is played and recited — after that you will still need to recover from the “shock” you have suffered, according to the words of the English journalist, in a period of six days!

at the first Anthroposophical College Course at the Goetheanum

Question: How can we recognize the different temperaments in children and in ourselves?

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say a few words about temperament, more to point out how, under the influence of the pedagogy that we want to cultivate in Waldorf schools, intellectualism and the other soul qualities gradually become an art of education. What is important is that it should not be a matter of mere skill or of pure science in education, but that it should be an art. This presupposes that one is able to observe the human being from all sides, that one has made a great effort to grasp the nuances of the soul life as revealed in the different temperaments. First more theoretically, then, as soon as one has grasped what you find in our anthroposophical literature in various descriptions of the temperaments, by applying it to life. In many cases, this is a method of convincing oneself of the truth that anthroposophy can help when it is seen in the spirit; it is a method of having life confirm it. Life's experiences will present themselves to us at every turn, showing how what is seen in the spirit - or even just appropriated by learning what the seer has seen - must then be transferred into life.

So it should be a more or less long path of one's own study of the human being, and I would like to say about the whole human being. When this has been passed on to the teacher, then what comes out at the end is something like a rounded handling of life. Let us assume that a teacher has been trained in the way I have only been able to sketch it out, in that he has looked into the being of the developing human being with certain glances, and he comes to teach after such preparation. Then the following can happen: he speaks with a child in class. This child, to whom he asks a question, will prepare to answer with a certain ease and indifference. The teacher has a certain idea of how the answer should be. The child easily decides to give the answer, gives an answer without showing that the decision is difficult for him. In the end, one has the feeling that —- one acquires a certain certainty in this feeling only by allowing what I have described to happen: Yes, that is an answer, it is approximately correct, but this answer came about because this child has forgotten much of what I have already taught. The answer is such that much more could be added to it. And I may be led to add much more. The child accepts this and sits down again. I am dealing with a sanguine child.

I ask a question of a second child. The child shows me as I get up that it takes a certain resolve to approach the question. So it allows the question to approach it, not moving its face back and forth, but looking at me quite rigidly. It allows the question to approach it. Now, after it has heard the question, it is silent for a while. It will take a special art to observe and evaluate such reactions in the right way when teaching in a game of questions and answers. Only after a certain pause, which is, so to speak, completely neutral, can you see an effort in the child to come to a decision, to formulate the answer. One will find that the answer is difficult for him, that the child has to struggle to formulate the answer. For such things one must be able to acquire the necessary sense of tact. And one will generally find that this child brings everything he can muster to give the answer. And one will notice from the child's whole bearing – especially from the fact that he probably lowers his face a little – that he is not entirely satisfied with his answer. One will therefore be able to notice anticipation and retrospective feeling, anticipation and empathy before and after the answer: one is dealing with a melancholy child.

You ask a third child a question. You may need to ask the question a second time, because you realize that the child has not fully understood it. The child barely takes in the question completely, you may have to make an effort to formulate the question again forcefully, and so on. Then the child does not make the gesture with his hand, but in his soul [Rudolf Steiner demonstrates the gesture]. It says something to you; there is then something in the words - you have to have a feeling for this - sometimes something that does not correspond to the question: you are dealing with a phlegmatic child.

Then a fourth child. It has long been noticed that this child is eager to answer and wants to be asked questions. You ask it a question and you can hear how the answer bubbles up. How it says something in some way beyond the answer that one expected. This has nothing to do with the method, or that the answer may not be given correctly, but it is a matter of the habitus, how the child behaves, namely that it pushes itself to do so. One must develop a feeling for what is going on in the sphere of temperament – because it is not at all the case that the child who pushes to answer and wants to be asked is much more knowledgeable than the other. Perhaps it does not even know as much as the phlegmatic child. It is not a matter of the method or something learned, but of the feeling habitus, the sentience habitus. There may be a very poor answer. Nevertheless, you can recognize the choleric child by the way he behaves. And so, if you observe the essence of the human being in the right, lively way – if you stand in front of the children in the first lesson, you can tell from their corresponding expression – if you are only able to assess them correctly – what temperament you are dealing with.

Of course, this is just one example. It can also be observed in other ways. What matters is that the educational theory gained from anthroposophy becomes an art of education, so that, just as the artist nuances in color, sees something in color that the other person cannot see, so one sees something in the child that the other person does not see and perceive, and so one must first become acquainted with the nature of the child.

Question: How can we influence the temperaments through colors?

Rudolf Steiner: I refer you to the booklet “The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy”, which was published many years ago. I will try to explain some of it to you.

Let us assume, then, that a child faces you at an early age as a choleric child. It will not take a game of questions and answers to figure it out, but it may show itself by kicking terribly at every opportunity, by throwing itself on the floor and beating itself. All these expressions are the corresponding ones in the choleric child.

Now, if you are a layperson, you will probably believe that you can tame such a child by placing it in a calming, colorful environment if possible. But that is not true. If you surround the choleric child with blue or dress him in blue clothes, then precisely because he has the disposition for it, when he is surrounded by this calming blue color, which he does not reject, he will act out his choleric temperament. He will become even more “z'widerer,” more rumbling. On the other hand, if the child is surrounded by red, the exciting red color, you know from other lectures that the complementary color is green, the green-bluish complementary color is evoked. The child, when constantly surrounded by red, has to make an effort internally to experience the complementary color internally and is not externally excited. So the same thing, that is what has a calming effect on an excited child.

On the other hand, you will have a good effect on a melancholy child if you get him to come out of himself by bringing him into a blue, greenish-blue environment; so don't be afraid that if you give him a calming, adoring environment, you will make him even more melancholy.

The point here is to really understand how it follows from the essence of man that you fight fire with fire. You see, it is always a matter of starting from the essence of man and using the knowledge you gain to approach life. But I would like to make it quite clear that a mechanistic view must be avoided when considering education as an art. And when we ask how we can influence temperaments by means of colors and such things, we must not fall into the trap of intellectual systematization. If education becomes an art, then one does not arrive at such intellectual schematizing. When dealing with color, one does not look at the temperaments, but in general one is more concerned with whether the child is an excited or an unexcited child. It may also happen, for example, that a phlegmatic child may have to be treated in the same way with colors as a melancholic child, and so on. In short, the aim is to develop a living art of education from a living science of education.

Question: Is it beneficial for children to look back as early as five or six years of age?

Rudolf Steiner: I do not know what prompted the question about children looking back. I also do not know if the question arises from experience. It seems so, because it is written here. I am actually surprised that this question has been asked, because I would have thought that such nonsense, having five- to six-year-old children look back, would not actually occur. As you know from my writings, looking back is practiced, in particular, from “How to Know Higher Worlds” in order to advance spiritually and to gradually arrive at a real spiritual view. And you can easily imagine what a profound effect it has on a person when such a review is practiced, when you consider that the other thinking, the one that runs along in the course of natural phenomena, is the thinking of ordinary consciousness. When we now, through a certain inner effort, try to formulate a review in such a way that we, as it were, go through the events of the day backwards from evening to morning, we snatch ourselves away from precisely this ordinary thinking and imagining and experiencing of things. We break free. And by doing this radically, in such a contrary way, we gradually achieve an inner emancipation of the soul and spirit element in the human being. Such practice provides a support for spiritual progress.

Now it could be meant – it is not clearly expressed in the question – that a review would be adapted for children to such an exercise, which is appropriate for spiritual progress in later life. That would simply be nonsense for the reason that one would introduce an absolute disorder into the relationship between the spiritual-mental and the bodily-etheric of the child. It would be plain to see that one was causing terrible damage. To allow such practices with children would mean that one would tear apart at a very early stage that which corresponds to the imagination, to feeling, to the will; that one would bring such disorder into the whole soul-spiritual-physical organization of the child that one would virtually develop the child, deliberately develop it into childish mental deficiency, into a kind of dementia praecox. If one hears about such things at all, if one becomes familiar with such things, it is important to know that they should not be used in a novelistic way, and especially that they are not only not intended for children aged five to six, but that it is nonsense to use them at all in people before sexual maturity. If the intention is to look back in such a way that the child is allowed to remember the events of the day, then such a thing must at least not be taken to any extreme. It may sometimes be necessary for the child to remember some kind of misbehavior or for them to remember a joy they have experienced for this or that reason, but to is something that is basically also a kind of mischief, albeit a small mischief, compared to when, for example, it is meant to suggest that the child should be doing spiritual exercises.

A question about a 23-year-old person with an intellectual disability: Is the disability connected to a past life and how should the person in question be educated?

Rudolf Steiner: In such matters, each case is truly an individual one and nothing can be said from the few details given on this note, least of all how the mental deficiency in question is connected with any previous life on earth. As for how to treat him educationally, that really depends entirely on what the person was like before. Above all, the person should be followed up in terms of education: What was done with the person before? Was no attention paid to the fact that there were abnormalities in the past? The real issue is that it is not possible for a young person of twenty-three to become feeble-minded unless it is due to an external necessity. Rather, the issue is that the things that preceded it should have been dealt with in the appropriate way. But to answer the question of what to do after he turns twenty-three, you would have to know the person very well.

Perhaps I may take this opportunity to come back to a few other things that have caught my eye during the course of the evening. First of all, the matter of the age of nine. It is indeed the case that the main epoch of the developing human being's life is from birth to the change of teeth, then again from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, but that between the ages of nine and ten there is something that intervenes in the child's life in an extraordinarily significant way. You know that the sense of self first arises in the form of a sense of self. This sense of self only emerges in the second, third, sometimes even the fourth year of life. It is not yet an actual sense of self, and this sense of self is not actually present in a transparently clear way even at the change of teeth. So you don't give the child something that is in line with his development when you introduce things that sharply challenge the child to separate himself from his surroundings, to have a strong sense of self. Everything that is perceived when one strongly separates oneself from one's surroundings, when one perceives another being as another, one should bring up as little as possible to the child up to the age of nine, but should guide the child in such a way that it perceives the outside world only as a continuation of its own being, so to speak. One should cultivate precisely this feeling, which does not separate from the outside world. One should educate the child in such a way that it can feel and sense what is outside, as if it were continuing into its own organization and vice versa. And only around the age of nine does a clear and distinct sense of self actually awaken. It is this sense of self that Jean Paul says is actually in the innermost sanctum of the human being and that only this sense of self actually allows one to feel the human being as such, the human existence inwardly. This sense of self awakens in the ninth year. And in this year, between the ninth and tenth year – these things are, of course, only approximations – the world also enters, the outer world; the child differentiates itself from the outer world, is allowed to differentiate itself of its own accord. It is then possible to approach the child with the simplest ideas and observations from the plant and animal kingdoms, no longer to bring things to the child merely in the form of fairy tales, legends or stories, but to really bring them in such a way that the child acquires possible ideas - I do not mean systematically as in science. That is what needs to be observed.

What cannot be emphasized strongly enough for the art of education is that one must not follow the mischief of introducing scientific categories into school life. Unfortunately, even the schoolbooks for the lower grades are often put together in such a way that their content is taken out of scientific books in its structure and direction. But botany, zoology and so on should not be taught to the child as if one wanted to believe that he should become a botanist or zoologist; rather, precisely because one assumes that he should certainly not become a botanist or zoologist, not in such a way that one presents him with all the raisins, but in such a way that one uses the aptitudes that the child has at that particular moment, and then helps them to break through. This is the result of a natural art of education, as applied in Waldorf schools: people are not trained according to a certain specialization, but they are made human beings. And if they then develop in one direction or another, it is because their original abilities have not been suppressed and can now develop in a certain sense. That is what makes a human being human.

Regarding the lecture by Rudolf Meyer, Berlin:

It would certainly be interesting to pursue the considerations that Mr. Meyer so beautifully presented in his lecture on the relationship between Fichte, Pestalozzi and Herbart from a psychological point of view. But let me just express a few thoughts about it.

It is extremely interesting that from the consideration of Pestalozzi one gets the idea that the successes that he had with his art of education are essentially based on the fact that he was, as it seems, an infinitely amiable personality, especially towards children, and that out of a certain childlike love he instinctively applied a highly perfect art of education.

It is a different matter when we look at what was happening around Pestalozzi. Here we do not get the impression that Pestalozzi would have been able to transfer to others the educational skills that he possessed through the inherent kindness of his personality. And if you look at the actual pedagogical principles, the more fundamental aspects, and not just at the extraordinarily charming descriptions that Pestalozzi gave of life with children – which can be extremely inspiring, especially for educators – but if you ask other people about the instructions he gave, you can see that he was not in a position to become aware of what instinctively worked in him as an educational art in a lovable way, so that he could have transferred it to others. Therefore, the love that Pestalozzi is shown is actually based more on the fact that this amiable personality speaks from all his writings, and what one feels when reading these writings triggers many educational impulses from within the human being. While - I only need to recall the instructions that Pestalozzi gives, one must teach very young children the parts of the human body in a way that is not at all natural. If you look at Pestalozzi's formulations in his art of education, you have to say: that is not suitable for inspiring other educators.

But something else is becoming blatantly obvious. It may well be that Pestalozzi also proceeded with young children as he describes it, and had great success; while another - even a direct student of Pestalozzi, we can prove that it was so - who followed the same instructions, now achieved absolutely nothing. The fact is that the important personality of Pestalozzi was not behind it. In the final analysis, it is not the content that is important in a pedagogical system that aspires to become an art of education. The pedagogy cultivated in Waldorf school lessons is actually about the fact that, under certain circumstances, even if the content of what is taught is based on false premises – it does not have to be so, but it can be so – it can nevertheless have an effect on the child in an appropriate way through the way the art of education is applied. One might say that in Waldorf education it is not so much the content of the teaching that is important as the way it is handled. This is because spiritual science is fundamentally not something that merely — that is not even the most important thing, in fact — but spiritual science essentially consists in the fact that it gives a living world view, that it allows what it gives as a world view to be truly experienced. That is why spiritual science is so poorly understood. Because, you see, in the sense of our spiritual science here – and I am saying this precisely with regard to spiritual science as the basis of a pedagogical art – it is certainly a mistake for someone to be a pure materialist, for someone to have materialistic theories; but one can also formulate materialistic theories very wittily. One can have spirit and be a materialist. And conversely, one can also be a spiritualist, a theosophist, an anthroposophist, who can reel off theories from spiritualism, theosophy or anthroposophy and be terribly spiritless in the process. Then it is a matter of the spirit of materialism, which, however, prevails, having to be valued more highly in the sense of a real anthroposophy than the spiritlessness of the anthroposophist, who schematically recounts everything that is theory or inanimate outlook on life. So that one can say: anthroposophy is directed towards the real life of the spirit. And this real life of the spirit really does enter the whole human being. In a sense, the spirit should be banished into what the human being does. And that is what makes the teacher, from the most profound level of his spiritual science, skilled in the art of education, which enables him to truly transform education.

This is what Rudolf Meyer presented so beautifully in his lecture and by which he measured the intellectualism of Herbart, who played such a great role in the education that we will hopefully soon have behind us and that we will very soon replace with a different one.

Today, you have also been presented with a very nice illustration of how Herbart's views were shaped by his inheritance. But there is something else that matters in the assessment of Herbart, namely how the selection has worked. For the culturally and historically important phenomenon is that one looks at this Herbart, who was purely intellectualistic, but who founded a comprehensive pedagogical school that then had an enormous influence on pedagogical work. It must be said that the fact that, of all the philosophers and other world-view thinkers, it was this intellectualist Herbart who was chosen by the fate of Central Europe to be the educational source of inspiration can be traced back to the entirely intellectualist tendency that the intellectual life of the 19th century took.

This can be made particularly clear with regard to Herbart by the following: one could point out, for example, as Rudolf Meyer has done very nicely, and one can also do so with other personalities, that Schiller's “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” are also a kind of pedagogical impulse. Schiller, who so magnificently portrays how, on the one hand, man tends towards intellectualism and, on the other, towards mere sensual-physical instincts, points out how man follows the necessity of reason in logic, in the intellectual, and how he follows the necessity of the senses in ordinary life. And then Schiller presents beauty, which is the balance between the two, which one achieves by being able to follow the spiritual not only logically in the intellect, but to already have it in sensual perception, so that one may also feel the pleasant as thoroughly beautiful. On the other hand, he demands that what one experiences sensually should already be spiritualized, so that it is elevated, that one experiences it as spiritual. Schiller therefore actually wants to create a balance in beauty between the intellectual and the sensual-illustrative or instinctive will. And basically he wants to permeate all of life with what emerges from people when they are educated for such a balance. In Schiller, we see how he wants to bring people to action through the spirit, how he works towards this balance between intellectualism and between the instinctive, that is, the dull-willed element, but one that is to be spiritualized, how he points out that the whole human being is to be placed in the world.

This is then contrasted with Herbartianism – yes, one can tell a whole story about it if one has experienced Herbartianism as strongly as it was experienced by people who spent their youth in Austria in the second half of the 19th century, where Herbartianism was proclaimed as philosophy from all the lecterns. It was only Brentano who introduced a change in this respect, but he was an isolated case. Herbartianism continued to be preached until the turn of the century, or at least until the 1890s, and everything that was achieved in the field of education, as you can see, is based on Herbart.

One of these 'Herbartians' was Robert Zimmermann, a very brilliant man, an important man and also a morally superior personality; but he was a Herbartian through and through. And he wrote a 'Philosophical Propaedeutic' for grammar school students. This “Philosophical Propaedeutic” also contained a psychology. In this psychology, there is the following sentence: Man experiences hunger or satiation through food not through something else, but through the ideas he has about it. So it is quite broadly argued that it does not depend on the real process behind the phenomenon of how hunger is transformed into satiation, but it depends - and now I quote almost word for word: if you have the idea of hunger at a certain moment of the day, this idea of hunger would be pushed below the threshold of consciousness by the opposite idea of satiation.

This replacement of nutrition with a purely intellectual process is something that has actually been included in high school psychology textbooks, and one can imagine how the minds of those who absorbed such psychology without knowing it had to be colored.

But I would like to draw attention to something else. Very briefly, I will touch on how Herbartian aesthetics stands in contrast to basically all other aesthetic worldviews that have emerged in Central Europe. When one speaks of aesthetics, then it depends on whether one speaks – I will say it now in general – of what speaks to you as beauty or what repels you as ugliness, that you essentially remain in the realm of taste judgment. Then one differentiates from this aesthetics – and this is what otherwise distinguishes aesthetics from the ethics found within Central Europe – that which, as will, impulsates the moral act or that which is sick in the will in the immoral act. What other people in Central Europe developed as aesthetics, what they selected from the direct impulse of the will, does not exist for Herbart's philosophical considerations. For ethics is only a special chapter of aesthetics. And just as in art, when two forms have something in common, for example, this is the summarizing, the harmonious element, so it is for Herbart in relation to moral judgment. He speaks of five forms: the relationship of action to action or action to thought, and the like, and he says: a strong action pleases next to a weak one. He looks at the aesthetic impression, not at the volitional impulse, and gives his judgment of favor the term “perfection.” So that in the case of perfection, it is not the volitional element that is effectively present in the human being as a volitional impulse, but rather he says: If I will more strongly one time and more weakly the other, I gain the aesthetic impression that the strong is more pleasing than the weak. Therefore it is predominant.

You see, what should be a powerful driving force is reduced to a judgment of liking or disliking. You then have the idea of wanting, of moral freedom, of right and of retribution. These five ethical ideas are therefore considered by Herbart, not by taking them out of the nature of the will, of ethos, but by observing, as it were, how man's action pleases or displeases when it is looked at. So you have here the task of at least guiding ethics, which should essentially arise from the will, on the way to the intellectual. I said that one must look at the selection process to see why Herbart was chosen by the fate of Central Europe. This is based on the fact that the age as such had to go through intellectualism, that the age as such demanded intellectualism.

Now, we have indeed gained a great deal through intellectualism. In Herbart's work, some dark sides and some light sides of this intellectualism can be seen. As Mr. Rudolf Meyer just mentioned, Herbart's ideas only found their way into elementary school pedagogy indirectly, not exactly directly, but all the more so into grammar school pedagogy. The only problem is that in the latter case, it remained an intellectual exercise and did not lead to a true art of education or to the proper practice of pedagogy. For what was this grammar school education? As you know, as a rule the philosopher in the philosophy faculty had to teach it as a subsidiary subject, not out of any great sympathy for it. And as for how it was practised – well, we would rather not talk about how education was practised at grammar schools. It was simply not possible to bring into the art of education that which draws from mere intellectual sources. On the other hand, we must not forget or overlook the fact that Herbart, who had such a broad impact and was so widely disseminated, had an enormously disciplining effect on thinking, that the inner weaving of thoughts does not follow pure arbitrariness but certain underlying laws, which is of course also true. And in this respect it did not really improve until Herbartianism gradually declined more or less only towards the end of the nineteenth century; on the contrary, it must be said that there was something disciplining in Herbart's philosophy , something that, even if it easily led thoughts into an even greater pedantry, nevertheless made this pedantry less unbearable than when the pedantry runs without an inner conformity to the laws of thinking. On the whole, it must be said that, in the 19th century, humanity's urge to discipline thinking inwardly came about, which then also had an effect on natural science until very recently and which has a certain significance. It must be said that in this respect Herbart certainly had a disciplining effect. But today we are faced with a challenge of the world, in the face of which we have to say: We will not get anywhere with such intellectualism. We can no longer, so to speak, substitute the idea of hunger and satiation – apparently it can only be one or the other – for the real process and thereby entrench ourselves entirely in our heads as in a fortress. We have to engage the whole person through what we do. In the course of this discussion about Herbart's intellectualism, I was constantly reminded of how the entire 19th century, especially in Central Europe, was dominated by intellectualism. This became very vividly clear to me many years ago in a conversation I had with the long-deceased Austrian poet Hermann Rollett. He was a remarkable personality. He was completely immersed in intellectualism. He could not imagine the world differently. He said that everything else was simply not proper, had no discipline of thought, one had to think intellectually, think atomistically, and so on. But he was terribly pessimistic, and he once said to me: “For our development as a civilization, as civilized people of the world, we have the prospect of ultimately wasting away in all our limbs and being only heads, being only a ball!” This was Rollett's world, and it was what led him to despair of the progress of humanity, because he believed that the limbs would atrophy more and more, that man would only roll along as a head ball, and that there would be such small bits of arms and feet sticking out. He painted this vividly as a picture.

But it is necessary, at least in a spiritual and psychological sense, to do everything from now on to prevent man from developing into a mere head person in the future. It must be understood that the spirit is not only talked about to him, but that it is banished from human life. But when the spirit takes hold of the whole human being in such a way that this whole human being also radiates the spirit into the social existence, then this is what the time demands of us with all our energy and what we must fulfill: the education of the human being not only as a head human being and towards some one-sidedness, but the education of the whole human being through spiritual science.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! I sincerely thank Licentiate Bock for his welcoming words, and I promise you that I want to apply everything in my power to contribute at least partly, towards all you are looking for during your stay here.

[ 2 ] Today I would like to discuss some orientation details so that we may understand one another in the right way. It will be our particular task—also during the various hours of discussion we are going to have—to express exactly what lies particularly close to your heart for your future work. I hope that what I have to say to you will be said in the correct way, when during the coming discussion hour your wishes and tasks you ask about, will be heard.

[ 3 ] Anthroposophy, my dear friends, must certainly remain on the foundation of which I've often spoken, when I say: Anthroposophy as such can't represent religious education; anthroposophy as such must limit its task as a spiritual science to fructify present culture and civilization and it is not its purpose to represent religious education. Actually, it is quite far from such direct involvement in any way, in the evolutionary process of religious life. Nevertheless, it appears to me to be certainly justified in relation to the tasks you have just set yourselves, that for religious activity something can be extracted out of Anthroposophy. Indirectly it can not only be obtained through Anthroposophy, but it must be extracted, and this must be said; your experience is quite correct that religious life as such needs deepening, which can come out of the source of anthroposophical science.

[ 4 ] I presume, my dear friends, that you want to actively position yourself in this religious life and that you have looked for this Anthroposophic course because you have felt that religious activity has lead you increasingly towards a dead end, and that through the religious work today—with our traditions, with the historic development and others, which we will still discuss—elements are missing which actually should be within it. We notice how just today even important personalities are searching for a new foundation for religious activity, because they believe this is needed in order to progress in a certain direction. I would like to indicate it as a start, how even the most conscientious personalities ask themselves how one can reach a certain foundation of religious awareness, and how then these personalities actually search more or less for a kind of—one can also call it something else—a kind of philosophy. I remind you only how a home is sought for a kind of philosophic foundation for religious awareness. Obviously, one has to, through the current awareness, recognise something absolutely necessary and one should not ignore that an extraordinarily amount has been accomplished this way. However, one can't comprehend, with unprejudiced observation, what is strived for, and come face to face with this: such an effort, instead of leading into the religious life, actually leads out of the religious life.

Religious life, you will sense, must be something direct, it must be something elementary, entirely connected to human nature, which lives out of the elementary, most inward foundation of human nature. All philosophic thinking is a reflection and is distanced from this direct, elementary experience. If I might express a personal impression, it would be this: When someone philosophises about the religious life and believes that a philosophical foundation is necessary for a religious life, then it always seems to me to be similar to when one wants to turn to the physiology of nutrition in order to attain nourishment oneself. Isn't it true, one can determine the exact foundations of nutritional science but that means nothing for nutrition itself. Nutritional science elucidates nutrition, but nutrition must surely have a sound foundation, it must grow roots in reality; only then can one philosophise about nutrition. So also, the religious life must have roots in reality. It must come to existence out of reality, only when it is there can one philosophise about it. It is certainly not possible at all to substantiate or justify the religious life with some or other philosophic consideration.

[ 5 ] That's the one thing. The other one is something which I can best indicate—I always like referring to realities—through a book which had already came into existed several decades ago in Basle, with the title: The Christian Nature of our Theology Today. It is a book by Overbeck. In it he refers to evidence that the current theology is a kind of theology but that it is actually not Christian any longer. Now, when one takes Harnack's book The Being of Christianity and in its arguments everywhere simply exchanges the word "God" in every instance where he has "Christ," then one will not really change anything in the inner content of Harnack's book. This is already expressed in what Adolf Harnack says, that in the Gospels actually only the proclamation of the Father is needed and not those of Christ Jesus, while naturally during the earlier centuries the Christian development of the Gospels was above all regarded according to the proclamations of Christ Jesus. However, if the Gospels are really considered as the actual proclamations of Christ Jesus, then one has to, beside the Father-experience, that means beside the experience of the world in general being permeated by the Godhead, have the Christ-experience as something extra special. One must be able to have both of these experiences. A theology like Adolf Harnack's no longer has both of these experiences, but only a God-experience, and as a result it is necessary for him that what he finds in his imagination of God, he baptises it with the name of Christ; purely out of a historical foundation, because as he is even a representative of Christianity, he calls his God-experience by the name of Christ.

[ 6 ] These incisive, important things exist already. Certainly, they are not made properly clear but they are felt, and I presume that currently, where nearly everything is shaken up in people's minds, a young theology in particular needs to show itself, in how these things can't really be completed, as is seen to some extent today with theologians, without being permeated by the actual being of Christ. Out of this experience such a book as von Overbeck's was created regarding the current Christianity of theology, where basically the answer is given to why modern theology is no longer Christian because it deals with a general philosophising about a world permeated by God, and not in the real sense of the Christ experience creating the foundation for the entire treatment of religious problems. Religious problems are dealt with based only as Father-problems and not actually the Christ experience.

[ 7 ] Today we basically all have an education inculcated in us, derived from modern science, this science which actually only started in the middle of the 15th century but which has entered into all forms of modern people's thinking. One basically can't be different because one has been educated this way from the lowest primary classes, by forming thoughts according to modern science. This has resulted in theology of the 19th century wanting to orientate itself according to the research of modern science. I'd like to say they feel themselves responsible for the judge's chair of modern science and as a result have become what they are today. One can only find a basis of true religiosity today by, at the same time, considering the entire authorisation and also the complete meaning of the scientific element of life.

[ 8 ] To some of you I have possibly already referred to a man who needs to be taken seriously in relation to religious life, Gideon Spicker, who for a long time studied philosophy at the Münster university. He proceeded from a strict Christian conception of the world, which he gradually developed into his philosophy which was never considered a philosophy but more an instrument for the understanding of religious problems. Modern thinking didn't offer him the possibility to find a sure foundation. So we find in his booklet, entitled At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period the hopelessness of modern man which characterised him so clearly, because he says: "Today we have metaphysics without transcendental conviction, we have a theory of knowledge without objective meaning, we have psychology without a soul, logic without content, ethics without liability and the result is that we can't find some or other foundation for religious consciousness."—Gideon Spicker stood very close to the actual crux which lies at the basis of all religious dichotomies in modern mankind. One can take it like a symptom, to indicate where the actual crux, I could call it, lies. If modern man is discerning, if he tries to create an image through his imagination of the world, then at the same time he clearly has the feeling that this discernment doesn't penetrate the depths. Gideon Spicker expressed it like this: "We have a theory of knowledge without objective meaning", which means we have our insights without being in the position to find the power within us to create something really objective out of our assembled insights. So, the modern discerning man sickens because he fails to find the possibility of a guarantee for his knowledge of objectivity in the world, for existence as such. He finds it in what he experiences subjectively in the knowledge, not really out of the thing itself.

[ 9 ] All of this of course, because it is philosophy, has nothing to do with religious experience. Still, one can say that religious life today is certainly under an influence which heads in a similar direction. The kind of humanity which is not in the position to say about knowledge: "in this realization there exists objective existence for me"—such a type of humanity feels this same insecurity rise up at another point, and that is religious life. The insecurity is situated at the same pivotal point where actual religious life exists today. We will see how other problems will huddle around this pivot point. This pivotal point lies in prayer, in the meaning of prayer. The religious person must feel that prayer has real meaning; some or other reality must be connected to prayer. However, in a time epoch when the discerning person fails to come out of his subjective knowledge and fails to find reality in knowledge, in the same time epoch religious people won't find the possibility, during prayer, of becoming aware that prayer is no mere subjective deed, but that within prayer an objective experience takes place. For a person who is unable to realise that prayer is an objective experience, for him or her it would be impossible to find a real religious hold. Particularly in the nature of current humanity prayer must focus on the religious life. Various other areas must focus on prayer. However, a prayer which only has subjective meaning would make people religiously insecure.

[ 10 ] It is the same root which grows out of us on the one side for the insecurity of knowledge, the Ignorabimus, and on the other side in fear; worry, which do not live in prayer in divine objectivity, but which is involved in subjectivity.

[ 11 ] You see, the problem of faith and the problem of knowledge, all problems, which involve people from the theological side, are connected to the same characteristics. Everything which depresses people from the side of direct religious experience, which needs confirmation, which must be maintained, this all comes from the same source. You can hardly answer this question if you don't orientate yourself historically where it will quite clearly show how far we have actually become distanced with our sciences from what we can call Christian today, while on the other hand today there is the constant attempt to proceed by pushing anything Christian out with science. Take everything in the Gospels which is Christian tradition. You can't but say: in this, there is another conception of the human being than what modern science claims. In modern science the human being is traced back to some or other primitive archetypal creature—I absolutely don't want to say that mankind had perhaps developed out of an animal origin—we are referred back to a primitive Ur-human, which gradually developed itself and, in whose development, existed a progression, an advance. Modern humanity is satisfied to look back according to scientific foundations, to the primitive archetypal beings, who through some inherent power, it is said, they created an ever greater and bigger cultural accomplishment, and to behold the unexpected future of this perfection.

If one now places within this evolution, the development of the Christ, the Mystery of Golgotha, then one can in an honest way hold on to the Gospels and say nothing other than: into this He doesn't fit, what fits here is a historic conception which goes around the Mystery of Golgotha and leaves it out, but the Christ of the Gospels don't fit into this conception. The Christ of the Gospels can't be considered in any other way than if one somehow believes what happened in the 18th century especially among the most enlightened, the most spiritual people as a matter of course. Take for instance Saint Martin—I now want to look further from religious development and want to point out someone who was in the most imminent sense a scientist of the 18th century—and that was Saint Martin. He had a completely clear awareness that the human being at the start of his earthly development came from a certain height downwards, that he had been in another world milieu earlier, in another environment and through a mighty event, through a crisis was thrown down to a sphere which lay below the level of his previous existence, so that the human being is no longer what he once had been.

[ 12 ] While our modern natural science points back to a primitive archetypal being out of which we have developed; this observation of Saint Martin must refer back to the fallen mankind, to those human beings which had once been more elevated. This was something, like I said, which to Saint Martin appeared as a matter of course. Saint Martin experienced this fall of mankind as a feeling of shame. You see, if the Christ is placed in such a conception of human evolution, where the human being, by starting his earth existence through a descent and is now more humble than he was before, then the Christ becomes that Being who would save humanity from its previous fall, then the Christ bears mankind again up into those conditions where it had existed before.

[ 13 ] We will see in what modification this imagination must appear to our souls. In any case this involves a disproportion between our modern understanding of mankind's evolution and the understanding of the Gospels; there is always dishonesty when one goes hither and thither and does not confess that one is simultaneously a supporter of modern scientific thinking and also the Christ. This must actually be clear for every honest, particularly religiously honest sensitive person. Here is something where a bridge must be formed if the religious life is to be healthy once again. Without this bridging, religious life will never ever be healthy again. Actually, there are people who come along like David Friedrich Strauss, and to the question "Are we still Christians?" reply with a No, indicating that they are still more honest than some of the modern theologians, whoever and again overlook the radical differences between what the modern human being regards as pure science and the Gospel concept of the Christ. This is the characteristic of modern theology. It is basically the impotent attempt to treat the Christ conception of the Gospels in such a way that it can be validated in front of modern science. Here nothing originates which somehow can be held.

[ 14 ] Yet, theology still exists. The modern pastor is given very little support for his line of work in the kind of theology presented at his schooling currently, from the foundation which has been indicated already and about which we will still come to in the course of our observations. The modern pastor must of course be a theologian even though theology is not religion. However, in order to work, a theological education is needed, and this educational background suffers from all the defects which I've briefly indicated in our introduction today.

[ 15 ] You see, the Catholic Church knows quite well what it is doing, because it doesn't allow modern science to come into theology. Not as if the Catholic Church doesn't care for modern science, it takes care of it. The greatest scholars can certainly be found within the Catholic ecclesiastics. I'm reminded of Father Secchi, a great astrophysicist, I remember people such as Wasmann, a significant zoologist, and many others, above all one can remind oneself of the extraordinarily important scientific accomplishments, worldly scientific accomplishments of the Benedictine order and so on. But what role did modern science play in the Catholic Church? The Catholic Church wants to care for modern science, that there are real luminaries in it. However, people want this modern scientific way to be applied in connection with the outer sensory world, it wants to distance itself strongly from the conceptions of anything pertaining to spirituality, no statements should be made about this spirituality. Hence it is therefore forbidden to express something about the spiritual, because scientists must not enter into this mix when something is being said about the legitimacy of the spiritual life. So, Catholicism relegates science to its boundaries, it rejects science from all that is theology. That it, for instance in modernism, gradually came into it, has caused Catholicism to experience it as dispensable; hence the war against modernism. The Catholic Church knows precisely that in that moment when science penetrates theology, extraordinary dangers lie ahead, and it is impossible to cope with scientific research in theology.

It is basically quite hopeless if it is expressed in abstract terms: theology we must have but it will be scorched, burnt by modern science.—Where does this come from? That is the next big burning question. Where does this come from?

[ 16 ] Yes, my dear friends, theology as we have it now, is rooted in quite different conditions than those of modern mankind. Ultimately the foundation of theology—if it wants to be correctly understood—is precisely the same foundations as that of the Gospels themselves. I have just expressed a sentence and naturally in its being said, it is not immediately understood, but it has extraordinary importance for our discussions here. Theology as inherited tradition doesn't appear in the form in which modern science appears. Theology is mostly in a form of something handed down, as such it goes back to the earlier ways of understanding. Certainly, logic was later applied to modern theology, which changed the form of theology somewhat; theology no longer appeared as it had been once upon a time. On the other hand, it is Catholicism which actually has something in this relationship which works in an extraordinarily enchanting manner on the more intelligent people and which is firmly adhered to in many Catholic clerics upon studying theology, through what has been handed down as knowledge of the so-called Primordial Revelation (Uroffenbahrung).

[ 17 ] Primordial Revelation! You have to be aware that Catholicism does not merely have the revelation which we usually call the revelation of the New Testament, nor this being only the revelation spoken about in the Old Testament, but that Catholicism—as far as it is theology—speaks about a Primordial Revelation. This Primordial Revelation is usually characterised by saying: that which was revealed by the Christ had been experienced once before by mankind, at that time humanity acquired the revelation through another, a cosmic world milieu. This revelation was lost through the Fall, but an inheritance of this great revelation was still available through the Old Testament and through pagan teachings.—That is Catholic thinking. Once upon a time, before people became sinners, a revelation was made to them; had mankind not fallen into sin, so the entire act of salvation of Christ Jesus would not have become necessary. However, the primordial revelation had been tarnished through humanity falling into the sinful world and in the course of time up to the Mystery of Golgotha the human being increasingly forgot what the primordial revelation had been. To a certain extent in the beginning there still remained glimpses of this primordial revelation, then however, as the generation went further and further away, this primordial revelation darkened, and it had become totally dark in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha which came as a new revelation.

This is what Christianity looks like today—under theological instruction—in Old Testament teaching and above all in the pagan teaching it is seen as a corrupted Primordial Revelation. Catholicism has an insight into what I've often spoken about in Anthroposophy, namely the old Mysteries. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I pointed these things out, but, not quite, but only as far as possible because these things are as much unknown as possible in today's world and most people are not prepared for these things. Only, here we can speak about it, and about one point.

[ 18 ] Everywhere in the pagan-religious mysteries there are certain experiences which allowed people to learn more than those communicated outwardly, exoterically, to a large crowd. These experiences didn't happen under supervision but through asceticism, through practice, they happened by the person going through certain experiences; a kind of drama was experienced leading to a culmination, with a catharsis, until the person came to sense the lightening of the divine laws of the world. This is simply a fact and within esoteric Catholicism it engendered an awareness of what existed in the Mysteries. It is even said that modern times are filled with worldly science and that this worldly science must not enter theology with arguments; as a result, we'd rather protect our knowledge of the Mysteries so that worldly science doesn't come in to explain it, because explaining the Mysteries would be a great danger under any circumstances. Catholicism was afraid that scientific involvement would reveal what one could possibly know about such things.

[ 19 ] Now we come to the question: what did the Mysteries actually impart during these olden times? The Mysteries didn't produce a mere theoretical knowledge, it produced an evolution of consciousness, a real transformation of consciousness. A person who had gone through the Mysteries learnt to experience life differently to those people who hadn't gone through them. A person who stands fully awake in the world, experiences outside the sleep state, the outer sense world; he experiences memories, he can through these memories relive his life within himself when after various interruptions he comes to a certain point in his life which lies a couple of years after his birth. With an individual who has gone through hard exercises in the Mysteries, something quite different rises up in his awareness than what he usually can find in his consciousness. In the old Mysteries one expressed this experience as a "rebirth." Why does one call it a rebirth? Because in fact a person goes through a kind of embryonic experience in his consciousness; an awareness comes to the fore in the manner and way the person had lived through during his time as an embryo. During the time of being an embryo, our inner experience is namely of the same kind as are the experiences during thinking, because what is experienced in our senses is only done so through our mother's body. An embryonic experience is woken up, that's why we call it a "rebirth." A person goes back in his embryonic life up to the time of his birth, and so, just like memories rise up, so that what is being experienced also rises up. In this way a person feels himself coming out of a spiritual world, being partially connected to a spiritual world. These were the mysteries of birth, under which time one understood the blossoming of the Mysteries as something which human beings could go through during such an initiation. What he went through during such an initiation was considered a shadowed knowledge of such a state he was in, before he descended into the world of the senses. Thus, through the "rebirth" the human being re-places himself again to a certain extend back into a human form of existence free of sin.

In earlier times, knowledge which was not of this world was called "theology," and this knowledge could be acquired through the return to the wisdom that human beings had had before entering into this world, a wisdom which had been corrupted because people had dragged it into this world.

[ 20 ] I'm sketching these things for you and later we will naturally bring today's considerations to our awareness. Theology in olden times was a gift from the gods, which could only be achieved through such exercises which could lift people out of their senses and bring them at least back to the experience of motherly love, enabling them to take up this wisdom again, this uncorrupted wisdom. This cannot be taken up in the form or modern logical concepts. Within the Mysteries people could not be given logical concepts in the modern sense, they received images. All knowledge which is gained in this way is gained in pictures, images. The more a person actually entered into the real world of existence—not only associated himself with existence—the more he lives into this existence, like when he lives within the existence of motherly love, so much more will consciousness stop living in abstract concepts, so much more will he live in images. Thus, what was designated as "theology" in olden times, in pre-Christian times, visual science, was science living in images. For this reason, I could say: this theology certainly had a similar form of expression as the one living in the Gospels, because in the Gospels we find images, and the further we go back, the more we find that the Gospels are still being expressed in the attitude of the old theology; there is certainly no differentiation between religion and theology. Here theology itself is something which has been received from God, here in theology one looks upon a God, and sees how the theology is given through a communication with God. Here is something which is alive, in theology. Then it came about that theology was experienced differently, somewhat like the conditions in which one lives when you grow older. At that time therefore, in olden times, theology was nourished through the religious life. This particular way of living though-oneself in the world of religious experience, this actually was getting lost to humanity at the same time as the Mystery of Golgotha was occurring.

[ 21 ] So you see, when we look towards the East as it is connected historically to the source of our religious life, we have, we can say, the Indian religious life. What nourishes the Indian religious life? It is nourished through the observation of nature, but the observation of nature was something quite different then to what it is for modern humanity. Nature observation was for all Indians such that one can say: an Indian observed spiritually when looking at nature, but he only observed the spirit which lay beneath the actual being of humanity. The Indian observed the mineral world spiritually, likewise the plant world, animal world; he was aware of the divine spiritual foundation of these worlds; but when he wanted to attain the human world as well, it didn't reveal itself to him. By wanting to access the actual being of the human being in the world, which he had himself, there he found nothing: Nirvana, the entry in nothingness towards what could be perceived in relation to the human being. Thus, the fervour of the Indian's religious life, which certainly was still present at that time, where theology, religion and science were one, was Nirvana. We have an escape from what is perceived from the natural basis of the image-rich consciousness, an escape into Nirvana, where everything that is given to the senses is obliterated. This self-abandonment to Nirvana must be experienced religiously in order to find a possible form for the religious stream of experience for individuals.

[ 22 ] Now, when we consider this religious observation of the world further, with the Persians and later with the Chaldeans, we see how they turn their gaze outward, they don't experience the world like us, they live through a world permeated with spirit, everywhere the spiritual foundation permeates everything, but immobilises it. There is a different disposition with these peoples compared to the Indians. The Indian strived towards mankind and found nothing. The other peoples who lived to the north and west of the Indians didn't strive towards mankind but towards the world, towards the spiritual in the world. They couldn't understand the spiritual world in any other way than to avoid with all their might, what later human evolution could no longer avoid.

[ 23 ] It is unbelievably meaningful, my dear friends, to observe how, on the one hand the old Indian striving came from what he saw, while he, when he strived towards human beings, I might call it, fell into unconsciousness, into Nirvana, while the Old Persian remained in what he was looking at. The divine which is the basis of the mineral, the plant and animal worlds, was understood by the Old Persian and from this came his religious striving; but now he was overcome by fear that he might be urged to seek man, and this turned into abstract thoughts which turned into imagery. This is actually the basic feeling of the near-Asian peoples all the way to Africa. They saw the foundation of nature as being a spiritual world; they didn't see people, but they were afraid to search in people because then they would enter an abstract region, a region into which later, the Romans entered with their religion. Before the Roman time, in the second, third Century there was the aspiration everywhere to avoid entering into abstractions, hence the aspiration to capture what is presented in images. There was even the endeavour to express in images, what one understood, in image form. There was an effort to, in relation to the divine, which one perceives, not to search for it through abstract concepts but in actions made visible; this is the origin of ritual, sacramental action. In this religious area which I'm referring to, is the origin of ritual in worship.

[ 24 ] Now place yourself into this entire development of the old Hebraic peoples; the Judaism which strongly feels the urge for its people's development to enter into what one possesses in one's consciousness. Today I only want to make indications in my presentation in order for us to orientate ourselves. The members of the Hebrew people wanted above all to feel the God on which human nature is based. The Old Indian only sensed God, or the gods, who lay at the basis of sub human nature, and as he tried to penetrate with his consciousness into the human being, there he wanted to rise up into Nirvana. The other, the Persian, Chaldean and Egyptian peoples searched for the connection to the Divine in images and applied these according to their character dispositions, to get up to the human being. So we can see how this urge, as in Judaism, to draw the divine and the human together, to bring the divine in a relationship with the human being, lead to the divine appearing at the same time the foundation of humanity. There was not predisposition to that in the Indian when they sailed into Nirvana; there was no longer a conception that the human consciousness wanted to be reached. For the Indian this personal route to the human soul was to be avoided. This personal route of the human soul had even lead to gradually slipping out of existence into nonexistence, so to speak. The other, the Prussian route, came to a standstill with imagery, remaining in ritual only.

[ 25 ] We see how the Jewish peoples developed, within these strivings, their own special character and this resulted in the impossibility to reach God out of one's own life. One had to wait and see what God himself gave, and it was there that the actual concept of revelation came into being. One had to wait and see what God would give and on the other hand one had to be careful not to search through the route of imagery or symbolism (Bilderweg), which was to be feared. If the route of symbolism was sought, then one arrived at a subhuman God, not at a God who carries humanity. In Judaism the symbolic route was not to be followed, it would not be through ritual an also not through the content of knowledge that one would speak to God. The olden time Jew wanted to meet their god by Him revealing himself, and human beings would communicate in a human way, while from their side, not make outwardly fulfilled sacrifices, but what arises subjectively: the promise—revelation, promise and the contract between both; a judicial relationship one could call it, between the people and their God.

[ 26 ] So the Jewish religion positioned itself and thus the Jewish religion stood in the entire evolution of humanity. therefore, one can say: here already a relationship is the example which is performed in our modern time, where science wants to be beside religion but where science has nothing to say about religion, just like the olden time Jew removed everything which appeared as imagery. This is already performed in Judaism, and precisely in the modern differentiation between knowledge and faith, lies unbelievably much Judaism. In Harnack's The Being of Christianity everything is again based on Judaism. You have to see through this that we get sick with these things.

[ 27 ] Human evolution is penetrated by more and more things. Something is continuously developing which belongs to the Jews in particular: the awareness of personality, which is urged by ego development. With the Greeks there developed a mighty inner world beside the outer world of observed nature but this inner world could raise doubts, because it was observed merely as a world of mythology. Sensing the religious element rising in Hellenism, which lives in Greek mythology, through mythological fantasy, which people are searching for—because it was not to be found in nature—is what rises up in man. The Greek however didn't grasp the actual important point within the human inner life, resulting from mythological fantasy, which the Romans evolved into abstract thinking, which certainly already started with Aristotle, but which was developed particularly in Rome. This abstract way of thinking which is so powerful as to being people to the point of their I, bringing them to self-consciousness, to I-consciousness, this is something which we today still carry in us today and we carry it heavily in us, in the form of modern agnosticism.

[ 28 ] My dear friends, basically there is no spiritual teaching other than modern materialism. This sounds like an extraordinary paradox and yet it is so. What the modern materialistic thinker carries in his head is quite spiritualized, so spiritualised that it is quite abstract and has no connection to reality any more. That's Romanism in full swing. We actually have become unbelievably spiritual in the course of the 19th century, but we deny this spirituality because we maintain that through this spirituality, we can understand matter. In reality our souls are in a spiritualised content, right into our ideas are we spiritualised, but we maintain that through all of this we can only understand a material world. Thus, human beings have grasped their ego through this spiritualisation, but as a result they have become separated from the world. Today humanity must again look for its connection to the world, the search need to be for inner knowledge, there needs to be the possibility to not only have "knowledge without objective meaning" but knowledge with objective meaning, in order for knowledge to reveal the being of the world, and on the other hand to authenticate what is hidden within the human being as objective.

[ 29 ] You see, the Greeks had a great advantage compared to the oriental world, they could to draw together their innermost nature so to speak. From within themselves they could draw a content, but this content could first only attach as filled with fantasy, imagination. However, there was something the Greeks didn't know. They had brought the development of humanity to internalisation but didn't attach it to the inner life. The internalisation and the hardening continued in the Roman times and beyond, and man had to learn—today still we need to learn to understand—how one can attach what is within, what permeates this inner being. The Greeks could think about their gods in grandiose fantasy images but what the Greek could not do, was to pray. The prayer only cam about later and for prayer the possibility had to be found of connecting the one praying, to reality. To this we must connect those times in which prayer was not merely spoken, not merely thought or not merely felt, but in which prayer became one with the sacramental ritual. Then again Catholicism knows quite well why they don't separate themselves from ritual, from the sacrificial act, from the central sacrifice of the mass.

We'll talk more about these things.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Yesterday my stating point was to indicate in a few words how Anthroposophy can certainly not be considered as an education of religion and in no way can it directly enter into the development of religious life, but only, as I indicated, indirectly. Anthroposophy must, according to its nature, live as a free deed in the human spirit, it must depend on the free deeds of the human spirit—like natural science as well, which heads in the opposite direction—while religious life must be based on communication with the Godhead with whom one knows one is connected and with whom one knows one is dependant in religious life.

[ 2 ] At first a serious abyss could open up between those who can offer Anthroposophy to contemporary civilization, and the blossoming of religious life. Perhaps in the totality of what we will talk about here will show you that this abyss doesn't exist. I would just like to call your attention today to how anthroposophical life intervenes in the academic world in such a way that it lends a religious colouring to it.

[ 3 ] It is quite without doubt that the modern world rules the relationship of humanity to the cosmos and its earthly environment with agnosticism, and religious people who do not acknowledge this, will come up against a very serious mistake. They would like to remain, to a certain extent, stuck in the comfortable old form and would not contribute anything to ensure that the essence of the old form can remain intact for the earth's development. This mistake unfortunately applies to many people at present. They shut themselves off from the necessity that the epoch we are entering into, requires that we clarify and move towards a conscious, awakened knowledge with human prudence in every area. If religious life is artificially distanced from this knowledge, so it would—while undoubtedly knowledge of a larger authority is being addressed—cause this knowledge to perish, as it once before had threatened to do in the 19th century, when the materialistic knowledge wanted to destroy religious life in a certain sense.

[ 4 ] What I have said regarding this must simply penetrate our sensitivities, it must be clear, and when it is clear, my dear friends, then our mental picture, as I bring it up in front of you, will not seem like such a paradox, as it might be for those who encounter and hear it for the first time.

[ 5 ] The agnosticism, the Ignorabimus, is something which has sprung up out of the scientific way of thinking of modern time. What kind of knowledge is it which professes ignorance or agnosticism? It is based on something which it agrees with completely; it is based on the fact that people have gradually been trying to totally shut out their life of soul from knowledge. It is namely so that the ideal human knowledge according to the modern scientist, also the historian, is to shut out subjectivity and only retain what is objectively valid. As a result, the process of obtaining knowledge—for scientific research as well—is completely bound to the physical body of man. Please understand this, my dear friends, in all earnest. Materialism namely has the right when it takes this knowledge which is available to it, not only in regard to what is totally due to material conditions, but which appear as material processes. What really happens between people, in their search for scientific knowledge and the outer world, moves between the outer material things and the relationship to the sense organs; this means their relationship with the material, physical body. The real process of seeking knowledge in connection to the earthly world is a material process right into the final phases of cognition. What the human being experiences in this cognition, is lived through as an observer; he experiences it with his soul-spiritual "side-stepping," so that the human being actually is quite right in the cognitive process as being understood physically and to recognise this as the only decisive conception. The human being as observer, which has no activity within himself—this has already often been mentioned by scientists who have thought about this, recognised it and spoken about it.

[ 6 ] You see, for in this process of acquiring knowledge, where the human being is actually a mere observer, everything a person has as inner journeys in his soul life, is discounted by the observed reality. The human being observes the outer things, he thinks about these outer objects, he is reminded by outer things, but he certainly also observes how in his reminiscences, his memories, how his emotions of feelings and willing come into it, only how this happens, he doesn't know because he is completely unsure about the origin of these feelings and willing, so that for this knowledge, which can only be acknowledged in the present, the only thing which comes into consideration is what happens between the observation and the memory. This is only a picture; it runs as a parallel occurrence next to the real materialistic process running alongside it. The material process is the reality and the recognition runs alongside the material process.

[ 7 ] If one had the means for really absorbing what was approaching in the epoch leading up to the Mystery of Golgotha, in the teachers and pupils of the mysteries, and what in that time, one could say, through three decades during which it happened, the then Gnostic orientated mystery teachers spoke about their most inner heartfelt convictions, then one can do no other than to say: they anticipated that the human being will experience himself as a mere observer in the world, and that even his process of acquiring knowledge will occur without his soul's participation. This experience ruled throughout the prevailing mood of the beings of the mysteries during the times of the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 8 ] How can we come to terms with this knowledge today regarding ignorance and agnosticism? We arrive, as we've said, at something which appears as a paradox. Knowledge is the result of the material process, even tied to the material world, while the human being experiences spiritually, but is a mere observer in his spirit. If we now expand the Christian point of view of this phenomenon, then we finally reach a point of integrating this knowledge into the process itself that the Christian view of the various human processes ever had. We reach a point in a sense, which we characterised yesterday, to regard the recognition of human sinfulness in our time as the final phase of the Fall of mankind from its former conditions. Only then will we understand our current science out of religious foundations, when we can regard science as the final phase of the expression of the sinful human being, when we can place it into the realm of sin. This is what appears as a paradox. Out of sinfulness comes ignorance, out of sinfulness, religiously expressed, comes agnosticism.

[ 9 ] Only when we feel this way regarding modern science, can we feel Christian towards science. Then again—and we will actually see this in the following days—quite a necessary path results from the understanding of the sinfulness of today's science, an inner human path which can be understood as grace.

[ 10 ] With this I have initially indicated what we will be undertaking in the following days; because sometimes you have to do things a little differently to what is customary with today's science, when one wants to explain things in a proper way. To a certain extent one must first draw the outer circle and go inward from there and not start with a theory and draw conclusions from that.

[ 11 ] With this at least something real is indicated in humanity. If we simply remain stuck in the ordinary knowledge of current science, then we remain stuck in images. The moment we sense within these images—and all of science today is an image—the sinfulness within this modern scientific element, we comprehend matter with a reality within ourselves, then we are on the way to take science itself into reality. One must be able to develop a feeling, if one wants to rise to it, to ask questions in such a way that something of reality is felt: how is it possible, in a religious sense that, what the human being initially experiences as an observer, can be brought into something real through which human life here on earth is not merely a nonhuman, material life and that the human being is not a mere observer but that a person with his own true being can express himself by processing material existence? When does inner life reach into outer reality so that something is created out of the inward experience and a person is no longer only a mere observer?

[ 12 ] You see, there have been attempts to answer this question from time immemorial with the essence of sacramentalism, and one doesn't arrive at another understanding of the essence of sacramentalism than on the basis of such considerations as I've pointed out. First of all, one thing confronts us in human beings and that is the Word.

[ 13 ] The Word is actually for current science something quite mysterious, something secretive; because uttered words are at the same time perceived through the sense of hearing. In man there is a moment which lies in the words, when he utters words and he hears them at the same time. In the eyes, in the ability to see, the process has an active and a passive element completely intertwined; it is also present there but is not yet analysed in physiology today. Actually, it is present in all the senses but in relation to hearing and speaking both the active and passive elements are clearly separated from one another. When we speak, we certainly don't consider ourselves as observers of our lives; when we speak, we participate creatively in our life because speaking is simultaneously connected to our breathing process. What takes place in speaking streams over the breathing process. When we breathe in we bring the pressure of the breathing right into our spinal cord canal and in this way, pressure is translated to the brain and works creatively on the cerebral fluid. In the breathing process the outer world streams into us, moulding ourselves. The air we breathe is firstly outside, it enters into us, works formatively on our cerebral fluid and thus also works formatively in the semi-solid parts of the brain. We only understand the brain correctly if we don't just look at it as something which has grown in humans, but if we look at it as something in progressive interaction with the outer world.

[ 14 ] In this in-streaming of breath we weave the words which we express. I want to firstly only indicate these things, as I suggested, I want to draw an outer circle and then move gradually inward. By our interweaving our words with our breath—which is indicated in the Old Testament as giving humans their origins—blowing in the air to breathe—through which our word unifies with what is considered in the breath of air as divine, we experience the Word as the Creator within us. We observe something in the world process where we are not merely observers but feel our soul's life working creatively into our body.

[ 15 ] We have reached an understanding which allows us to say: in the original creation of mankind was the Word, and everything in human beings was created through the Word.—Just study what it means that the human being, by learning to speak, slowly disentangles his physical organisation through speech. We haven't yet considered the words of the Gospel of St John, but we have discovered the manifestation of something of the bodily nature of the human being in this Gospel. When we contemplate the human being we first of all have his spiritual soul expression and from here the Word comes, which then draws into his bodily organism and shapes him, and thus we have many of these bodily forms which in the course of our lives develop from words themselves, because this is the way we are, we develop out of our words.

[ 16 ] What speech/language means to human beings can only really be studied fully in its depths through spiritual science. Already in the sense of the Testaments we have an interweaving of the words which moves through man as the first divine process, that of breathing. Mere thinking which moves in the sphere of the observer is pushed into the creative sphere. When thinking becomes transformed into words, the Divine empowers these thoughts; it is, one could say, the deification of thoughts occur in the words. When one becomes aware that there is much more to words than speech, then words become something through which a person discovers his first connection, his first communication with the Divine in his own behaviour, a behaviour which is like a condensing; like a thought immersed in feeling. While this is to some extent a route from subjective to objective thought, we have the possibility for something which is spiritually objective, to flow into the word. This can be followed by the idea that much more can exist in words than what is in merely man-made thinking; that to a certain extent something divine can flow into the words and that in the words something divine can be expressed, that a divine message can be contained in the words.

[ 17 ] So we have the first element, that people from out of themselves, find their way going out into the environment, permeated with what is divine in the words. This is somewhat the way the Words of the Gospels were experienced, the in-streaming of the divine in the words of the Gospels which we can feel in the creative activity of the words for ourselves; here we have the first element how man can change from his subjectivity to the objective, like in ritual.

[ 18 ] Now, one can look at what a person doesn't think regarding the world, but what actions he performs in the world. Simply look at human actions. These human actions are seldom regarded in the right light by modern materialism.

Once again, I can only make indications about what this actually involves; we will later enter into them again.

[ 19 ] Just imagine the following contrivance: around a pulley a rope, here a weight, and on the other side a larger weight. The rope is pulled down on the side of the heavier weight and pulled up on the opposite side. The same thing can happen if you now pull on the lighter side and lift the heavier side. You could accomplish something yourself which can also happen as an objective process. In the first place, depending on the heavier weight, it happens without you being there; but when you are there, you can shift the weight. What happens in the outer world can also happen without you.

[ 20 ] This is however a process in inorganic nature. When you study what a person accomplishes in the outer world you realize what is of importance is that it happens in such a way, that it comes from spiritual interrelationships, and that the body of a person only presents the possibility for the action. In our actions we namely—in that we gain knowledge of the world as soul-spiritual observers—only have our body as one ingredient. In our bodies processes take place—processes of movement, of nourishment, of dissolving and so on. What takes place in our bodies is an ingredient, something that is added to what happens objectively. Our body doesn't take part in our actions; we only understand our actions when we consider them when separated from the body. Just as we in the cognitive process, seen materialistically, have something which turns us into observers, so we have in the process of actions for the world, in the process of action, which takes place in the world, something in which the body doesn't participate. Processes which take place in the body remain without cosmic meaning, just like materialistic knowledge has no cosmic meaning. A person remains in materialism in his actions when they only pertain to the earthly, like a hermit standing in the world has no relationship to anything outside of himself. If he searches for this relationship, then he must mix something spiritual into his actions, accomplish actions in such a way that they aren't separated from him, like all earthly actions, then he must allow his thoughts and feelings to enter in a vital way into his actions, so that the actions become signs for what lives in them. Then the actions are a sacrificial act, then they are the sacrifice.

[ 21 ] When we look at knowledge in this way, we see knowledge objectified by the validation of the message in words; if we look at the actions, we have the objectification of action, the drawing out of man alone in what is given in the sacrificial act. Here we first have the relationship of a person to the outer world in the sense that it originates out of the human spirit-soul. Out of the spiritual soul now also rises the imagination—in relation to words, which are no longer experienced as a human, but as a divine revelation—and in relation to the sacrificial act, which is no longer being experienced as the manipulation of the human world, in which man is not involved, but as such is involved with his thoughts, his feelings; this he experiences again in his inner life.

[ 22 ] The other relationship of the human being to the outer world, we find in human nutrition. We actually have three relationships to the outer world: observation through the senses, breathing and nutrition. Everything else can be referred back to these. Breathing is actually positioned between perception and nutrition because one could say that breathing is half perception and half nutrition. It is undeniable that the breathing process stands between the process of perception and nutrition. You see, it is simultaneously connected to the processes of perception and nourishment. Breathing is the synthesis between observation and nutrition.

[ 23 ] Physiology considers nutrition incorrectly. Physiology is of the opinion that we take in nourishment, that we take out of the food what we need and repel the rest. This is not so. That we absorb substance is only a side-effect. The process of life means we are actually constantly opposed and fight back against what is caused by the ingestion of foodstuff into ourselves. We eat, we drink—and the result is something which lies truly very deep in our consciousness, beneath our conscious soul life. What happens there is a constant defensive action. In this physical-physiological process of defence are found the actual processes of life and of nutrition. The life process of nourishment is an averting process. Only when we realize how the organism is organised in this way, to receive the suggestion for a defence—for us to have a defence there naturally has to be suggestion—only when we understand that by the defence against a substance coming from outside as a suggestion in the process of nourishment, will we be able to really understand nourishment. With nourishment a process of aversion is involved, while the absorption of substances is only a side effect through which the finest filaments of the human being the suggestion for resistance is directed from the outside, in order for the aversion to take place in the most outer periphery of the organism. Only at this point of averting does the actual life process of nutrition take place, so that the ordinary earthly process of nourishment is actually a resistance to the earthly. The earthly pushes the nourishing items into us, and we must absorb it, but this is a process of resistance.

[ 24 ] This is the reality, but it is not the way science looks at the whole thing. What is actually happening with this repulsion? Something happens which lies completely outside of human consciousness. When we take up nourishment, it is actually a process of the material world. Each substance is actually a concentrated, reduced world process. Processes of the outer world we take into ourselves, we repel them, but by repelling them, a counter process comes about: the process of the outer world becomes something quite different, transformed, and in this transformation, something happens in us. Outer matter is transformed in us. What becomes of it? It becomes spirit within us. This is something which is ordinarily not seen, that the human being in his actual process of digestion, in his transformation of the outer world steers outer material processes to spiritualization.

In the outer world nature goes through world processes, and as a fragment of this world process, we could call it the origin of a seed, from which all other things originated through the seed serving as nourishment. What happens in the outer world becomes firstly transformed within the human being before it goes further on its way to spirituality. It can't be transformed into the spiritual in the outer world, only within the human being can it change into the spiritual. This is simply an objective fact, which I state here, nothing else. However, what I'm presenting here for you happens outside the world of human thoughts. It happens in the deeper regions of human will and partially in the feeling realms. Only certain parts of the feeling life, and will, take part in the process of nourishment, which I've recently indicated. Thought processes don't take part in it; it goes in the opposite direction; through the Word it goes from below into the formation. Here beneath, we have, coming from outside in the opposite direction, like the way the thought process does it, the process of transformation.

[ 25 ] If one wants to place this transformative process within the human being so that when one looks at a person according to the manner in which he looks at the outer world, then one must place something in the outside world which actually doesn't happen in the outside world, but only within the human being. With this one had placed a sacramental act in the outside world, something which doesn't take place in natural phenomena, but which takes place within the human being as a human mystery. If one wants to take what belongs to the most inner part of man, which we have just characterised, and place this in front of the human being, then one arrives at the conversion of the bread and the wine as the body and blood (of Christ), which is the transubstantiation. The transubstantiation is not an experience of the outside world; the transubstantiation is revealing to the outside world what is fulfilled within the most inner part of the human being. We see in the transubstantiation what we are unable to see in the outside world, because the outside world is a fragment of existence, not a totality; in the sacraments we add that to the outside world in addition to what the kingdom of nature accomplishes within the human being.

[ 26 ] This, my dear friends, is the original idea of the sacrament, that something is added to outer world phenomena, something which inner man doesn't experience consciously but which is within the human being, and because it is not recognised but exists subconsciously, it can through signs be placed into the outside world. To consummate transubstantiation, a person must feel something unconsciously connected with the innermost being of his self to the symbols. He is indeed paving the way for intercommunications with the spirits of the outside world by presenting the transformation, which would otherwise take place behind the veil of memory within him, as a sacrament.

[ 27 ] With this we have not yet grasped what the highest achievable thing is by human beings, we have only grasped the spiritualisation process of substance in the human being, the transformation, the transubstantiation. What happens in man as an objective process takes place, I would say, only as separated from our consciousness by a thin veil, behind our consciousness. This happens because from this side, at every moment of our lives, our "I" is stirred up. We dive down below this transformed substance and by our absorbing the matter of the outside world, our process of life exists in this transformation, by our spiritual soul diving under into the transformation of the outside world, our "I" is continually nourished, our "I" is continuously encouraging the union with the substance transformed by this process. The union with the substance after its transformation represents the accessibility of the ego-manifestation to spiritualisation. Let's consider this in a sacramental way.

If we place the sacramental before us then the participation in the sacrament is such that it is materially represented through symbolism; as soon as it is transubstantiated it becomes united with the human being and here we have the fourth link of what in the ritual can be represented as the sacramental signs in the relationship of the human being to the world.

[ 28 ] If we look at the human beings in as far as they are involved with the outside world, then we have, what I would call, the realization of the process of knowledge (in spirit) in Words, and in the sacrificial act, which appear outwardly in signs, we have indicated everything which a person can unite with in his soul-spirit and actions. If we look at human beings absorbing the outside world, where we have the proclamation of the message in word and the sacrificial act, if we look at human beings who continuously give birth out of the spiritual, then we have realized this in the sacramental acts of transubstantiation and communion.

[ 29 ] With this we have thus the possibility to connect the human being in his relationship to all his actions in the outside world in a real sense. Actions distance themselves from him, his own body walks beside him. In transubstantiation that which does not take place in the world is presented as an event, because the outside world is only a fragment of possible events. In communion a person unites himself with the outside world to which he can't connect through his thinking. Objective processes precede transubstantiation and communion. As a result of this we place a person through a physical-soul-spiritual way in a relationship with the world. We have stopped regarding the human being as in a hermit's existence removed from the world; we've started seeing him as a member of the whole world. We have learnt to regard the world as material, but there, where we see it as a fragment, to look at it as if the spiritual foundation on which matter is based is only a part, spiritualising and perfecting; and we have taken the divine cycle, which is in the outer and inner part of man, and placed it before us ... (Some gaps in stenographer's text made the publisher shorten the text here.)

[ 30 ] This is what the people wanted to present to those who said: The human physical-soul-spiritual relationship to the universe can be brought back through the sacraments; recognised through the proclamation, through the sacrificial act, performed through the transubstantiation and communion. You could live together with the entire world by taking what is usually spread over two halves in a person, the soul-spiritual, which just watches, and the physical, which is just an addition to external actions. These can be united by taking what the mere observer wants to remain in relation to the outside world, sacramentalize it in the proclamation of the Word, in the Gospel—which comes out of the "Angelum," out of the realm permeated by the spiritual world—and in the sacrificial act, experienced in his inner life and through which the human being only becomes complete, sacramentalised in the transubstantiation, the transformation, and then by incorporating the human being into this whole in communion, in union. Here you have a real process which is no mere process of knowledge but a process which is connected to your feeling and will, while the process of knowledge takes place in a cold, frozen region of mere abstraction.

[ 31 ] What takes place in the coldness of knowledge is warmed somewhat by the proclamation of the Word and in the sacrificial act. That which, however, through overheating can no longer exist consciously, because heat numbs consciousness and thus can't be perceptive, which can happen when the phenomenon is elevated to a noumenon/psyche, means that in place of external processes which are perceived by the senses, the external process of sacramental action is imitated by the human being itself, in which sacramental action is regarded as what lies behind nature, which can't be produced by anything else, with an objective meaning in the world, because it places the events of human life itself in the cosmos.

[ 32 ] With this we have given something which our current abstract process for acquiring knowledge actually presents in life. However, a question remains, which is an important question. We can understand that something happens in people through the Word, because the Word works into the corporeality and man forms himself through words. We can also understand that through the sacrificial act something happens in the inner part of man because the sacrificial act is executed in such a way that he is not just holding back what is in his body, but that his feeling and willing takes part in the sacrificial act. As a result, an earthly event in the body is connected to a super-earthly event. This can be comprehended. In fact, quite different feelings are experienced during the sacrificial act than any during any other processes in ordinary outer activities. A dampening of the consciousness which is carried within, is numbed. If we can now say something happens within human beings, then the great question arises which we want to address in future: does this event, which is primarily an independent event, does it not take its course in outer events? Is it not also a world event? If so, then we should ask ourselves, what a person experiences as in an outer action, which is symbolic and thus somehow withdraws from the course of events in natural phenomena—do such actions in their turn somehow weave into the course of events in natural phenomena? Are they something real, outside of the human being? This is the other component of the question. As we said, we will occupy ourselves with this question in the next days.

[ 33 ] You will have already noticed in what has come in front of you, that there are four main elements of the sacrifice of mass which rest on the primordial experiences of consciousness, in the mysteries. The four principal constituents of the sacrifice of mass are namely: reading the Gospel, the Offering, the transubstantiation (transformation) and communion (unification).

[ 34 ] In everything which I present to you, my dear friends, I have no other goal than to share these things firstly with you. Everything that is to happen now will be based on the fact that, despite our communal confrontations which we know about, the tasks of our time will especially come out of a truly religious consciousness. We will speak about this further, tomorrow.

An Open Letter To Dr Rudolf Steiner

September 1921

Honourable Doctor!

After the devastating impressions of the last years which have gone through the German world, a longing has developed for religious renewal. It is true that on the whole, quite small circles have these longings which are really serious and alive. However, these are circles in which one can hope to find the power for how this can be developed. Some really strong will glows here in the youthful hearts waiting for the aim and leadership. There where one didn't dare to think about it not long ago, lectures are being held regarding the rebirth of the German nation, and one allows certain religious sounds to become agreeable even if one doesn't want to know anything about church life. In newspapers and magazines, and much more so in innumerable dialogues, there is a turn towards higher questions. The feeling that something new and great could come into the inner realm lives in a clear or less clear way in many of the best of us. As hopeful as we at times evoke this mood, at closer inspection we still discover a hopelessness, which is truly a call for mercy. Nearly superstitiously one waits in these circles for religious leaders, but one has no idea in which direction one is steered and vacillates between hope and a deep mistrust in one's own hope. Inspired, one celebrates soon the one and then the other which on the region of the inner life appears strong and safe to talk about, yet to which one has to admit shortly after, that one was disappointed and that the word of fulfilment is not mentioned again. One hopes for intuitions, does not know the at least where it should come from and which are the most believable, and confuses ever more dangerous tendencies of instinctive life with divine revelations. One regards the great personalities of the past, Fichte, Goethe, also Luther, and tries drawing inspiration from their work without really liberating contemporary solutions.

People look for substitutes in community feelings and community experiences and completely forget that each and every great soul had been given by community. There's a demand for a new "ritual" and they don't know that only a new spirit can bring a new ritual/worship, that the right spirit on its own can bring about a satisfactory form of worship from out of himself. People create all kinds of dance and play and enjoy the sure spirit of times gone by, expecting from this to create something which one can't create yourself but should create.

In this general hopelessness, which becomes ever more evident and could bring about a change of heart, Anthroposophy steps in and—multiply this hopelessness! Those who experience Anthroposophy for the first time, express much of the passionate rejection they experience. As one of those who have entered into such a circle where an understanding for your work can be found, I would here like to be the spokesman for these circles. In this way I would like to advise you to make something of the coherence and mood of these people, in order to help them understand Anthroposophic thought and actions better. As vividly as I am empathic on the one hand, how strange, yes, repulsive these people at first encounter Anthroposophy, so sure is my experience on the other hand that a fulfilment of the great, deep longing of our time can be achieved through the correct knowledge of anthroposophic accomplishments.

The people of whom, and for whom, I want to talk about here, long for a great purpose in life. They imagine this purpose of life, consciously or unconsciously, as a unified, powerful thought, as a singular soul-powerful feeing, which carries the whole of life and lift it up. Now the find Anthroposophy and discover an abundance of assertions in all kinds of fields, a mass of individual insights, big and small, which they initially don't know how to approach and towards which they feel helpless. It is as if they want to dangerously push everything away by saying 'One is necessary', which they still experience as a deep human need.

They want a clear, safe way to be indicated up high, which recommends itself to them convincingly and invitingly, a way they can walk forward to with a clear conscience and joyful courage. Now they hear of all kinds of exercises, which could and should be done, through which one laboriously acquires all kinds of abilities which do not seem essential and decisive to them—how one for example focuses your mind on the blossoming and withering of a plant in order to get an impression of the transience of life, the spirituality of a flower and so on. A confusing wealth of advice spreads itself out before them, on the one hand from the moral, known and obvious side and on the other hand, from the 'occult' strange or even questionable side. They would gladly feel free and great, striving at the pinnacle of humanity so to speak, but now they must find that some individuals with deep insights should be far ahead of them, and that they have no prospect in life to even come close to reaching them. As a result, they feel themselves pushed into a lower human class and even robbed of their human kingdom. They feel like an assassination attempt on their human dignity, even if they don't say it out loud.

Many of these people strongly feel that help can only come from a higher world. It is precisely here that Anthroposophy seems to be gradually thrown back on itself. It is for them as if people gradually want to and must push themselves higher, with unending effort and boredom while they long to be seized from above and be filled with new, powerful life forces from above.

Many of them have worked through a large part of knowledge of our time. Just from current science they have received powerfully chilling and paralysing impressions. And now also the realm of belief and the realm of knowledge needs transformation? Must their most precious and highest experiences of their inner soul realm be sacrificed for research and a descriptive 'science'? They fear that this will fall back into a dull intellectualism; they rear a falsification, even desecration of the inner life. It looks to them like a basic, dangerous underestimation of the deep distinction is presented between knowledge which appear through the senses and phenomena, and belief, the inner truth freely acknowledged. Not only a few of these people carried a strong knowledge within, that help must somehow be expected from Christ, not from churchlike Christianity, but from the correctly understood Christ himself. Yes, in individuals you find an instinctive awareness of the "living Christ" as the great helper of mankind. Now they are told that in Anthroposophy, Christ is regarded as the "regent of the sun" or that to begin with the two Jesus children in our time reckon with all kinds of extraordinary details; sincere claims which, as far as they had not found this quite repulsive initially, now in any case mean absolutely nothing and above all doesn't appear to be of help.

Some of them are also influenced by the "culture" of the last decades—the word "culture" itself has become so questionable that it can hardly be heard any more. They all look rather at everything else as a "new culture." Now they experience Anthroposophy penetrating into all outer areas, in architecture, the art of dance, which all want to renew our culture. There it appears that the power of humanity regarding religion as the main focus is pushed aside to a busyness and all kinds of outer work of vain distraction.

Above all, however, we must also remember those by whom the social question has been raised precisely by religious sentiment, becoming the mighty burning question of our time, and who can only through a new spirit, which grasps and truly fulfils humanity with a pure, strong brotherly mood make the salvation possible for the world. To them Anthroposophy seems neither simple nor warm, neither convincing nor contemporary or popular enough to somehow help humanity recover from their current main dilemma.

How much the present theological striving of anthroposophy has remained inadequate, I know all too well. During the last years I've had many hours of embarrassment about it, that this great spiritual movement has been regarded as failed by my theological colleague, in a spiritual and unfortunately also human way. In the above-mentioned mood I believe deeper reasons need to be looked for regarding this strong instinctive antipathy which anthroposophy meets in theologians, but also in other religious circles.

Let me at least indicate to ignorant readers—who can say one gets the clear impression that I am again being mistaken through Anthroposophy—that I believe I have the right to know what to expect from all these objections which I have to handle almost daily. I clearly see that the antipathies partly originate out of a false understanding of the tasks which Anthroposophy proposes, which is quite inclusive yet simultaneously humble, when many of its opponents think, partly out of an inadequate insight into the depth and character of the current spiritual crises, and out of a similar inadequate knowledge of the real possibilities for their solution. While you have up to now not according to my knowledge entered explicitly and in detail into this whole circle of concern, I believe that for many there is really a need for you to once and for all answer such questions. Particularly enlightening it could be as well, if you can express yourself regarding how you from your point of view, out of your abilities judge the actual present human being to have "religious impressions" at all. Does one not turn to soul powers which are dwindling relentlessly, when one in some old sense of "pure religious" way want to address current humanity? What exists for the future when people today still speak about a "religious experience" and impressions of God? How can powers, which make people susceptible for the higher worlds, be enlivened and in which way can they be renewed? How do you imagine an active religious proclamation in future? The main issue would be to hear what you have to say, how you see the current religious crisis from your point of view, and how Anthroposophy can and will contribute.

As always with immense gratitude and veneration.

Yours,
Friedrich Rittelmeyer.

[ 1 ] Emil Bock: I would like to open the hour of our discussion with my immediate task in asking Dr Steiner to give answers regarding the letter of Dr Rittelmeyer. This letter has indeed grown out of various wishes for guidelines regarding possible answers to those who made these objections.

[ 2 ] Rudolf Steiner: If we have to start with it, please permit me to make a few points. I ask you however, to link your remarks to those comments I will be making, because obviously some of you here can approach what Dr Rittelmeyer has formulated, from another point of view.

[ 3 ] Firstly, I think there is a feeling for many today that some kind of impact is needed in religious life, that religious life needs a kind of renewal in the most diverse areas. Dr Rittelmeyer has formulated the experience which he indicates is present with those familiar with it and I have to admit, something similar has at times confronted me. Already in relation to his first point presented here, one expects unified thoughts, a soul-powerful feeling—and this is summarised in the words "one thing is necessary"—while one finds in Anthroposophy a sum, even perhaps a very large sum of declarations regarding the world content and so for a person, who knows no sure approach, has to say: it appears to me through this experience that in many respects it has already been there for such a long time and has now contributed a lot to the fact that we in our current western civilisation have entered into a dead end.

[ 4 ] Just think how vague, how uncertain an experience would be to presume it could perhaps be more succinctly formulated in order to solve the problem. One could even make references to this in our domain. In our domain another kind of domain has arisen out of Anthroposophic foundations where something similar has happened as what is meant with this point, if I understand it correctly. This is in the domain of social thinking. Something like a unified thought has come about, I could say, in the domain of the Threefold social organism. Firstly, I only want to make characteristic comparisons. I must confess this example doesn't show anything significant when it appears publicly in such a short formulation. In life such short formulations don't prove to be really effective; having a decisive importance. I always encounter an objection for instance when someone says: You want to tell me something about the human organism, and instead of giving me a uniform idea, you present an entire physiology.—One must try and understand how the doubt-free comfortable thoughts of modern time have contributed largely to our unhappiness and inner and outer relationships, and what we are suffering from is based on the vague manner of our desire to understand everything in a summary. One has to say to oneself: precisely because such ideas arise, proves that something must change when things happen, which many expect in a vague way. In particular, when it is then said, instead of such "uniform ideas." instead of "mighty soul feelings," a number of exercises are given, some of them could be of a moral nature—and others—they are called "occult" in the letter, which makes an unusual, thoughtful impression on others—yes, it must even be said: What can one then actually expect?—One can expect that there will simply be a debate about what current humanity is missing. I'm speaking firstly in this way, how in the anthroposophical domain it is by all means necessary; we will soon address the particular religious questions given in the letter itself.

[ 5 ] You see, the moral exercises, which are mentioned here as familiar, are such that according to their wording, they certainly would be known if they were moral instructions. Firstly, according to the anthroposophic context, this is not what they are. In an anthroposophic context they are indications for the attainment of higher knowledge. It is certainly presented in such a way that it must be clear: they are indication for the attainment of a higher, supersensible knowledge. One must after all admit: If I would say a person necessarily longs for the attainment of supersensible knowledge, as opposed to if I say, that a kind of tranquillity in relation to "exulting to the skies, grieving to death" provides humanity with a moral stand, there is certainly a more radical difference between them. By me expressing something like the demand for serenity, I'm expressing something which could perhaps be quite well known, and which could initially sound like an obvious moral instruction, but which is not a discussion based on the demand for serenity. Is it said in my book 'Knowledge of the higher Worlds and its attainment' that for the purpose of morality, for the purpose of obtaining moral support it is necessary to develop serenity? No! Something quite different is said. It is said that an exercise needs to be done, it is said that this exercise needs to be repeated, in this way the exercise should be done in a certain rhythm in such a way that one could describe it as done in tranquillity. To repeat a certain exercise is quite different to a moral action. Above all you need to consider what is given in my book Knowledge of the higher Worlds and its attainment.

You see, it is actually the most natural thing that one person can say to another: you need to make an effort to search for the truth. That is a self-evident fact. Here the important thing is that within the rhythmic sequence of thoughts, thoughts are rendered to the truth, in relation of human beings to the truth. This exercise, this making-oneself-conscious-in-the-present within such a content, this repeated rhythmic making-oneself-conscious-in-the-present is what is involved. It is about applying quite a particular mood for spiritual knowledge. I want to explain this attitude to you in more detail. I will deviate from the strict formulation of the letter but maybe this will make some things much clearer.

[ 6 ] Let's see, take for example a professor, lecturer or some scholar who gives lectures. Very often it happens that he prepares his lecture, then memorises it and then delivers it. This is indeed not possible if one really allows spiritual science to live within it. If you lived within spiritual science, this would be unworthy of you. Preparation can only be that a certain inner accumulation regarding the subject matter comes about. As a result of this inner assembly you do indeed step—even though you have a been connecting with the subject matter a thousand times—each time again with a new approach regarding the subject matter, so that you gradually grasp it clearly and speak out of the direct observation of it once again. You see, when you learn about something, for example a chapter in geography—good, you learn it, you have it, and then you retain in your thoughts. This doesn't happen in spiritual science at all if it is to be alive. Whoever wants to be a spiritual scientist in reality, must just again and again allow the most elementary things to draw through the soul. What I have written for example in my book Theosophy doesn't have a conclusive meaning. What it contains, I had to repeatedly allow to be drawn through my soul for it to have meaning. It can't be said: The book Theosophy is there, I know its contents.—It would, on the basis of spiritual science, be the same if one would say: I don't believe that there is a person who could say: I have eaten for 8 days so now I don't need to repeat it.—Every day we sit down to eat and do the same thing. Why? Because it is Life, it is not something which can be merely stored in thought form. The life in spiritual science is Life, and it declines if it is not ever and again lived through. This is what needs to be considered.

[ 7 ] If you have through spiritual science approached life you would have become acquainted with the possibility for instance, that you can help those who have passed through the gate of death, by giving them a kind of meditative content based on the spiritual world which they have entered through the gate of death. This doesn't mean that one, for example, reads something to them once and now recon: now they understand it—no, it involves repeating it ever and again, this living-yourself-into the content, each time, as something new. This is far too seldom respected. People are used to observe everything as theory. Spiritual science is no theory, it is Life; but if one treats it by thinking one can learn it, like you learn about other things, then you make it into a theory. Obviously one can make it into a theory but then if you take it up this way, it is only a theory. Every serious spiritual scientist knows that one must live in it; the exercises are not exhausted by knowing their contents.

[ 8 ] These are things which have disappeared from Western consciousness. What this Western consciousness is, shows also in other things. People have come to me who say: There's something awful about the Buddha speeches, they contain mere repetitions; one should surely produce a publication with only the contents of the speeches and leave out the repetitions.—Yet, no one really understands the Buddha-speeches who can make such a statement because the essence of the Buddha speeches depend upon following the rhythmic sequence in very small slots, always repeating the same one. This is an oriental method which does not coincide with our work here and in order to clarify this, I will make some comments.

[ 9 ] Continuing with the letter, there is further mentioned about the exercises, that some are strange and questionable. Yes, we must look at the kind of judgement or the basis upon which this assessment is made today. If one speaks about the desire present today for something new, then one must acquaint oneself with why such a desire exists; and what exists must really be characterised. I could, in order to make myself clear, perhaps bring to mind the book of Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West. Spengler followed up with a small brochure entitled Pessimism? I will quote a sentence from Pessimism. He says: It is not important to recognise truth, but to make facts matter.—Now a discussion follows regarding this statement, regarding what he understands as "truth" and as "facts". In one place he says: "Truths are the greats of thought ... what stands in a dissertation is truth, that a candidate fails his dissertation is a fact."—Now one must imagine that with such a sentence something must somehow be said, but it is complete nonsense. Yet people read over something like this, they take it all in, which says something, and they don't notice anything strange and consider it as something outlandish. One can't possibly have a discussion about such a statement, it is total nonsense. Something like this is not even discussed when it is such nonsense; you don't even notice it. It can't fail that in a time in which such a judgment prevails, many strange and questionable things are found. However, we can imagine where we have actually arrived—in any case in another connection than meant by Spengler. We graduate today, so to say without a fuss, up to the highest levels of our study; here in our knowledge itself there are actually no disasters or turning points. You could say that a disaster happens when a student fails, but not knowledge itself. This involvement of the whole person, so that you are able to live with a problem in such an inner way as you have any other outer experience, is something which is rarely found. When you have written a book or if you are a private tutor you may feel very satisfied, but you don't experience disasters or turning points because of the material. This is something which has, one could say, spread over the entire scientific life.

[ 10 ] It is necessary that we come to live within the spirit once again, that the spirit becomes a reality in whose processes we participate. This is no contradiction against tranquility. Precisely though cultivating tranquility you acquire the right way to participate more strongly and concretely towards what happens objectively; finally, it is no contradiction against tranquility when one observes all the horror of a volcanic eruption or some similar events this way.

[ 11 ] I would like to say that in our modern time there is hardly any receptivity necessary for the particular way to spiritual science, simply the entire way of thinking, the quite different way of experiencing truth, is first necessary. You see, when someone says: Yes, we don't need thinking, we don't need intellectualism, we need feelings!—it is because he doesn't get the feeling that he's being moved inwardly; what should be given is what is lacking.

[ 12 ] You see, is it really enough today, to adhere to ancient religious rules? When one gives a single lecture—and I speak from experience—when one gives a single lecture, let's say, from certain details regarding the social question, then there are many listeners who could say or write: Sure, this is all possible but in this lecture the name of Christ is not mentioned even once.—Yes, my dear friends, there is still a divine commandment which says: You should not pronounce the name of God in vain—and there is the commandment: You should not continuously say, God, God. It can be something very Christian, no not continuously say the name of Christ; perhaps it is even Christian for this reason, because the name of Christ is not misused. It is not through the use of Christ's name in every third line that something becomes Christian.

[ 13 ] All these things should stop in the old thinking's comfortable way. Those who don't drop this comfortable thinking—they would also have the vague feeling that something must change—they can't be informed about the demands of the time because everything which exists in the demands of the time is something which they are unable to experience; they can't, because they are merely taught that these demands must be experienced basically as they have always been, and not commit to actually moving to solutions which must be investigated to really meet the demands of the time. Often the enormous difference between theoretical thought and immersed-in-spirit-living, is not considered. However, already during the first step into spiritual science there must be a living-within-the-spirit. I'm not saying you need to be clairvoyant or something of the kind, but that there needs to be a living-in-spirit; there must be another form of experience of truth, of content, than what one is accustomed to these days.

[ 14 ] Another objection which Dr Rittelmeyer expressed took me quite by surprise, I must admit, but this is the way it's going to happen. The objection is that people feel insulted when, instead of something being pointed out as within them, they are made aware of what individuals perhaps know, what individuals have seen. People feel, they expressed it as "their human kingdoms having been stolen", they had felt great and now they must feel small.—Yes, I must admit, this objection surprised me because I don't really understand its content. Isn't it true, what is said consequently in the letter, that people expect something to happen from above, but now they feel thrown back on to themselves, on to exercises they need to do, on to efforts needed to understand something.—I initially feel an extraordinary contradiction between both these allegations. Secondly, I must add this: my whole life I have been—and it has been already quite long—extremely glad if a truth appears somewhere, and I actually find it disturbing when someone rejects the truth, because it has not grown out of their own soil. This is quite an egotistical subjective judgment, but we are stuck in such egotistical subjective judgments, and as a result we need a renewal of thinking in our current time, because it exists.

[ 15 ] Here we have a bunch of judgements which indicates how necessary it is that a shift takes place. If these judgemental directions, which have been created by our time, continue to exist, then we will get nowhere. It is already necessary to say, even though it may sound rough, it is above all necessary to mention that the objectors must think about their objections, to what a degree they should not be making them, in order for the entry of the renewal not to be disturbed by the most ancient judgments. This is what has to be said above all things.

[ 16 ] Another objection which is of course often made is that Anthroposophy appears in the form of a science and the inference is made that the realm of belief and the realm of knowledge must metamorphose. Actually, the objection depends, when it is made, on the inexact understanding of the context in Anthroposophy. In Anthroposophy the claim is never made that a belief must be transformed into knowledge or something similar, but in Anthroposophy this first positive element appears: it is shown that through knowledge not only can one have something in the sensory world of appearance, but also in the spiritual world. The question can at least be: Are the methods which are applied directed to the real, safe and equivalent?—This can then be examined and re-examined. When the issue is expressed in a way of objecting to imagination, objecting to inspiration and so on, then there is nothing to be discussed. However, no judgment can be made when one says: I feel uncomfortable if something is to be known about it.—It isn't important if something is unpleasant, but it is important that a certain method regarding the super-sensory can be known, just as in the sensory world something can be known. What can be known can't be judged in a way so that one can say the objects of faith were based on the free recognition of inner truths because Anthroposophy is a knowledge forced through "hallucination and proof."—Anthroposophy is just a science and is established as a science, it can't get involved with such an objection because it is a science. One could have the same objection against mathematics; one could say it would be detestable if mathematical truths were actual truths. Such an objection can't actually be made, because it is basically pointless.

[ 17 ] An objection which I have heard with the most diverse nuances, is this, that something is expected, which could be something shocking, which you accept and get away with by listening to such things as "Christ is the ruler of the sun" or the issue about the "Two Jesus children." which are equally indifferent to you.

My dear friends, I must admit I don't really understand how these things can be indifferent, when they are understood. The unbelievably important question of the present day is: How can the realm of morality be founded in the realm of natural necessities? We live today on the one side within a scientifically acknowledged realm of natural necessities and one allows that within this realm of necessities, hypotheses are made which are not supported by direct observation. One takes for instance the example of the development of the earth according to geology and so on, spanning only a certain time in history and then according to these impressions arrive at the origin of the earth as coming out of the ancient mists, or like the modified hypotheses in the sense of the Kant-Laplace theories which are no more valid these days; then out of this comes the imagining of the earth's origin and out of the second main statement of the mechanical heat theory, the theory of entropy, the imagining how everything is heading for death through heat (Wärmetod). Who constructs this hypothesis regarding the earth's origin and evolution must say to himself—because according to the scientific point of view on which it is based, it can't be assumed otherwise—that this ancient mist was there as the sovereign entity with laws of aerodynamics and laws of aerostatics, and out of this the laws of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics were created, and then luckily such conditions arose through which connections were created as we find in the simplest cells, the amoebas, and then all that turned into complicated organisms, also humans, and in humans moral ideals rose through which human worth could be felt.

[ 18 ] What would we be as humans if we hadn't had our moral ideals, and if through these moral ideals we didn't, through the acceptance of a divine world order in the entire global context, become ennobled? It is useless to just let it go; to say we will separate the realm of the certainty of faith which we have in moral ideals, from what we have as the natural order. Such a separation can only happen with those who aren't really inwardly serious about what they see presented in the natural order.

[ 19 ] My dear friends, I once became acquainted with someone who at the time was involved with the great problem of death in the world, explored from Haeckel's point of view. With an earnest attitude, an inner enthusiasm to understand such a point of view, he approached this view which is quite honestly based on the foundation of science. What did he have to say about moral-religious ideals? He said: "Those are religious foam bubbles rising in human life, it is something people put in front of themselves, it is something on which the human race lives, from which they take their dignity; but one day the great graveyard of the heat death will arrive, and then all outer forms of organisms, everything which appeared as moral-religious foam bubbles will be buried, and in the world's space a sloop will be circling in some curve that can be said to be something which people once created according to mechanistic or dynamic laws, these people allowed bubbles to rise and from this the people derived their worth; and all of that has turned out to be a cosmic cemetery."

[ 20 ] You see, out of this person's honesty, because he couldn't unhook himself from it, he returned to the blissful womb of the Catholic Church for some years. This is only one example out of many.

[ 21 ] This abyss has opened up between the moral-religious world order and the scientific-mechanic world order. There are only a few people capable of enough sensitivity, who doesn't tolerate the entire world view regarding the earth's origin or demise according to science. For example, Herman Grimm said a rotting and decaying carcass bone would be an appetizing piece compared to what the Kant-Laplace theory made of the earth.—What Herman Grimm added is true, future generations of scholars will be able to make astute treatises to explain the nonsense which the Kant-Laplace theory introduced into people's heads, to their detriment.

[ 22 ] My dear friends, if with your deepest insight you want to look at what such a point of view has caused for the doom of the human soul, starting in the lowest classes in school, then in order to do what needs to be done today, you must search much deeper than is normally done. You can't get stuck half way and say: We must withdraw religious content from the general view of the world, we must have our own religious certainty and beside it, science may exist.—For then, at most, man's moral-religious view of the world will help him return to the bosom of the blessed Roman Catholic Church to numb himself if he still comes under such an anesthetic.

[ 23 ] In the course of evolution, we have reached the point where we no longer know that the spiritual lives in all-natural laws, that for example what happens within man himself, where there is actually a hearth within him, is accomplished outside in nature. My dear friends, the people from the 19th century quite correctly were strongly affected by for example what Julius Robert Mayer expressed as a law of conservation of energy and of matter. (Erhaltungssatz der Kraft.) It has really come to the fore that the law of the conservation of power and of matter in the 19th century dominates our physics today. However, this is valid for outer nature only and there only within certain boundaries which become more limited as time goes by; but in terms of time it doesn't apply to human beings. It is simply true that within man there is a hearth where all material things which he takes into himself, is transformed into nothing, where matter is destroyed, matter is dissolved. By letting our pure thoughts be assimilated by our etheric body and letting these thoughts work on our physical body through the etheric, matter is destroyed in our physical body. (During the next explanation drawings were made on the blackboard. The originals are no longer available.)

I'm sketching diagrammatically, it is intensively spread over the entire human being, I draw it in such a way as if it is only a part. This place in a person where matter becomes destroyed is at the same time the place where matter is created again, when morality, when religious perceptions glows through us. What is created here simply by our perceptions through moral and religious ideals, this is like a seed for future worlds. If the material world perishes, when the material world has been destroyed in the heat death then this earth will be transformed into another world body, and this body of a world will be made from the moral ideals created into material forms. Because our science is not capable of penetrating deeply enough into matter, it is not capable of grasping the thought that matter itself is an abstraction. We may speak about the thermal death of the earth, but at the same time we have to speak of what is cast off from plants, in wilting and drying out, and about the seed surviving into the next year; even as we can speak in relation to the heat death, we can speak about the seed which remains to us and survives the world death.

[ 24 ] There is a sphere where scientific truths end; mere scientific truths in the sense of today, where moral ideals end being bubbles of foam, when the earth will expire in the heat death. There is an accessible region for man, where moral ideals are received when physical matter is destroyed, a sphere where the Word becomes a natural scientific truth: "Heaven and Earth will pass away but My words will not pass away!"—There is a sphere where the Bible becomes science; and before this—it needs to be acknowledged in the background of today's aspirations—no healing can occur, before we have the opportunity to advance to a science, not a one-sided science like today, nor one which is a one-sided abstract spiritual science.

[ 25 ] Today the term "spiritual science" is applied only to the science of ideas. For Anthroposophy spiritual science is not only what can be grasped on the other side of materiality, but it is something whose processes penetrate matter.

[ 26 ] With results of this research it is then possible, certainly by applying diligent spiritual scientific methods, to consider everything regarding the relationship between the sun and Christ. These things must be considered in the right light. With a certain authority we have during the course of the last three centuries come to see something regarding the stars, sun and moon, which can be calculated. What has brought us misfortune is that we only calculate. We need to once again observe that by looking at the arithmetic of the world's structure, we are in fact investigating a corpse. We need to learn to investigate the spirit of the cosmic whole. Everything depends on this. We won't find the spirit, if we allow matter to violate us in such a way that it presents itself in the universe as something which can only be calculated, or at most be judged according to basic mechanical laws. For this reason, it can already be said that it depends entirely on the individual human being who says: "For me it is not important that the Christ is the ruler of the sun".—This sentence must be understood in the correct way: "For me it is a matter of indifference".

[ 27 ] My dear friends, I've heard a few people say they are indifferent to what the Christ has to do with the sun, but they were not indifferent when their taxes increase by fifty percent. Yet it is more necessary for the overall salvation of mankind that Christ and the sun are seen to be related than the rising tax of fifty percent is.

[ 28 ] How we think in detail about the two Jesus children may be discussed again. However, what would one say to an objection which claims we should practice something that, yes, I don't know what it is, and then the issue about the two Jesus children is put on the table, which leaves us indifferent. I open the Gospel and read a great deal which is presented there, similar to the issue about the two Jesus children mentioned in Anthroposophy. Then again, you don't say: We want religion, but we are quite indifferent whether Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary or something similar, every single Gospel truth leaves us completely indifferent.—I don't know to what else you don't care about. One doesn't want to enter into something which is of no interest to you, but an objection is not the same, it is definitely not.

[ 29 ] Now I would still like to enter into point eight which I've written down for myself, because time is marching on. It is said that a certain progress is expected in people's internalizing; yet through the way culture has been created, people have come to hate culture, they don't want to hear anything more about culture, and now (with Anthroposophy) something arrives which doesn't only speak about internalization, but even what strives to have an effect on architecture and the art of movement.

[ 30 ] Yes, my dear friends, if you take life seriously you won't want anything other than what appears in Anthroposophy, what appears to you as spiritual foundations penetrating everything in outer life. I'm still talking about Anthroposophy; we will still touch on what religion has to say about it. That's just the trouble, we are no longer in the position to bring what we experience in the spiritual into our outer life, and finally this happens just in those areas where it is the most noticeable. Just imagine you had said to a Greek that he couldn't express his spiritual experiences in outer life. Just as the Greek thought about his Apollo, as he thought about Zeus, he created his Zeus temple accordingly, his colonnaded temple. We no longer create, we imitate what is old; we don't have the possibility of taking those areas relating to the spirit and also create an external physiognomy of life. The only thing we can create is a department store. The department store is the grandiose creation of the materialistic spirit of the present day. However, if we wanted a home for the spirit and turn to a builder, then he would build it in a Romantic, Gothic or some or other style, and we would have no feeling, when we stand there within the walls, of anything being expressed of what we had inwardly lived through spiritually.

[ 31 ] You see, when the thought was created—not through me but through others—to build a house for Anthroposophy, not for an instant would an idea exist to approach a builder and let him erect a Renaissance or Baroque building and then to move in there, but the idea could come about in the following way. In this building this and that would be spoken about and the forms which would be visible all around should say exactly the same as what is being spoken within it. If this is not only theoretical but life, if the forms are creative, then they are presented—as living—in the world. It is impossible to measure what is created here as a matter of course in comparison with the dishonest cultural activity of the times which has brought us into all this trouble.

[ 32 ] This is what I wanted to present primarily, my dear friends. There are too many questions to deal with in one stroke; I will continue with them tomorrow. I've limited myself today by entering into what has been raised against Anthroposophy in general. I will however expand on what in particular will be raised against the service which Anthroposophy will bring towards religious renewal. I would like to stress the following: if somehow an idea develops that it equally represents an existing religious confession, or a creed, which one thinks to justify only through Anthroposophy as its basis, then you do Anthroposophy a wrong because it has never claimed to be a religious education nor is it a religion or wants to establish a religion. This Anthroposophy will not do. Anthroposophy follows impulses to knowledge, goals to knowledge; and whoever says that Anthroposophy is not a religion because it doesn't have the characteristics of religion—say something which Anthroposophy must say about itself from the outset. You can't accuse someone of being something he doesn't even want to be! The objections which are actually made from a religious side, appear to me as if, let's say, someone is active in a field and is accused of not doing what he could in another field.

The objections raised by Dr Rittelmeyer, as far as I have taken into account, certainly involve the relationship people have to Anthroposophy. For this reason, I approached it from this side and will enter into it from the religious side, tomorrow.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Last night I received a letter from Reverend Dr Schairer in Nagold which contains a number of theses regarding how Anthroposophy can conduct itself regarding religion, and religion conduct itself regarding Anthroposophy, and how a way must be found to initiate this behaviour. Dr Schairer thinks a discussion could be based on this. That also seems to be quite right following on from the first part of the letter—I couldn't read the whole thing, I haven't yet read the last pages—because a lot will be clarified in an exceedingly exact manner. Perhaps this could in some respects provide a good basis for a discussion because it will be a priority in our future work, if I may say so, to bring these fundamental issues in order.

[ 2 ] In addition to what I want to say to you today—everything is for the time being still introductory—depends from one side on the main issue of this question, certainly from one specific side. We have to be perfectly clear that Anthroposophy as such must arrive in a positive way at the Mystery of Golgotha so that the manner and way in which this happens regarding this event, can really be ascribed to a concept of knowledge, a knowledge which, if the term is taken seriously, this concept of "knowledge" is also applicable in the modern scientific sense. It is on the other hand right that this special way, first of all—I stress first of all—Anthroposophy needs to get to the Mystery of Golgotha, that at first the Protestant sense of religion from certain foundations need to be brought to consciousness, which can take offence. Only complete clarity about these things can lead to some healing goal.

[ 3 ] I must therefore, even if it appears somewhat remote, enter into what I want to say to you today. Anthroposophy or spiritual science actually creates out of supersensible knowledge, and rejects—in principle rejects—anything from older traditions, let's say, the oriental wisdom or historic Gnosticism, through somehow assembling a content, or expanding the content. Anthroposophy quite decisively rejects this because it focuses above all in its comprehensive task of practically answering the question: How much can a person today, who has in his soul, latent, or in ordinary life, not conscious forces in his awareness, how can he now in full consciousness and with full human discretion, recognise the supersensible world instantly?—Spiritual science would like to proceed with this cognition similarly to a mathematician who wants to prove the theory of Pythagoras. He proves it out of something which one can recognise today, and he doesn't reject purely from historical writers what he had encountered before, when he obviously later, in his historic studies, entered into the way the theorem had been found. If you research spiritual science in this way you will certainly conclude that an abyss lies between the way and manner in which current spiritual science arrives at its results through fully conscious research, and what still remains in Gnosticism or oriental wisdom, which has a more instinctive character on the other hand. Precisely what people want as unmixed knowledge brought to realization, even this, as I've said, needs to be researched. In the course of this research it becomes apparent that something is needed which makes an appearance as if one had reverted back to the old. In the course of research spiritual experiences take place namely for which modern people—the entire modern civilization—the concise words are missing. Our modern language has definitely connected to material thinking patterns; our modern speech has been learnt as linked either to mere outer material or intellectual matters—both these belong together.

Inner intellectualism is nothing other than correlations to the materialistic methods of observation of the external world. What can be recognised about matter is that when one uses the materialistic method, it reflects inwardly as intellectualism. It is like this, that any philosophy which wants to prove its spirit through mere intellect or a spirit comprised from the intellect, will be wafting around in the wind; these would hardly be able to acknowledge that the intellectual is quite rightly spiritual, but that the content of what is intellectual can be nothing other than that of the material world. One must always speak clearly about these things. By expressing a sentence like: "The content of the intellectual can be nothing other than that of the material world," I'm only saying it can be nothing other than the content of the world, which can be viewed as the sum of material beings and phenomena; whether this is what it is, is not yet agreed upon. The intellectual material world could be through and through spiritual and what comprises intellectualism could be an illusion. Therefore, it is important for spiritual scientific discussions there should already be an unusually powerful conscientiousness existing towards knowledge otherwise there will be no progress in spiritual science. This conscientiousness is also noticed by people of the present; they find it necessary to hackle through their sentences in all directions in order to be concise, and people of the present day who are used to the journalistic handling of a style, call this wrestling for conciseness a bad style.

[ 4 ] Such things we certainly must understand out of the peculiarities of the time. So, while current materialism and intellectualism have hassled speech/language to such a degree that language only operates in terms of the material, one can hardly find the right words needed to describe one's experiences and then one grasps for the old words which come from instinctive observation, to express that which needs expression. This results in the misunderstanding: people who cling only to words now believe that in the word one borrows what is contained in the translation of the word. This is not the case.

The words "lotus flower" is a borrowed expression from oriental wisdom but what I have indicated (in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment) is certainly not borrowed from oriental wisdom. This is what I'm asking, for you to always take this into consideration, when on occasion I need through necessity to borrow expressions from history, as I have to do today.

[ 5 ] You see, spiritual science first and foremost wants to gain human knowledge through Anthroposophy, modern physiology and biology need to some extent be considered as the most unsuitable instrument for acquiring real human knowledge. Modern physiology and biology unfortunately base their knowledge on what can be seen in man's corpse. Also, when living people are studied, they are unfortunately only studying the corpse. At most they indulge in a certain deception, which extraordinarily characteristically was revealed when Du Bois-Reymond held his famous lecture on the Ignorabimus. He is quite clear that nothing—because he was besides a scientific researcher also a thinker—of this modern manner of research of the soul—he called it consciousness—can be gained; so that one actually through natural science, according to Du Bois-Reymond, can't find out anything about the actual being of man. He is submitting himself to an ever-greater deception; he says that with outer scientific beings we will never be able to recognise conscious people, at most only those who are asleep. When a person lies sleeping in bed, according to Du Bois-Reymond, the sum of all processes is within the person, but at the moment of waking, when the spark of consciousness jumps in, the possibility of observation ends. It would be correct if one was able today, to scientifically understand the life and development of the plant world. The life and development of the plant world is still not comprehensible through science today because the method is not recognised through which this would be understood. So that too, is an illusion, what current science explains about sleeping people; it can only be in their domain to explain sleeping people, the corpse; further than this they don't go. They can only explain those who are sleeping; the ones who are lively they can't explain.

[ 6 ] Anthroposophy doesn't follow philosophic speculation about people, but the way which I outline in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, in the withdrawal of the soul into observation, and then the attainment towards not remaining stuck in the mineral element in man, which is perpetually dead and is incorporated as a dead mineral element in the being of man, but that one gets to, through what could be called the ether body or creative force, observe what the real foundation of the sleeping human being is.

[ 7 ] Now people come along out of the current philosophic consciousness; I can refer to one case. When my Occult Science was published, there was talk about a Polish philosopher, Lutoslawski, in an old German monthly publication. In this discussion it was said, among other things, that it is only an abstraction to divide a human being into members of the physical body, the ether body, the astral body and the I, one can certainly as an abstraction divide man into these, but it goes no further.—As far as Lutoslawski at that time regarded it, he was correct in his assertion, but he remained in the field of abstraction, and this depends on the following: As soon as a one moves up to contemplate the ether body one can't remain in the physical body of the human being; as long as one only contemplates the physical body then one doesn't need anything but to investigate within the human skin and at most go as far as to examine the interaction with the outside world through breathing and so on; but nothing further is examined, basically nothing more than by beginning with the boundary of the human skin.

[ 8 ] This characteristic I'm offering, you will quite rightly find if you only think about it. One can, if one remains confined in examining the physical body only by what is enclosed by the skin, but one can no longer remain in what is contained by the physical skin when one thoroughly looks at the ether body. Obviously, the basic outlines need to be drawn first, as I have done in my Occult Science, so attention can be drawn to man's physical body, ether body, astral body and so on. However, Anthroposophy doesn't remain stuck here; Anthroposophy must now expand these things. As soon as knowledge of the ether body is extended one can no longer remain within the human being, but one needs to observe the human being as a single being in connection with everything earthy. One must examine the human being in connection with the earthly. This means as long as the human being is enclosed in his physical body, he leads a relatively independent life, a relatively independent life. To a high degree man is dependent on everything possible, air, light and so on, for the physical body; man is dependent on these to a high degree. You can see this in the following example.

When materialism was at the height of its blossoming, Wolff, Büchner and Czolbe very often referred to the dependency of man on the physical environment and one of these writers once listed everything, from gravity, light, the climate and so on and concluded that the human being was the result of every breath of air he breathes. He meant by this—the person concerned was a materialist—the physical organism is dependent on every breath of air. Yes, my dear friends, if one considers the depiction of materialism in this reference in all earnest and contemplate how the human being was as depicted by materialism, then one will become aware that the human being at its highest potency could be a hysteric or a cripple. The materialists have already described the material human being but not what happens in the world, a being who at its highest potency would be an hysteric. The hysteric at his highest power would be as dependent on his environment as the materialist has described him.—The actual human being in his highest power is independent on what the physical earth environment offers. One can't say this about the etheric man. As soon as one rises to the etheric in man, one can't observe the etheric body as isolated from the entire earth's etheric which needs to be examined, and here man lives in a far higher—naturally not in the physical sense higher—level as his physical body. When one comes to the realm of the etheric while observing the earth, then one can no longer hold on to concepts of chemistry, or mineralogy and so on, but one must now search for completely different conceptions; now one will be confronted with the necessity of wanting to say what one wants to say, at least prove it with expressions which the Greeks had, because it is not possible to do so in today's language.

[ 9 ] The (ancient) Greek would, if you demonstrated current chemistry to him, express himself in the following way. Just imagine we have on the one hand a really modern chemist and on the other hand a Greek, an educated ancient Greek, who would like to talk to the chemist, and the modern scientist would say something like the following: "You Greeks come from far back, you took the four elements of fire, earth, water and air. Those are for us at most, aggregate conditions: fire as all penetrating warmth, air as aeriform, the water as liquid and the earth in a solid physical state. We acknowledge that from you. However, we have placed some seventy elements in place of your four." If the Greek would study what has been presented as some seventy elements, he would say: "What we understand under the four elements will not touch many of your seventy elements. We have for what you have in your seventy elements, the collective name of 'earth': we call all of that 'earth.' With our four elements we are referring to something else, we indicate through it how some things express themselves from out of their inner being. What you are pouring out regarding your elements, that is for us aeriform and such further conditions of the earth. Something far more internal than what you acknowledge with your elements, describe for us the expressions of earth, water, fire or heat."

[ 10 ] Exactly to these four elements one is guided when one considers everything surging and weaving which has been spun into the earthy etheric and human etheric. Only when you follow this etheric, which lives in the four elements, as an experience within the circling of the earth's weaving existence, will you understand spring, summer, autumn and winter. In spring, summer, autumn and winter which exist as the foundation of the etheric processes of the earth—not merely as the physical processes of the earth—in this etheric weaving of the earth the human ether body is woven so that one, when one in a sense advances to the etheric body, one must find the etheric body rooted in the earthly-etheric.

[ 11 ] What we rediscover again—I have explained this whole relationship in detail in the Hague—sounds like instinctive wisdom of the ancients, which continued right into Greek times. We don't understand the continuity in humanity if we don't, in our way, discover what the content of these instincts were.

[ 12 ] Now we will go further and come to the astral body of the human being. The terminology doesn't mean anything to me; the astral body had been spoken about much later, right into the middle ages and even up to present time, but it must have some formulation. When one rises up into the astral body, the actual carrier of thinking, feeling and will in man, then you again come to realise that man cannot be regarded in isolation. Just as one makes the etheric a member of the etheric weaving of the earth, so one needs to make the astral—in quite a spiritual manner—as basically incorporated in what is expressed in the movement and positioning of the stars. The astral in man is simply the expression of the cosmic, the astral relationships; how the stars move and are positioned to one another, this is expressed in the human astral body. Just like the human being through his etheric body is interrelated to the earthly etheric, so man through his astral body is associated through his astral to the earth's surroundings; it lives further in the earthly surrounding, they continue to live in the events, in the processes of his astral body.

[ 13 ] You see, it is not an abstraction to structure the human being; we are required to structure the human being because in this structuring we rise from human knowledge to cosmic knowledge, quite naturally. Now we can go back in human evolution to more ancient times which had not actually reached into the Greek times any more. Here we find an instinctive awareness of people's relationship to the starry worlds. Not as if Astronomy was carried on in these ancient times, and if it was, that it could be considered serious, but the connection happened as a direct experience. Human beings experienced themselves in certain times of their earth evolution far less as earthlings than as heavenly beings. In our research we easily reach a time where people, certainly inwardly, lived into the growing and flourishing of the plant world, also in the animal world where everything offered in air and in water were experienced, but as being independent. Similar to how the human being in current times experiences inner processes of nutrition and digestion, processes taking place independently, so the human being once took in all that he experienced in the physical world, as independent, but he didn't take what he lived through in his astral body as independent from the influences of the heavenly worlds. That was something that differentiated itself, imposed itself too strongly upon him, to be taken as independently. When winter shifted closer, when nights lengthened and a person found frost had arrived all around him, he sensed in a certain way how he simply depended on his placement in the world, he felt something within him, like a memory of heaven. During winter he felt himself separated from heaven in a way, he sensed something within him which was like a mere memory of heaven. When by contrast spring approached and the warmth of the earth was interwoven with man, then he felt something dissolve within him as when he shares in the experience, I would call it, of a spreading out breath, the events of the heavens. Now he had heavenly reality, not just a memory of heaven which he had in winter. In this differentiated way he experienced the other seasons also; he actually participated in the seasons.

[ 14 ] Today in our inner reflections we have a weak memory of what at that time had been lived through instinctively. We celebrate Christmas and a historic glance reveals to us the connection of the inner memory life of individuals who, during winter, had felt abandoned by heaven, and so nursed their memories in solitude. We still have echoes of experiences, not at one time through astronomical speculation or astronomy, but direct experiences in the determination of the Easter spring celebration according to the relationship of the sun to the moon. What is revealed in our abstract minds and calculations to determine the Easter festival, this was a direct experience for earlier man; it was observed in the heavens after the completion of winter and the time of St John in the soulful feeling of the divine weaving in the heavens, to unite in divine blessedness with the truly Spiritual-Divine which had been only a memory at Christmas time and into which they lived at springtime. The old summer solstice was primarily celebrated as the inner search for the union with the Divine in which man could empathise with how, if the earth would not be enclosed, the earth would be an active being working in the cosmos together with the entire being of humanity towards this cosmic experience.

[ 15 ] In other words, what we refer to in spiritual science as an objective experience when we refer to the astral body, this would have been a direct experience for ancient mankind, but such that it didn't only occur in a moment but that it spanned time; from which one knew the stars worked here in their laws, in their movement. Not that man took much notice of sun and moon eclipses; that only happened when religion was transferred to science. In olden times people looked up to the heavens with religious simplicity, but also sensed the heavens within them, for a certain time.

[ 16 ] You see, my dear friends, consider what one can think when theology comes forward today and says: What human beings primarily experience through the senses can hardly lead over to the super-sensible; what we have in science, can hardly lead over into the super-sensible; something quite extraordinary must happen in a person if he wants to become accessible to the spiritual worlds.—Such an examination of current theology shows that people are advised to justify religion while life, because we participate in life in the outer world, has no religious character; in a sense it needs to be removed out of ordinary life and placed in a special life in order to feel religious. There once was a time on earth where religious feelings were direct, in the present, and independent, and where one had turned life on earth out of religion. Just as we sense materialistically when we look at the plant world, the animal world and the stars and then need to turn within if we want to have religious experiences, just so once upon a time religious life was the given and if one wanted to turn away from what was given, one would go primarily out from the religious life.

[ 17 ] As long as these things are not fully examined, there would be no clarity about the relationship of science, daily life and religious experience. At least once in life one should look at how human evolution is linked to these things, that at one stage in old world imagery there came the appearance of the outer sun, moon and stars which were relatively indifferent, these appearances coming from outside only addressed feeling; but was inwardly experienced. What took place in heaven was an inner experience for man which he could settle with himself, the effect still came from the heavenly realm and that was given to him as a matter of course.

[ 18 ] Of course, there was a time where what lived and weaved in the astral body as the result of star activity was to some extent interlinked with an experience that takes place inwardly, in relation to the earth, which we can penetrate recognizably when we move forward to the ether body today. Human beings felt themselves more in the soul-spiritual when, through their astrality, they experienced celestial processes. Then one sees the human being indeed in the earthly, but he wasn't penetrating it as we do today; he penetrated the etheric, into what ruled in fire, water, air and earth. Here he maintains a relationship of which he is deprived according to today's viewpoint and particularly the view of science. Right in the experiences the human being has in these relationships, refer back to the ritual acts which of course for our confessions are actually only inherited traditions.

[ 19 ] Yesterday I introduced you to how the Ritual Acts can be grasped out of human understanding. It can also be understood through insight into every interplay between possible experiences through the astral body and those through the etheric body; they go back to the sense which one can have when one follows the celestial vitality and weaving in the earthly etheric. What is revealed as a result is that man is placed in a cosmic process, in a cosmic movement which I can express in the following way. You see, when we turn to the tone which rings out of words, when we thus approach them, for example in the Greek Logos, what lies in the words of the Logos—this what I'm saying right now was certainly still experienced in (ancient) Greece and certainly felt in the composing of the St John's Gospel—when one approaches what lives as tone, what rings out as tone and then turn it to the outside, then one is involved in processes which are about to happen, which are revealed in the air. When we hear a tone or the words and the process is created which I indicated yesterday as it entering into the human being, then we are considering the movement of air being breathed in, which then hits the spinal cord and the brain fluid and continues as a movement; we also have this continuation in the air penetrating into the human being here. When we do further research, we don't only have to deal with this, but, because words manifest an effect in the human being, it acts on the human being's state of warmth. The human being becomes inwardly imbued with warmth, he contains the element of warmth differentiated by the sound entering him, of the word entering inward. This means on the outside warmth or cold is at most a by-product of sound, when the tone is too high or too low; remaining with one tone has no meaning. In the human being actually every differentiation in the word and in the tone is differentiated within, through engendering warmth or cooling, so that we can now say: In our understanding of the Word, we find it manifests outwardly in air and we find it manifest inwardly in warmth.

[ 20 ] If we now go from what we learnt yesterday, we now approach the Sacrificial Act. These things, like many others, we later will clarify more, but this will be able to give you an indication. In olden times the actual characteristic could be found in the Sacrificial Act, of people experiencing the Sacrificial Act as a total reality. Actually for the more ancient presentation, the Sacrificial Act obviously connected to the smoke-like, to the airy; it was because, while the Sacrificial Act flows from within the human beings people knew—as one can also today really experience this in a Sacrificial Act—that just in this way, how the word sounds inwardly and lives itself out in warmth, the Sacrificial Act realises itself in air. Inwardly it lives itself out in the air. Towards the outside the true Sacrificial Act can't manifest without it somehow or other appearing through light. However, we will speak about these things again later.

[ 21 ] When we now go to what we called the Transformation yesterday, we find that with the Transformation we refer to something which already penetrates matter, which already strongly approaches substantiality, but which has not yet been configured, which has not yet taken in an outline; this is experienced in the transformation as characteristic and one refers, in the same sense, to how the Word refers to the warmth, the Offering to the air, the Transformation, the transubstantiation to the water.

[ 22 ] What is experienced as living in Communion, in the union, is felt now as through the connection with the etheric and its connection with the earth; one experiences oneself as an earthling, as a true earthling only because one feels so connected to the earthly, that one feels this union as related to the earth.

[ 23 ] In the Old Mysteries this was the result: they had seen how the Word outwardly manifested in the air, and inwardly as warmth. (This was written on the blackboard.)

Word—Air—Warmth
Offering/Sacrifice—Water—Air
Transformation—Earth—Water
Union—earth

[ 24 ] The Offering manifests itself inwardly, as we've seen, as air. When you come to examine the following things, you could later say: I'm taking notice of these things so that I can say that what referred to water in the Sacrificial Mass of the old Mysteries, has now been retained as a residue in the Baptism. How the spoken word referred outwardly to the air and inwardly to warmth, so the Transformation could accordingly refer to the earth, to what is firm, and only inwardly to water; and what had corresponded to unification, one had nothing. In the human being, one could say to oneself, the connection with the elements shifts. However, already in the Transformation to the extra-terrestrial, the earth is available, which man experiences by turning to be united with it. How can he then experience being united with the earthly?—This was the great question of the Old Mysteries. How can one somehow feel anything at all about the truly earthly?

[ 25 ] I've even spoke about it from another point of view. One looks around and it becomes obvious that people take their inner processes for granted, but they don't find anything which they want to take up into their consciousness. Symbolic action took on unification, but on the outside the place remained empty, something was necessary, so people said to themselves, for this place to be filled, if one wanted to turn to something within the earthly element itself it could correspond to the uniting taking place in communion. People felt they could look down on the earth. What presented itself within the earth, this could be fulfilled in the communion, but something outwardly was not possible. This is how people basically felt in the Old Mysteries, when they spoke of communion. They spoke about it this way, but they felt it could not be a concluded event. We basically feel this way when are instructed according to the outer statements of the Old Mysteries, how in images the event of Golgotha was foreseen, how it was symbolically carried out, which current research always refer to when they want to show that the Mystery of Golgotha was only something which can be compared to later developments when various sacrificial acts took place in temples, by presenting a sensory image of the representative of man having died, buried and resurrected three days later. [ 26 ] You know how the real crux of the Christ conception resulted from people noticing some similarities between the symbolic religious practices and the event of Golgotha, that they believed, even theologians believed they must speak about Christ as a myth or as something which had developed and reached fulfillment in the temples. The whole thing has now reached a point where this same way of thinking is appearing in other areas: the Our Father prayer has been examined in the same way and now nearly every sentence can be shown to have existed in pre-Christian times. This is regarded as a special catch for religious research. For someone who admits, truly admits to this way of closed thinking, it would be the same as to draw conclusions about people from their clothes. When a father allows his child to inherit his clothes, one can't say the son has become the father, because the son is someone quite different from the father even when he wears the same clothing. Just so the wording of the Our Father has passed over on to Christianity, but the content has essentially become something new. In order to examine these things, one must first look even deeper into all the connections: one needs to know the foundations from which the Old Mystery priests retained something like an expectation, which resembled something which could not yet have been accomplished on earth.

[ 27 ] So there we will, I'd like to say, be led, in the first element, even through quite careful considerations, to a mood of expectation in the Old Mysteries, certainly out of an instinctive science which was completely permeated by religion, how in all Old Mysteries a Christ-expectation mood was there, and then it was fulfilled though the Mystery of Golgotha. [ 28 ] Tomorrow we will look at the entire problem from another side, when we will enter into it more profoundly. However, you see how Anthroposophy approaches the Christ-problem in what could be called a certain scientific manner, by making a lively observation of the ether and astral bodes and also what results from their cooperation. You see, by discovering, so to speak the Christ-experience in the boundary between the astral and etheric bodies, you must arrive in a positive way to the Christ-experience. I must say to you, my dear friends, this is largely the biggest difficulty of Anthroposophy and its task in the present. You see, the somewhat washed out Theosophy which you find for instance in the Theosophical Society, finds this reference far easier. It doesn't enter into the Christ-experience but stops just before it. Therefore, it's easier. To some extent they laid down all religions as equally valid and seek within it the common human element which of course every science must be based on. [ 29 ] Anthroposophy is determined in its own evolution, through the nerve of its entire being, to approach the Mystery of Golgotha in a positive way, and because it wants to remain scientific, to make the task of the events of Golgotha clear to humanity, as clearly as mathematics states the theory of Pythagoras. All religious confessions are in line with this rejection of the event of Golgotha as such. As a result, the world task of Anthroposophy necessary for our time is not easy. How difficult it is, I ask you to read the in words of a poet from Prague, Max Brod, who writes—he has also written some other things—in "Paganism, Christianity, Judaism" about how these things need to be handled; how out of the re-enlivened Jewish consciousness everything that makes Jesus into Christ must be removed, and only to keep Jesus as what does not make him into Christ. What is at the foundation of this tendency? It is the tendency to make it possible for modern Jews to have a relationship with Jesus, in which Jesus can be admitted but in which it is not necessary to see Him as the bearer of the Christ.

[ 30 ] Anthroposophy is compelled—and we will still talk about this a great deal—to recognise Jesus as Christ. For Jesus to be taken as valid is what the Jews also strive, as well as the Indians; the entire East is striving for this, but they only strive to accept Him as he is, and not for being Christ.

[ 31 ] Now my dear friends, Harnack's book about the Essentials of Christianity and the Weinel's research about Jesus you can take all in a way in which they could be accepted by all non-Christians to a certain degree. I know there can be some objections, so for this reason I say you could take it in this way—of course they are not like this. However, what we have as a task is this: To fully understand Christianity—not to keep Jesus at the expense of the fact that He is the bearer of the Christ.

[ 32 ] Here lies the complete other side of a basis for the true, earnest Christianity through Anthroposophy, because one has to admit, that a communal world task has to be dealt with which encounters the most frightening prejudices. This world task is connected to what we today experience as dissatisfactory in religious experiences. For this reason, this can't be understood in the narrowest sense, but one must allow oneself to enter into what penetrates our religious life as unsatisfactory and look at this from a higher perspective. We will speak further about this tomorrow.

At the start of the hour, various participatory questions and objections were presented. The stenographer didn't add to these words, but Rudolf Steiner had jotted down the following key words in one of his notebooks (See the fax page 38-40 NB 127 in the documentary supplements):

• Discussion
• Can we define religion?
• Impossibilities—
• Luther as an answer—
• Do without knowledge to reach religion!—
• Spine of the world—and turn to the divine—
• Gulf—world = God
• ?—another: Contrast between God and World isn't found
• Rel. Connection with God—3 ways

Thinking Feeling Willing

• Anthrop unclear: due to transformation of world through science or not making religion dependent on knowledge—so that people who have no knowledge, come short—Good faith =
• Dr Geyer: It is said: Anthrop in the world Religion belongs to God. Paradox
• Another: Can religion become independent?
  or Art—science?
  will religion stop being independent
• Another: if it repulses someone
  faith—endangered
  Secret—deepest being. Despite all unravelable difficulties on hand ... submit/go through to* the soul-like
• and another: religion—relation between one soul and God—but the effects change towards others—this is increased by Anthroposophy
• and another: ? leads us to God today?
• and another: Is a value judgement of Anthrop to religion both necessary? (Ist ein Wertunterschied z. A. u. Rel. beide nötig?)*
and another: Living relationship to concepts—are concepts in contrast with corrupted form—
• Main concept: Pledge faith
  Faith has knowledge content—gradually got lost
  awareness, which gives knowledge content—
  the results of today—

(*—words are abbreviated which can create various interpretations—Translator)

• To what extent does the Pauline contrast with the Pistis and Gnosis.—

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: I would prefer at best to answer you more concretely than in abstractions. First, I would like to approach a difficult question by saying the following.

[ 2 ] In Anthroposophy we currently have very few people who are engaged in spiritual activity. Anthroposophy is in the beginning of her work and one can admit that in a relatively short time it may work differently into the human soul, compared with today. One thing is quite remarkable today, and perhaps you'll find that reprehensible, but it is perhaps much better to side with what appears currently than to express it with an abstract reprimand.

[ 3 ] Anthroposophy is taught, recited, written in books and I have the basic conviction that the way those questioners here, at least some of them, require Anthroposophy to be a knowledge—and that such a knowledge which is understood by most, at least a good many, for the majority who interest themselves intensively in Anthroposophy, this is not yet the case. Many people today accept something which they have heard about in Anthroposophy, on good faith. Why do they do this? Why are there already such a large number of people who accept Anthroposophy on good faith? You see, among those the majority have acquired religious natures in a specified direction and without them actually claiming to understand things in depth, they follow Anthroposophy because they have become aware of a certain religious style throughout the leadership of Anthroposophical matters. It is just a kind of religious feeling, a religious experience, which brings numerous people to Anthroposophy, who are not in the position of examining Anthroposophy, like botanists who examine botany; this is what is promoted here.

[ 4 ] One doesn't usually intensely observe that in relation to what I mean here, Anthroposophy is quite different to the other, the outer, more scientific sciences. Scientific knowledge is in fact quite so that one can say about it: take the human being into consideration and it will in fact be quite dangerous for faith, you'll impair faith. It is not just about science making you uncomfortable, but it is about having the experience of the mystery of faith being disturbed. In the practical handling of this question one finds, as far as it goes beyond where it is another kind of science, as is the case with Anthroposophy, that numerous people experience a consistent religious stance in the way Anthroposophy is presented. Despite it not wanting, as I often repeat, to be a religious education, it is nevertheless felt that it is moving in the direction where a religious feeling can go along with it. Actually, this idea that knowledge kills faith—I have much understanding for this—must be revised regarding Anthroposophy. One must first ask if it is not because Anthroposophy is a not conceptual knowledge, but a knowledge based on observation, that the relationship between faith and knowledge becomes something quite different. Let us not forget that this observation of knowledge killing faith has only been created on the hand of a science which is completely conceptual, completely intellectual. Intellectualism is for Anthroposophy only a starting point, it is only regarded as the basis and foundation, then one rises to observation quite indifferently whether it is one's own or a shared observation.

[ 5 ] My view is that it is not necessary at all, to place a wall in front of Anthroposophy, that things should be accepted in good faith. This is not quite so. A certain shyness remains today, to shine a very thorough light into what is said by single anthroposophical researchers. When this shyness is overcome then one doesn't need some of other perception or clairvoyance. Just like one can take a dream as an error or a truth, even if one only experiences the dream for what it is, which is a perception; in the same way one can recognise the truth or error in a painted image. Basically, it's the same for life. This is not easily understood—those involved with spiritual research know. One gets much more out of life when one looks at things yourself rather than being told about them, because observation of life demands a great deal. Yet, these things need to be researched so they can enter into life.

[ 6 ] Now, something like the viewpoints of conceptual knowledge which we are already familiar with, is what I noticed in the inquiries of our questioners, whose first point was: How can we define religion? One could—this is how it can be said in the course of the discussion—renounce knowledge, leave the world lying on its back and turn to the Divine because there is an abyss between the world and God, and so on. This is said about it.

[ 7 ] Now if you are familiar with my arguments you will have found that I do not give definitions anywhere; in fact, I am sharply against giving definitions in Anthroposophy. Sometimes, since I speak about popular things, I conceptualise them. Even though I know quite well that definitions can certainly be a help in the more scientific or historic sense of today's kind of knowledge, even though I'm aware of the limited right of definitions, I remind myself how, within Greek philosophy, defining a human being was recommended. The definition is such that a human being is alive, that it has two legs and no feathers. So the next day someone brought along a plucked chicken and said, this is a human being.—You see how far a person is from the immediate observation, even with practical definitions. These things need to be examined.

[ 8 ] That is the peculiarity of intellectualistic knowledge, and in it, is to be found many such things which have led to the judgement which sharpens the boundary between belief and knowledge even more. One needs to enter into the intricacies a bit more. You see, already in our simplest sciences are definitions which actually have no authority at all. Open some or other book on physics. You find a definition like the following: What is impenetrability? Impenetrability is the property of objects, that in the place where an object is present, another body cannot be at the same time.—That is the definition of impenetrability. In the entire scope of knowledge and cognition, however, not everything can be defined in this way; the definition of impenetrability is merely a masked postulate. In reality it must be said: One calls an object impenetrable when the place where it is in, can't at the same time be occupied by another object.—It is namely merely to determine an object, to postulate its individual character; and only under the influence of materialistic thinking, postulates masked as definitions are given.

[ 9 ] All of this creates an entire sea of difficulties which current mankind is not aware of at all because people have really been absorbing it from the lowest grade of elementary school; mankind really doesn't know on what fragile ground, on what slippery ice he gets involved with, in reality, when educated through the current system of concepts. This conceptual system which is in fact more corrupt than theological concepts—a physicist often has no inkling that their concepts are corrupt—this is something which not only kills belief, but in many ways, it also kills what relates to life. These corrupt scientific concepts are not only damaging to the soul, but even harmful to physical life. If you are a teacher, you know this.

[ 10 ] Therefore, it is no longer important that the spiritual scientist, the Anthroposophist has to say: Precisely this scientific concept must be transformed into the healing of mankind.—Here is where the Anthroposophist becomes misled, when the religious side insists that an abyss be created under all circumstances between belief and knowledge, because, between what one observes with the senses, and Anthroposophy, there is really a great abyss. This is what even from the anthroposophical side needs to be clarified.

[ 11 ] Now I would like to consider this question from the religious side and perhaps as a result of me approaching it from the religious side, it will be better understood religiously. You see I can completely understand that the following may be said—that one must turn away from the world to find the way to God. The basic experience that exists, the paths that will have to be taken, those I know. I can also certainly understand when someone talks about how it would be necessary, in a certain sense, that the dew of mystery should cover anything with religious content. I would like to express myself succinctly only; it has already surfaced in the questions. Briefly, I can fully understand if someone strives in a certain way to place everything that can be known on the one side and on the other side, look for a religious path according to such fundamentals as are searched for by a whole row of modern evangelists. This search should take place not through events but in a far more direct way. In the elaboration of Dr Schairer, it was again correctly described: also in the questioning of Bruno Meyer which was given to me yesterday, it is expressed clearly. So, I can understand it well. But I see something else.

[ 12 ] You see, what people take from Anthroposophy, quite indifferently now, how far their research comes or in how far they have insight—and as we said, it can be seen without being a researcher or an observer through what you get from Anthroposophy—means they must relinquish quite a few things from their "I," I mean from their egotism. In a certain sense selflessness belongs to this point of departure from one's self, when entering the world. One could say a person needs to radically tear out inborn egoism in order to really find a human relationship to the simplest Anthroposophical knowledge. A feeling for the world as opposed to an ego feeling for oneself must be developed to a high degree, and gradually grow just by following this apparent path of knowledge, which is not only similar to fervent love but equal to it; everything grows from here. Basically, one learns about true submission to objectivity by following anthroposophic content.

[ 13 ] In opposition to this, I propose something else. One can relinquish all such involvement in the world, all such conceptual submission of oneself and then try, out of oneself, I don't want to call it "in feelings" but for instance how Dr Schairer expressed it, through "connecting to God" make one's way. One can try to stretch the entire sum of inner life, one could call it, electrically, to find what the direct communication with God is. Also there, I must say, I know what can be achieved by that strong relationship of trust in God, without entering into some kind of unclear mysticism, up to certain mystics who have remained with clear experiences. I've seen it before. Yet I find despite everything that is attempted in devotion to the world, in connecting to the world, in connecting to divine world forces and so on, a large part of egoism, even soul-filled egoism, remains. Someone can be extraordinarily religious out of the most terrible egoism. Prove it for yourself by looking with the eyes of a good psychologist at the religiosity of some monks or nuns. Certainly, you could say, that is not evangelistic belief. It may differ qualitatively, but in relation to what I mean now, it still differs qualitatively. If you prove this, you perhaps find the performing of a devotion to the utmost mortification, yet it sometimes harbours—the true observation of psychologists reveals this—the most terrible egoism. This is something questionable which can give up even a superficial view of an important problem. You see, to find an exchange with God in this way is basically nothing extraordinary because God is there and whoever looks for Him, will find Him. He will obviously be found. Only those who don't find Him are not looking for Him. One can find him, sure, but in many cases, one asks oneself what it is one has found. I may say out of my own experience: What is it?

[ 14 ] In many cases it is the discovery the forces of the inner life, which only exists between birth and death. One is able to, with these forces which exist between birth and death, to be a very pious person. However, these forces are laid down with us in our graves, we have no possibility of taking these forces with us through the gate of death. Should we acquire thoughts of eternity, acquire thoughts of the supersensible, these we will take with us through the gate of death and while we do so, we must already have become selfless, as I have indicated. You see, this is something which is always questionable to me, when I discover it—what I can quite rightly understand—like Schleiermacher's philosophy of religion. Licentiate Bock has recently told me that with Schleiermacher one could discover something quite different. It would be lovely if something could happen, but according to the usual way Schleiermacher is interpreted, I find in the Schleiermacher way the reference and exchange with the Divine as only created through the forces which are lost when we die. What is this then, that is lost though death, my dear friends? Even if it's religious, if it is lost with death it is nothing more than a refined lust of the soul, an intensification of temporal life. One feels oneself better for it, when one feels secure with God.

[ 15 ] You see, I want to speak religiously about the necessity to achieve a concept of belief which lives within the danger of connecting temporal forces to people. This of course has a relationship to the Divine. Here something terrible always appears to me in the great illusion within the numerous people's current lives which consist of people being unable to see how the rejection of a certain content, which must always have a content of knowledge—you could call this observational content, but finally this is only terminology—how the judgement of such content severely endangers religious life. Old religions didn't exist without content and their content of Christian teaching was once full of life, and it only turned into what we call dogma today, at the end of the fourth century after Christ. So one could say this distaste for content, this selfish fear of so-called wisdom—I'm fully aware of calling it "so-called wisdom"—that, my dear friends, always reminds me of people living in this illusion, that this fear of knowledge of the supersensible actually is also produced by materialism. Within this concept of faith, I see a materialistic following, I can't help myself; this following of materialism is no conscious following but something which exists in subconscious foundations of the soul as a materialistic following.

[ 16 ] I really believe that it will be through religious foundations, particularly for the priest, if he could bring himself to it, to overcome the shyness of the so-called gulf between belief and knowledge. The world and God, and the gulf between them—yes my dear friends, this is indeed the deepest conviction of Anthroposophy itself; what Anthroposophy seeks, is to create a bridge between the two. When this gulf has been bridged, then only will the higher unity of God and world be possible. At first, from the outside, this abyss appears, and only when man has gone through everything which makes this bridging necessary, can the abyss be overcome, and only then does man discover what can be called the unity of God with the world.

[ 17 ] Let's consider the religious connection with God. Would a religion—this question was asked in three ways and called thinking feeling and willing—would a religion still be approachable through Anthroposophy, which is dependent on knowledge, to people who do not have knowledge, or will they get a raw deal?—Anthroposophy certainly doesn't make religiousness dependent on knowledge. I must confess in the deepest religious sense I actually can't understand why a dependent religious life should exists beside Anthroposophy because the course of an anthroposophic life becomes such that firstly, of course, single personalities become researchers, who to some extend break through to the observation; then others will apply their healthy human minds to it—yes, this is what it is about. Just recently in Berlin this word was taken as evil from a philosophic view, and opposed on the grounds of the human mind being unable to understand anything super-sensory, and that the human mind which is able to understand something super-sensory, would surely not be healthy.—

A healthy human mind can simply look through the communications of spiritual researchers when he only wants to, if he doesn't put a spoke in his own wheel because of today's scattered prejudices. Certainly, there will be numerous other people who take it on good faith. Now, we can't compare something small with something big, but if this is only about using comparisons, one could perhaps do it. You see, I assume that the Being, Who we call the Christ, possesses an immeasurable higher content within, than human beings who call themselves Christians, and you have but trust in Him. Why should that be unjustified? That knowledge appears through this, knowledge which is not immediately clear, but which arrives in an earnest manner, that is to say as it comes out of personal research, clarifies what is discovered with no need to somehow try to understand why that would let people be given a raw deal. In this I actually find something which ultimately amounts to the fact that one can't acknowledge anything which one has not discovered oneself.

[ 18 ] We won't get far in life at all if we are not also presented with something through other means than only direct observation. You see, it is obvious for a spiritual researcher to say: You, living in the present, haven't seen the deeds of Alexander the Great, but there is a connection between the life at present and the regarded-as-truth unseen deeds of Alexander the Great. Here a theologian objected: Yes, Alexander the Great don't interest me any longer, but that which is claimed in Anthroposophy I must see for myself, otherwise it doesn't interest me.—One can't say that everything of interest must always come from something observed. Just imagine if someone could only believe in his father and mother after he has looked at the truth of his belief in them. So, as I've said, I can't quite grasp something by applying precise terms to what is really meant; I would like to rather say, that I find a certain contradiction between, on the one hand, it is said that Anthroposophy wants to be wisdom and therefore appears dubious, and on the other hand, one could accept it, if you knew about things. This doesn't seem like quite a good match.

[ 19 ] A particularly important question to me is the following. Perhaps its difficulty has resulted from what I've said myself: A person experiences through the anthroposophic life at the same time something which can meet the religious need. The next question then comes: When art assumes religious form, when science and social life take on religious form, will religion stop being independent and gradually only become something which exists with everything else in the world?—Well, that seems to me or at least seemed to me to be a complete misjudgement of the religious when it is indicated that art will develop in future in such a way, in the anthroposophic sense, and that it will develop social life in such a way according to the anthroposophic sense, that religion as something independent will vanish. Religion has indeed other living conditions, quite other needs than Anthroposophy.

[ 20 ] It was so that the old religious foundations always had wisdom in the background. One can say there is no old religion which doesn't have wisdom in its background, and because knowledge existed there, it is not involved in religion. Religion is only created through the relationship of man to what is known. When so much anthroposophic art produced in future is not looked at with a religious mood, it will never make a religious impression. One would never be able to cultivate religion, no matter how hard one tried, in order to say about the social life what can be said out of spiritual science, out of Anthroposophy, when in reality people don't experience in all earnest the meaning of the words: "What you do to the least of my brothers, you also do to me."—The most beautiful anthroposophical impulses could never become a reality in life, if so much should be done, it would remain an empty science if religious life wasn't cultivated.

[ 21 ] However, something has to be taken into account. In Shairer's defences there are three images: The first image is that man can approach water in a dual manner, either as a chemist and analyst in H₂O, or one can drink water. The supersensible world analyses a person whether he comes as an Anthroposophist, or when he takes possession of a direct experience, then he is a religious person. The religious person equals someone who drinks the water, the Anthroposophist is someone who analyses water and finds H₂O. Dr Shairer's second image is the following: Let's assume I've deposited a large amount of bank notes or gold on the table and I count, divide it and so on, so I calculate the money; but I may also possess this money, that is another relationship. The person who calculates the money is an Anthroposophist; the one who possesses it all, is a religious person. Shairer's third image is particularly characteristic. A person could have studied every possibility of human health and illness; he could know every branch of medicine. The other person can be healthy. So the one who is healthy, is the religious person, and the one who studies everything about illness and health, is the Anthroposophist.

[ 22 ] The three examples are, considered abstractly, are extraordinarily accurate but still, only thought about abstractly. They are actually only valid for today's common knowledge. You see, with the water analysis, something can be done. For someone who doesn't study Anthroposophy, it is useless. Because one has to, if one wants to approach it, begin by "drinking" it. Water in Anthroposophy is not there for mere outer analysis; it must be drunk at the same time. The activity of drinking and the activity of the analysing or synthesizing are the same. That one believes something else about it, results from the fact that recently an otherwise excellent man has written in "Tat" that he would have no interest in my statements regarding the Akasha-Chronicle unless I honour him with them in a splendid illustrated edition.—Yes, my dear friends, to use such an image at all, one must acknowledge that the Akasha-Chronicle can only exist for those who allow themselves to experience it spiritually. It can't be allowed to be compared in this way. Already upon this basis I'm quite sure that the modern bad habit of the cinema will not be applied to Anthroposophy—hopefully not.

[ 23 ] Therefore, the comparison between drinking water and water analysis is relevant for ordinary science but has no relevance to Anthroposophy. The second image was about counting money and possessing money. This also is not quite so; it is tempting, but it doesn't work this way. I can namely possess money but when I'm too foolish to be unable to count it, then its possession doesn't matter much. Under some circumstances I could possess the whole world but if I can't enter into it, then under the circumstances the world can mean very little.

[ 24 ] Now; the thing about medicine. Materialistic medicine can certainly be studied on the one hand while on the other hand one could be healthy. One could certainly, if it's your destiny, be sick despite anthroposophical medicine. However, the comparison on this basis is not entirely true for the reason that materialistic medicine, what one knows about it, actually has nothing to do with being healthy in earthly life, but it is a knowledge and from this knowledge action can result. With Anthroposophy it is namely so, that anthroposophical medicine has to certainly also be a deducted knowledge, but the human being is approached much more closely. Here is something which can be proven with great difficulty, and it is because of the following. Take for example, this is necessary, someone aged forty and recommend, for a start, that he should stop smoking and drinking wine or something, and say to him, it would in fact improve his health, he would live longer than he would otherwise. Now he dies aged 48; and people say he already died at 48, it didn't help him.—I can't prove that if he hadn't avoided wine, he could perhaps have died at 44 already. When one encounters such things, there are small stumbling blocks. It is extraordinarily difficult to deliver proof when that which is to be accomplished, must be created as proof out of the world.

[ 25 ] People certainly sometimes think curiously about things. I knew an anatomist, Hyrtl, who was an extraordinary big man who equally had a stimulating influence on his students and had a long life after he retired. He became over 80 years old then he died in a small place into which he had withdrawn. Just after Hyrtl's death, a widow who was a farmer encountered a man and she said to him: "Yes, now Hyrtl has died, we liked him so much, but he studied so much, and that's why he had to die; it doesn't bode well if one studies so much."—To this the man asked: "But you husband, how old was he when he died?" She said: "45 years."—Now the man asked if her husband has studied more than old Hyrtl?—You see, similar things actually happen on closer examination.

[ 26 ] Now I don't want to deviate from serious things and would like to say the following. For Anthroposophists it is not important that there should be a distinction between drinking water and water analysis, but there is in fact something where in place of abstract knowledge, of discursive knowledge, an experience occurs within the knowledge of analysis; yet it remains above all knowledge. Only the Leese licentiate has resented calling an experience knowledge while he claimed—not out of a Christian but out of another scientific dogma—he may never take what he has experienced as an object of knowledge. Well, I mean, the thing is, if you really understand what Anthroposophy is as a human experience, this alien-to-life of the scientific no longer applies.

[ 27 ] In relation to the secret, the Mystery, I may here insert what I said yesterday. I said it is not so that Anthroposophic knowledge can be obtained and then through thoughts, change into ordinary knowledge. In order to have the correct relationship to it, one must repeatedly return to it. It exists in quite another kind of inner relationship to people than does scientific knowledge. There still exists something of a sacred shyness in the relationship people have to anthroposophical knowledge and it is certainly not the case that clarity is thus undermined according to what is attained through Anthroposophy. You see, basically it's like this: when we go through the Portal of Death and before we enter the Portal of Birth into this earthly world, we live in that world which Anthroposophy speaks about. That is in fact the reality. Through Anthroposophy we take part in the riddle of creation and in the riddle of death, to a certain degree. That one doesn't understand these things in the same way in which one understands ordinary intellectual knowledge, something else must make this possible. You are not going to be guided into such a world as some people suppose. I have heard among thousands of objections, also heard that it is said Anthroposophy wants to solve all world riddles, and when the time comes where there are no more riddles in the world, what will people do with this knowledge? Then the earth will not be interesting anymore; everything which one can know about the earth, exists in them being riddles.—

[ 28 ] Certainly, in an abstract sense, this can be an objection. However, even understood abstractly, the riddles do not become smaller, but they become ever bigger. Life has not been made easier by entering into the spiritual world, but at first the immeasurability of the world and the immeasurability of knowledge becomes apparent. That is why, in the case of the Mystery there is no reduction or degradation of the Mystery, but there is actually an elevation of the Mystery. This at least is apparent in experience.

[ 29 ] Regarding the question whether there's a difference in value between Anthroposophy and religion or if both are necessary, I would like to say the following. Value differences lead into a subjective area and one has no sure foundations if one wants to assert differences in value. In any case you may from the scant anthroposophic explanations which I've given today and before, actually say that Anthroposophy and religion are both necessary in the future and that Anthroposophy is only necessary for the foundation of the work, which you need towards the renewal of religious life. Anthroposophy itself doesn't want to appear as endowed with religion but it wants to offer every possible help when religious life wants to find renewal.

[ 30 ] Now my dear friends, I could, as I see, not answer everything exhaustively, I still want to put some things on hold. I have certainly had feelings through experiences with which I now want to give an answer to the question, which perhaps has not already appeared in the question, for instance this: I also have my religious objections to the faith which serves only those human forces which actually die with us, and that one—according to my experience I can say this—also through religious instruction, say something in a sense of: avoid the world and develop something completely different—and precisely in this way, strongly refer to man's egoism.

I have experienced the following phenomenon. For example, a good Anthroposophist who tried to work with all his might in order to find a path in Anthroposophy, but without a necessary measure of selflessness and without enough self-confidence, when courage failed him, became a Roman monk. I'm not speaking hypothetically but from experience. Yes, this person has experienced nothing other than having failed due to a lack of selflessness which he would have needed and the lack of confidence which he would have needed. This is the strongest appeal to those forces which dissipate with death; it doesn't serve these forces to go through the gate of death with the soul, to penetrate to reality. People just want to go down to where they don't have to be so strong, so there arises a sinking courage, this attach-oneself-on-to-something which through its submission into activity brings a certain inner satisfaction—which is only a kind of inner desire or lust—to become a Roman monk.

[ 31 ] It is indeed from a religious basis needed to say that the priest should give a person something which doesn't only work for his communications with God up to death, but beyond death. In this connection Anthroposophy must be honest throughout with its knowledge. If one could know more—which is possible—about what goes beyond the gate of death and what doesn't remain, where for instance one has a mystic like saint Theresa, with an involvement only with the transient, so one could, even if you weren't a mystic, prepare yourself for life after death, where one enters atrophied for being a mystic with desires in life. One does enter, but in such a way of course as one would enter into life without hands or feet.

[ 32 ] Through Anthroposophical knowledge a religious impulse can be discovered. To all of this the shyness must be overcome to unite belief and knowledge, which is what Anthroposophy strives for.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Up to now I've been introducing my lectures by indicating what the Anthroposophic path is like, implementing my lectures out of Anthroposophy in order to lead towards the initiation of the renewal of religious life, out of the wishes present in the souls of contemporaries.

[ 2 ] Naturally first of all it is necessary to look more closely at what would be needed for the actual renewal of religious life. I would like to, in order to bring this into a clearer light, still today refer to the relationship, not of religion to Anthroposophy but the reverse, that of Anthroposophy to religion; but I have to say in advance, my dear friends, it is necessary, if we want to understand one another here, for a clear awareness of the seriousness of the relevant question in relation to its meaning in world history. If someone in a small circle sees some or other deficiency, finds this or that imperfection and is not able to perceive its relationship in our world's entire evolution, they will not quite rightly develop in their heart, or have a sense to develop, what is actually needed at present.

[ 3 ] We live in a time where humanity has been deeply shaken and with all the means at its disposal to do something, with all these means humanity has actually failed to move forward. As a result I particularly want to be clear that I believe, even if it perhaps doesn't appear as pertinently—let me quite sincerely and honestly express my opinion on this matter—that I believe the rift between those who have lived for a longer time in pastoral work and those younger ones who stand before this need today, and only enter it today, is far greater. Even though it might not yet be felt so strongly, yet it is still there, and it will appear ever more clearly; I believe that for many the question between older and younger people, if I might express it this way, is to experience its formulation very differently. It seems to me that for the younger ones the formulation as we saw it yesterday, appears no longer to carry the same weight; it has already been dismissed. Let's be quite honest with ourselves, and clear, that there is a difference whether we can, in a sense defend a cause in which we are, or whether it takes strength to get into it. We don't want to have any illusions about that. Of course, when one is older one could say one has the same earnest interest as a youngster.—Yet, we need to take into account all possible subconscious impulses, and for this reason I ask you already, because we are dealing with things of a serious nature, to accept what I want to say today.

[ 4 ] You see, Anthroposophy is quite at the start of its work, and anyone who uses Anthroposophy to develop some or other area, certainly has the experience that all he can still experience for himself in anthroposophical knowledge, the biggest difficulty arrives when he wants to share this with the world. This is just a fact, this is the biggest difficulty. Why? Because today we simply don't have the instrument of speech which is fully suited to concisely express what is seen through Anthroposophy. The Anthroposophist has the expectation that through Anthroposophy not merely such knowledge should come which live within the inner life, which they see as an inner observation, because it is unattainable for the human race in its entirety. For us this must be of foremost importance: What is possible in the human community?—and not: What can the individual demand?—Let us be clear, my dear friends, whoever is an Anthroposophist speaks out of reality, and in me speaking to him I don't feel as if I'm merely speaking in general, but when I speak to such a person it seems that either he is a priest or he should become someone who cares for the soul. Theoretically one can thus in the same manner shape one's endeavours in the most varied human areas. As soon as one enters into such a specialised field, one has to always state the most concrete of opinions which one can only take in. Please observe this. I'm making you aware that Anthroposophy certainly knows it stands at the start of its willing, a will which has to develop quite differently than the way in which it has already stepped in front of the world today. On the other hand, one can see that the world longs very, very strongly for what lies as a seed in Anthroposophy.

[ 5 ] Something exists as a seed in Anthroposophy, which is rarely noticed today. This is the speech formation element itself. If you read Saint Martin's words, who was still a guardian of a religious belief katexochen in the 18th century—Matthias Claudius has translated the work of Saint Martin entitled Errors and Truth which should be republished—if you read Saint Martin, you find him speaking from a certain implicitness that humanity possessed an ancient speech which has been lost, and that one can't actually express in current differentiated languages what could be said about the supersensible worlds, and which should be expressed about the supersensible. So the Anthroposophist often has the feeling he would like to say something or other, but when he tries to formulate it, it leaves him speechless and doesn't come about. Yet Anthroposophy is creative speech. No one is able to meet something in such a way as Anthroposophy—what once was encountered in this way was in olden times and always occurred at the same time as religious formation—no one can encounter anything without a certain theological approach to final things in life like death, immortality, resurrection, judgement, without a certain anticipation of the future, therefore Anthroposophy must in her inward convictions look, at least for a short span of time, into the future and it must to some extent predict what must necessarily happen in the future and for the future of humanity. That is, that mankind is able to strip off all such connections with single individual languages which still exist today, and which more than anything have drawn nations into war and hardship. Ever again one must address the comparison of the Tower of Babylon construction and understand it today when one sees how the world is divided. Anthroposophy already has the power to sense something expressed between the differentiated spoken languages by looking from the original being of the sounds themselves; and Anthroposophy will, and not in the course of many centuries but in a relatively short time—even at is was initially suppressed, it soon rejuvenated—Anthroposophy will, through the most varied languages, not create a type of Yiddish language unit which is an abstraction from another, but it will out of itself creatively enter into the language and become reconciled with what is already in the human language.

[ 6 ] Therefore, I want to tell you that Anthroposophy not only provides formal tasks of knowledge but that Anthroposophy has to face historical creative tasks. You can see what is in the hearts of people today who can create such things. I've been wanting for years to take the most important components in anthroposophical terminology, as paradoxical as this may appear, to try and give words formed out of sound. The time has not been ripe yet to accept this. But it is quite possible.

[ 7 ] For this reason, I must call your attention to the real tasks of Anthroposophy. Why do I feel myself compelled to call your attention to it? Simply from the basis that as soon as mankind is ripe for the perception of the sound, for the word creative power itself, then everything which has up to now been in other spheres, in a more instinctive-animal way taking its course, must in future take place in the spiritual-human sphere. If humanity has come this far then it can sense the truth in a deed, sense what lives in the proclamation, in the message, in the Gospel, because the truth can't be sensed in the Gospel if one doesn't live in the creative power of a language. To really experience the Gospels, my dear friends, means to experience the details of the Gospels in every moment in which one lives, from having really recreated them within oneself.

[ 8 ] Today's tendency is to only basically criticize the Gospels, one can't recreate them; but the possibility for their creation must be reworked. Where are the obstacles? The obstacles lie in already referring to the very first elements which were available for the creation of the Gospels. In fact, Gospel examination is placed on another foundation when the Gospel is thought about this way, than how it needs to happen from the character of the words. You see, under the objections which Dr Rittelmeyer mentioned, not as his but those of others, it is also one which is mentioned besides. It's the objection that it does not interest the religious today whether there are two Jesus children. I can completely understand how, in the religious mood of today, little value is placed in such things. Now there is something else. During the coming days we see, published in the Kommenden Tag-Verlag, how unbelievable the Gospel understanding is regarding the promotion of this "trivial matter"—it is however no small matter—how the power which created the Gospels is promoted by simply referring to a proof of what stands in the Gospels, regarding the two Jesus children. People don't understand the Gospels, they don't know what is written in them. However, the creative power of speech must be drawn out of further sources, and as a result, develop the heart and mind for these sources so that from the heart and mind the first of the four sections which I've given you in the description of the Mass can be given. You see, it doesn't mean the Mass is only being presented symbolically, but that the Mass symbolism becomes an expression for the totality of the pastoral process. If the totality of the pastoral work does not flow together into the Mass as its central focus, then the Mass has no meaning; the coming together of the pastoral ministry in the Mass or the modern symbolism that can be found—we will speak about this more—only then, in the full measure of the four main sections of the Mass, which I have mentioned, can it be fully experienced.

[ 9 ] The reading of the Gospel to the congregation is only a part; the other part is expressed in the sermon. The sermon today is not what it should be, it can't be as it is intellectual because as a rule the preparation for the sermon is only intellectual and arising out of today's education, out of today's theology, can't be anything else. The sermon is only a real sermon when the power of creative speech ensouls the sermon, in other words when it doesn't only come out of its substance but speaks out of the substance of the genius of the language. This is something which must first be acquired. The genius of language is not needed for religiosity which is in one's heart, but one needs the genius of language for the religious process in the human community. Community building must be obligatory for the priest, as a result, elements must be looked for which are supportive of community building. Community building can never be intellectual, because it is precisely the element which creates the possibility of isolation. Intellectualism is just agreed upon by the individual as an individual human being and to the same degree, as a person falls back on his singularity, to that degree does he become intellectual. He can understandably save his intellectualism through faith because faith is a subjective thing of individuals, in the most imminent sense one calls it a thing of the individual. However, for the community we don't just need the subjective, but for the community we need super-sensory content.

[ 10 ] Now, just think deeply enough about how it would be possible for you to effectively bring the mere power of faith to the community, without words. You wouldn't be able to do this, it is impossible. Likewise, you couldn't sustain the community by addressing it through mere intellectualism. Intellectual sermons will from the outset form the tendency to atomise the faithful community. Through an intellectual sermon the human being is thrown back onto himself; every single listener will be rejected by himself. This shakes up in him those forces which above all do not agree but are contradictory. This is a simple psychological fact. As soon as one looks deeper into the soul, every listener becomes at the same time a critic and an opponent. Indeed, my dear friends, regarding the secrets of the soul so little has been clarified today. All kinds of contradictions arise in objection to what the other person is saying when the only method of expression he uses is intellectual.

[ 11 ] This is precisely the element which split people up today, because they are permeated thoroughly with mere intellectualism. You are therefore unable, through the sermon, to work against atomising, if you remain in intellectualism. Neither in the preparation of the sermon, nor in the delivery of the sermon must you, if you want to build community today, remain in intellectualism. Here is where one can become stuck through our present-day education and above all in the present theological education, because in many ways it has become quite intellectual. In the Catholic Church it has become purely intellectual, and all that which is not intellectual, which should be alive, is not given to individuals but has become the teaching material of the church and must be accepted as the teaching material of the church. A result of this is, because everything which the Catholic Church gives freely as intellectual, the priest is the most free individual one can imagine. The Catholic Church doesn't expect people to somehow submit to their intellect, inasmuch as it releases them from what is not referred to as the supernatural. All they demand is that people submit to the teaching material of the church. Regarding this I can cite an actual example.

I once spoke to a theologian of a university, where at that time it paid general homage to liberal principles, not from the church but from liberal foundations. Of course, the theological faculty was purely for the Catholic priesthood. This person I spoke to had just been given a bad rebuke by Rome. I asked him: How is this actually possible that it is precisely you who received this rebuke, who is relatively pious in comparison to the teacher at the Innsbruck University—who I won't name—who teaches more freely and is watched patiently from Rome?—Well, you see, this man answered, he is actually a Jesuit and I'm a Cistercian. Rome is always sure that a man like him, who studies at the Innsbruck University never drops out, no matter how freely he uses the Word, but that the Word should always be in the service of the church. With us Cistercians Rome believes that we follow our intellect because we can't stand as deeply in our church life as the Jesuit who has had his retreat which has shown him a different way to the one we Cistercians take.—You see how Rome treats intellectualism psychologically. As a rule, Rome knows very clearly what it wants because Rome acts out through human psychology, even though we reject it.

[ 12 ] Now, what is important is that above all, the sermon should not remain in intellectualism. All our languages are intellectual, we don't have the possibility at all, when we use common languages, to come away from the intellect. But we must do it. The next thing you come to, with which you need work as purely formative in the power of creative speech, is symbolism, but now formed in the right way, not by remaining within intellectualism but by really experiencing the symbols. To experience symbols indicates much more than one ordinarily means.

[ 13 ] You see, as soon as the Anthroposophist comes to imaginative observation or penetrates the imaginative observation of someone else, he actually knows: The human being who stands in front of him is not the same person he had been before he had seen the light of Anthroposophy. You see, this person, who stands in front of us, is considered by current science to be a more highly developed animal; generally speaking. Everything which science offers to corroborate these views and generally justifies it is by saying a person has exactly as many bones and muscles as the higher animals, which is all true, but science comes to a dead end when one really presents the difference between people and animals. The differences between people and animals are not at all to be referred to through comparative anatomy, whether the whole human being or a single part of it, and an entire animal or part of an animal is similar, but to grasp what is human is to understand what results when human organs are situated vertically while the animal organs lie parallel with the surface of the earth. That one can also observe this in the animal kingdom as far as it proves the rule, is quite right, but that doesn't belong here, I must point out the limitations.

Because the human being is organised according to the vertical plane with his spine, he relates in quite a different way to the cosmos than does the animal. The animal arranges itself in the currents circulating the earth, the human being arranges itself in currents which stream from the centre point of the earth in the direction of the radius. One needs to study the human being's situation in relation to space in order to understand him. When one has completed one's study of the human being's relationship to space, and make it alive once again, as regards to what it means that the human being is the image of God. The human being is not at all what comparative anatomy sees, he is no such reality as anatomy describes him to be, but he is, in as far as he is formed, a realization of an image (Bildwirklichkeit). He represents. He is sent out of higher worlds into conception and birth so that he represents what he brings from before his birth. Out of the divine substance we have our spiritual life before birth. This spiritual life dissolves through conception and birth and achieves a representation in the physical person on earth, an imagination. Imagination, drawn out of the world all, becomes the form of man, but what is drawn out of the world all needs to be understood according to its position in the world all. Every single human organ takes place in the verticalization. The human being is placed into the world by God.

[ 14 ] This happens directly as an inner experience as the human being is grasped by the imagination. One can no longer intellectually say and believe that when I say the words "Man is the image of God" that we are only talking about a comparison. No, the truth is expressed; super-sensibly derived similarities from the Old and New Testaments can be found not as allegorical similarities, but as truths. We need to reach a stage when our words are again permeated by such experiences, that we learn to speak vividly in this way. In the measure to which we in a lively way enter into vivid characterisation, not through contriving something intellectually, we come to the possibility of the sermon, which should be an instruction.

[ 15 ] I have often pointed out that when a teacher stands in front of a child and wants to teach him in a popular form about the immortality of the soul, he should do so through an image. He will need to refer to the insect pupa, how the butterfly flies out of it, and then from there go over to the human soul leaving the human body like a pupa shell; permeating this image with a super-sensible truth. I have always, when I deal with this alleged parable, said: there is a big difference whether a teacher said to himself: I am clever and the child is stupid, therefore I must create a parable for the child so that he can understand what I can understand with my mind.—Whoever speaks in this way has no experience of life, no experience of the imponderables which work in instructions. Because the convincing power with which the child grasps it, what I want to teach with this pupa parable, means very little if I think: I am clever and the child is stupid, I must create a parable for him which works.—What should be working firstly comes about within me, when I work with all the phases and power of belief in my parable. As an Anthroposophist I can create this parable by observing nature. Through my looking at the butterfly, how it curls out of the pupa, I am convinced through it that this is an image of the immortality of the soul, which only appears as a lower manifestation. I believe in my parable with my entire life.

This facing of others in life is what can become a power of community building. Before intellectualism has not been overcome to allow people to live in images once again, before then it will be impossible that a real community building power can occur.

[ 16 ] I have experienced the power of community building, but in an unjust field. I would like to tell you about that as well. Once I was impelled to study such things as to listen to an Easter sermon given by a famous Jesuit father. It was completely formulated according to Jesuit training. I want to give you a brief outline of this sermon. It dealt with the theme: How does the Christian face up to the assertion that the Pope would set the Easter proclamation according to dogma, it wouldn't be determined as God's creation but through human creation?—The Jesuit father didn't speak particularly deeply, but Jesuit schooled, he said: Yes my dear Christians, imagine a cannon, and on the cannon an operator or gunner, and the officer in command. Now imagine this quite clearly. What happens? The cannon is loaded, the gunner holds the fuse in his hand, the gunner pulls on the fuse when the command is sounded. You see, this is how it is with the Pope in Rome. He stands as the gunner beside the cannon, holds the fuse and from supernatural worlds the command comes. The Pope in Rome pulls on the fuse and thus gives the command of the Easter proclamation. It is a law from heaven, just like the command does not come from the gunner but from the officer. Yet, something deeper lies behind this, my dear Christians—the father says—something far deeper lies beneath it, when one now looks at the whole process of the Easter proclamation. Can one say the gunner who hears the command and pulls on the fuse, is the inventor of the powder? No. Just as little can one say that the Catholic Pope has instituted the Easter proclamation.

The faithful are drawn by a feeling into the congregation through the use of this image, this representation but obviously in an unjust a field as possible.

[ 17 ] The symbol can be a way for the human heart to actually find the supersensible, but we, like I've indicated with the comparison to the insect pupa, need to learn to live within the symbol; to be able to faithfully take the symbol itself from the outside world. I clearly understand when someone wants to appeal to mere faith as opposed to knowledge. I take this so seriously, that this faith must also manifest and be active in the living of oneself in the face of outer nature, so that the entire outer nature becomes a symbolum in the true sense of the word, an experienced symbolum. My dear friends, before the human being again realizes that in the light not mere comparisons of wisdom live and weave, but that in the light wisdom really live and weave ... (gap in notes) ... light penetrates into our eyes, what is light is then no longer light—with "light" one originally referred to everything which lay at the foundation of human beings as their inner wisdom—because by the light's penetration it becomes inwardly changed, transubstantiated, and each thought which rises within, my dear friends, is changed light in reality, not in a parable. [ 18 ] Don't be surprised therefore that the one who has got to know through appropriate exercises that to some extent outer phenomena describe inner human thoughts, by describing them in light imagery. Do not be surprised because that corresponds to reality.

[ 19 ] Things were far more concretely taken in the ancient knowledge of mankind than one usually thinks. You must also become knowledgeable with the fact that the power which then still lived in the Gospels, have in the last centuries also got lost, like the original revelation of man has really been lost as has the original language been lost. Now I want to pose the question: do we grasp the Gospels today? We only grasp them when we can really live within them and presently, out of our intellectualized time epoch, we can't experience them thus. I know very well about the opposition expressed against my interpretations presented in my various Gospel lectures, from some or other side, and I'm quite familiar that these are my initial attempts, that they need to become more complete; but attempts to enliven the Gospels, these they are indeed.

[ 20 ] I would like to refer back to times, my dear friends, when there were individuals who we today, when you imagine the world order at that time there also existed, those we call chemists. Alchemists they were called in the 12th and 13th centuries, and they were active with the material world which we usually can observe in chemists. What do we do today in order to create a real chemist? Today our preparations for the creation of a chemist is his intellectual conceptions of how matter is analysed and synthesized, how he works with a retort, with a heating apparatus, with electricity and so on. This was not enough, if I may express it this way, for a real chemist, up to the 13th and 14th centuries—perhaps not to take it word for word—but then the chemist had opened the Bible in front of him and was permeated in a way by what he did, in what he did, by what flowed out of the Bible in a corresponding force. Current humanity will obviously regard this as a paradox. For humanity, only a few centuries ago, this seemed obvious. The awareness which the chemist had at that time, in other words the alchemist, in the accomplishment of his actions, was only slightly different to standing at the altar and reading the mass. Only slightly different, because the reading of the mass already was the supreme alchemical act. We will speak about this more precisely in future.

Should one not be creating knowledge out of these facts that the Gospels have lost their actual power? What have we done in the 19th century? We have analysed the Gospels of Mark, John, Luke and Matthew, we have treated them philologically, we have concluded that John's Gospel can be nothing, but a hymn and that one can hardly believe it corresponds to reality. We have compared the various synoptists with one another and we have reached the stage which ties to the famous blacksmith where distillation takes place: what is said iniquitously about the Christ is the truth because you won't find that with mere hymns of praise.—This is the last consequence of this path. On this path nothing else can happen than what has already happened: the destruction of the Gospels will inevitably arise in this way. While we are still so much into discussing the division between knowledge and faith, it will not be sustained if science destroys the Gospels. One must certainly stand within reality and need to understand how to live out of reality, and therefore it is important that the pastor must come to a living meaning of the perceptible representations, the perceptible-in-image representations. The living image must enter into the sermon. That it should be an acceptable, a good image, it obviously must have a purity of mood, of which we will speak about. It's all in the image; the image is what we need to find.

[ 21 ] Now my dear friends, for the discovery of the image you will be most successful with the help of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is mocked because of its pictoriality. If you read how the intellectuals—if I may use the word—apply their opposition to my depiction of evolution, you will soon see how easy it is from the intellectual point of view to mock the images which I have to use in my depiction of the Old Saturn-, Sun- and Moon existence. I have to use images otherwise things would fall out of my hands, because only though images I can grasp the reality which has to be searched for. I would like to say, Anthroposophy has in each of its parts definitely a search for images and is for this reason the helper for those who use images. Here lies the real field, where the pastor can firstly benefit much from Anthroposophy. Not as if he has to undertake to believe in Anthroposophy, not as if he has to say: Well now, let's study anthroposophical images and books, then we can use them.—This is no argument. It needs to come, so to speak, to the opposite of what had to develop in philosophy, into an age that lived contrary to Anthroposophy.

[ 22 ] To this I would like to say the following. Philosophers today who are students of a content or a system, or of the belief that a system needs to be established, such philosophers are antiquated; such philosophers have remained behind. Such system-philosophies are no longer possible in the intellectual time epoch. When Hegel presented his purely intellectualism in his last thoughts of the human conception and placed this in his overall system, he had created what I would like to call the corpse of philosophy. Exactly like science studies the human corpse, so can one in Hegel's philosophy in a corpse-like way study what is philosophy—as only that, it is very good. That is why the Hegelian philosophy is so great, because nothing disturbs the flow of intellectualism to really study it. The amazing thing I admire for example, is to develop something pure which is purely intellectualistic. However, after Hegel there can no longer be such endeavours which take thought content to create a philosophic system. That is why people create such awful somersaults. Yes, one can't think of worse somersaults than the philosophy of Hans Vaihinger, called the "As-if" (Als Ob). As if one can have something like a philosophy called: "As if." It is created from experience in the mind, this philosophy of "As if." It is not even a philosophy out of what humanity was, but the last imaginative remnants in humanity, which are translated into thoughts. What philosophers are obliged to study today should be a practice in pure thinking. To study philosophy today is meditative thinking and should not be practiced in any other way. I believe that if one looks at these things in an unprejudiced way, one will soon see that what I have offered in my Riddles of Philosophy as the development of philosophy, that it constantly proposes one can work through the most diverse philosophic systems as an exercise in thinking. One can learn unbelievably much out of the latest systems, in the Hartmann system and the American system linked to the name of James. One can learn unbelievably much in as far as one lets it work on one to such a degree that one asks: How is thinking trained; what does one gain from thought training?—Please forgive the hard words. Nietzsche had already made an effort to introduce such thought training in philosophy.

[ 23 ] This will draw your attention, regarding philosophy, to today's need that man must direct thought content into direct living content, not by positioning oneself as a subject against the truth from outside, but in such a way that truth becomes an experience. Only one who has understood current philosophising in this way will actually be able to understand the contrary; for readers of anthroposophical writing and hearing anthroposophical lectures it does not mean things are to be taken up as dogma. That would be the most incorrect attitude to have. Just think, what is given in Anthroposophy has actually been brought down out of the supersensible, it may have been awkwardly put into words, but when one allows oneself to reach deeper, it will be as if the true philosopher in his thoughts reaches deeper into other philosophies. He would not take anything from other systems, he takes the blame. The image capability for the pictorial, for the sake of clarity, is the first step to educate students in Anthroposophy. When words are encountered which have flowed out of imaginative thinking, when such thoughts are taken up, then it is necessary, in order to really understand them, to raise the pictorial power out of them from soul foundations. Above all, that's what we can do to help Anthroposophy.

[ 24 ] One therefore appeals less by saying: Well, I must first for my own sake become clairvoyant, then I can make some decisions about Anthroposophy.—One appeals in such a way that one firstly, quite indifferently, get to know the content of truth in Anthroposophy; one simply takes the sum of all the images which shows how one or other soul paints it. That is at least a fact which they paint for themselves. One takes this and first allows the inherent truth to remain undecided, but then one tries to find within it, how the person speaks who has such supersensible images, and one will see that this is the best way to enter in to seeing for oneself. With many people who encounter Anthroposophy today it is as if they set the wagon straight but then incorrectly spans the horse to it. (A stenographer's note indicates that a horse was drawn on the blackboard with the wagon positioned in one way, while the horse is drawn with its head towards the wagon and its tail pointing to the road ahead. The original drawing was not preserved.) There is no need for this; that one must first learn to be a seer. It could, in fact happen due to a certain arrogance and then the thing as a whole is passed by. If one has the humility to want to experience the seeing adequately, then one can come to the perception without the fear of receiving a suggestion. The fear of receiving a suggestion can only be had by philosophers alien to reality; which we have for instance with Wund, the latecomer of system philosophers who of course from his point of view, argued: Yes, how would I know if what I've first perceived of the supersensible world and look at it, that it was not suggested to me?—One should reply the Wund: How do you actually know the different between a piece of iron with a temperature of 100 degrees or higher which you can only imagine, or another one which is lying in front of you? You can discuss this for a long time but by looking at it you will never discover whether the iron is really lying in front of you or whether it is suggested; but when you grab hold of it and look at your fingers, then you will find the difference—through life. There is no other criterion.

[ 25 ] It is however an unmistakable criterion, if one places oneself into life in such a way to come into Anthroposophy. One may however not take on the point of view that one knows everything already. In my life I have found that people learn the least when they believe they already know what they should learn.

[ 26 ] It is for instance only possible to be a real teacher when you are a teacher of attitude. How often is it said to teachers in the Waldorf schools—and you have understood, in the course of years it has happened that teaching is characterised by this attitude; it is clearly noticeable—how often is it not said: When one stands in front of a child, then it is best to say to oneself that there is far more wisdom in the child than in oneself, much, much more because it had just arrived from the spiritual world and brings much more wisdom with it. One can learn an unbelievable amount from children. From nothing in the world does one basically learn so much in an outer physical way, as when one wants to learn from a child. The child is the teacher, and the Waldorf teacher knows how little it is true that with teaching, one is the teacher and the child the scholar. One is actually—but this one keeps as an inner mystery for oneself—more of a scholar than a teacher and the child is more teacher than scholar. It seems like a paradox, but it is so.

[ 27 ] You see, Anthroposophy directs us to new knowledge about the world, in many special areas in life, so it is worthy of questions which are thought through ... (Gap in notes). Yes, Anthroposophy appears consistently in this mood, with this attitude. Anthroposophy just can't appear without a religious character as part of it. This must also be stressed about Anthroposophy: Anthroposophy does not strive to appear as creating religious instruction, as building a sect; it strives to give humanity a content to their inner experiences which lets them strive to what comes quite out of themselves, which is expressed with religious characteristics. Anthroposophy is not a religion but what it gives is something which works religiously.

[ 28 ] Very recently I had to speak to a person whose earlier life situation was not quite over confident, but of a joyful nature, and who descended into a deep depression, a depression which had various, even organic, causes. This man is an Anthroposophist, he wanted to speak about his mood to me. I pointed out that a mood comes out of the totality of a person, and one gets a mood out of what one absorbs from the world in that one confronts the world as a human being.

Anthroposophy itself is a person (Mensch). If it wasn't a person, it wouldn't transform us. Out of us it makes us into someone different. It is a person itself, I say it in the greatest earnestness. Anthroposophy is not a teaching, Anthroposophy has an element of being, it is a person. Only when a person is quite permeated by it and Anthroposophy is like a person who thinks, but also feels, senses and has emotions of will, when Anthroposophy thinks, feels and wills in us, when it is really like a complete person, then one can grasp it, then you have it. Anthroposophy acts like a being and it enters present culture and civilization like a kind of being. One experiences this entering as by a kind of being. With this at the same time one can say: Religion—spoken from the anthroposophic stand point—religion is a relationship of human beings to God. However, Anthroposophy is a person, and because it is a person, it has a relationship with God; and like a person has a relationship to God, so it has a relationship to God. Thus, it has the direct characteristic of the religious in itself.

[ 29 ] I will now summarise this finally in some abstract sentences which do however have life in them. What I have said before and what I say now are interrelated and I don't say it without purpose, my dear friends. The first one which is experienced in this way is that one leans to recognise how godly wisdom acts in the child, where it is creative, where it not only comes to revelation in a brain, but where it still shapes the brain. Yes, "if you would not become like little children, you shall never enter into the kingdom of the heavens ..." That is the way to penetrate into what you notice in the deep humility of the child, that which lies before becoming a child, that which even Goethe experienced so lovingly, that he used the word "growing young" (Jungwerden) for entering into the world, like one can say "growing old" (Altwerden). Growing young means stepping out of the spiritual state, into earthly existence. One goes in a certain sense really through childhood and back to such a state where one still had a direct relationship with the divine. The old Biblical questions become quite real: Can one return into the mother's body, to experience a rebirth?—In spirit one can do this. However, in the old way where the Bible lay in front of the alchemists, and the new way which prepares us for handling the world, lies an abyss. The abyss must be bridged over. We will however not find the old ways, because we need to find a new way.

I have often spoken out among Anthroposophists what we might find when we are willing to do some kind of manipulation of nature. The "Encheiresis naturae" (an intervention by the hand of nature—Google) we must accomplish again, but we mustn't say "don't cut your nose to spite your face"; we must be able to take it in the greatest earnest then we will have an ideal , in any case only as an ideal, but an ideal which becomes reality. The laboratory workbench will in a certain sense become an altar, and the outer action in the world will become a service of divine worship and all of life be drenched by the light of acts of worship. [ 30 ] Now for the second thing: Anthroposophy as speech formation. Anthroposophy needs to strive to have such a grasp in the world, that I can apply the reality which I've presented today as an apparent contradictory image: the laboratory bench of the chemist, the physics-chemistry of clinical work must in human experience take on the form of an altar. Work on humanity, also the purely technical work—must be able to become a service of divine worship. That one will only be able to find when one has the good will to cross over the abyss which separates our world from the other side where the Gospels lay before the alchemists.

Emil Bock opened the discussion hour and formulated the following questions:

1. Out of the previous lecture this morning, how can we take the power of formative speech to which we still need to gain access, and accomplish a new speech technique, perhaps new forms and a new gestural technique?
2. How do we actually now really speak of a new understanding of the Bible, of a new Bible text? Furthermore, we ask Dr Steiner on occasion to discuss in more detail the two chapters from the synoptic Gospels, Matthew 13 and Mark 13.
3. What is the reality behind the Apostolic succession, the tradition and the ordination of priests in the technical sense, and how can such a reality be made more accessible again in the future?

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: With regards to the first question: You would already have seen, my dear friends, that out of what I said this morning, that in the illustration, the soul contents related to the supersensible and also what leads to the power of formative speech, must be searched for. Regarding the power of speech formation: we actually have no direct understanding of sound anymore today; we basically have no more understanding for words, so our words remain signs. Naturally our starting point needs to be out of the spiritual milieu of our time. Man must be responsible for these intimate things out of what currently is available. Precisely such a question brings us naturally into the area of the purely technical. First of all one has to make the understanding for the sound active again, within oneself. One doesn't easily manage the free use of speech when one isn't able to allow the sound as such, to stir within oneself. I would like to continue in such a way that I first draw your attention to certain examples.

[ 2 ] You see, when we say "head" (Kopf) in German, we hardly have anything else in mind than the total perception of what reaches us through the ear, which indicates the head. When we say "foot" (Fuss) it is hardly any different to what we experience in the tonality and sound content in relation to some foot. Now we only need, for instance, to refer to the Romance languages where head is testa, tête, foot is pedum, pied, and we get the feeling at the same time that the term is taken from something completely different. When we say the word Kopf in German, the term has come out of the form, from looking at the form. We are not aware of this any longer, yet it is so. When we say Fuss, it is taken from walking where furrows are drawn in the ground. Thus, it has come into existence out of a certain soul content and coined in a word. When we take a word formation like, let's say, "testament" and all other word formations which refer in Romance language terms to head, testa, then we will feel that the term Kopf in the Romantic languages originate through the substantiation and thus not out of the form, but through the human soul with the help of the head, and particularly activating the mouth organs. Pied didn't originate from walking or drawing furrows but from standing, pressing down while standing. Today we no longer question the motives which have come out of the soul and into speech formation. We can only discover what can be called, in the real sense, a feeling for the language when we follow the route of making language far more representational than it is currently, abstraction at most. When someone uses a Latin expression in terminology, some Latin expressions are even more representational, but some people use them to denote even more. For example, today one can hardly find the connection between "substance" and "subsist" while the concept of "subsist" has basically been lost. Someone who still has the original feeling for substance and subsistence would say of the Father-God, not that He "exists" but that he "subsists."

[ 3 ] Researching language in this way and in another way which I want to mention right now, in order to develop a lively feeling for language again, leads then to something I would like to call a linguistic conscience (Sprachgewissen). We need a linguistic conscience. We speak really so directly these days because as human beings we act more as automatons towards language than we do as living beings. Until we are capable of connecting language in a living way to ourselves, like our skin is connected to us, we will not come to the right symbolization. The skin experiences pain when it is pricked. Language even tolerates being maltreated. One must develop a feeling regarding language that it can be maltreated because it is a closed organism, just like our skin. We can gain much in this area, when we have a lively experience in some or other dialect.

Consider how often we have performed the Christmas Plays, and in these plays there is a sentence spoken by one or more of the innkeepers. When Joseph and Mary come to Bethlehem in search of lodging, they are refused by three innkeepers. Each one of the three innkeepers says: Ich als a wirt von meiner gstalt, hab in mein haus und ligament gwalt.—Just imagine what this means to a person today. He could hear: "I as a host of my stature ..."—and think that what the host is saying means he is an attractive man, or something like that, or a strong man who has stature within his hostel, in his house. This is certainly not meant. If we want to translate that into High German we'll have to say: "I as a host, who is placed in such a way as to have abundant comfort, I am not dependent on such poor people finding lodgings within, with me." This means: "I as a host in my social position, in my disposition." This shows them it is necessary not only to listen to him—words one often enough hears in speech—but to enter into the spirit of the language. We say Blitz" (lightening) in High German. In Styria a certain form of lightening is called 'heaven's lashers' (Himmlatzer). In the word "Blitz" there is quite another meaning than in the word Himmlatzer.

[ 4 ] So we start becoming aware of different things when we approach the sense of speech. You see, such an acquisition of the sense of language sometimes leads to something extraordinarily important. Goethe once uttered a sentence, when already in his late life, to the Chancellor von Müller, a statement which has often been quoted and is often used, to understand the entire way in which Faust, written by Goethe, originated. Goethe said that for him the conception of Faust had for 60 years been clear "from the beginning" (von vornherein); the other parts less extensively. Now commentary upon commentary have been written and this sentence was nearly always recalled, because it is psychologically extraordinarily important, and the commentators have it always understood like this: Goethe had a plan from the beginning for his Faust and in the 60 years of his life—since he was twenty or about eighteen—he used this plan, he had "from the start," to work from.

In Weimar I met August Fresenius who bemoaned the fact that it was a great misfortune, if I could use such an expression, which had entered into the entire Goethe research, and at the time I had urged an unusually thoughtful and slow philologist to publish this thing as soon as possible in order that it doesn't continue, otherwise one would have a few dozen more such Goethe commentaries. It is important to note that Goethe used the expression "from the start" in no other way than in a descriptive way, not in the sense of a priori but "from the beginning" in a very descriptive manner so that in the strictest sense one could refer to Goethe not having an overall plan, but that "at the beginning" he only wrote down the first pages (i.e. to begin with) and of the further sections, only single sentences. There can be no argument of an overall plan. It very much depends on how one really experiences words. Many people have, when they hear the word vornherein totally have no conscience that it has a vorn (in front) and a herein (in) and that one sees something spiritual when one pronounces it. This simple dismissal of a word without contemplation is something upon which a tremendous amount depends, if one wants to attain a symbolic manner of speech. Precisely about this direction there would be extraordinarily much to say.

[ 5 ] You see, we have the remarkable appearance of the Fritz Mauthner speaking technique where all knowledge and all wisdom is questioned, because all knowledge and wisdom is expressed though speech, and so Fritz Mauthner finds nothing expressed in speech because it does not point to some or other reality. [ 6 ] How harsh my little publication "The spiritual guidance of man and of mankind" has been judged in which I mention that in earlier times, all vowel formation expressed people's inner experiences, and all consonant unfolding comes from outer observed or seen events. All that man perceives is expressed in consonants, while vowels are formed by inner experiences, feelings, emotions and so on. With this is connected the peculiar manner in which the consonants are written differently to the vowels in Hebrew. This is also connected to areas where more primitive people used to dwell, where they have not strongly developed their inner life, so predominantly consonant languages occur, not languages based on vowels. This extends very far, this kind of in-consonant-action of language. Only think what African languages have from consonants to click sounds.

[ 7 ] So you see, in this way we gain an understanding for what sounds within language. One would be brought beyond the mere sign, which the word is today. Only with today's feeling for language which Fritz Mauthner believes in, can you believe that all knowledge actually depends on language and that language has no connection to some or other reality. A great deal can be accomplished when one enters into one's mother tongue and try to go back into the vernacular. In the vernacular one finds much, very much if you really behave like a human being, that is, respond to what you feel connected to the language. In the vernacular one has the rich opportunity to feel in speech and experience in sound, but also the tendency towards the descriptive, and you have to push it so far that you really, one could say, get into a kind of state of renunciation in regard to expressions that are supposed to phrase something completely separate from human experiences.

Something which thoroughly ruins our sense of language is physics, and in physics, as it is today, it only aspires to study objective processes and refrains from all subjective experience, there it should no longer be spoken at all. According to physics, when one body presses (stoßen) against another, for example in the theory of elasticity, then you are anthropomorphising, because the experience of pressure as soon as you sense sound, means you're only affected by the same kind of pressure as the pressure your own hand makes. Above all, one gets the feeling with the S-sound that nothing other can be described as something like this (a waved line is drawn on the blackboard). The word Stoß" (push/impacts—ß is the symbol for ss—translator) has two s's, at the end and beginning; it gives the entire word its colouring; so when the word Stoß or stoßen (to push/thrust) is pronounced one actually can feel how, when your ether body would move, it would not only move but be shoved forwards and continuously be kept up.

[ 8 ] Thus, there are already methods through which one comes to the power of speech formation, which is then no longer far from symbolizing, for the symbolum must be hacked out of the way so that one experiences language as a living organism, because much is to be experienced within language. Someone recently told me that there are certain things in language which only need to be pronounced and one is surprised at how they reveal themselves as self-evident.

The Greeks recited in hexameter. Why? Well, hexameter is an experience. A person produces speech, as I've already said, in his breathing. However, breathing is closely connected to other elements of rhythm in the human being; with the pulse, with blood circulation. On average, obviously not precisely, we have 18 breaths and 72 heat beats; 72 equals 4 times 18. Four times 18 heart beats gives a rhythm, a collective inner beat. In a time when man sensed in a more primordial and more elementary way according to what was taking place within him, man experienced, when he could, in uttering the relationship of the heart beat to the breathing, bring the totality of himself into expression. This relationship, not precisely according to time, this relationship can be brought to bear; you only have to add the turning point as the fourth foot (reference plate 3 ... not available In German text) then you have a Greek hexameter half-line, in the ration of 4 to 1 as a pulse beat to breathing rhythm. The hexameter was born out of the human structure, and other measures of verse were all born out of the rhythmic system of the human being. You can already feel, when you treat language artistically, how, in the process of treating human speech in an artistic way, language is alive. This makes it possible to acquire a far more inner relationship to language, yet also far more objectivity. The most varied chauvinistic feelings in relation to language stops, because the configurations of different languages stop, and one acquires an ear for the general sound. There are such things which are found on the way to gaining the power of creative speech. It does finally lead to listening to oneself when one speaks. In a certain way it's actually difficult but it can be supported. For various reasons it seems to me that for those who are affected by it, it is also necessary not to treat the Scripture in the way many people treat it today. You will soon see why I say these things.

[ 9 ] In relation to writing, there are two kinds of people. The majority learn to write as if it's a habit of staking out words. People are used to move their hands in a certain way and write like this: in the majority. The writing lesson is very often given in such a way that one just comes to it. The minority actually don't write in the sense of reality, but they draw (a word is written on the blackboard: Kann [meaning can; be able to]). They look at the signs of the letters simultaneously as being written, and as an artistic treatment of writing, it is far more an intimate involvement. I have met people who have been formally trained to write. For instance, once there was a writing method which consisted in people being trained to make circles and curves, to turn them and thus acquire a feeling of connecting them and so form letters out of them. Only in this way, out of these curves, could the letters come about. With a large number of them I have seen that they, before they start writing, make movements in the air with their pen. This is what brings writing into the unconsciousness of the body. However, our language comes out of the totality of the human being and when one spoils oneself by writing you also spoil yourself for the language. Precisely the one who is dependent on handling the language needs to get used to the meditation that writing should not be allowed to just flow out of his hand, but he should look at it, really look at what he is writing, when he writes.

[ 10 ] My dear friends, this is something which is extraordinarily important in our current culture, because we are on our way to dehumanizing ourselves. I have already received a large number of letters which have not been written with a pen but with the typewriter. Now you can imagine the difference between a letter written with a typewriter or written with a pen. I'm not campaigning against the typewriter, I consider it as an obvious necessity in civilization, but we do also need the counter pole. By us dehumanizing ourselves in this way, by us changing our relationship towards the outer world in an absolute mechanistic and dead manner, we need in turn to take up strong vital forces again. Today we need far greater vital forces than in the time in which man knew nothing yet about the typewriter.

[ 11 ] Therefore, for someone who handles words, he must also acquire an understanding for the continuous observation, while he is writing, that what he is writing pleases him, that he gets the impression that something hasn't just flowed out of a subject but that, by looking simultaneously at it, this thing lives as a totality in him. Mostly, the thing that is needed for the development of some capability is not arrived at in a direct but in an indirect way. I must explain this route because I have been asked how one establishes the power for speech formation. This is the way, as I have mentioned, which comes first of all. As an aside I stress that language originates in the totality of mankind, and the more mankind still senses the language, so much more will there be movement in his speech. It is extraordinary, how for instance in England, where the process of withdrawal of a connection with the surroundings is most advanced, it is regarded as a good custom to speak with their hands in their trouser pockets, held firmly inside so they don't enter the danger of movement. I have seen many English people talk in this way. Since then I've never had my pockets made in front again, but always at the back, for I have developed such disgust from this quite inhuman non-participation in what is being said. It is simply a materialistic criticism that speech only comes from the head; it originates out of the entire human being, above all from the arms, and we are—I say it here in one sentence which is obviously restricted—we are on this basis no ape or animal which needs its hands to climb or hold on to something, but we have them as free because with these free hands and arms we handle speech.

In grasping with our arms, creating with our fingers, we express something we need in order to model language. So it has a certain justification to return mankind to its connection with language, bringing the whole person into it, to train Eurythmy properly, which really exists in drawing out of the human organism what is not fulfilled in the human body, but is however fulfilled in the ether body, when we speak. The entire human being is in movement and we are simply transposing though the eurhythmic movements, the etheric body on to the physical body. That is the principle. It is really the eurythmization of something like a necessity which needs to be regularly brought out of the human being, like the spoken language itself. It must stand as a kind of opposite pole against all which rises in the present and alienate people towards the outer world, allowing no relationship to be possible between people and the outer world any more. The eurythmization enables people in any case to return to being present in the language and is on this basis, as I've often suggested, even an art. Well, if you take into account the things I've just proposed, then you arrive at the now commonplace speech technique basically under the scheme of pedantry.

The great importance given to teaching through recitation and that kind of thing, only supports the element of a materialistic world view. You see, just as one would in a school for sculpture or a school of painting not really get instructions of the hand movements but corrects them by life forces coming into them, so speech techniques must not be pedantically taught with all kinds of nose-, chest- and stomach resonances. These things may only be developed though living speech. When a person speaks, he might at most be made aware of one or the other element. In this respect extraordinary atrocities are being committed today and the various vocal and language schools can actually be disgusting, because it shows how little lives within the human being. The formation of speech happens when those things are considered which I mentioned. Now if the question needs to be answered even more precisely, I ask you to please call my attention to it.

[ 12 ] Now there is a question about new commentary regarding the Bible, in fact, how one can arrive at a new Bible text.

[ 13 ] You see, the thing is like this, one will first have to penetrate into an understanding of the Bible. Much needs to precede this. If you take everything which I have said about language, and then consider that the Bible text has originated out of quite another kind of experience of language than we have today, and also as it was experienced centuries before in Luther's time, you can hardly hope to somehow discover an understanding of the Bible through some small outer adjustment. To understand the Bible, a real penetration of Christianity is needed above all, and actually this can only emerge from a Bible text as something similar for us as the Gospels had once appeared for the first Christians. In the time of the first Christians one certainly had the feeling of sound and some of what can be experienced in the words in the beginning of St John's Gospel which was of course experienced quite differently in the first Christian centuries as one would be able to do today. "In the primal beginnings was the Word"—you see, today there doesn't seem to be much more than a sign in this line, I'd say. We come closer to an understanding when we substitute "Word," which is very obscure and abstract, with "Verb" and also really develop our sense of the verb as opposed to the noun. In the ancient beginnings it was a verb and not the noun. I would like to say something about this abstraction.

The verb is quite rightly related to time, to activity, and it is absurd to think of including a noun in the area which has been described as in "the primal beginning." It has sense to insert a verb, a word related to activity. What lies within the sentence regarding the primal origins is however not an activity brought about by human gestures or actions, because it is the activity which streams out of the verb, the active word. We are not transported back into the ancient mists of the nebular hypothesis by the Kant-Laplace theory, but we will be led back to the sound and loud prehistoric power. This returning into a prehistoric power is something which was experienced powerfully in the first Christian centuries, and it was also strongly felt that it deals with a verb, because it is an absurdity to say: In the prehistoric times there was a noun.—We call it "Word" which can be any part of speech. Of course, it can't be so in the case of St John's Gospel.

[ 14 ] In even further times in the past, things were even more different. They were so that for certain beings, for certain perceptions of beings one had the feeling that they should be treated with holy reserve, one couldn't just put them in your mouth and say them. For this reason, a different way had to be found regarding expression, and this detour I can express by saying something like the following. Think about a group of children living with their parents somewhere in an isolated house. Every couple of weeks the uncle comes, but the children don't say the uncle comes, but the "man" comes. They mean it is the uncle, but they generalise and say it is "the man." The father is not the "man"; they know him too well to call him "man." In this way earlier religious use of language hid some things which they didn't want to express outwardly because one had the inner reaction of profanity, and so it was stated as a generalization, like also in the first line of St John's Gospel, "in the beginning was the Word." However, one doesn't mean the word which actually stands there but one calls it something which has been picked out, a singular "Word." It was after all something extraordinary, this "Word." There are as many words as there are men, but children said, "the man," and so one didn't say what was meant in St John's Gospel, but instead one said, "the Word." The word in this case was Jahveh, so that St John's Gospel would say: "In the primal beginnings was Jahveh," so one doesn't say "God," but "the Word."

[ 15 ] Such things must be acquired again by living within Christianity and what Christianity has derived from the ritual practice of the Old Testament. There is no shortcut to understanding the Gospels; a lively participation in the ancient Christian times is necessary for Gospel understanding. Basically, this is what has again become enlivened through Anthroposophy, while such things have in fact only risen out of Anthroposophic research. We then have the following: In the primordial times was he word—in primordial time was Jahveh—and the word was with God—and Jahveh was with God. In the third line: And Jahveh was one of the Elohim.—This is actually the origin, the start of the St John Gospel which refers to the multiplicity of the Elohim, and Jahveh as one of them—in fact there were seven—as lifted out of the row of the Elohim. Further to this lies the basis of the relationship between Christ and Jahveh.

Take sunlight—moonlight is the same, it is also sunlight but only reflected by the moon—it doesn't come from some ancient being, it is a reflection. In primordial Christianity an understanding existed for the Christ-word, where Christ refers to his own being by saying: "Before Abraham was, I am" and many others. There certainly was an understanding for the following: Just as the sunlight streams out of itself and the moon reflects it back, so the Christ-being who only appeared later, streamed out in the Jahveh being. We have a fulfilment in the Jahveh-being preceding the Christ-being in time. Through this St John's Gospel becomes deepened through feeling from the first line to the line which says: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." Even today we don't believe a childlike understanding suffices for the words of the Bible, when we research the Bible by translating it out of an ancient language until we penetrate what lies in the words. Of course, one can say, only through long, very long spiritual scientific studies can one approach the Bible text. That finally, is also my conviction.

[ 16 ] Basically, the Bible no longer exists; we have a derivative which we have put together more and more from our abstract language. We need a new starting point in order to try and find what really, in an enlivened way, is in the Bible. For this I have suggested an approach which I will speak about tomorrow, in the interpretation of Mathew 13 and Mark 13. You will have to state in any case that even commenting on the Bible makes it necessary to deal with the Bible impartially. If it is stated that something is mentioned which had only taken place in the year 70, therefore the relevant place could not have been mentioned before other than what had happened after this event, this could be said only if it is announced at the beginning of the Bible explanation that the Bible will be explained completely from a materialistic point of view; then it may be done like this. The Bible itself does not follow the idea that it should be explained materialistically. The Bible itself makes it necessary that the foreseeing of coming events is first and foremost ascribed to Christ Jesus himself, and also ascribed to the apostles. Thus, as I've said, this outlook is what I want to enter into tomorrow on the basis of Mathew 13 and Mark 13, by giving a little interpretation as it has been asked for.

[ 17 ] Another question asks about the reality behind the apostolic succession and the priest ordination. This question can hardly be answered briefly because it relates deeply to the abyss which exists between today's evangelist-protestant religious understanding and all nuances of Catholic understanding. It is important that in the moment when these things are spoken about, one must try to acquire a real understanding beyond the rational or rationalistic and beyond the intellectualistic. This is acquired even by those who have little right to live in the sense of such an understanding. In the past I have become acquainted with a large number of outstanding theosophical luminaries, Leadbeater also among them, about whom you would have heard, and some other people, who worked in the Theosophical Society. I have recently had the opportunity—otherwise I would not have worried about it again—to experience, that some of these people are Catholic bishops; it struck me as extraordinary that a part of them were Catholic priests. Leadbeater in any case had, after various things became known about him, not exactly the qualification to become a Catholic bishop. Still this interested me about how people become Catholic priests. One thing is observed with utmost severity, which is the succession. In order for me to see which people have the right to be Catholic bishops, I was given a document which revealed that in a certain year a Catholic bishop left the Catholic church, but one who was ordained, and he then ordained others—right up to Mr Leadbeater—and ordination proceeds in an actual continuation, in an absolutely correct progress; they actually have created a "family tree" by it. I don't want to talk about the start of the "family tree" but you must accept that if it would be a natural progression that there once was an ordained bishop in Rome who dropped away, who then however ordained all the others, so all these Theosophical luminaries would refer back to a real descent of their priesthood to that which once existed. Therefore, awareness of this succession is everywhere present and such things are, according to their understanding, taken completely as the reality.

[ 18 ] Something like this must be taken as a reality within the Roman Catholic Church. The old Catholic church more or less didn't have the feeling—but within the Roman Catholic church it is certain accepted this way—that the moment the priest crosses the stole he no longer represents a single personality or attitude but he is then only a member of the church and speaks as a representative, as a member of the church. The Roman Catholic Church considered itself certainly as a closed organism, where the individual loses his individuality through ordination; they see it this way increasingly.

[ 19 ] Now something else is in contrast to this. You may think about what I've said as you wish, but I can only speak from my point of view, from the viewpoint of my experience. I have seen much within the transubstantiation. Today in the Catholic Church there is quite a strict difference according to which priest would perform the transubstantiation, yet I have always seen how during the transformation, during the transubstantiation, the host takes on an aura. Therefore, I have come to recognise within the objective process, that when it is worthily accomplished, it is certainly fulfilled. I said, you may think about this as you wish, I say it to you as something which can be looked at from one hand, and on the other hand also as a basic conviction of the church being valid while it was still Catholic, when the evangelist church hadn't become a splintering off. We very soon come back to reality when we look at these things and it must even be said within the sacrament of mass being celebrated there is something like a true activity, which is not merely an outer sign but a real act. If you now take all the sacraments of mass together which had been celebrated, you will create an entirety, a whole, and this is something which stands there as a fact. It is something which certainly touches things, where the evangelical mind would say: Yes, there is something magical in the Catholic Mass.—This it does contain. It also contained within it the magical part, one can experience in the evangelist mind as something perhaps heathen. Good, talk to one another about this. In any case this underscores it as being a reality, which one can't without further ado, without approaching the bearer of this reality, celebrate a mass. I say celebrate; it can be demonstrated, one can show everything possible, but one can't celebrate with the claim that through the mass what should happen at the altar will only happen when it is read without any personal imprint, in absolute application.

You see, it is ever present there where one works with the mysteries; it is simply so, when one works with the mysteries. Just as no Masonic ceremony may be carried out by a non-Mason in the consciousness of the Freemason, nor may a non-ordained person in true Catholicism work from out of Catholicism and perform with full validity the ceremony in consciousness.

[ 20 ] This is where we are being directed and must consult. I want you to take note that in this case the Catholic rules were actually very strict. Please don't take things up in such a way as if I am saying this towards pro-Catholicism; I only want to point out the situation. It isn't important for us to be for, or opposed, to Catholicism, because it's about something quite different. Particular customs were very strictly adhered to in the Catholic Church—not at all what is today in Rome's mood and procedure. If a priest became so unworthy as to be excommunicated, then his skin would be ripped off, scraped off from his fingers where he had held the sacred host in his hands. His skin would be scraped off. Sometimes such things are referred to but legally it is so, and I know such processes quite well, that after the priest's excommunication the skin of the fingers which touched the host, were scraped off. You can certainly set the objective instead of the succession that goes from the apostles through the priesthood to the priest celebrating today. You can set that which goes through consecration and through the sacraments themselves. You can exclude priesthood, but you can only exclude that by taking things objectively, right to a certain degree, objectively, that the priest no longer may have skin on his fingers when he is no longer authorised to celebrate the sacrificial mass.

[ 21 ] Isn't it true, if you have Catholic feeling, it is something as definite to you as two plus two making four? It is something definite according to religious feeling. When you don't have that then you as modern people must have a certain piety, which says to you the Catholic church has also just preserved the celebration of mass and if this is carried outside the circle to which it had been entrusted—other circles have not preserved the sacrifice of mass—if it is being performed in other circles it is pure theft. Real theft. These things must also be understood from such concepts. I believe to some it appears very difficult to understand what I am saying but in conclusion it has as such a certain validity which needs to be achieved through understanding. We don't have to worry about it here because you can experience the mass according to what there is to experience. As far as the training of a new ritual is concerned, it would not be disturbed at all by this, that the Catholic mass regards the mass to be something so real that it may certainly not to be removed from the field of Catholicism.

[ 22 ] This is firstly something which I wanted to say during our limited time. When I speak about the mass itself, and I will do so, I will still have a few things to add.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! It is important that the question which we had yesterday and actually have been considering during the past days from the side of Anthroposophy, we now approach from a religious side, but again I don't want to do it through definitions and explanations but in a more concrete way. It is important in fact, as you have probably already sensed, to find a way which must come out of religious experience. What belong to religious experiences are the reality of prayer and the reality of the examination of the word, first becoming visible for us in the examining of Gospel words. We will have to draw on the more inner elements of religious life, but we will adhere to these two, prayer and the examination of Gospel words, through examples that are far better than concepts.

[ 2 ] Regarding prayer, my dear friends, one can from a religious standpoint say that a person who does not pray in our present time, cannot be a religious person. Certainly such a statement can be doubted from this point of view, but we don't want to enter into an abstract discussion but approach from a positive point of view, and this must always have some or other basis. So I would like to start from a kind of religious axiom, which for many can consist in feeling that without the possibility of praying it is not an inner religious experience, because in prayer a real union with the Divine must be sought, which interweaves and rules the world. It is important now to examine prayer.

We need to be clear that despite the general human differentiation in humanity, the care of a spiritual life also appears, according to the varied callings of different people. If prayer is also certainly something general and human, one can say that a special prayer is then again necessary for those who want to be teachers in the field of religious life, and this will bring us to the Breviary absolving. We want to speak about all these things because they are for you, namely young theologians, of imminent seriousness for the tasks that you are to set yourself, I'm not saying now, but which you can set yourself according to the demands of the time.

[ 3 ] Regarding prayer, in order to reach clarity, I want to speak about the Lord's Prayer and inner experiences of the Our Father. It is important that we may not take our starting point today from experiences of ancient Christianity by examining the Lord's Prayer or bringing it to life inwardly; our basis must be about contemporary man, because we want to speak about the Lord's Prayer in a general human way. Yet one must be aware of the following. Let's accept we will start to say the Lord's Prayer according to the style in which we say the first sentence: "Our Father who art in Heaven." It is important what we feel and experience in such a sentence and what we can feel and experience with other sentences of the Lord's Prayer, for only then will this prayer become inwardly alive. What we are talking about here, in fact, first of all, is to have something like an inner perception of such a sentence, not really just something that appears in the symbols of the words, but something that lives in us in real words. The heaven is basically the entire cosmos and we make it perceptible when we say "Our Father in Heaven" or "Our Father who art in the Heavens" or "Our Father, You are in the Heavens," so that in saying these words they are permeated with the spirit; we are turning towards the spirit. This is the perception of what we need to visualize, when we say such a sentence as "Our Father in the Heavens." Such a similar experience is what we need with the words "Your kingdom come," because within us there needs to be, more or less as an intuitive feeling, the question: What is this kingdom? If we are Christians, we will gradually, in our striving, approach a perception of this kingdom—or expressed more appropriately, the kingdoms—and be reminded of what was mentioned yesterday, we are reminded of Christ's words which sound and ends in "the kingdoms of heaven." Already in the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel, the Christ wants to speak to the people on the one hand and to the disciples on the other, about what the kingdom of heaven is. There has to be something lively about the phrase "Your kingdom" or "May Your kingdom come to us." When will the right thing come to life in us? The right thing will only become alive in us when we take such a sentence not as a thought, but when we make it alive as if we actually hear it within us, as if we apply what I have more than once spoken to you about recently. A path must be made from the concept to the word, because there is quite a different kind of inner experience when we, without outwardly saying the words, inwardly not only hold an abstract concept, but a lively experience of the sound, in whatever language it might be.

The entire Lord's Prayer becomes, so to speak, reduced out of the specificity of language, also when we in some or other language not only imagine the thought content but what is contained in the sound. This was stressed much more in earlier times regarding prayer, that the sound element becomes inwardly alive, because by the sound content becoming alive within, the prayer is transformed into what it should be, as an interactive conversation with the Divine. Prayer is never true prayer unless there is an exchange with the Divine, and for such an interactive conversation with the Divine, the Lord's Prayer is suited in the most immanent form because of its structure. We are so to speak outside of ourselves when we speak such sentences as "Our Father who art in the Heavens" or "Let Your kingdom come." We forget ourselves the moment we really make these sentences audible and alive within us. In these sentences we erase ourselves to a large extent simply by the content of the sentences, but we take hold of ourselves again when we read sentences of a different structure or make them inwardly alive. We take hold of ourselves again when we say: "hallowed be Your name." It is then actually a lively exchange with the Divine, because it transforms itself immediately as an inner deed in "hallowed be Your name."

On the one hand we have the perception that in "Our Father who art in Heaven" nothing is happening unless the sentence is thoroughly experienced. By us directing ourselves to inner listening, it enlivens our inner hearing for the name of Christ, like it did in pre-Christian times when the Jahve name had caused it, in the sense of what I had mentioned earlier about the beginning of the St John's Gospel. If we utter the sentence "Our Father who art in Heaven" within us in the right way in our time, then Christ's name mingles into this expression, then we inwardly give the answer to what we experience as a question: "Let this name be sanctified through us/ be hallowed by your name."

[ 4 ] You see, it takes prayer to live correctly into the Lord's Prayer; it takes on the form of an exchange with the Divine, even so when we in the right way experience the perception "Your kingdom come." This kingdom can't primarily be taken up in the intellectual consciousness; we can only take it up in the will. Similarly, when we lose ourselves with the sentence "Your kingdom come to us" we discover, taking hold of ourselves, that the kingdom, when it comes, works in us, that the actual Divine will happens in the heavenly kingdoms, and therefore also where we are on earth. You see, you have an exchange with the godhead in the Lord's Prayer.

[ 5 ] This conversational exchange prepares you firstly to have inner dignity in relation to the concerns the earth, and to bring it into a relationship with what has happened in this exchange, by connecting that to earthly relationships. Obviously to some of you it might appear that when I say "Hallowed by Your name" there's an enlivening of the Christ name. However, my dear friends, it is precisely here where the Christ Mystery lives. This Christ Mystery will not really be recognised for as long as St John's Gospel is not really understood. At the start of St John's Gospel, you read the words: "All things came into being through the Word and nothing of all that has come into being was made except through the Word." By ascribing the creation of the world to the Father God, you go against St John's Gospel. In the St John's Gospel you hold on to what you take as sure, that everything which exists as the world had been created through the word, thus in the Christian sense through the Christ, through the Son which the Father had substantially created, had subsisted, and that the Father has no name but that His name is actually that which lives in Christ. The entire Christ Mystery lives in these words: "Hallowed be your name" because the name of the Father is given in the Christ. We will still speak about this enough on other occasions, but I wanted to refer to it today, how in prayer a real inner conversational exchange with the Divine should be contained in the prayer itself.

[ 6 ] Now we can go further and say: Nothing is given to us from the natural world merely by taking our daily food, our bread. We take our bread from nature with the conditions which I've mentioned; by our digestive processes, through regenerative processes we become earthly man on the earth, but that can't really live in us because life in God is different, the life of God lives in the spiritual world. After we have entered into a conversation with the Divine in the first part of the Lord's Prayer, we can now out of this mindset which has permeated us within, release the negative and say positively: "You give us our bread, which works in our everyday life, today." With this it means: what has been nature's processes and work in us as processes of nature, this is what should, through our consciousness, through our inner experience, become a spiritual process. In this way our mindset should be transformed. We should become capable of forgiveness towards those who have done something to us, who have caused damage. We would only be able to do this when we become conscious of how much we have damaged the Divine spiritual, and therefore should ask for the right mindset in order for us to handle what we have become guilty of, in the right way; we can only do this if we have become aware that we are continuously doing harm to the Divine through the mere nature of our being, and continuously need the forgiveness of those beings towards whom we have become guilty.

[ 7 ] Now we can add the following, which is again an earthly thing, something which we want to link to the first thing we have related to: "Lead us not into temptation," which means: Let our connection to You be so alive that we may not experience the challenge to merge with mere nature, to surrender ourselves to mere nature, that we hold you firmly in all our daily nourishment. "But deliver us, from the evil." The evil consists of mankind letting go of the Divine; we ask that we are freed and let loose from this evil.

[ 8 ] When we ever and again have such experiences of the Lord's Prayer as our foundation, my dear friends, then we deepen the Lord's Prayer actively towards an inner life, which enables us to create the mood and possibility in us which allows us not only to act from one physical human to another physical human but that we act as one human soul to another human soul. In this way we have brought ourselves into a connection of the Divine creation in others, and we learn through this, what it is to experience such words as: "The least thing you have done to my brothers, you have also done to Me." In this way we have learnt to experience the Divine in the earthly existence. However we must in a real way, not through a theory, but in a real way turn away from worldly existence because we become aware that earthly existence, as it was first given to mankind, is actually no real worldly existence but an existence stripped of the Divine, and that we will only have a real worldly existence after we have turned ourselves to God in prayer, having created a link to God in our prayer.

[ 9 ] With this, my dear friends, the most elementary steps, the stairway, can lead to the conscious awakening of religious impulses in human beings. These religious impulses had to a certain extent been instilled in the human beings since primordial beginnings, but it concerns becoming aware of these impulses within, and that can only happen when a real exchange with the Divine in prayer comes about. The first meaningful discovery which one can make about the Lord's Prayer is that within its inner structure lies the possibility for a person to directly, with understanding, enter into a conversational exchange with the Divine. That is only a beginning, my dear friends, but it is so, however, that in the beginning, when it is really lived through, it is taken further and just when the question is taken religiously, it concerns wanting to find in our experience of the first steps, the strength to continue with the next steps through our own inner being.

[ 10 ] It is quite different to speak from the point of view of knowledge than it is to speak from the religious viewpoint. When one speaks from the side of knowledge, one deals mainly with the content; when one speaks about Anthroposophy as a religious element, my dear friends, then we need to pay attention to Goethe's words: Not What we think, but more How we think!—and for this reason I said yesterday, Anthroposophy inevitably, as is its character, leads to a religious experience, it flows into a religious experience through the How, how its content is experienced. However, when one speaks from the religious angle, it is necessary now not to look first at What it is which lies in the spread ahead of us, but that one goes out from this How, one comes from the human subject, one has to illuminate this human subject.

When you have found the attitude of prayer, you can now go to the other side and find it in the reading of the Gospels as well. The meaning the Gospels have for religious development, we will of course still speak about. In any case, real Christians need to remain within inner childlike feelings today in order to understand the Gospels in a believable way, also without criticism. When as a theologian he applies criticism, he has to, because he comes from the Christian angle, be able to understand the Gospel without criticism. At least he must firstly become strong in his experiences of the Gospels, and then, armed with this strength, he only then applies criticism. That's actually the basic damage in Bible criticism and actually in the Gospel criticism of the 19th Century; people are not initially religiously strengthened before they apply criticism to the Gospels. As a result, they have arrived at a Gospel criticism which is nothing other than done in the modern scientific sense. Nothing is more clearly felt regarding this modern scientific sense, my dear friends, than the Gospel words of St Matthew 13, for in Matthew 13, I could say, the pivotal point of the whole chapter are words which encloses a mystery, and that perhaps in the entire evolution of Christianity it could never have been felt more deeply by religious people than today, when they come up against the world. It is in the words: He answered and said: for you it is possible, to understand the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven, but for those, whom I've just mentioned, the people around, it is not so.—To this an actually deep puzzle is connected: To him who has it, more will be given ... but he, who does not have it, nothing will be given: what would have been given to him, the little he has, will be taken from him.—These are extraordinarily deep words. Perhaps nowhere else in the evolution of Christianity can these words of giving and taking be so deeply felt—when one can really feel in a religious way towards the world and people—how just today, science has taken over nature and in the widest circles gained ever more authority; accepted to take away everything which could give the possibility of being able to spiritually hear with his ears or see with his eyes. This is not what man is supposed to do, in the scientific sense. Spirit should be obliterated in the sense of science, in the mood of our modern times. When we speak in the same way as modern theology speaks to people who are raised in scientific terms, we take away that little which they could have in religious feeling. When we counter what is done in the Faculty of Philosophy with what is done in enlightened theology today, we remove the last bit of what is religious.

[ 11 ] This needs to be felt, experienced in deep profundity, because the mood of the time is such has made it necessary for theologians to eradicate the religious. It is very necessary that we listen in a lively way to these words of the Matthew Gospel. However, this leads us to the next question: How can we discover the truth content, the vital content of the Gospel in the right way? We must find the correct way so that we can find the truthfulness also in the details of the Gospel and with this truthfulness directly illuminate the content of our lives. You see, in the way I'm saying this, I'm formulating my words in a particular way. I'm thinking of Paul's' words "Not I but Christ in me" and see how it should be spoken now in relation to the understanding of the Gospels, and when the word is within the heart of truth: "Not I, but Christ in me," the Christ said, in order to align the people in the right direction: "I am the way, the truth and the life."—We may express the words of Paul, "Not I but Christ in me," and then we will approach the Gospel in a way which leads to the right way to access the truthfulness and through this find the vital content in the Gospels. We have to climb up to a certain level in order to bring to life Paul's words: "Not I, but Christ in me." We must try to ever and again let it be spoken out, when we want to understand the Gospel. My dear friends, if Christ had spoken in the theologians of the 19th Century, then quite a different theology would have resulted, than it did, because a different Gospel view would have resulted.

[ 12 ] Having indicated the first steps to experiencing it further and continuing with the Matthew 13 Gospel, I would like to say a bit more. I stress clearly that this is the start of something we need to continue within ourselves, and here I want to again call your attention to the words "Think what? Think more how!"

By taking the 13th chapter of St Matthew's Gospel as our example, we must understand the situation: as soon as we approach the Gospel, we must renounce intellectualism and find our way into the descriptive element. Let us go straight away into the descriptive element and let's look at the verses leading up to this, in the verses 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 of the 12th chapter. These indicate how Christ Jesus is addressed: "See, your mother and our brother stand outside and want to talk to you"—and how he lifts his hand and points to his disciple and says: "Behold, in those souls live my mother and my brothers."—We want to go even deeper into these words, but first we need to clarify the situation. What we bring with us through birth into this life, the feeling which one can in the profoundest sense refer to as a child-like feeling, or as a brotherly feeling, this which we receive through the utmost grace, this is what is referred to here. Immediately the transition can be made towards which the most important aspect of Christianity is to lead; that we learn to extend, as best we can, the child-like, the brotherliness, to those souls with whom we have a spiritual connection. Wrong, it would be completely wrong, to feel this is somehow negative, when it is felt that only in the very least would that which lies in the childlike and brotherly feeling would be loosened and put in the place which lies in the feelings to the disciples. This is not what it is about, but it is rather about the human feeling lain into mankind as brotherhood, firstly only found in nature, therefore in that which we are born into this world as our first grace, in the feelings to our parents, to those we are bound through blood. We place ourselves positively towards it, and what we find in it, we carry over by ensouling it, towards all those with whom we want to have a Christian connection and want to live in a Christian community.

[ 13 ] This is what comes over into the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel. With it we are immediately in a starting position. If we take the content from the 53rd to 58th verses of the St Matthew's 13th chapter of the Gospel, and lead it over to the following, then we find that the greatest importance is the Christ Jesus now returns to his hometown, and through the experience of being in his hometown, express the words which appear in the 57th line of the 13th chapter: He says: "A prophet is nowhere less accepted than in his hometown and in his own house." The 58th verse now continues with the line: "And he was not able to do many deeds of the spirit there, for the sake of their unbelief." When we understand this situation, we are immediately led to see how Christ Jesus stands amidst people who have not understood the words: "Behold, in those souls live my mother and my brothers."

They failed to understand these words; as the words were not understood in their time; they also don't lead the way to Christ Jesus. The way to Christ Jesus has to be looked for. At this point it is indicated in the Matthew Gospel which people would find the way and who would not be able to find it, but also, how it can be found. We really need to understand that for those who are unable to ensoul the feelings of blood relationships given through grace to mankind, would not be able to find the way; those who only want to be part of their fatherland and not part of God's land, will not be able to find their way to Christ Jesus. So we are placed between two concrete experiences in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 13, and out of this situation we must expect that in this 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel the relationship between the folk and Christ Jesus is stated, and how Christ Jesus as such can be discovered again by the folk.

[ 14 ] Let's enter more deeply into this situation. Already in the first sentence we are drawn more intimately into the situation. It is important firstly, to be able to enter right into it. You are already standing in it if you take what leads up to it and away from it; it is important to stand completely within it: "On the day of Saturn Jesus left his home and sat down at the lake."—If this is read without a lively engagement and purpose, then the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel is not actually being read. First of all, what is happening there is on the day of the Sabbath, the day of Saturn. We will discover, my dear friends, that the enfolding of the liturgy is found throughout the year but it is not indifferent regarding how a priest applies the Gospel; we will see that the Gospels are placed in the course of the year in such a way that people can find a connection in the Gospel to what can be experienced in nature, otherwise you will not really give the words of the Gospels their correct inner power.

[ 15 ] We will still talk about the details of the year's liturgy, but we need to get closer to these things. If you look at it spiritually, the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel speaks about the end of the world, that means the earthly world, and it is clearly indicated that it will happen in the manner of the prophecy. In the 35th verse it says: "That it might be fulfilled, that which is spoken by the prophet, who says: I want to open my mouth in parables and speak about the mysteries of the world's primordial beginning."—Here in the 13th chapter the end of the world should be spoken about. Christ Jesus chose the Sabbath because earlier people turned to it when they wanted to understand the beginning of the world, to compare it to the truths about the end of the world. The reception of these words needed an inner peace, it is indicated directly by the time setting. The effort of the preceding days must have taken place for man must be in need of rest in order to understand what would be said in the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel. He goes out of his home because he has something to say which goes further out than what can be said at home; this is the immediate recovery of verses 53 to 58. At home he couldn't have said anything. The writer of the Gospel is aware of indicating this in conclusion. You can't get close to the Gospel if you don't have the precondition that every word of the Gospel carries weight; it can't be indicated outwardly, you must try to let it enter into your inner life.

"He sat down beside the lake." You only realize what it means to sit beside the lake, how we are led in the wide world of experiences, when you sit at a lake and you are led away from everything which binds you to the earth. With the sensation of airspace, we already have too much abstraction which escapes us. Of course, experiences in the air spaces of the spirit leads us away from what chains us to the earth, but as human beings there is firstly something which escapes us.

[ 16 ] We now have him sitting down beside the lake. Here he now gathers the folk, and speaks to them of the Kingdom of Heaven, in parables. The disciples start to understand that when Christ Jesus speaks to the people in the way in which he addressed the disciples, in the examination of the parables, then people would also be deprived of what they have, at least. He could give the people nothing if he gave them the solutions to the parables. So what does he have to do first of all? To start off with, he should not speak of a spiritual world content, but firstly speak about world content, spread out before the senses. He needs to speak about the grain seed, leading them through every possibility in the destiny of the kernel. He must lead them to the possibility that the seed can't develop roots, or only weak roots, or hardly any roots, and can be lamed by opposing forces to fully develop its roots.

[ 17 ] My dear friends, you need to understand that you must speak in this way to people, because people first need to become inwardly alive towards what is usually thoughtlessly passed by. Their souls need to be lit up for the observation of the outer world. The soul remains dead and un-kindled if what lies externally, is not stirred up in inner words. People go thoughtlessly and wordlessly through the world. They look at the seed, which wilts. They see the seed which bears fruit, but they don't connect their seeing in such a way that it becomes alive as an inner seeing, an inner hearing. Only when we have transformed the experience of outer world into an inner image, only then do we have what can become preparation. The soul needs to be kindled by the external, the soul needs to revive itself in the external world. If you speak only about the meaning of nature, then you will firstly be speaking to deaf soul ears and blind soul eyes, and you will also take away the least which people have. You only give them something when they understand that you are speaking to their soul, speaking to their soul in the same way as Christ Jesus could speak to the disciples, having enlivened their souls through their participation in his life. The soul needs to be stirred, made to come alive towards the outer world and only after this enlivening is accomplished can you speak to the souls regarding interpretations placed before them as parables of nature. In this sense you link people initially to natural processes and try to transform the natural processes into images. Enliven everything which you can experience around you, imbue it in a sunny way.

From the moment we wake up in the morning, to the evening when we bring ourselves to rest, we are surrounded by sunshine. As unprepared individuals we have at first no inkling of what surrounds us in sunlight, which floods around us. We see sunlight reflected on single items, we initially see colours mirrored, but whether this imbuing sunshine floods through us as human beings experiencing colour, particularly activated and enlivened, we have no inkling of. We simply find ourselves in light from waking to going to sleep, and then we turn in a moonlit night to the moon, with open human hearts, and see how it is surrounded by stars that accompany it, and now return to the first experience which we could have that when you look at the sun, just when it is most lively with its light flooding around you, your eyes become blinded. The intensity of sunlight is so strong that it could, without hesitation, change eyes into suns.

If I look at the moon, then the moon throws the sunlight back to me, it sends the light back in such a way that I can take it in. The dazzling sunlight takes away the discretion. This discretion only remains while I'm looking at moonlight. The rays of the sun have such a majestic intensity that they do not have to rob me of my discretion when I turn towards them. I can turn to them when they are given again by the moon. How can I make this into an inner experience? I may and can, as a human being, unite myself with what the moon returns to me; I may, when I place it as a symbol in front of myself, have something with which I can unite myself. I can, with what I encounter in the moonlight, make myself an image with which I can unite myself. In other words, I may make an image of the sun, which has presented itself through the moonlight, and that is the Host, which I may consume. However, there is something so intense, so majestically great, that I can't be allowed to expose it immediately.

When I imagine this in images, I must present it in another way. I must determine a relationship which is not only visible as a similarity, and place it there, by becoming the nourishment for what the journey is allowed to become (the Host) surrounded with that which may only be looked at, with the monstrance (receptacle of the Host) [a drawing is done on the blackboard] and I have my relationship to the world born out of a dualistic comparison, a twofold kind, which I make into a kind of image with the inclusion of the monstrance. In the nourishment for the way, in the Host I have something with which I can unite. In what surrounds the Host I have an image of the weakened rays of the sun. Through communion there must appear in me what appears in the experience of the weakening, which I sense in moonlight, which I couldn't feel as a direct sun process, otherwise I would be blinded. In between both these is the communion: I place myself in the world context.

What the sun and moon have to say to one another, this is what is found in human beings, the human being stands right in it and enlivens it through communion.

[ 18 ] So you can see, further than just the mentioned comparison, it is distilled into a symbol which can be experienced. If it is experienced in the right sense, that means, experienced in a way as one does with others, with the full understanding of the words "And he pointed over to his disciple and said: See, that is my parent and my brother," then to a certain extent the human community is placed within the sense of these words, then one works towards community building and this teaching, how community building can be achieved, we will discover again when we move forward in the interpretation of Matthew 13.

[ 19 ] My dear friends, it is from inner knowledge—which an anthroposophical overview can give of human evolution—it is from my complete conviction that it would be especially bad for the present if we were to ignore the signs of the times today in order not to want to surrender to them. Just think, just when you allow your soul to look at Matthew's Gospel 13, you notice the following: the Catholic Church remains primarily fixed at the symbolism; what appeared in their community building was tied to the symbolism, the symbolism which lets you experience the kingdoms of the heavens. It didn't occur to anyone during the first centuries of Christianity's propagation, to speak about patience, that people could wait, and so on. I am obliged to say this. They were completely filled with the need for action, because they found the efficacy of symbolism and contribution of the symbol itself, as community building. They found within the symbolism what Christ wanted to indicate through the words which record the seven parables of the kingdom of God. They wanted through the symbolism make ears to hear and eyes to see before they started with the proclamation; you are standing within the living world of symbolism.

[ 20 ] Today we are standing in a completely changed time. We read in Matthew's 13 Chapter that initially explanations of the parables would only be given to the disciples. This we can't do today. It would be impossible today because the Gospels are in everyone's hands and the meaning of the parables can be read by everyone. We really live in a completely changed time. We don't really notice this at all. We must in a new way understand what the Matthew Gospel Chapter 13, contains. In the sense of our time, we must consider the structure of Matthew 13. Firstly, we have Christ sitting in front of the people, he delivers the parables to them about the kingdom of heaven, and from the 36th verse it is written: "Then Jesus left the people and came home, and his disciples approached him and said: Explain the parable of the weeds on the fields. And he explained it to them."

Let me clarify this situation completely. Firstly, the Christ speaks to the people in parables, which are clothed in outer events. He points to these parables for his disciples. He utters during these explanations meaningful words of mystery, which I have tried to bring closer to you. After he has returned home and spoke to his disciples about the parables of the weeds, he spoke to them about a number of other parables—about the treasure in the field, the priceless pearl, and some of the discarded fish found in the fishnet. Thus, he spoke about other parables to the disciples, after he had left the people. This all belongs to this situation: in the Gospels everything is important. We also have—let us place this clearly before our souls—the Christ at the lake, sitting in front of the people, telling them about the parables, then turning away, turning to the disciples, leading them into the situation in which he utters important mystery words, speaking to them alone away from the people, explaining the parables with the help of other parables, then, after he had again led them to the spirit-godly revelations, he asks if they had understood. Their answer is "Yes." Now the very next conclusion is—because everything else is just an introduction—: "Having been initiated into the scriptures you will conduct yourselves like a man who is master of his house, who takes out of his treasure that which he has experienced, but that part of what he has experienced which he has filled with life inwardly, so that he can add something new to it and then be able to present it to his listeners."

[ 21 ] I wanted to show you the way towards understanding Matthew 13, and tomorrow we will speak further about the content of truth and content of life, which can be found in this way in the Gospels. I have only indicated as an insertion how symbolism is found in this way in a central symbol from which certainly everything has to be believed, my dear friends, that it should also become a central symbolism for those who want to bring it into the ritual in pastoral care. What is needed is something visible as a symbol, which is more than just a product of nature, and for this, words are necessary which are enlivening; and action is necessary which is more than a mere action of nature. In the context of our civilization today we have dead words, not enlivened words. We only have actions, also human actions, which only contain nature's laws. We have neither living words, nor actions permeated by Divine will. To both of these we need to come through prayer and in reading the Gospels on the one hand and real fulfilling of the ritual on the other hand.

More about this tomorrow.