The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Brochure, based on the introductory words to the lecture of May 18, 1913.

My dear Theosophical friends!

Before I can begin with the subject of our consideration today, I still have a message to make to you. You know, my dear Theosophical friends, that some time ago the construction of a kind of Theosophical center for our work was undertaken, and that after much effort, we succeeded in acquiring a property in Munich on which the so-called Johannesbau was intended under the care and guidance of our Johannes-Bauverein, so that, in accordance with our intentions, this Johannesbau in Munich should have been there for certain central events.

Now, over time, more and more difficulties arose in terms of actually completing the construction in Munich in the foreseeable future; and one might be forgiven for suspecting that, once things have been going for a while, the story of this Johannesbau will be able to form a peculiar chapter in the illumination of contemporary intellectual life. I would like to tell you as dryly as possible, so that we can come to the consideration of our subject, what there is to say about the matter! It could easily arise the idea - since we find ourselves compelled to come to an end with the matter at a time when a number of us can still be in the process of leaving Munich and building it in another Otto — one could easily get the impression that the main reason for this was the general world's dislike of our theosophical spiritual life, which might have expressed itself in very little cooperation, say, from the administrative authorities or the like. I would like to emphasize that, although these or those entities of the earth, who are called spirits, earth spirits, human spirits, have also done what was necessary through all sorts of well-meaning newspaper articles or the like to stir up sentiment against our construction in order to turn the administrative authorities against us, that does not come into it; because judging by the overall situation, we can say that we have had no interference from any political or church authority. From that side, I would still have found resistance understandable. I do not mean to say that there were no moods – there were! – but they did not get in our way. However, if we had waited much longer as a result of the other inhibitions, we might have encountered obstacles there, but these factors could not be counted on as such until now, as ones that would have presented us with immediate, tangible resistance.

No, something has come into consideration so far, but it radically forces us not to be able to think further about the construction in Munich, something that, to characterize it precisely, could take quite a long time. It came into consideration that people who, according to their pretensions, should have shown us understanding did not show us this understanding. If we had encountered resistance from administrative or church authorities, we would have realized it; but what had to be reckoned with, and which must tip the scales, is that in our time every current of thought like ours is compelled to introduce something into the chaos of the rest of culture. Our central structure must, if it is to be anything at all, be something that is truly worth realizing. It must, of course, be something that not only fits into contemporary life, but something that expresses the very new and the freedom of our spiritual current in relation to contemporary culture.

If this is not understood by others, by the administration or the church, then one need not be surprised. But the misunderstanding came from another side: from the side that today, let's say, settles on having a judgment about what is to be considered artistic in the [world or what] does not have to be artistic in what stands as the outer cityscape. And when we come to talk about the artistic field today, we realize most of all how we are in the midst of a cultural chaos. But it is precisely here that one should have assumed that there is still so much sense of freedom in the souls that the artistic judgment should have been made: “One must respond to something that wants to arise from the center of a new spiritual life, so to speak.” Instead, resistance arose, and one could see what was asserting itself under the flag of artistic insight as artistry, the kind of artistry that calls itself that and that has not the slightest understanding of what should be achieved through the artistic evolution of humanity.

It would be presumptuous of me, my dear friends, to recall the difficulties faced by a different artistic direction in the modern era – everyone knows that I am referring to the artistic creation of Richard Wagner. But even if it would be immodest to consider a comparison, the difficulties that we had to face with those who believe that they can judge dogmatically what is art or artistic could be characterized by studying the artistic trends that are built on the name of Richard Wagner. It was people of this ilk who threw the spanner in the works, people who had once opposed the aforementioned school of thought and now, having grown old enough, are fawning on it.

You could hear judgments that were made from an artistic point of view, that could make you lose your desire. Those people who recognize human spiritual life in its becoming know anyway that it is natural for this to happen as well. All human schools of thought that represent an original could not place themselves in the middle of the other. I could make a long list. Those who could only place themselves in the world according to a principle that is already in the Gospels. That which today is often called art, which asserts itself here or there under the most absurd judgments, is a dying thing. And new cultures could never place themselves in this dying thing. Wherever we today expect to find the greatest blossoming, there we find dying; and the new cultures must take to heart the principle: “Let the dead bury their dead, but you, follow me.” That which is dying must take care of its own burial, while that which is alive and germinating will not find a place there.

This is not a defeat, it is something that is perfectly justified in the normal course of evolution, and it would be pedantic to fight today against a judgment that presents itself to the world with such ridicule, as for example when some master builder says that architecture must be free, could not be guided by what should flow from some school of thought. Art itself should be free. I would advise such a master builder only, if he were commissioned to construct a residential building or build a train station, if it occurred to him.

Such absurdities, as flourish today in so-called artistry, which pushes itself forward everywhere with infinite arrogance and impotent judgment, is what cannot be emphasized enough. And it is under the influence of such currents that we finally, after we had tried hard to set up the matter in Munich, found ourselves faced with the necessity of having to reckon with never-ending periods of time; because we received a message that was roughly the same as “Wash my fur, but don't wet it” — something you can't count on at all when you have plans to work on, like our esteemed friend, Mr. Baumeister Schmid, who works so beautifully in complete harmony with us. We would have had nothing to do but plans, which would have been rejected with the comment, “They do not correspond to artistic taste,” so that we would have had to work out plans again and again, and then someone would have said, well, something like, “summarize the masses better.” I don't want to go into these things any further!

It was only necessary, absolutely necessary, to motivate an important step. And this step is this: that we will leave Munich with the St. John's building.

Thanks to the invaluable willingness and kindness of our Swiss friends, we will be able to carry out our building in nature outside, in Dornach near Basel. And our dear friends, when they want to get out in the summer to refresh themselves in the open air, will now have the opportunity, at the central point that is to be created there, to combine the impressions of nature and landscape with what we are doing in seclusion, and to enjoy seeing how our temple will rise, reaching far into the distance, a monument to that, my dear friends, which we may perhaps want to do, especially now, at this time, when our spiritual movement must stand entirely on its own two feet and is also forced to position itself as freely as possible in terms of space and location. I assure you, I went there in the summer and imagined how beautiful our building would be seen from all sides. So we hope that, out of free life, that which corresponds to our spiritual current, our central building, will rise at that site.

Now, my dear friends, although some things can be spared in the material realm through the kindness of our Swiss friends, many things will still be needed in terms of the willingness of our Theosophical friends to make sacrifices so that what needs to be done in this work can be done. I am convinced that anyone who is able to look at the facts objectively will agree that we are breaking free from our shackles and completing the matter as necessary. And it is necessary that we can complete our summer games in this central building in the near future.

If everything really does go well, we will be able to announce to you next time, with the help of the spirits, in the same way that the summer festival for the People's Theater in Munich was announced to you today, that the festival will take place in Dornach.

We would not have been able to keep to this date if we had wanted to fight the uninteresting battle – uninteresting not in the usual sense of the word – against the meaningless judgments of an unartistic present. What would have been opposed by – I do not even want to say error, because in this case it is not a matter of error – but what would have been opposed by presumption, will not be opposed to us by the magnificent nature that is to surround our spiritual work. Many will take joy in what will come about.

That, my dear friends, is what I had to put forward in order to, firstly, share a fact with you and, secondly, to provide some motivation for this fact, which marks an important step in our spiritual movement.

Of course, there might have been people who would have found it bolder to fight against prejudice and arrogance. But something else was important, and what has happened recently shows that something else was important. Now, my dear Theosophical friends, if we want to take into account what is happening around us, we need time and we must not waste time with all kinds of fighting, but must fill it in the way that common sense can see needs to be done.

This information should be conveyed without anger or resentment, just in recognition of the fact that it had to be this way. And please regard it only as an expression of why the JohannesbauVerein was hindered from approaching you freely, so that one had to hear again and again: One does not hear what should happen; if one knew what should happen, one would be able to raise the funds much more easily. Now we are in a different position, so that everyone knows what is at stake. And what has been said may be said in such a way that it is spoken in the direction of your heart, that you take up the central building in your love. Consider what is to be created as your own, as something you want to help found for the spiritual life of humanity.

Each of us will contribute what we are able to according to our abilities. And in the future we will no longer be hindered by the side that was mentioned, but, depending on the help we receive from our dear friends, we will be able to accomplish what, under the present circumstances, must be accomplished quickly. I do not emphasize the word quickly without reason, my dear friends.

In the light of the above, the Johannesbau Association would like to make the following factual announcements:

The original program of the Johannesbau-Verein has not undergone any significant changes with regard to the actual central building. Essentially, the “School of Spiritual Science” will be built in Dornach in the manner planned for Munich; in some details, the freedom we enjoy in Switzerland makes it possible to develop the intended architectural ideas more completely, including their outward appearance.

On the other hand, the residential buildings will not be built to the extent planned for Munich. The rural conditions of Dornach call for a spacious design for our settlement, so that the individual villas will be built in the middle of gardens. However, the Johannesbau-Verein must leave it to the initiative of those who want to live near the central building to build these villas; it will devote all its energy to the design of the central building alone.

It would be desirable if the developing settlement of our anthroposophical friends were to arise around the central building in accordance with a unified idea, without the activity of individual tastes being too narrowly defined; “the individual villas should, so to speak, express both through their construction and perhaps also through their orientation, express that they belong to it.” In order to carry out this idea, knowledge of the underlying ideas and construction concepts, which have emerged over the course of a long collaboration, is of course necessary. This knowledge cannot be made available to our friends at the present time, for example through a publication , so that we are obliged to request that the plans of the villas to be built in the style of the Johannesbau be submitted to the building association, which will then, of course without wanting to claim any decisive rights, suggest those corrections that could bring the present project into line with the central building. Such a measure cannot be misinterpreted as an intended monopolization.

Centralization is also extremely important for the purchase of land. In Dornach we are dealing with a rural population; the land is divided into the smallest of plots, which are in the possession of the individual farmers. It is clear that conducting purchase negotiations with so many owners requires knowledge of the circumstances, and so on. Furthermore, there is a fear that if our projects become known too soon, this would lead to a huge increase in the price of the land.

Our friends who intend to either live permanently or secure a summer residence near the central building want to get in touch with Dr. E. Grosheintz, Basel, Holbeinstrasse 55, for the terrain acquisitions.

Dornach, in the canton of Solothurn, can be reached by train in ten minutes and by electric tram in half an hour from Basel.

Furthermore, we request that for the time being absolutely nothing about the existing projects be revealed outside the Anthroposophical Society, least of all in Dornach or Basel itself.

We would like to point out that we are thinking of setting up a “College of Spiritual Science” and urgently request that all other designations that could only mislead and antagonize public opinion be avoided.

Munich, May 22, 1915
The Board of Directors of the Johannesbau-Verein

We are beginning our work!

You Seraphim, you Cherubim, you rulers of the world, you who, like lightning, take up the veils of the Cherubim through the spiritual currents, marrying them to the creative existence of the world, you high thrones, we call upon you as protectors of our actions, and you, you wisdoms, you who radiate that which exists in man before all his own existence, and you, you keepers of the eternal forces of the world, and you, you formers of our existence, you who place the form of all being into the currents of existence: We call upon you to be protectors of our actions. And you, you personalities of the spiritual stream, and you helpers, the archangeloi and the angeloi, you who are the messengers of the spiritual life of man to the earth, we call upon you all to be the protectors and guides of this our action. We call you down upon the soul of the human being whom we wish to consecrate, insofar as this is in our power. We approach this human soul, which we wish to consecrate to the work that, to the best of our knowledge, should serve the times.

We have formed this stone as a symbol of the human soul that consecrates itself to our great work. It is a symbol for us in its double twelve-foldness of the striving human soul, as a microcosm sunk into the macrocosm. Anthropos, the human being, as he derives from the entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies. So this cornerstone is a symbol of our own soul, which we incorporate into what we have recognized as the right spiritual striving for the present. Thus we will sink this stone, which is shaped according to the world pictures of the human soul, into the realm of the elements. Within this stone, taken from the denser realm of the elements, are two rocks that best express how the forces of the macrocosm interact in the denser realm of the elements. This twelve-part structure, we will sink it as the actual sign of the human soul into the place above which will rise that which, if we understand it correctly, my dear Theosophical friends, will become a sign of our work this evening. And with this stone we want to sink that through which we commit ourselves to that which we have recognized as the right thing in our spiritual life.

This document is sunk into our stone; it bears the inscription:

In the name of the seraphim, the cherubim, the thrones, the wisdoms, the movers, the shapers, the personalities, the archai, the archangeloi, the angeloi!

Man, Anthropos, lives as a microcosm in the macrocosm, and is also depicted here as a twofold twelve-membered image, a symbol of the spiritual world. And within this symbol, the well-known saying of Rosicrucianism expresses the meaning of our striving:

Ex Deo nascimur
In Christo morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus

As the formula for an oath, do we understand this correctly? It is written on this stone, which as the cornerstone expresses the human being who wants to seek himself in the spirit, who wants to feel himself in the soul of the world, who senses himself in the world-I. We sink this stone into the condensed realm of the elements, as a symbol of the power towards which we strive, placed by the Johannesbau-Verein Dornach on the 20th day of September 1880, according to the Mystery of Golgotha, that is 1913 after the birth of Christ, when Mercury was the evening star in Libra.

As master builder:
Carl Schmid-Curtius

As members of the administrative council of the Johannesbau-Verein:
Sophie Stinde
Emil Grosheintz
Hermann Linde
Felix Peipers
Pauline Gräfin Kalckreuch
Carl Unger
Emmy Gumppenberg
Mrs. Bürgi
Mrs. Schieb
Mrs. Hirter-Weber

As the Central Council of the Anthroposophical Society:
Marie von Sivers
Dr. Carl Unger

and Dr. Steiner as the spiritual leader of the action.

This document, it is incorporated into the symbol of the human soul, and then into the denser realm of the elements.

[The document is inserted into the copper container and soldered.]

The stone, the symbol of our souls, is lowered into the condensed realm of the elements.

[Dr. Peipers and four other men place the foundation stone in the foundation stone pedestal. It is placed so that the larger dodecahedron faces east and the smaller faces west, i.e., the opposite of the building, whose larger dome faces west and the smaller faces east. Rudolf Steiner then descends into the foundation stone pit himself.

The stone, as a symbol of our soul, has been sunk into the earth; it is a symbol of the striving for knowledge, for love, for strong action, a symbol for humanity. It shall be a symbol for our souls that we will always hear the deepest meaning of the word of the world:

Ex Deo nascimur
In Christo morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus

Thus the symbol of the human soul becomes a sign of the human soul. I consecrate you as a sign of the human soul with the first blows that will be struck at this, our work of creation.

[Three, five and seven blows are struck on the small, then twelve blows on the larger dodecahedron.

The stone has thus become a sign from the symbol. And now we want to entrust it to the realm of condensed elements, the earth, into which our soul has been sunk in order to develop that which is the earth's mission in the evolution of humanity. The stone from the sign becomes veiled when we entrust it to the earth. The human soul ascends three times to the three secrets of existence: at first they are symbols, then signs, when the soul reads the eternal word of the world. But the deepest depths of the secrets of the world are brought to life and united with the soul when this soul from the realm of the hierarchies is able to give itself the covering. Thus be veiled! A veiled one shall become from the symbol and the sign, so that you may be a firm cornerstone of our striving, our seeking, as we have recognized it to be right in the evolution of humanity. Thus we want to make the stone, which is the sign of our soul, the veiled one.

[Architect Schmid-Curtius and engineer Englert then cover the stone, on which Marie von Sivers has placed a bouquet of roses - 12 red and one white rose - with soil. Then Dr. Steiner hands the cross-folded hands of those present at the laying of the foundation stone, Dr. Peipers, Dr. Grosheintz, Miss von Sivers, architect Schmid and engineer Englert. Everyone leaves the foundation pit and Rudolf Steiner returns to his place on the axis of the foundation stone, where he began his address.]

My dear sisters and brothers!

Let us understand each other correctly on this festive evening. Let us understand each other to the effect that this act, in a certain sense, signifies a vow for our soul. Our striving has brought it about that we are allowed to erect this symbol of spiritual life of modern times here in this place, from which we look far out in the four elementary directions of the compass rose. Let us understand that today, by feeling our souls united with what we have symbolically sunk into the earth, we are committing ourselves to this spiritual evolutionary current of humanity that we have recognized as right. Let us try, my dear sisters and brothers, to make this vow of the soul: that we want to look away at this moment from all the pettiness of life, from all that connects us, must necessarily connect us as human beings with the life of everyday life. Let us try to awaken in us at this moment the thought of the connection of the human soul with the striving in the turn of time. Let us try to remember for a moment that, in doing what we have committed ourselves to doing today, we must bear in mind that we have to look out into the far reaches of time to see how the mission, of which this building is to become the emblem, will fit into the great mission of humanity on our planet Earth. Not in pride and arrogance, but in humility, devotion and willingness to make sacrifices, we try to reach up with our souls to the great plans, the great goals of human activity on earth. Let us try to put ourselves in the position in which we should and must actually be if we understand this moment correctly.

Let us try to remember how the great message and tidings of the eternal gospel of divine spiritual life once took time to evolve on Earth, when the divine spirits themselves were still the great teachers of humanity. Let us try, my dear sisters and brothers, to transport ourselves back to those divine times on earth, of which a last yearning, a very last memory still arises in us, when we hear about the eternal ideas and the eternal shell of the world in ancient Greece, for example, with the last tones of mystery wisdom and at the same time with the first philosophical tones of the great Plato. And let us try to comprehend what Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences have taken hold of our evolution on earth since then. Let us try to realize how the connection of the human soul with the divine existence of the world, with volition, with feeling and with divine spiritual cognition has been lost. Let us try at this moment to feel, deep down in our souls, what human souls feel out there, in the countries of the east, west and south, who we can recognize as the best and who cannot go beyond what we can express with the words: an indefinite, inadequate yearning and hope for the spirit. Look around you, my dear sisters and brothers, and see how this indefinite yearning, this indefinite hope for the spirit, prevails in humanity today. Feel and listen, here at the foundation stone of our emblem, how in humanity's indefinite yearning and hope for the spirit, the cry for the answer can be heard, for that answer that can be given where spiritual science prevails with its gospel of the spirit. Try to write into your souls the greatness of the moment we are going through this evening. If we can hear humanity's yearning for the spirit and want to build the structure from which the message of the spirit is to be proclaimed more and more and more – if we feel this in the life of the everyday world, then we understand each other correctly this evening. Then we know - not in arrogance and not in overestimation of our striving, but in humility, in devotion and willingness to sacrifice, we know - that we must be in our striving the continuers of that spiritual work that was triggered in the Occident in the course of a progressive human development, but which, through the necessary counter-current of the Ahrimanic forces, must ultimately lead to humanity standing at a point where souls would wither and become desolate if the yearning for the spirit were not heard. Let us feel, my dear sisters and brothers, these fears! This is how it must be if we are to continue to fight in that great spiritual battle, which is a battle glowing with the fire of love; in that great spiritual battle, which we are allowed to continue, which was fought by our ancestors when they distracted the Ahrimanic onslaught of the Moors.

We are now, guided by karma, at the place through which important spiritual currents have passed: Tonight, let us feel the seriousness of the situation within us. Once upon a time, humanity had reached the end of its striving for personality. Since the old heirloom of the divine ladder of the original beginning of earth evolution had withered in the abundance of this earth personality, the world word appeared over there in Asia:

In the beginning was the word.
And the word was with God.
And a god was the word.

And the Word appeared to the human soul and spoke to the human soul: Fill the evolution of the earth with the meaning of the earth. Now the Word Itself has merged with the earth aura and is absorbed by the spiritual aura of the earth.

Four times the world word has been proclaimed through the centuries, which will soon have been two millennia. Thus the world light has shone into the evolution of the earth. Deeper and deeper sank and had to sink Ahriman. We feel surrounded by human souls in which the cry of longing for the spirit resounds. But, my dear sisters and brothers, do we not feel how these human souls must remain with this general yearning, because the dark Ahriman spreads chaos over the aspired spiritual knowledge of the worlds of the higher hierarchies. Feel that the possibility exists in our time to add to the fourfold proclaimed spiritual word that other, which I can only represent in symbols.

From the East it came – the light and the word of the proclamation. From the East it went to the West, proclaimed fourfold in the four Gospels, waiting for the mirror to come from the West, which would add knowledge to what is still proclamation in the fourfold spoken word of the world. It goes deep to our hearts and souls when we hear about that Sermon on the Mount, which was spoken when the times of the maturing of the human personality were fulfilled, when the old light of the spirit had faded and the new spiritual light had appeared. The new spiritual light has appeared! But since it had appeared, it went through the centuries of human evolution from the East to the West, waiting for the understanding of the words that once sounded in the Sermon on the Mount into human hearts. From the depths of our world evolution sounds that eternal prayer that was spoken as the proclamation of the World Word when the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled. And the ancient prayer resounded deeply, which was to proclaim to the microcosm in the deepest soul, from the innermost part of the human heart, the secret of existence. It was to resound in what was proclaimed to us as the Lord's Prayer when it sounded from the east to the west. But this cosmic word, which descended into the microcosm at that time, waited to resonate with the fifth gospel. Human souls had to mature in order to understand what was to echo from the West as the most ancient, because the macrocosmic gospel, like an echo of the gospel of the East. If we show understanding for the present moment, then we will also understand that a fifth gospel can be added to the four. So let the words that express the secrets of the macrocosm resound this evening, in addition to the secrets of the microcosm. The first of the fifth gospel to be heard here is the ancient macrocosmic world prayer, which is connected with the moon and Jupiter, just as the four gospels are connected with the earth:

AUM, Amen!
The evils prevail,
Witnesses of dissolving egoity,
The guilt of selfhood incurred by others, Experienced in the daily bread, In which heaven's will does not prevail, Since man has separated himself from your kingdom And forgot your name, You fathers in the heavens.

The Lord's Prayer was given as a gift: given to mankind. The microcosmic Lord's Prayer, proclaimed from East to West, is now echoed by the ancient macrocosmic prayer. Thus it resounds again, when it is rightly understood by human souls, sounding out into the world and being returned with the words that have been shaped from the macrocosm. Let us take with us the macrocosmic Lord's Prayer, feeling that we are beginning to gain an understanding of the Gospel of Knowledge: the fifth gospel. Let us carry home into our soul with earnestness and dignity our will from this important moment. Let us carry home the certainty that all wisdom sought by the human soul - if the seeking is a genuine one - is a countercurrent to cosmic wisdom; and that all human love rooted in selfless love of the soul is fruitful from the love prevailing in the evolution of mankind.

Throughout all the ages of the earth and in all human souls there is at work, arising from the strong human will that is imbued with the meaning of the earth, a strengthening through the cosmic power that humanity is invoking for itself today, looking vaguely towards a spirit that it hopes for but does not want to recognize, because an unconscious fear has been cast into the human soul Ahriman wherever the spirit is spoken of today. Let us feel this, my sisters and brothers, in this moment. Feel this, and you will be able to prepare yourselves for your spiritual work and reveal yourselves as spiritual light, “thought-powerfully even then, when, through fully awakened spiritual vision, the dark Ahriman, dimming wisdom, wants to spread the darkness of chaos.”

Fill your souls, my sisters and brothers, with the longing for true spiritual knowledge, for true human love, for strong will. And try to stir up in you that spirit that can trust the language of the word of the world, which echoes to us from the far reaches of the world and from the widths of space, entering into our souls. That is what he who has grasped the meaning of existence must truly feel this evening: human souls are at a turning point in their striving. Feel in humility, not in arrogance, in devotion and willingness to sacrifice, not in arrogance of your self, what is to become of the symbol for which we have laid the foundation stone today. Feel the significance of the realization that we are to become through the fact that we can know: In our time, the cover of spiritual beings must be pierced in the vastness of space, when spiritual beings come to speak to us about the meaning of existence. Everywhere in the surrounding area, human souls will have to take on the meaning of existence. Hearken how in the various spiritual places, where spiritual science, religion and art are spoken of and acted upon, hear how the powers of striving in the souls become more and more barren, feel that you are to learn to fertilize these souls, these powers of striving in the soul, out of the spiritual imaginations, the inspirations and intuitions. Feel what he will find who will truly hear the sound of creative spirituality.

Those who will learn to understand the meaning of the Lord's Prayer in the light of the Fifth Gospel will be able to recognize this meaning thoroughly in our new era. When we learn to understand the meaning of these words, we will seek to absorb the seeds that must flourish if earthly evolution is not to wither, if it is to continue to bear fruit and flourish, so that the earth may achieve the goal set for it from the beginning through human will.

So feel this evening that wisdom and the meaning of the new knowledge, the new love and the new strong power must come to life in human souls. The souls that will work in the flowering and fruiting of future earth evolutions will have to understand what we want to incorporate into our souls for the first time today: the macrocosmically resounding voice of the ancient eternal prayer:

AUM, Amen!
The evils prevail,
Witnesses of the dissolution of the ego,
Selfhood guilt incurred by others,
Experienced in our daily bread,
In which heaven's will does not prevail,
Because man has separated himself from your kingdom
And forgot your name,
You fathers in the heavens.

So we part, taking with us in our souls the awareness of the significance of the seriousness and dignity of the act we have performed, the awareness that should remain from this evening, igniting in us the striving for knowledge of a new revelation given to humanity, for which the human soul thirsts and from which it will drink. But only when it will fearlessly gain the faith and trust in what the Science of the Spirit can proclaim, which in turn should reunite what had to go through the evolution of humanity separated for a while: religion, art and science.

Let us take this, my sisters and brothers, with us as something that we, as a commemoration of this jointly celebrated hour, do not want to forget again.

My dear friends!

On Saturday we laid the foundation stone of our building in Dornach, and with the permission of the Johannesbau-Verein I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words about this act. I would like to do this for the simple reason that one must feel that this act was a very responsible one. And in a way, we can say that this act spoke a clear karma. A karma that may only gradually come to light. Among other things, a conversation that took place this morning may have revealed that the laying of the foundation stone took place exactly seven years after the branch here in Basel was inaugurated. You can already sense that, in a sense, many forces are at play in all these matters that can only be discovered or, better said, named, little by little.

This laying of the foundation stone must be perceived as a responsible act for the simple reason that we were indeed right to remember last night - if, as I said, not in arrogance, but in humility and humility and modesty - to have also laid the cornerstone for our awareness that what we want fits - to put it very modestly - into what we feel is our mission on earth. And then, what we have done really does grant that seriousness and dignity that I tried to draw attention to at the laying of the foundation stone the day before yesterday.

We associate the stone we have been handling with the symbol of our soul, which we entrust to the earth mission, so to speak. And it was also right to emphasize on this occasion that what this stone is to be the cornerstone of must truly be our answer to a general cry that is currently going through the spiritual life of humanity. This cry is like a question from a frightened humanity. It is not always understood, my dear friends. But it can be understood, my dear friends, in the most diverse symptoms, which need only be viewed in their true light.

Take something like this in your hands – I am just saying in other words what I said at the laying of the foundation stone – like the little book of one of the currently most famous researchers, Dr. Eucken, that book: Can We Still Be Christians? you will hear from such a little book not only the soul of a single person, but the anguished, ignorant soul of humanity today, which thinks it knows. The anguished soul, which is afraid of the true answers and yet ignorant of humanity. The whole book, which is boring enough as it is, is full of talk of spirit and spiritual striving, and at the same time, the book is characterized by the clear trait that is typical of our time: the author does not know what he is talking about. It can be painful, but one finds that the call for truthfulness is necessary for humanity. People read the beautiful phrases, which sometimes sound quite theosophical, but one must read such things a little more deeply if one wants to understand their significance for spiritual life. And there I would like to suggest with a few words how one can read them. The call for truthfulness in the face of the lying culture of the present is raised in a way that disturbs people. But one passage of this book must be compared with two other passages.

For example, at one point in the book we find the same Rudolf Eucken saying that contemporary human consciousness can no longer endure the fact that certain religious circles speak of demons. The fact that demons are spoken of is accepted as a matter in relation to which contemporary human consciousness can only shrug its shoulders. Of course, it has long since gone beyond that. We no longer talk about demons; that is childish. Let us now compare this with another passage in the book, which is not far removed, only so far removed that the learned, who think they know, can forget what is said in the first passage. This second passage says: Demonic powers arise through the touching of the divine with the soul of man. This is said by the person who has been awarded the Nobel Prize, the greatest honor that can be given for achievements in the field of soul research.

Today's science does not pay attention to the infinite inner hypocrisy that lies in saying on the one hand: We have long since gone beyond demons, and on the other hand: Demonic powers arise when the divine touches the soul of man. The profound dishonesty, the unconscious profound dishonesty of our entire thinking, feeling and willing is expressed in this. And then in a third place the author cries out for the truth and the shaping of the truth in our culture.

One must enter a little into the intimacies, then one will realize what is meant by the words that the cry of the human soul is present in the unconscious depths of the soul, but that an answer can only be given where the spiritual life is really present, where writing is done concretely from the spirit, but not where it is only written about the spirit in general, as it still is by the best of our contemporaries.

There one will feel for what the cornerstone has been laid for our truthful construction. One must say: One wonders how the human souls of the present, who are searching for understanding of the consciousness of the present, are not dismayed when they perceive these things. But they do not see it, even when they pick up a widely read weekly magazine and a doctor in this magazine of the present talks about how such things as Spinoza's intellectual life should be depicted in a film so that it becomes clear to people, and how it should be grouped in the film. It is impossible to deal with abstract concepts in film so that humanity can finally get a vivid picture of Spinoza's world view!

These are things that only cause consternation in those souls who understand the course of intellectual life. But I do not see this, and we will not see the consternation that we must have when we get used to taking in the most serious thing for which the cornerstone should be laid! Then we shall grasp the feeling that with this stone we have made a symbol of that which the present time so urgently needs: an answer to the cry of the human soul, which shrinks in fear from knowledge. Only then shall we feel this seriousness, which is called for.

We know what we have to do and why this stone, which is to signify knowledge, love and strength, must also become a stumbling block and an offence for many opponents. Let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that the days of difficulty are over; I do not want to evoke that belief. On the other hand, let our confidence in the souls grow that we will overcome the difficulties. The toad-like natures will emerge from all sides, and this building will be a stumbling block and an offence to them. Therefore, we will need proper vigilance and stand bravely at our post!

Perhaps this laying of the foundation stone will only be the beginning of what we have to achieve for the truth and for living out the truth. That is why I wanted to express in words, my dear friends, what I was able to share with you for the first time at this laying of the foundation stone, which could be called the macrocosmic echo of that prayer that can be addressed as the most important event of the fourth period of our post-Atlantic development. Then, little by little, the fifth gospel will be discovered from the mysterious writing, which must be added to the other gospels in the fifth period.

Then the eternal prayer that resounds in the microcosm as the Lord's Prayer and that is included in the Gospels will reach us from the fifth gospel as the Lord's Prayer of Knowledge in contrast to the Lord's Prayer of the Agony of Redemption. Yes, what the agony of redemption is in the fourth period, that is knowledge in the fifth. If humanity in the fifth period had to wither away the realization that in the place of faith, the satisfaction of the spiritual, comes unbelief, emptiness. And this Lord's Prayer of knowledge is expressed in the words of our language:

Amen!
The evils prevail,
Witnesses of dissolving egoism,
guilt of selfhood incurred by others,
experienced in our daily bread,
in which Heaven's Will does not prevail,
since man has separated himself from your kingdom
and forgot your name,
you Fathers in the heavens.

It sounds as if it is resounding from the past to the future, but transposing the sound to the macrocosmic level, that which, as the Lord's Prayer of Knowledge, must enter into our souls. Just as inner bliss arose in the fourth period from the Lord's Prayer, so that which humanity needs from the present point on will be able to flow from this Lord's Prayer of Knowledge, which shows us in the structure of its individual sentences why the evils prevail, why man needs to rebuild his body.

What do evils mean in the face of eternity, through which man builds up his physical body from the daily bread? We know that he has descended into these deep spheres, and we must try to understand how a person works his way out in the course of earthly evolution - works out as an ego - in the way that must be out of freedom, in order to once again gain an understanding of the divine spiritual powers that are weaving through the world.

Because I wanted to point out the seriousness of the times in this way, and because I want to draw attention to the fact that we are only at the beginning of the difficulties and want to start our work with seriousness and dignity, but also with firm confidence in the spiritual victory, I have therefore asked the Johannesbau-Verein once again today asked the Johannesbau-Verein to repeat what I tried to write on Saturday in the face of the ruling elements in the open air to our assembled friends, so that this seriousness and dignity live in the souls, and so that we take it with us in this time as something we do not want to forget.

Lecture given at the second General Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society

My dear Theosophical friends!

In connection with the construction of our Johannesbau in Dornach, a number of our friends and members have felt the desire to create some kind of home around or near the Johannesbau, and a number of members have already registered and considered the purchase of property there in order to create permanent homes for the whole year or for some of the year. Of course, my dear friends, the words I would like to say at this moment, following on from what I have just said, are not meant to imply that I would like to interfere in any way with what these colonists are undertaking around our Johannesbau in Dornach. It is self-evident that, given the way we understand our anthroposophical movement, the freedom of each individual member must be preserved to the greatest extent. So I have no business to speak in terms of even hinting at compulsion in either direction; but I may perhaps have the right to express what is desirable.

So, in Dornach we will now have the Johannesbau as such, for which we have endeavored to find a truly novel architectural style, in order to express what we want in the building forms and to create something that can represent, in the sense already often hinted at, a not only dignified but also correct envelope for our cause.

Dr. Grosheintz has shown you the efforts that have been made to achieve this goal in various illustrations. If the funds are sufficient, buildings will be constructed directly around the Johannesbau, individual houses, some of which you have already seen will be in the immediate vicinity of the Johannesbau. And we will try to build these houses in such a way that their artistic design will truly allow them to form a whole with the plans for the Johannesbau itself.

It takes a lot to create such a whole. We have, of course, only had the opportunity to implement the idea just characterized for the small house that you see there (in the model ) at one point, and which is initially intended to be used to make the glass windows in it; so that Mr. Rychter and perhaps someone else can find shelter in it, and the glass windows can be made in the other rooms. Secondly, we have the so-called “Kesselhaus”, which is already in a very definite form, so to speak. This Kesselhaus had to be designed with the modern material of reinforced concrete in mind. And so the problem was how to construct such a giant chimney – which would, of course, be an eyesore if it were built in the same way as chimneys are built today near buildings – how to construct such a chimney in such a way that it is architecturally compatible with the building and made of the appropriate material.

In the small figure form that you see here (in the model), and in what Dr. Grosheintz showed as an image of this boiler house, you will have seen that an attempt has been made to solve the architecture of this structure as well. And once it is standing there and, in particular, once it is heated – because the smoke emerging from the chimney is incorporated into the architecture – then perhaps people will be able to feel that these forms have intrinsic beauty despite their prosaic purpose. Perhaps precisely because the building's function is truly expressed in its forms, one will be able to sense that these forms have not only been purely formed according to the principles of the old utilitarian architecture, but at the same time in such a way that an inner aesthetic formation has taken place. By thinking of the two domes together, with an extension that is shaped differently on different sides, and on the chimney in a burst of, one cannot say “leaf-like” structures, because a member who saw this model found them, for example, “ear-like” – but one need not define them as such, the forms just have to be right. All these forms will probably make it possible to feel that even such a building, which serves a very modern heating purpose – the Johannesbau and the buildings immediately around it will be heated from here – can be given aesthetically pleasing forms.

For such a thing, now – the other things are therefore only provisional and it will become clear to what extent they are provisional – in order to know what is needed for these forms, it is necessary to first know a precise, specified indication of everything that is to take place in the building, for which purpose it is to serve. I would like to say: If one knows how many rooms, for what purposes rooms are needed, how many types of staircase, how many types of view and so on one wants, and if one also knows exactly the location of the building in relation to the Johannesbau, to the north or south, then one can find a corresponding architecture for each such specification.

Therefore, it will be necessary for all those friends who want to become colonists and are thinking of building something near the Johannesbau to really follow, at least in a broader sense, what must be pursued for the buildings in the immediate vicinity of the Johannesbau if we do not want to be unfaithful to our principles. For the first thing that is at hand is that through the external construction, through the overall style, it should be apparent to the outside world that all these houses, so to speak, belong together, form a whole. Even if other houses should be in between, it would still be desirable that precisely those houses that are built by colonists be built in such a way that it is clear from the houses: they belong to this whole. People on the outside might say: These are twisted people! Very well, but one should feel it - regardless of whether one looks at it affirmatively or negatively - and we should give cause for feeling that in this way - even if perhaps disturbed by many other things that stand in between - the complex of buildings built towards the Johannesbau forms an ideal whole.

This is the one aspect that really needs to be taken into account. But the other aspect is that we really want something that has a certain significance in the cultural development of the present day. We want, my dear friends – and you can see this from the forms of the John building itself – that our spiritual-scientific attitude should actually be incorporated into the architectural style and into the artistic forms in all areas. Just as we would be in no position to answer the question, “How can one best practise the art of dance?” by saying, “Go to such and such a person who has this or that method”, so too, just as we would be compelled to seek our own way in eurythmy, we must also learn to understand how to seek our own in other art forms and thereby create something for those who want to understand, something that is perhaps only possible from such a productive spiritual current as the humanities provide.

I have often pointed out how it continues to resound in my ears what the architect Wilhelm Ferstel said after he had built the Votive Church in Vienna and was elected rector of the Vienna University of Technology, when he gave a lecture on architecture, what his actual tenor was in this lecture: architectural styles are not invented! One can object to this statement, one can also prove it, both can be equally correct. They are not invented, the architectural styles, but from the correctness of the statement that they are not invented, it does not follow at all that one simply takes the Gothic architectural style, as Ferstel took it, and builds the somewhat enlarged confectionery, this sugar work of the Votive Church in Vienna. Nor does it follow at all from that sentence that architectural styles in our own time can only be formed by modifying old architectural styles in an eclectic sense, welding them together again and again, and in this way creating this or that.

A spiritual scientific attitude should show that it is possible to bring real art forms into the architectural style from within spiritual life. And we should prove to the world that this is also possible in a private house. We should be able to gain understanding for our cause from this point of view. By being able to proceed from this point of view, we will create an enormously significant ideal value for our culture.

So it would certainly be nice, without wanting to exert any influence on the freedom of any member, if the colonists would come together and, of their own free will but with an understanding of our principles, achieve something unified. Since this cannot be changed for the time being – it may be different later – we have to take into account the factor that there is a house near the Johannesbau that cannot be removed yet and will not enhance the beauty; but it is there now and it is not important that we make everything “beautiful”, but that we make what we do beautiful in our sense.

Therefore, I was really saddened, I might say, when in the past few weeks I came across construction plans and proposals for houses to be built by the colonists there. They were, of course, intended with the very best of intentions, but they exhibited all the ugliness and monstrosity of a terrible architectural style. It really can be done differently if you have the good will to do so. It goes without saying that a number of obstacles and hindrances must be expected, but what new movement that has to become established in the world does not encounter obstacles or hindrances?

I do not want to interfere in what might arise from the members of the colony – that is, the colonists themselves – getting together tomorrow; but it would sadden me if anything other than what is in line with the words just spoken could or would arise. It will be entirely possible if we all take care to ensure that what has just been characterized comes true. Of course, if colonists do not have the patience to wait until the time comes when it may be possible to indicate how one or the other could be done well, then nothing favorable can be done.

As much as it is understandable that some of the colonists may be in a hurry to get their building project started, it would be desirable for the colonists who are serious about our cause to exercise a little patience patience in order to let things develop in accordance with the intentions, which I cannot say are ours through our will, but that they arise out of what we have to bring out of the spiritual scientific attitude. Something might indeed come into being of which the world might at first receive an impression that makes it laugh. Let it laugh! But the time for laughing at such things will come to an end. If nothing of this kind were ever undertaken, human development would never advance.

No one should think that they have to endure even the slightest discomfort in their home if the principles I have mentioned are adhered to. But one thing is certainly necessary: that not every colonist goes his own way, so to speak, but that what is done is done in a certain harmony, that people can discuss and hold each other mutually.

The architectural style of the colonists' houses will make the entire colony appear as an ideal unit, and this will be an external expression of an internal harmony. I say this, partly as a wish, partly as a hypothesis, partly as something, yes, I myself don't know what word to choose: It should simply be an expression of the inner harmony of those living in this community!

It will be in keeping with the spirit of the Anthroposophical Society that not the slightest discord or mutual incompatibility, or even a bad word from one member of the colony to another, or even a frown from one to another, will ever be allowed to pass. And it will be beautiful when this is also expressed in outward forms, as it were, as if personified peace were to pour over everything. But even if it should ever happen that a little thing in someone's mind might cause one or the other to turn a crooked mouth or a crooked face, because forms stimulate thoughts, he will turn his eyes in that crooked face to the common peaceful forms and a peaceful smile will immediately cross the twisted face.

If we consider all this, then we really have the reasons for the impulse to create something unified there. Do not think that this unity will mean that one house will be like the other. On the contrary. The houses will be very different from each other and everything will have to have a very individual character. After all, a human organism is not created by saying: an arm is like this, a hand is like this... [gap in the text]. If we had never placed the arm or the hand on top instead of the head, an organism would never have been created. Similarly, the shape of a house that is right on one side will not be right on the other side. But all of this will have to be carefully thought out for our purposes.

And then, when we are in a position to really put it all into practice, there are other aspects to consider. Just think, we were united here this week. On Monday, some Theosophical Society was meeting in the next room with a lecture by so-and-so; on another day, another society was meeting with something else, and on a third day, an “Anthropos” society was meeting, and so on. Just think, if it could happen that the son, daughter, grandson, or nephew of one of our members would join some “Anthropos” society or even some theosophical society, and it came to that houses in our colony were later inherited by such members of a family, then not only would we have the lectures of the other societies in a neighborly way, but we would also have the attitudes and so on of these societies right in the middle of us.

We must therefore consider today what difficulties may arise over time and how we can counter them. We will only be able to counter them if we create such an association of colonists through which means and ways can be found to ensure that the possessions of members of the Anthroposophical Society really do remain with members of the Anthroposophical Society in the future. That this will only be possible through a wide variety of means will become clear to you tomorrow when we discuss the practical principles. Of course, heirs must never be affected, but it is also possible to create the possibility that what one owns in the colony might never pass to heirs who are not members of the Anthroposophical Society, without affecting the heirs.

It would be desirable to preserve this colony as a colony for members of the Anthroposophical Society in the future; but not just to think about how nice it is for oneself to live there, how nice it is not to have to travel far to the events in the Johannesbau and to be there with Anthroposophists. To think only of that, would be even less in keeping with our spiritual current than if it were for anything else. The fact that our spiritual current still has to be associated with certain sacrifices is particularly evident when the principles and impulses of our spiritual current have to be put into practical reality. It should be more or less self-evident that we cannot have our houses built by just any architect who is completely unconnected with our cause. It should also be self-evident that we want to express the anthroposophical character of the colony.

These are certain aspects that I would like to present to you, of course, as I said, not to exert any pressure, but as something that you will admit on closer reflection that you cannot avoid if anything is to come out of the whole matter of our Johannesbau and thus serve our anthroposophical cause.

You see, we had to leave Munich because we did not find any understanding there, initially purely for what we wanted artistically. Out there in Dornach, where we can be now, we can put ourselves in a position to serve as a model for what our spiritual movement should bring in the future. And it would be a misunderstanding of our movement if we did not want to do this, if we let ourselves be deterred from adopting the points of view that have been discussed by petty considerations or by anything else. Basically, everyone who wants to build there should realize that it is necessary for them to really join a colonists' association. Perhaps it would be best if the artistic side of things were subject to a kind of committee or commission. There is no need to force this matter, but it would be wonderful if all the colonists could agree that it would be best to submit to a kind of commission the houses and other structures that are to be built. If we can really carry this out, if we, as colonists, can show that we can imbue a number of us with a common will and give this will the direction that is prescribed by our anthroposophical attitude, then we will create something exemplary there. And what is created there will be a test of how well or how poorly our cause has been understood. A house built by any old architect will be seen as further proof of how little our anthroposophical movement is understood in today's world! And of every house that is a formal expression of our anthroposophical convictions, people will say: How glad it makes one that there is already an inner understanding in one or other of us for what we want!

I would have been so very happy if what I had intended for this General Assembly could have come about. We will see what can still be achieved tomorrow if a really inspiring discussion comes about in this General Assembly in free debate on the basis of the theses: How can we, each and every one of us, best work anthroposophically among our fellow human beings and how can we best show our anthroposophical attitude and put our experience at the service of the world? But my dear friends, by endeavoring to merely bring the wisdom of the anthroposophical movement to the people, we alone do not do what we must do if we want to establish our movement in the world. We must really ensure that what is given to us as spiritual knowledge is properly presented to the world in the embodiment of what is created by us externally, just as the old architectural styles were embodiments of the old cultural ideas.

If we succeed in creating something truly unified there and in legally safeguarding this unity as something to be preserved for the anthroposophical movement, then we will have provided proof that we understand our movement. May it really come to pass that quite a number of such artistic elements – also in architectural and other forms – on this occasion, when it can, provide us with proof that The anthroposophical movement is already understood!

Truly, we do not want to be a sect or some kind of community that represents and spreads these or those dogmas. We want to be something that takes cultural tasks seriously. However, we can only do that in the case of the Johannesbau and the associated colony if we act in accordance with what has now been said.

I think, my dear friends, that these few words may have provided some insights for your colonization efforts around the Johannesbau.

Address before the lecture

My dear Theosophical friends!

Before I come to the lecture itself today, I would like to address a few words to you, which only mean that this year, unfortunately, we will not, as in previous years, have the events that would otherwise have taken place in Munich in the middle of summer, because the next such event is to take place in the Johannesbau and this building is taking a little longer than originally thought. We hope that in the last two months of this year we will be ready to hold a festive opening of the Johannesbau. This building is giving us more work than one would normally imagine, and you will therefore understand that personal meetings have had to be canceled for a certain period of time.

For our dear Austrian friends, it has certainly not been easy in many respects to come to terms with the fact that the Johannesbau is so far away. However, although I am not in a position to discuss this further, because there is not enough time, it was simply the case that karma led us to build the Johannesbau where it is being built; and that will be good.

We must be aware that we see this building as a kind of central place and symbol of our spiritual movement. What is far for one person is near for another; it could not be done differently from the outset. But it is to be hoped that our Austrian friends will also find ways and means to experience this symbol of our anthroposophical movement as their own, I would like to say explicitly, by being personally present at the appropriate event in the Johannesbau. It is in fact not only a symbol because of what it will become as a monumental building, but it is in a sense a symbol because, if it really comes about, it can only come about through the great willingness to make sacrifices on the part of some of our friends, who have really made the utmost in willingness to make sacrifices in order to bring the difficult and, above all, costly construction to completion, just as it is supposed to be.

What is to be created should actually express in every respect what our spiritual movement will be. And the whole architectural style must correspond to this. Everything that flows into the building must be such that it does not enter in a symbolic or allegorical way, but must flow into this building in a truly artistic way. Above all, it was necessary to construct a building that is an embodiment of the spiritual being to which we are devoted in all its forms. The different periods and cultures of human development also had their own corresponding buildings. The building to be erected in Dornach should show in all its forms, from which it is composed and with which it is to form a shell for our spiritual work, through the way this shell opens outwards and inwards and closes and joins together, that something is expressed in its forms that has never before been conceived in architecture for such a building.

Just as the Greek temple is designed to be a dwelling for the god within, just as the Gothic cathedral is designed to form a whole together with the community gathered within it, so our building should be designed in such a way that the forms directly, I would say in a spiritual, intellectual relationship, shape the building in such a way that it is spiritually transparent. That means that when you are inside the building, you will have the feeling, through the architecture and through that which passes from the architecture into the sculpture, that these walls are not like other architectural walls that have existed up to now, closed, merely enclosing, but that they are at the same time the communicators that open up spiritual life into infinite spiritual expanses. These are walls that simultaneously transcend themselves through their forms, that at the same time are not present in their physical form. The aim is to achieve something that everyone inside can gradually get used to, to understand these forms, not allegorically or symbolically, but in a living sensation, to have something like a view of the world we are talking about, simply by experiencing the form.

Of course, this is something completely new in architecture, it is unusual, and it takes time and work. And as it is already the case in our time – forgive the harsh expression – it also needs and has needed: money! And in this respect, the willingness of some of our friends to make sacrifices was so accommodating that we can say: this willingness to make sacrifices is, in a way, a symbol of how our spiritual movement has penetrated the understanding of souls.

I just wanted to mention that you take this building into your heart, that you feel it as the center of our movement, so that you can imagine yourself united with it, and that you allow your personal presence to be there as much as the opening in the future will allow.

before the lecture

My dear Theosophical friends!

We who are gathered here around our building, which is to become a symbol of the spirit, are undoubtedly all under the impression of the events that have befallen Europe while we were still fully occupied with our building. Those of our dear friends who have listened more closely to some of the things that have been said in our circles in recent years know that we have always been in some sense influenced by what has now broken in so terribly, and that many things have been said with the perspective of what had to come upon the peoples of Europe and what, for certain reasons, did not come earlier – for reasons that will be superfluous to discuss at this very moment.

But as we here on the one hand have the painful events in our immediate vicinity, and on the other hand are protected from them by what is happening in the country to which our good karma has carried us with our construction – we, who are standing in direct view and yet protected from the events, we may and must actually at this moment place two thoughts quite seriously before our soul. The thought that we tried to express in the last of our reflections here, - the thought that can inspire us in our deepest hearts: unshakable trust in the power and effectiveness of the spirit, in the victory of the spirit and its life. And we would be poor members of our spiritual movement if we did not have this thought in our souls, if we had not won it for ourselves over the years that we have stood within our movement, if we did not carry within us the firm certainty: Whatever may come in the way of serious trials, whatever may happen to us, we hold within us the unshakable trust in the power and victory of the spiritual life! if we do not feel that in the end the spirit will triumph!

But another thought must be added to all that inspires us with such confidence. This is the thought of - it need not be misunderstood, but it may be expressed and can be understood - the present physical weakness of what can be done for the spirit. To put it before our minds, let us think of a contrast that may weigh dreadfully on our hearts at this time: let us think that we have three principles, and that the first of these principles must be to cultivate in ourselves a spirit of brotherhood that transcends all nations. There is no doubt that the faith we have in the spirit will clearly permeate us with the awareness that this ideal, too, is a legitimate and great one.

But let us compare this ideal with the present in which we live; let us compare it not in the abstract, but in the immediate, concrete form that concerns each and every one of us: and then we may come to the conclusion how little it has been possible for us to date to contribute even a little to the realization of this, our very first thought! We need not consider in detail what is being spread about the events, but the mood of the mind is something we must consider very carefully. And then we will feel: We travel around the world, a large number of us, from country to country, everywhere we are lovingly received, everywhere we feel how necessary it is to carry the spiritual seed everywhere, and we now see how across the borders and areas in which we have thought, lived and spoken so lovingly, how across these borders moods of hatred and antipathy are sent to each other to such an extent!

The contrast is there before our mind's eye, how great the demands of the spirit are, and how little we have been able to do for our very first thought. And if we, who are now gathered here in our ranks, around our building, which is supposed to be an expression of our spiritual striving, could now force a model and pattern into our hearts, into our mutual behavior, a model of brotherly spirit, it would have to be this thought.

May it serve to inspire each of us to recognize each of the others in our hearts! We can only do our part in the construction of our society with bleeding hearts, knowing how little of what is happening corresponds to what should be happening. We may console ourselves with the thought that our ideal, which we have in relation to our construction, will triumphantly go forth into the world in the future: this is not a thought of weakness, it will change in us into a thought of strength.

Many things will have to change, my dear friends, if we are to approach the minds that are out there in this terrible life again. We shall find many things changed, many minds will meet us differently than before, and many things that have been done in our movement will have to be done differently in the future. And if we want to do something for the spirit in the turmoil that will develop, then we must not continue to cultivate old ideas. We will need new ideas; those that the situation demands will develop. But we will only be strong if we arm ourselves with the thought: Wherever events may place us, whatever they may demand of us, we will do it in the confidence of the spirit's victory.

Our building rises up in peaceful thoughts and peaceful work. In these times, when everything seems to be shaken, let us strive to be a group that cherishes and cultivates peace and harmony in each other's hearts, so that each of us has the best thoughts about each other, without envy, without discord. That, my dear friends, will be the only thing that makes it possible, in the face of painful events, to continue what must be continued. For our work must and will be continued, despite all the obstacles that pile up. What must happen in the sense of our movement will happen. It will happen, no matter what obstacles appear to us!

But it can only happen if we try to keep love and peace in our hearts, which should be generated by holding on to the spirit within our hearts. Without this, the world outside cannot progress either; but for the group gathered here, it is even more important to keep love, peace and harmony in our hearts. Because whatever we are building will be disrupted if it is not built with these feelings of love and peace; it will be disrupted by envy and discord. Only when thoughts of harmony, peace and love are built into the forms we are working on will they be what they should be for humanity when peace returns to the world. The more harmony we can muster in our hearts, the more these forms and means of expression, which our building has in itself, will be imbued with them. If we really understand this, then it may be possible for us to imbue ourselves with the attitude that is the ideal of our spiritual striving.

I wanted to say these words at the beginning today, as words that should justify the fact that we are continuing to work here in peace and quiet during these times, and are not going out to take part in the events that are taking place outside. But as for what the individual is called upon to do in this regard, it can only be said that the individual is doing his duty. If we now hold on to this ideal with all our strength and with courage and confidence, then it will grow more and more and, when peace has returned to the world, it will be able to fulfill its mission. Of course, it will be necessary to a much, much greater extent than it has been in our ranks for us to try to put aside our own personal aspirations and strive to imbue our entire spiritual movement with what is like a spiritual lifeblood.

As these words come from deep within my heart, my dear friends, I want them to go deep into your hearts as well!

My dear friends!

One of the things that I otherwise always find difficult, despite what one might think, is speaking, and it always means a kind of difficult decision for me to speak, despite having to do so so often. It seems particularly difficult to me in this day and age, in this time when the heart and soul are burdened and weighed down by so many things.

Not only do I long to be with you, my dear friends, again after a long time, but today there is also a very special reason for our being together. Today is the eve of the anniversary of our laying of the foundation stone. It will be exactly one year from today, Saturday; according to the date, it will be one year tomorrow, Sunday. We will therefore gather today and tomorrow, and I ask our dear friends to please gather in this room tomorrow at six o'clock as well. We will not read the drama, as was the custom during the time I was not present, but we will try to spend the evening in a different way tomorrow. The drama reading can take place again in the near future.

But today, above all, I would like to remind you of the ideas, feelings and emotions that moved our souls when we laid the foundation stone for this building here on this hill a year ago. Even though few of you, my dear friends, were present at that time in terms of your external, physical personality, in terms of your hearts and feelings, you were all there. And all those who have since then worked so lovingly and selflessly on this building have experienced for themselves and also shown how closely they are connected to the feelings and emotions that, at that time, in the most beautiful sense of the word, namely, glowing with divine fire, when we - it had to be so; it was brought about by the circumstances of the time - laid the foundation stone in a small circle.

At that time, we tried to use few words to guide us in the soul, which spirit this building should be. We tried to envision how we could see from this hill to the north, south, east and west, and how we want to serve that spiritual life, which we are convinced humanity in the north, south, east and west needs if the development of the earth is to proceed in the appropriate way intended by the spiritual hierarchies.

Indeed, I also believe I have sufficiently pointed out that it is not a proud feeling with which we present our view of spiritual life as the one that must be intimately connected with the salvation of humanity. Rather, this emphasis is truly connected with the feeling of humble modesty that we only want to be servants of that spiritual life that wants to flow in, through the peaceful harmonies of the higher hierarchies, into the salutary development of the human race.

So we understand the matter, that we do not rise in pride because we believe we recognize something special, but that we feel blessed by the divine spiritual beings, feel blessed to be allowed to be servants in the development of the stream of spiritual life to which our soul, our heart, our whole human being is attached.

And it was at that time, my dear friends, that I was allowed to speak for the first time the words of which I not only believe I know, but – with all the certainties with which one can know such a thing – I truly believe I know that they were heard from the divine-spiritual heights by that entity that was to become the bearer of the Christ who would harmoniously unite people.

It was one of the most uplifting moments for me that I have experienced in our movement when I was allowed to speak the words for the first time:

Amen!
The evils prevail,
Witnesses of dissolving egoism,
Guilt of selfhood incurred by others,
experienced in daily bread,
in which heaven's will does not prevail,
because man has separated himself from your kingdom
and forgotten your name,
you fathers in the heavens.

In these words, whoever reflects on them often enough will gradually find that they contain everything that can move human hearts and souls in a great and sublime way. But these words also contain everything that can cause human pain and suffering in human hearts and souls. And if we allow them to work in the right way in our souls, these words contain the strength that can sustain us in the sense of our spiritual current, can endow us with inner security, in whatever situation in life we may find ourselves, whatever life circumstances we may be forced to face.

What, my dear friends, inspired us when we turned our thoughts to such a building, as it now stands before us as a landmark, years ago? We were inspired by the conviction that the salvation of humanity depends on not only the theoretical knowledge and conviction of the existence of the spiritual worlds flowing into humanity, but also on our direct experience of them, on our being united with the spiritual worlds in our souls.

We are permeated by the belief, my dear friends, that this spiritual life is present in the world everywhere, but that it is up to people to grasp it, because man is meant to be free in the world, and this spiritual life approaches him only on condition that he wills it, that he take it up into his will. This justifies the necessity that we find imposed on us by karma to do everything that can release this sacred human will from the depths of human nature, wherein it is often so hidden that it may unite with the converging will of the hierarchies, who will then choose the earth as the site of a cosmos where, in the future, holy, spiritual Christ-sunlight will shine if humanity wills it, if humanity wants to mature for it.

The thought occurred to us at the laying of the foundation stone before the year was out - but it did not live much longer, but that is our karma - that with the last days of July this year our building would be ready, so that it could be spoken in the sense that had been indicated by the reality of spiritual life and its reception by man.

Of course, karma willed otherwise, and the human soul must learn to submit to necessity through spiritual science. If the idea of coping in July had been realized, then, my dear friends, we would now be able to feel how, during the entire construction of the house dedicated to our sacred cause, we could look down – as we looked down at the time of the laying of the foundation stone to the north, south, east and west – on the peace that prevailed among people.

Now, that did not happen. The last work of our construction must look down on a completely different world, my dear friends, on a different world, which can truly evoke deep feelings of suffering in those hearts that have already been filled to a certain degree with the spirit of the spiritual life that we mean.

However, as I already indicated when I last spoke to you from this pulpit, it would be a sign of weakness for those who are engaged in the spiritual life if we did not , at least in our inmost being, we have developed the faith in the one great victory that must come – may it come in whatever way – in the victory and the victoriousness of the spiritual life. We can celebrate, my dear friends, the annual festival of a building that is intended to serve in the most eminent sense to bring together human souls across the earth in harmony. If it should happen, as honestly and uprightly as it can happen, then the way we stand by our building should correspond to what is the first principle of our spiritual movement, and what is expressed in the foundation of every single, even artistic, form of our building.

If anyone takes the trouble to study the individual artistic forms of our structure, they will find that, in addition to everything I have allowed myself to say in the course of the lectures in this room about the meaning of the forms of our structure, every detail expresses the sense of the true Christ impulse to embrace all human hearts, as they are found among the peoples and races of the earth. For, my dear friends, the spiritual life of humanity, life in the spirit, is one; and from the words I spoke here last time, you will have gathered how this must be understood in the most earnest and worthy way.

The spiritual life of humanity is one. But if we want to make this sentence completely our own in the immediate present, we will have to take some of what we have learned in the course of our spiritual work over the years seriously, deeply, deeply seriously.

And let us not hide from ourselves that it will be difficult for some souls to perceive the things that have been accepted as truth in the deepest peace, in the immediate present with the same intensity as truth. But on the other hand, let us remember that this is precisely our test in the present time: to take things seriously.

Now, my dear friends, let us look at an example. It was during the time of deepest peace that I spoke to a number of our friends in the north, in Christiania, about the nature of the folk souls and their significance in the evolution of humanity. There is no doubt that the lectures given at that time on the nature of the folk souls were understood by our dear friends in an objective way; but it is also equally certain that many other people in the world who are outside our society could have understood these lectures in an objective way at that time.

It cannot be assumed that we would be able to accept such lectures with the same objectivity today without being truly moved in our innermost being. And yet, I would like to say, how instructive for today, for the immediate present, what was said in Christiania at that time about the nature of the souls of the people could be! Perhaps we may be permitted to remind our friends of some of the lectures of those days, and particularly of what was said at the time of the greatest peace, at least for the greater part of the European nations.

My dear friends, before I draw your attention to what was said about the national souls of Europe in the course of these lectures, let us consider a fact, a fact that is, so to speak, intimately connected with a correct, deep and serious understanding of our spiritual science. This is this: our soul nature itself, our individual soul nature, is by no means the simple being that exoteric science would like to present it as out of convenience. It is one of the simplest things we have to recognize when we place ourselves on the ground of spiritual science, that we see what a complicated being works and lives in our own inner being. We immediately get to know in our soul being: sentient soul, mind soul and consciousness soul, and how the I is predisposed in it and the striving upwards to the higher members. Immediately we are confronted with a fivefoldness of effective elements. There are still people today who laugh at this description of the soul's elements. But a time will come when people will recognize the complexity of the human soul life, when they will turn their gaze - because life will become more and more difficult in the course of our development on earth - to what so irrefutably shows the multiplicity of our soul elements. This is that our soul members can come into inner conflict, into inner soul war.

We know, of course, how the human soul can feel divided within itself in everyday life at these or those times. The more one delves into the life of the soul, the more significant it becomes when the individual soul members, as it were, rebel against each other within the human being. One perceives how they stand within the human being, one cannot say otherwise: fighting against each other. And the way we are tuned, our state of soul, whether we are more inclined to immerse ourselves in a matter with the element of feeling or more in a rational frame of mind, is reflected in the structure of our being, which is meant to express this.

However, the soul members will only behave correctly if each one finds its corresponding weight, with which it draws the human being, so to speak, to the truly true earthly task required by the spiritual hierarchies, when the soul members come together in harmony. They will become so in the highest sense when they overcome the difficulties that lie in the mutual struggle of the soul members.

In one of the Mystery Dramas there is a scene – in the Test of the Soul – where this inner working, surging and weaving is pointed out in the most eminent sense, but also the fighting of the individual soul forces.

But there is also a representation - and this representation forms the final tableau of the Gate of Initiation, the first mystery play - where what basically lives in the individual soul is distributed among what stands before us in the final tableau. There are Mary and Thomas Aquinas, Lucifer and Ahriman, the hierophants, and so on. They speak with each other, and their voices reflect what speaks in the individual human soul. The goal of the human spirit is to be found in such a union, as depicted in the final temple tableau, where every single soul force and every single personality is placed in its proper place and each contributes what lies in its nature.

I would like to point out the many-sidedness of the human being and how it has been attempted, in the various representations and discussions, to show what works and weaves in the human being in connection with the many-sidedness of the human soul , how we can look into our own soul in true, not theoretical self-knowledge at many an inner war and struggle, and how we can look at the lofty solar ideal that wants to be achieved in human, harmonious cooperation. Basically, our spiritual scientific literature contains everything that can give us not only comfort but also security and support and strength, at least for the inner life of our soul, even in the most difficult situations in life.

Now, in that lecture cycle in Christiania, it was shown how what we otherwise find in the individual soul is, as it were, distributed among the folk souls of Europe. Read about it in the lecture, I think it is the penultimate one, how it is pointed out how the three western folk souls relate to the middle and in turn to the eastern folk soul. Read it up and bear in mind the fact that everything in the evolution of humanity is based on repetition. Bear in mind the fact that the folk soul that prevails on the Italian and Spanish peninsula expresses in a special way what we know as the essence of the sentient soul - a repetition of what was connected with the essence of the sentient soul in Atlantean times. Read up on what has been said about the shades and nuances of the French folk soul and its relationship to the mind soul, and about the British folk soul in its connection with the consciousness soul. Read further and see that in Central Europe, above all, the nuance of the I exists, which prevails in the three folk souls.

Once historians write history in connection with spiritual science, they will be able to objectively describe the rule of the I in Central Europe, from the moment when the army of the Goths and Alarich's wild hordes passed through these lands, through all phases into our and even later times, which are to shine forth in Europe's east: Then they will show what will once be allotted to a distant future.

Yes, so certain, my dear friends, so reassured I would like to say, could one say this a few years ago and know that not the slightest sensitivity could be seen in any of the listeners, but rather it could be seen how what humanity is to achieve is to be achieved in community, but in such a community that flows from objective knowledge, from knowledge that comes from spiritual science.

And now take together what has been repeatedly said about the character of our time, how our time is the period in post-Atlantean cultural development that strives to cultivate the consciousness soul, how all soul forces must work together to give our time the nuances of the consciousness soul. The human I must assert itself in such a way that it finds a way through the consciousness soul, which must necessarily unfold the greatest egoistic strength in order to find the way up into the spiritual self. Not only deeper thoughts, but deeper feelings, feelings of understanding for human development and the character of the times, can move through our soul when we allow such things, as they were spoken at the time and printed as a lecture cycle, to enter our soul with seriousness and dignity.

How does it appear before our soul, this I in relation to the consciousness soul and mind soul, striving upwards to higher realms, forging the way through struggle and war? Frankly, my dear friends, one could not touch these truths again, which were expressed and felt in the deepest soul at the time, in such serious times as ours; they would have been spoken in vain, they would have been understood as a childish game with intellectual concepts and theoretical scientific ideas.

But these things do not only mean that our soul plays with them and finds a theoretical stimulus, satisfies a curiosity about knowledge. The significance of these things lies in the fact that what lies in them can really become the power of our soul. If it becomes a force in our soul, then we can find our way, we can find the possibility to understand ourselves when these things hold their earnest countenance towards us, we can find the possibility to understand them as far as we have to understand them through the power and consciousness of our soul. I know that these must also be the thoughts with which I would like to greet our building one year after the laying of the foundation stone: that it will become a symbol of the strength that we can gain in the sense in which the words just spoken are meant.

“Do we not belong to this building?” one might ask. We belong to the building in a different way than the Gothic church and the community.

It has already been discussed that we form the larynx in the same way as the gods speak. But when we mature and pay attention in our soul so that we receive the science of orientation, the science of finding our way, revealed, then we will recognize in the forms from which our structure is composed the letters of a divine language. We will learn to speak many things differently in the course of human development when we gradually understand this structure.

Time itself is pressing, I would say, out of the configuration of our words often what should no longer be in our words. But everything that is in the spirit of our spiritual science will come, if only we honestly strive to pursue this spiritual science with all the powers of our soul and our mind. We should not be surprised – at most, we may wonder about the point in time at which these things have occurred, and this point in time is explained to me by some occult insights that have been granted to me recently – we should not be surprised, especially not on the basis of our spiritual science, that these events have occurred.

My dear friends, how often have we heard it said that there are basically two currents flowing through the evolution of humanity. One of these currents is still weak, it is the spiritual current to which we want to cling with all our hearts and minds. The other is one that has a materialistic character. I have often spoken to you over the past years about the many forms this materialistic character takes. But you could learn from all that I have said about the materialism of our time that materialism has an effect on all the individual main and secondary currents. Materialism does not only enter into theoretical views. How often has this been emphasized, for example in the last Hague cycle of lectures. Materialism enters into the whole of human coexistence. It has a strong power that is by no means exhausted, that will continue to have an effect in one area – my dear friends, it is good to be clear about how materialism expresses itself; based on the words I have said before, I may assume that the words I will have to follow shortly cannot be misunderstood – [that] will continue to have an effect in the area of human coexistence.

Among other things, materialism has been asserting itself for some time in the fact that – yes, it is difficult to find words for such things – an idea has arisen in the life of European nations that is not really an idea at all and that, in certain respects, is a major step backwards from earlier times: it is what is often referred to as the nationality idea.

Much would have to be said if this nationality idea, which should not be called that at all, were to be discussed exhaustively. But a sense of what prevails in this area can run through our soul when we remember earlier times, times that seem so backward to our supposedly enlightened humanity. Let us remember that a time of ours has preceded, which is called the dark ages, in which people of all nations = one may think otherwise about this time, as one wants - have fought for religious ideas, for ideas that have gone beyond the idea of nationality.

What is present in the spirit as the content of an idea can become present in the spirit and can take hold of the human being as such. It is something that has entered into the formula that was presented here last time as the conversation between the individual and the spirit of his people. But the life of the spirit has receded. Natural scientific thinking and naturalistic feeling have taken hold of humanity. How this presents itself in the field of philosophy is shown in The Riddles of Philosophy, which you will find discussed in my latest book; the second volume also offers an outlook on anthroposophy.

How did it come about that what is called the nationality idea has emerged, I might say as a reflection of the darkening of spiritual life? As soon as one comes to the national aspect – please take this quite objectively – as soon as one comes to the national aspect, the forces that can no longer be overlooked by the spiritual core of our soul come into action. They pulsate through the human organism in an ahrimanic-luciferic way and dissolve into what are called ideas, but which are not ideas.

It may be said here: the more a person frees himself from this nationalistic thinking, the more he comes to see the spiritual world.

I am not saying this out of arrogance, my dear friends, but rather, I would like to say it with inner humility. I grew up in a country in which the most diverse nationalities are not even as far apart as they are here in Switzerland, but live in complete confusion, where one could experience as a child everything that is connected with the rise of the national principle, the national impulses. I do not have one, precisely because of this circumstance – I say it objectively, you may judge it as you will – I have no homeland and I do not really know, from subjective feeling, what is called the feeling of home. It is connected with a certain strange inner tragedy, which is perhaps difficult for someone else to understand if one is prepared by one's karma to be homeless. But all this enabled me to hold my head up high, even as a child, in a country where the individual powers of the soul, like the individual people, stood in relation to one another.

In the middle of the picture of the clashing nationalities, I was in my youth in Austria in it. There one learns about the origin of the nationality idea in a different way than one can learn when living in a homogeneous national body. I was also unable to acquire what is usually called “patriotism” or “national enthusiasm” by working for it. »; nor to the people whose language I speak, for the reason that at the time when one acquires these feelings, when one experiences these feelings, the people among whom I lived were filled with a hatred that can truly be called »hatred of Germans«. Nowhere was this hatred of Germans more intense than in the area of Austria where I grew up. I got to know it in my own family. I did not grow up or was educated in the love of Germanness.

Perhaps some of you recognize that it was precisely because of this homelessness that I was entitled to speak in our area about things about which I would otherwise have to remain silent. That is how it is in my feelings, that is how it is when you struggle through life and its pitfalls. And one can only justify a judgment in one's own soul if one has truly fought for it for decades. I would not make anything out of all the studies I have devoted to the current European situation, I would not believe that I could see the big picture if I did not feel justified in speaking about these things in a few words as I have just done.

One must submit to necessity. But how tempting it is to judge great situations such as the one we are facing on the basis of individual experiences that one has here or there. How tempting it is to judge an entire nation on the basis of individual experiences, which may – as is inevitable in the present day – be rather poorly substantiated.

But occasionally we may also, dare I say, rise a little on a hill, as symbolized by the hill on which our building stands, and look at the matter with the eye of the soul, which the years of working in spiritual science can give us. There would be much to say and perhaps much will be said when calmer times return. But the one thing I would particularly like to emphasize this evening, my dear friends, is how – I would say – those impulses that are now discharging in such a heartbreaking and often horrific way were prepared within European humanity. One could see, as it were, how, with forces still superior to our own, what is expressing itself in our time seized everything that strives towards the true goal of humanity out of goodwill, but less out of insight, because only spiritual science strives out of insight. I say this without arrogance, because it strives under the motto: “Wisdom is only in truth.”

My dear friends, a peace movement spread across the various countries. When the Libyan war broke out, the members of the movement in Milan united and passed a resolution in favor of the Libyan war. They expressed their confidence in the minister who had unleashed this war. Facts are what matter, not opinions. And how could it have been hoped otherwise than that it would have to turn out as it has in Europe now, since, I would like to say, for centuries materialism, rooted in the most diverse living conditions, produced the impulses that are now there. The beginning of the 19th century still saw the Napoleonic campaigns across European soil. I do not want to talk about them, but I want to draw attention to one thing that we must write in our souls when we are carried away by what the individual hears: a saying that Napoleon said to the Austrian Chancellor Metternich:

"You, Metternich, were never a soldier and therefore do not know what goes on in a soldier's soul. I came of age on the battlefield; a man of my stamp does not care in the least whether a million soldiers have to bite the dust. I spared the French wherever I could. Of the 300,000 men that Moscow cost me, only 30,000 were French. As long as I could, I sent Germans and Poles into the fire...

I think we have come a little further than we were at the time when Napoleon, of the 300,000 people who lost their lives at Moscow, sent not Frenchmen but Germans and Poles into the fire.

“Any weak-kneed protection of human life is a dangerous mistake in war. That Louis XIV turned the Palatinate into a scene of fire was not, as our miserable histories gossip, worthy of blame, but of the highest praise. But the glory of this act belongs not to the king, but to the minister Louvois.”

Goethe, who was undoubtedly intimately connected with the whole of modern intellectual life, was not inclined to underestimate the man who cherished this attitude. Goethe, who was therefore accused of unpatriotism by lesser minds, hurled the words at all those who reproached him for it: “The man is too great for you.”

Yes, my dear friends, objectivity does exist. As Hegel was writing his Phenomenology of Spirit, the thunder of the French cannons was rolling near Jena; and as he watched Napoleon ride past his window, he said: “It is nevertheless an uplifting feeling to see the world soul riding past on horseback at your window.” He was the great master whose military writings and sentiments are still studied in all European war colleges to learn what he thought about war. One must not forget how Europe learned war.

Goethe had a different view of revolution from that of the German princes. This is clear from the words he wrote in Verdun in 1792:

"Between order and disorder, between preservation and ruin, between plundering and paying, one lives after all, and this may well be what actually makes war pernicious for the mind. One plays the bold, destructive part, and then again the gentle, invigorating one; one gets used to phrases in the midst of the desperate state of inspiring hope and invigorating. This gives rise to a kind of hypocrisy that has a special character and is quite distinct from the priestly, courtly – or whatever else they may be called – quite distinct.

My dear friends, the certainty of recognizing the great necessity of spiritual science can plant that in our soul.

We can see what historical necessities are at hand, we can see how I and consciousness soul, mind and soul of mind and soul, under the influence of the impulses of which has been spoken, could give the world such a picture as we now have before us. It is wrong to apply the everyday standard to these things, and wistfully, I may say, it may make one's heart sink when one has experienced what I have already modestly related to you.

This book, the second volume of my work Die Rätsel der Philosophie (The Riddles of Philosophy), was completed up to page 206. From page 199 to page 204, it deals with French philosophy as represented by Boutroux and Bergson. The book was finished up to this point. It could only be printed during the war. I hope that you will be convinced that, just like everything else, French philosophy by Mr. Boutroux and Mr. Bergson has been treated objectively.

It makes one's heart ache to hear the words as they are spoken by the West and to see what is happening in Europe. One then realizes how much needs to be done for the spiritual life and how much to struggle to be objective.

But there are other things that confront you, my dear friends. I have had a lot to go through in the last few weeks, I have seen and experienced many things. It is remarkable how karma manifests itself in the smallest details of the day.

When I was traveling from Vienna to Salzburg, I happened to come across an Austrian magazine dated September 1, 1914, at a train station. In addition to many other articles, this magazine contains a piece written by Robert Michel while he was in the field. So a soldier in the field wrote this article. He describes how the soldiers were loaded into the wagons, how they were sent into the field, how many were wounded and fell, how the Samaritans came and so on. I do not need to elaborate further. But the conclusion of this article speaks deeply to my heart. I will read this conclusion to you in context. Pay attention to one sentence and listen to the remarkable thing that is said to us:

"But every single person left behind in the monarchy has a duty to support them to the best of their ability until the victorious decision has been made. All the good words, hearty cheers and blessings that were bestowed on the troops as they left increased their courage and confidence, they were tiny splinters of strength that were by no means lost. This boost of mental strength must continue to be given to the poor, and the will to win must be passed from each individual to the fighters at the front. Therefore, let no one rush ahead of the decision that is being prepared in the north. Those who are lucky enough to be able to actively help should stretch their strength to the utmost. But those who must idly watch the tremendous power of the army and the empire should try to contribute their mite on the path that Scelic forces are taking: those whom God hears, pray; those who cannot pray, he should gather all his thoughts and willpower into a fervent desire for victory; and he who can do nothing else should press his fingers into the palms of his hands and say: We must go, we must win! ... In this way, the least and weakest will also have contributed to the victory that we are preparing to fight for, even if it is with the sacrifice of our last drop of blood!"

What education! For years we have spoken of the reality of the powers of thought and will. Here it comes back to us like an echo: “Those who cannot pray should gather all their powers of thought and will in a fervent desire for victory.”

I have to think of what I said to you last time. I said that human evolution must progress; by a certain point something must give way. To do this, it is necessary that in our time a certain amount of selflessness and willingness to sacrifice is achieved. Our spiritual science knows that this must come, but whether it is heard is another question. What must happen, must happen.

And now the second great teacher enters the stage. Does he not teach people what seems like an echo of what we have been saying from soul to soul for years – the appeal to the reality of the powers of thought and will?

We must only find the possibility, through all our efforts and through a non-arrogant nature, to rise to the greatness that the problem of our time presents.

How could it not be self-evident, my dear friends, that what occurs as a force between individual human souls should also occur in the external world, and that we must preserve it so that we can judge great things with a healthy view, that is the sense of justice and truth.

The world will only learn the truth about past events little by little. Our spiritual science gives us guidelines for everything, if only we want to use them to find the right tones and nuances of feeling in our hearts, as far as possible removed from all criticism. But understanding must

s achieved who but, my dear friends, how, under the influence of the other impulses, the constellation has arisen in such a way that, on the one hand, what has come as materialism can neither be lived out differently nor fought differently than as it happens. We must take things objectively, we must be clear about the fact that only the lack of spiritual impulses has gradually led to the surfacing of nationality principles based in instincts rather than in spirituality. We must be clear that only by freeing ourselves from this instinctual life can we move forward.

And how can our Russian friends, embraced by our hearts, not consider that the noble Russian people today must especially take to heart the spiritual science that will enable those who want to see things objectively and clearly to truly distinguish between the great task of this people and has been conjured up by an excessive imperialism, by an excessive materialism, which only wants to make up for a defeat by attacking European culture, and what has been conjured up by the foolish and mendacious talk of Pan-Slavism. Our Russian friends, who have our full support, must gain the conviction from the humanities that they must distinguish between the noble forces that lie in their nationality and the collaboration with what is not fundamental to their national soul, with what has happened in such a terrible way, to justify which would represent a lack of inner objectivity.

They [you?] will find each other in their hearts and minds if they [you?] keep an open mind for objectivity, for the objective.

I know, my dear friends, that there is a way and that there is ground – if you just look for it – on which our English friends can judge the statesman Grey just as I judge him. This ground exists, and it is the most sacred task, the most sacred task, to find this ground. If we find it, we will understand this structure, which we laid the foundation stone for a year ago. We will find the paths from soul to soul, from heart to heart.

The present is also expressed through something else. I only need to give a few figures to show the contrast we are facing. I am not criticizing these figures, far from it. But we must be aware of the figures, because figures speak for themselves, and since we live in a neutral country, I will use the figures of this neutral country.

My dear friends, we face each other according to our principle: heart to heart, soul to soul. What stands in Europe facing us? There is no rejection in this, no blaming criticism. In Europe, we face each other on the field that we looked out on a year ago as such a peaceful field. Now we face each other with fighting armies in their wartime strength, and this wartime strength speaks a clear language. First, France has a war strength of 4,372,000 men; second, Germany has 4,350,000 men; third, Russia has 3,615,000 men; fourth, Austria-Hungary has 1,872,178 men; fifth, England has 1,081,294 men.

To get a sense of the statistics, let's compare Germany, Austria, Hungary and France with Russia and England. Germany, Austria and Hungary, where the ego comes to life, have a total wartime strength of 62,221,780 men. France, Russia and England have a total of 9,068,694 men. The peacetime strength shows somewhat different numbers. At that time, when there was still peace, it amounted to 655,899 men for Germany, 414,679 men for Austria-Hungary, a total of 1,070,578 men, compared to 609,865 men for France, 1,384,000 men for Russia, and 254,968 men for England, a total of 2,248,833 men. The latter three empires thus had more than twice as much as Germany and Austria-Hungary in peacetime.

My dear friends, I would rather not comment on these figures, because it is difficult to do so at this time. It is really necessary that we let these official figures, which I have not taken from any of the individual states, but from this country, which is neutral to our satisfaction and where we are allowed to be with our construction with thanks, have an effect on us. I will not add anything to these figures. They speak of the necessity that the world now faces. It is necessary for us to be objective. No matter how trivial this truth may sound, I am not afraid to emphasize it again and again, because I know how difficult it will be to be objective in this time, justifiably difficult, naturally difficult, excusably difficult! After all, one can only see what is closest.

But, my dear friends, let us allow the spiritual science within us to be a truth! Let us not forget that what we have worked for over the years is not a game. Let us not forget, my dear friends, that we have no right, after having gone through all this and looking into the structure of the interrelationships of the folk soul, to fall back on the words of a Maeterlinck, who only drew his wisdom from Novalis and is now taking such a strange and ungrateful stand on current events. It is heartbreaking to see how he reflects what he has drawn from Novalis. It is heartbreaking, but I say it without bitterness. And it may be received without bitterness, even though today, of course, we are confronted in the outer world with what has really occurred after every outbreak of war: that it was always the other person's fault. That was always the case and, of course, it is the case today. That is understandable.

But for us it should not be about the guilt of the other, but about the realization of the necessity of existence and, in the second place, about what necessarily arises from our spiritual striving. It should be about learning to distinguish between those who made the war - these will not be the nations, but individual people, cliques and so on - and those who have to endure the war.

I would rather just hint at this as a question today, my dear friends. Let us build on what spiritual science can give us. In it we will find the possibility of coming together across all boundaries, from soul to soul, and we will grow stronger and stronger in forging this bond that leads from soul to soul. We will not grow stronger in this if we are unjust and unobjective towards individual nations, but [we will grow stronger] if we really find the hill, the spiritual hill, on which our judgment and our feeling, [like] our building, to which we laid the foundation stone with sacred feelings a year ago, stands symbolically on a hill.

That is my constant yearning now, the thought I pursue and which I would very much like to share with those of our friends who have some of the insights that I believe I have gained from the spiritual world.

You know that I do not want to claim authority, but I will say over and over again what lives in me as my faith, my conviction, my knowledge, as that which I myself have experienced and must experience anew every day and every hour: May our spiritual current may our spiritual current pass the test that must now be passed, by acquiring the right feeling and objectivity towards the events we are now experiencing; by acquiring feelings that exclude injustice towards the individual nations that are now fighting each other.

That is some of what I wanted to say to you at the present time.

My dear friends!

Today I would like to say a few words in advance about the thoughts that have come to me in the wake of the laying of the foundation stone of our building. Here in this place, we want to remember once more the man who is so intimately connected with everything that concerns our spiritual movement: Christian Morgenstern.

It is, my dear friends, not without an inner spiritual connection that Christian Morgenstern is commemorated precisely at the commemoration of our laying of the foundation stone. The last collection of Christian Morgenstern's poems, which was only published after he left the physical plane, is entitled We found a path. Christian Morgenstern found the path he refers to by approaching it, approaching it more and more, and finally standing completely within it in what we call our spiritual stream, our spiritual science and our spiritual life. And what is expressed in that volume is completely imbued with the feelings, with the living ideas that Christian Morgenstern experienced in connection with our spiritual movement. It meant a lot to him that he chose this title: We found a path.

But Christian Morgenstern also had a sense of how to express symbolically how he was connected to our movement. And that is what we also do when we commemorate the laying of our foundation stone. It did not come to that, but this last collection of poems, published with the passing away of Christian Morgenstern from the physical plane, should have included – in Christian Morgenstern's opinion – an illustration of our as yet unfinished main entrance. And we found that a path should have been able to find symbolic expression in the title picture, saying, as it were: He who enters into the feelings that are laid down here in this book will find the way through the gate through which one enters the Dornach building.

So Christian Morgenstern's soul is intimately, intimately connected with the one with whom we also feel so intimately connected. I don't know if all our dear friends have heard what I had to say in some of our branches, some time after Christian Morgenstern left the physical plane. It may sound so strange because it is perhaps too simple a word for the thing I mean: with Christian Morgenstern it came so vividly to my mind how one can get to know people in a completely different way than in the physical life, when one is able to see them after they have left the physical plane. There are many things that my soul now feels close to Christian Morgenstern's soul. I do not want to include the little poem that was added by Margareta Morgenstern on May 13, 1912, in the copy of the poems intended for me, with the beautiful features of Christian Morgenstern, written by him in pencil. But without offending modesty, I may perhaps share the last two lines of this unpublished poem in a certain context here, in connection with me. As I said, it is not out of immodesty, but because I want to come to an occult fact, be it said. In connection with me, insofar as I have to represent this spiritual movement to Christian Morgenstern through my personality. In this regard, the poem concludes with the words

And in my fourfold form
they wrote their cross as a silent stop.

Yes, my dear friends, it was one of the most beautiful, one of the most uplifting and exalted tasks of our spiritual movement to inscribe the Holy Cross, the symbol of our movement, as a silent hold in this four-fold form. And now I often find Christian Morgenstern meditating. And these lines, with those that precede this little poem, always form, so to speak, what is a mediation of the path to this soul. And this soul can be found meditating in many places. That was the peculiarity of this soul, that it really sought the spiritual path to our spiritual movement in the most dignified and earnest way through the gate, the symbol of which was to be on the last collection of poems. And that resonates, even now.

And I only needed to quote one poem that had already appeared in the collection published by Christian Morgenstern in 1911 to then find this soul in its current state. However, a poem that, in its unpretentiousness – I would like to use Goethe's word – “offenbar geheimnisvoll” (apparently mysterious), shows Christian Morgenstern's peculiar place in our movement. After all, Christian Morgenstern was basically as prepared as possible for our movement before he entered its reality, full of longing for the spiritual life, and at the same time ready to take it up to the full. I would like to say that this poem is the one that sheds light on the life of Christian Morgenstern, both before and after. It is so taken from his whole being, as this being was before he entered through our gate, and yet in the last line in such a way that it presents the glorious earthly end to the soul's eye in a certain way. This is the title of this poem:

The animal, the plant, these beings still had
the inhuman patience of the earth;
there was a year, which today is only a second.

Now nothing can happen fast enough for them.
Man began to become impatient.
She senses: Now at last the great hour has come:

I have been breeding myself for millions of years for this.
Now I no longer need to spare my body,
now I will soon be hanging on God's word as a ghost.

I had to emphasize, my dear friends, how the forms of our construction strive for our soul to cling to the mouth of the gods. The soul of Christian Morgenstern, characterizing its own destiny, speaks the words at the end of the poem: “Now I will soon be a ghost hanging on God's mouth.”

Indeed, this soul was well prepared to carry into the spiritual worlds what it was able to absorb to such a full extent here in the earthly world. And so Christian Morgenstern's spiritual body also appeared to me in such a way that woven into his spiritual garment now after death is that which he absorbed here on earth from our spiritual movement in terms of cosmic truths and secrets. This is now like his body, and it is one of the most profound experiences I have had in the spiritual worlds: to see what I strove to find in this earthly incarnation spread out in the spiritual worlds, as in an artistic painting, and to see it interwoven with Christian Morgenstern's spiritual garment. Just as a painting by a genius gives us something in addition to nature, so the spiritual body of a human being gives us something in addition to what is spread out in the field of spiritual life. Truly, this soul remains with us, that may be said, and also accompanies that which is to be the symbol of our spiritual life, the foundation stone of which we laid a year ago.

I wanted to preface this with these words, and now some of Christian Morgenstern's poems, inspired by the immediate spiritual life, are to be recited; and at the end, I will take the liberty of making a further observation that may be suitable to enliven our thoughts a little on this day of remembrance of the laying of the foundation stone.

[A recitation of poems by Christian Morgenstern followed.]

If my intention was to commemorate Christian Morgenstern today, it is connected with the whole way in which Christian Morgenstern, from his own intellectual life, which he lived through before he joined our current, approached this our intellectual movement. And this way of Christian Morgenstern's is, in a sense, only an isolated case, a representative case of impulses, of forces and elements that can be felt in the whole of modern intellectual life, and which were particularly on my mind when we laid the foundation stone for our building a year ago today.

At the time, at the site where our foundation stone was laid, I had to point out how something should be done, how something should be built with this building, that would meet the longings, the spiritual hopes of individual people in the present, and would do so more and more in the future. Unconsciously, it had to be emphasized, the longing for the spiritual life contained in our spiritual current hovers in the souls. The souls long for this spiritual life, they just don't know it. And something would be given, it was emphasized, not out of the arbitrariness of a person or a society, but out of the signs of the times, out of what the time is driving towards, what the souls of the time are striving for, unconsciously perhaps most , those souls who, even for this or that reason, behave very negatively towards the form in which the newer spiritual life, the newer spiritual current, must make its entry into world history.

When I had finished the second volume of my Riddle of Philosophy, the aim was that after almost thirteen years of our spiritual movement, the last chapter should contain a reference to our anthroposophy. Of course, on the few pages that could be devoted to actual spiritual science, only a few of the rich contents that have been on our minds for so many years could be hinted at. The question naturally had to arise for me: What is the most important thing that must first enter into the souls of modern people?

The most important thing that must move in is the realization that there is a spiritual life that dwells and weaves in man independently of the human body, and that this spiritual life is the same that unfolds from embodiment to embodiment in repeated lives on earth. If we leave aside everything else that has passed through our soul, these two truths are such that, one might say, they still move into modern spiritual life as something completely alien. They appear foolish and fantastic to the materialistic mind, contradicting all the scientific spirit of modern times. That is how they appear to the materialistic mind; but a soul that has truly participated in the longings and hopes, in the forces and impulses of modern spiritual life, drinks them in to the full. That soul has cheered ed for the return of spiritual proclamation, and who has suffered from the spiritual life of our time, from the impossibility of taking something from the outer life that justifies speaking of a spiritual world, despite all modern science.

Such a thing can only remain suspended in the spiritual atmosphere for a while, one might say. But then comes the age when such a thing penetrates into the sphere of everyday life itself. And here is the point where the matter of our spiritual movement is directly announced as that which must become the affair of the heart of mankind in the most intimate sense of the word. Today one can still speak as if our spiritual movement were only of interest to a few individual souls, as if it were only for those souls who could feel what must enter into modern spiritual life. But the time is already upon us when souls will become desolate because the spiritual atmosphere, under the influence of materialism, gives them no vitality.

You, my dear friends, have all reached the age where so much remains of the more or less spiritual impulses of a more spiritual past that your souls cannot yet be so desolate, that your souls are still searching for the spiritual world, but do not know the desolation that will come upon the next generation if the spiritual impulse of spiritual culture does not flow into humanity. Those who are young children today will face a life that will constantly ask them - not in theory, but in life itself - the question: What is the meaning of life? Why this bleak existence?

And in the future, the pale faces of those who are young children today, distorted by the hardships and worries of life, will stand before our souls in horror, unable to see anything in the material world that can comfort the soul in the face of the desolation that can only take hold in a person's life if materialism is the only thing that exists. Then, my dear friends, there comes that great compassion, that all-embracing sympathy that swells in the soul, that empathy with those who will come and who can only find the earth worth living in if the spiritual atmosphere of this earth is prepared by that which spiritual science can give.

I said: Among the most important things that humanity must first understand is the doctrine of repeated lives on earth. A time will come when man who does not know about repeated lives on earth, who has not heard of it, will face life as the most desolate. In individual souls, which are connected with the whole of modern spiritual life, this idea emerged; so it emerged, that if you want to describe how it emerged, you have to say: There are souls that ask themselves: How do we cope with life in the peculiar phenomena that confront us when we survey it? How do we cope?

Then there are souls who are immersed in modern spiritual life and say to themselves: Oh, at least in my imagination I must conjure up an idea of immortality that is initially very far removed from the materialistic consciousness of our time! This idea of immortality sometimes comes to us in the strangest places in modern spiritual life. I would like to point out one such instance as a symptom. On another occasion, I have pointed out to the same modern personality that this idea of immortality does arise in him. But you will see from the very first sentence how it arises!

Herman Grimm, the excellent actor of modern times, a personality with whom I was privileged to exchange many words, once wrote - one might say, strangely enough - the following words in an essay that was actually about a completely different topic:

It is conceivable that the spirit of a human being, released from the bonds of the body, might hover above the earth like a mere mirror of what is happening.

Now, one might say, the hesitation comes:

I am not stating an article of faith here, it is only a fantasy.

But this fantasy is necessary:

Let us assume that for some people, immortality takes this form: they float above the earth, unencumbered by what previously blinded them, and all the destinies of the earth and of mankind from the birth of the planet are revealed to them. The past would be a fabric of harmonious beauty to them. Every thought of a heart would be a necessary part of it, every deed that we call good or condemn, the falling of a tree leaf and the collapse of entire cities, under which the ground begins to move, everything would have the same rank among the events, because it was the same single force that moved everything. Now suddenly, let's dream on...

Herman Grimm does not dare to grasp the thought as reality –

... this spirit, which so freely surveyed things, would be forced to rejoin the body of a mortal human. If this human had the highest talents of every kind, would only the memory of the previous state be possible?

The idea of re-embodiment! Now he develops the thought of how the soul, which he first imagined hovering above the earth in a disembodied state, would have to return to an earthly body.

It would be born in a certain age. It would have a father and a mother, a fatherland, a class, a heart that loves and hates, vanities, pains, joys, vexation, despair, delight – when, even for a moment, would it be capable of the free clarity that was once its element? He would begin to doubt whether he had ever really enjoyed freedom, and the memory of it would soon be compressed into a dark presentiment, hidden deep within his soul. While he usually had the hearts of men before him like a glass beehive, where he saw thoughts flying in and out and working, now he must divine them as secrets.

And so on. These are the passages, my dear friends, in which we encounter the yearning of modern man for what we want, and which, in the form in which it must first appear before humanity, seems so unlikely to this humanity. Our building and our work on it is, as it were, the vow that we want to work devotedly to study the longings and hopes of modern man in order to find from the spiritual world that which can meet these longings, these hopes. I had to express this when the foundation stone was laid a year ago.

I would also like to quote from another passage, from Herman Grimm. Do people today look at the history of the past, at historical life and development, purely in terms of the course of external facts? And materialism has increasingly come to regard it in this way. If we compare what is called history today with what we are trying to describe as the successive life in the post-Atlantic era, it becomes clear how little can be understood in our materialistic times, even in historical matters. This is what must come and for which our building is intended to be a symbol. But the longing for it is there, the deep longing! In a little-known essay by Herman Grimm, there are words that are particularly valuable to me because they basically reflect a conversation I once had with Herman Grimm in Weimar. Herman Grimm said that an expansion of the concept of history was imminent:

A world-historical change is taking place before our eyes today, the like of which has not been seen in any period of history, as far as we are able to survey it. The peoples of Europe are suddenly demanding to be left to their own devices. The mutual influence of the races on each other is to be completely denied in theory and minimized in practice. And this new view is not the fruit of a doctrine propounded by the learned, but of a natural impulse that is shaking peoples to their very depths. It does not emerge in the individual, but moves the masses. Something has secretly ripened and the latest events are the storm that shakes it from the tree. There is a universal law by which great masses of people repel and attract each other, connected with their ability to bring about general spiritual progress either by coming together or by isolating themselves. What we today generally call history is the story of the coexistence of peoples, which the peninsula of Europe, attached to western Asia, has held over the course of the last three or four thousand years.

Regarding the conception of history, Herman Grimm once said that he foresaw a time when all those regarded as great in the 19th century would no longer be regarded as such, but quite different people would emerge from the twilight of time. History has developed in such a way that, in order to judge it today, a transformation of the human soul is necessary, a transformation that reaches down to the very roots of its life. From this point of view, I have emphasized this again and again, but it cannot be said often enough.

Yes, my dear friends, it is impossible to gain from what modern spiritual life has to offer without our spiritual science what we long for here. A new history is sought, a new view of historical development, which is characterized by the words I have just read. But this longing cannot be fulfilled anywhere because the elements, the forces, the impulses for it are lacking. One would like to say: As a yearning, it is present, present in the best of our time, which we strive for as the fulfillment of this yearning.

But what strikes me as particularly profound is the connection between this yearning and what we, in all modesty, strive for when I consider how art itself has taken this path through humanity; when I consider that to him [Herman Grimm] history was an evolution of the imagination. That there are imaginations in humanity that flow unconsciously into humanity in order to be realized in human activity, that history is based on inspiration and intuition, could not be realized by him. For him, it was the imaginative work of nations. He could only gradually replace Maya with what he called the imaginative work of nations, not with what must present itself to the human spirit if it is to find the way up from the physical world into the spiritual. Only later will we truly understand what it meant for the 19th century when Herman Grimm says: What can we find particularly interesting in the way history has presented Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar – Herman Grimm says – interests me much more as he is portrayed by Shakespeare. That is truer than anything a modern historian writes about him.

He repeatedly pointed out how much he likes to read Tacitus: because he is a person who knows how to bring to life what he has to describe, to transform it into the spiritual. And so, from such a premise, a wonderful thought arose, such as that which Herman Grimm wrote down in the nineties and which is in his book on Homer, a thought that really stands there as an anticipation of what was to come as a message from the hierarchies.

[Gap in the text]. How this art took its starting point from the spiritual revelations that came down to people in the primeval culture of nations from the spiritual fathers themselves, how then that which lay in the primeval culture of nations , by the Christ impulse, how this Christ impulse also made its way into artistic forms, but how we then came to a deadlock, to that deadlock in artistic development in particular, at which humanity now stands. It pains me to have settled into the lives of those artists who, from the bottom of their hearts, tried to find what would give modern art spirit again. The life of the serious artist in particular has become tragic, and it stands tragically even before world history, because there is the search for something that can also enter into forms, and because this search can only be met by that which comes from a real, genuine grasp of the spiritual world. How does human longing find itself, how it is rooted in the deeper feelings of precisely those who suffer from modern culture, how it finds itself in harmony with what our spiritual movement is able to give! We have to think back to the Stuttgart cycle 'Before the Gate of Theosophy', where I spoke of Christian initiation and gave the example of foot washing as the first stage.

Many years have passed since we spoke out of the spiritual, how the plant must incline towards the stone, as it owes it the ground of existence; in the same way, the animal inclines towards the plant, and the human being towards the animal, up to the hierarchies of the spirits! This also lived in Christian Morgenstern's yearning. It united harmoniously with what was spoken, and we hear an echo of what was given to the yearning, what spiritual science was able to give to the yearning. We hear it echo in the poem that we heard today, 'The Washing of Feet': 'I thank you, you mute stone...'

It gives me an idea of how what is the best of human longing in this modern age will grow together with what spiritual science has to give us. These longings will flow into our perceptions, into our ideas, into our entire intellectual life. But, as I said, it pains me to look at those artists who sought content for their art. Carstens, Overbeck, Cornelius: they sought to bring the Christ impulse into their art - but it was in vain. Just study a life as tragic as that of Cornelius, who was so close to Herman Grimm: He sought to find the living Christ-life in the form that Christianity had taken, in the form that could penetrate his soul and flow into his art. But he lived in the dead center. Just look at modern architecture: we are not walking through the artistically created, but through the preserved, prepared herbarium of old art styles. Only the living connection with the Christ Impulse will be able to infuse these art forms with life, but only the living Christ Impulse, which penetrates into the forms through what has flowed into people through the Mystery of Golgotha. For it is not by merely speaking of Him that the forms come to life, without which human life is dead in art as well.

All we have been able to do, both with our spiritual movement and with our building, is no more than a beginning; the very first beginning of a building style that is to come, that must come. But that is precisely what we are trying to do with our spiritual movement: to take up the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha into our souls, to take it up completely, and to take it up in such a way that future humanity will need it.

In this context, I must also mention a word that Herman Grimm has just spoken in an essay, in which he divides human development – I have already mentioned this in the Hague cycle – into three millennia: one before the Mystery of Golgotha, then the millennium of the Mystery of Golgotha, and one after. Today of all days, I would like to call to mind the words with which Herman Grimm characterized the second millennium, for these words once again show something of the longings of modern man. They are words that can penetrate deeply into the soul if one looks straight at what lives in the hopes of the new age and what, in essence, can only be fertilized by spiritual science.

The second millennium: Christ stands before us here in two forms. First, as the creeds of the religions allow him to appear:

[...] Christ cannot be placed in a row with other great men as an historical personality. He towers above them and is surrounded by an aura of inviolability. Therefore, many treat the great phenomena of history apart from Christ. They assume Christ's relation to everything else as being recognized. But we cannot avoid him, since he and the personalities connected with him are encountered at every turn, and since even the all-powerful spiritual forces that lived before Christ, I mention Socrates or Plato, can only be understood in comparison with him today.

A high-ranking man who admired him is said to have demanded that Christ be introduced into world history as the author of all human destinies. This demand, it is reported, caused the scholar to experience severe inner struggles, but was ultimately rejected on the grounds that the given explanation had to suffice. Christ appears to us in world history in two forms: as the founder of Christianity and as the superhuman Son of God, as the church teaches.

I consider this dual nature of Christ to be historically untenable. We do not have to explain Christ, but to accept him and the effect of his teaching as a fact. Christ's works are to be incorporated into the report of the course of world events. In Roman political history, the birth and earthly life of Christ belong as an event of world-transforming power, and should not be relegated to church history as a special chapter. The teaching of Christ has been effective from Christ's appearance.

Titus did not destroy Jerusalem only because of it, but it is to blame for the fact that from the reign of Augustus onwards Latin and Greek poetry and the fine arts moved down from the heights because the innermost lifeblood is missing from them from that point on.

Attempts to depict Christ as the most beautiful, most divine of men soon began, and reached their zenith in Raphael's paintings. This took many centuries, but the direction towards this goal is recognizable. Raphael's importance would be incalculable if history were conceived differently, while at the same time no one who conceives of recent history in this way, whether as a writer or a reader, would be compelled to confess or even hint at his own thoughts about Christ if he did not want to.

For it is our human right to do these things in private. Scholars whose work has consisted in investigating Greek history have looked at it in the broadest sense with such enthusiasm that zealots could accuse them of having pagan beliefs. Nothing could be less justified. The development of the Greek spirit is just as beautiful and worthy of knowledge as that of the moving universe, or that of a flower, or that of any law in the field of chemistry.

If we are looking for a reason why Ranke might have doubted for a while whether or not to hold on to the double historical figure of Chrisü, then perhaps it is also about particular inclinations that should be considered in every historian [...] He then easily lifts us up, but this height is not the highest [...] One should find out what he intentionally left unmentioned in his history of the popes [...] He may have been flattered by those who wanted to rise through him, but he renounced purchased praise and loved quiet, untrodden paths where he met no one. When a man like that, growing very old, takes in everything that has happened, his world view has lasting value. But the future does not reveal it.

We feel that new world conditions are forming. Nothing spiritual has remained untouched by them. A veil is already falling over the 19th century: a something that forms a perceptible barrier between us and the recent past. Again and again the question arises secretly and aloud: Where do we want to go, where do we have to go? This uncertainty prevails in all areas of human existence. It produces strange new considerations. Transformation is taking place before our eyes [...].

Consider, my dear friends: a person who strives to find spiritual life in the life of humanity, who even sees the Christ in two forms, but does not want to speak of the form that is not simply human! For Herman Grimm continues:

I believe that for the history of the future, the beginnings of the community he founded point to the Christ as a historically established power of the highest order, as the real living force in human history. The history of Christ, the growing authority of his ideas and general political progress form an intricate web. Raphael's inner urge to depict Christ himself and his experiences did not arise from any coincidences, but from his national-Italian nature [...] We are giving the book that is most widely read today, translated into all the languages of the world: the New Testament, compatible with other books of national origin. These other books are recognized at the same time as the Gospels as a source of our spiritual uplift and education, although there seems to be an unbridgeable gap between them and the Gospels.

These other books, in contrast to the dubious authors of the Gospels, have certain authors who live on at the same time as their works. The most distinguished of them were poets, others were visual artists, alongside them were philosophers who observed nature, and the series is concluded by statesmen and generals. These men of the highest national rank have ruled over nations stretching back to the distant past, and their relationship to national character and to the teachings of international Christianity determines their presence and future everywhere today. A wonderful contrast.

Christ knows only humanity without distinction, whose salvation he sacrificed himself for. [ ] The most powerful men known to the millennia of human history have been five poets living before and after Christ: David, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe. An Oriental, a Greek, an Italian and two Germans. Their careers and poetic powers are very different, but their works have a scope and impact that continues to grow. They also resemble each other in that we can most deeply penetrate their souls critically. For these five we know best of all people's earlier lives. Yes, one could say we alone know them. For we do not know Christ. We gaze at him in awe.

But where is the possibility of presenting the Christ to humanity in a new form? - to present him in such a way that one will no longer need to say: “These five we know best of all people's previous lives. Yes, one could say that we alone know them. For we do not know Christ. We gaze at him in awe.

When humanity decides to accept the spiritual form of Christ in its hearts, the time will have come for which people yearn, because they cannot yet see the form that Christ must take if he is to fulfill their longings. When one enters the path that leads to spiritual science, one will find the possibility to speak about the Christ in such a way that life, content, and certainty will enter into human souls, that certainty which is at the same time the certainty of peace itself. For is it not like a question that is posed but still stands without an answer when Herman Grimm says: he believes that - for the history of the future - the formation of the first Christian community as the actual living element of human history points to the Christ as a historically firmly established power of the highest order.

Spiritual science is the answer to such questions, the answer that must be given today. For it is precisely with regard to the contemplation of Christ that humanity has arrived at a dead end. Herman Grimm felt it rightly when he said that he only had the questions but not the answers! The answers will have to be kept back as long as it is not firmly grounded in spiritual science.

But how it is also, my dear friends, with the placing of this Christ-figure in the culture of the present still! How far is still that, what pulsates through the present souls, from what we must seek as this Christ-figure! Indeed, it must be said that the unpleasantly that Herman Grimm spoke of in relation to the Christ biographers, confronts us more and more. For the way in which people of the present time seek to understand Christ on the basis of what external cultural life of the present still knows, has indeed more and more of the unpleasantly. The tones with which Christ was characterized in past centuries are worn out and can no longer live in the modern soul. New tones and new modes are needed for this very purpose. Therefore, we see how the representations of Christ become more and more unpleasant and unpleasant if these representations of Christ cannot draw from what spiritual science is meant to open up for humanity. They become increasingly unpleasant and unedifying the closer they approach the present day. I would say that we have experienced the most unpleasant thing in a portrayal of Christ in the very bad drama of a grand duke, which represents a blasphemy of everything that happened through and around Christ, and which so clearly demonstrates the low point in the portrayal of that which happened through Christ. How our spiritual life, according to the means of the present, leads to the impossible: this is precisely what this abominable Christ drama shows, which is actually an anti-Christ drama in its whole attitude. But from the spiritual life of the present, longings are developing that are good soil and are becoming more and more good soil from which to sprout what we strive to put into it as seeds, into this soil full of hopes and longings, in this soil in which the hopes and longings of those who already live as young children today must be transformed into certainties, and are condemned to live unhappily unless spiritual science comes among humanity.

We see the yearnings everywhere, we see them also in the soil from which the unfortunate Christ drama, of which I have spoken, sprang. We also see the yearning for an understanding of this Christ impulse, but we also see, so to speak, the lack of understanding that is shown towards this true yearning for true understanding. I must confess that it was quite a strange feeling for me when I read the words that Solowjow wrote. I only discovered them recently; they made a particular impression on me. You can guess why! Various attacks have come from this or that side in recent times: I have been called a Jesuit from one side; I have been denounced as a Jew in another place; I therefore had to have my baptism certificate photographed.

Well, my dear friends, that does not matter, these are necessary side effects of being forced to say, albeit only in stammering words, what humanity needs. But those others who speak of the longing for a correct understanding of Christ have also been able to report a strange understanding that has been shown to them. Hence the words of Solowjow, spoken in 1886: “I am literally persecuted, my writings are banned because they are said to be harmful to Russia and Orthodoxy. Today I am said to be a Jesuit, tomorrow a Jew, and so on... so that one must be prepared for anything.”

My dear friends, some of what needs to be said as that which comes from the deepest, but also the most necessary longings and hopes of life, some of it has already been found harmful, and it is believed that it must not be allowed! Only when people of the present time come to understand the painful events of the present as a test, and in the sense that I was able to hint at yesterday, allow themselves to be led to a spiritual life, only then will they also recognize the necessity of these painful present events and learn to judge them differently than according to their immediate impression. Yes, my dear friends, it will always be possible to communicate with people who speak like Solowjow, one will find the way to them beyond all national differences. But it is not me, but Solowjow, a member of the Russian nation, of whom I spoke yesterday, the same Solowjow, who spoke words for those with whom there is such a close connection to what afflicts us so painfully today. It is he who characterizes this clique with the words: “Our state, church, and literary scoundrels are so brazen and the public is so foolish that one must expect anything.” Of course, he is talking about those who “absolutely banned” his writings.

My dear friends, today, as we stand before the unfinished building for which we laid the foundation stone a year ago, let us renew our pledge that we will remain true to what spiritual science can give us. Let us absorb the awareness that spiritual science can meet the longings and hopes, the needs of humanity. Let us absorb the consciousness that spiritual science will make it possible for humanity to speak of the Christ impulse in a way that even free spirits like Herman Grimm did not dare to speak of, just as it is necessary to speak of it, especially in view of the painful events of today. And let us absorb the consciousness that if we learn to speak rightly about the Christ, we learn rightly to speak about human history. For the Christ does not belong to one people, the Christ belongs to all people, the Christ did not speak to the members of one people: “You are my brother...” He spoke to the members of all humanity. We then find the way to every human being and to the peace choirs of all higher hierarchies, and find the way to the Christ.

This, my dear friends, must also be a foundation stone that we want to lay in our hearts, on which we want to build the invisible structure, for which the visible structure is the outer symbol. May this outer symbol, in a primitive, elementary way, but at least to some extent fulfill that which we attempted to implore from the world powers a year ago! May it be fulfilled for our good, that in these forms one may see how the spirit, which has communicated itself to the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, streams through our forms, takes hold of the forms, permeates them with the Christ impulse, so that the consciousness may permeate the soul, which is expressed in the words, which are still not understood deeply enough: Not I, but Christ in me! May this structure, too, upon people — even if it only imperfectly represents what is intended — may it at least to a small extent achieve what it wants: upon the human souls that enter it, make the impression: Not I, not my own is that which makes an impression on the eye through the outer forms... but the Christ wants to speak, who through the word of the higher hierarchies seeks an expression, a revelation. And the mouth shall be this structure!

May the souls, finding themselves in the spirit of this building, feel a little imbued with a similar feeling, which can be called: a feeling of the connection of the individual human soul with the soul of the earth, and of the feeling of how this soul of the earth lives today, how it has lived since the beginning of the earth, how it lives in all souls! May this soul then feel itself as a spirit at God's mouth, may this soul speak as Christian Morgenstern:

The animal, the plant, these beings still had
the inhuman patience of the earth;
there was a year, which today is only a second.

Now nothing can happen fast enough for them.
Man began to become impatient.
She senses: Now at last the great hour has come:

I have been breeding myself for millions of years for this.
Now I no longer need to spare my body,
now I will soon be hanging on God's word as a ghost.

May such feelings be able to enter the souls of more and more people when they become familiar with our designs! That is what our building is for. It should never be expected that it represents what it is supposed to be, even to a small degree of perfection: in its highest imperfection, it represents what it can represent of the hopes and longings of modern times. But even if we never dare to speak of the hour of laying the foundation stone as the great hour of world existence, but want to speak of it as the small hour of world existence, even if we say that we can only make a small, contribute a little to the great tasks of humanity, we still want to feel the great tasks of existence, to which, even with small means, we want to devote ourselves to what we laid the foundation for a year ago.

Automated Translation

Emil Grosheintz: It is necessary to discuss [the relationship between the colony developing on the Dornach hill and the Johannesbau-Verein] here because the Johannesbau-Verein has the greatest interest in the prosperous development of the colony and because it is precisely its aim to harmonize the interests of the colonists with the interests of our entire cause – regardless of the fact that what was presented here by Mr. de Jaager was directed directly at the Johannesbau-Verein.

Does anyone else wish to speak on this matter?

It seems that everyone here is satisfied, that no ill will has been expressed, that it has never been said that whether or not one can do something here, get a piece of land and so on, depends on the goodwill of Dr. Grosheintz or Dr. Grosheintz.

Rudolf Steiner: It is a pity that these things, as we have heard them, are passed on, because the difficulty always lies in the transition from a special thing to generalities, to general sentences - I think. It is not right if it turns out that although some individual thing is highly unsatisfactory, the sentence is formulated as if there were fundamental contradictions between the colony and the Johannesbau-Verein, and if such a sentence is passed on, it creates bad blood in public and confusion in people's minds. This is something we should avoid at all costs.

Let us imagine how such a matter unfolds. So, let us start from the hypothesis that everyone really is of one heart and one soul – which is indeed how it turned out, isn't it – but nevertheless, in one case it is said: Yes, your interests as a colonist and those of the Johannesbau-Verein are two different things, two completely different things. If you have the first thing and then immediately say the second thing as an afterthought, then it may seem harmonious to you, but that's not how it's told. The individual matter in question is left out entirely, but the sentence that is told everywhere remains: the interests of the Johannesbau Association and the colony are two completely different things. And from this sentence, all sorts of accusations arise, so that one can no longer get out of the mutual recriminations.

Consider, please, that it is now a matter of how one says something and what follows from it as an interpretation. Isn't that what it is about! Let's assume that someone had presented in the form of a feature article what the whole discussion here was based on – let's assume that it was so. If you think about it, you will have to say to yourself: If you phrase the words just a little bit more sharply than they are in this feature article, then you come to a completely different conclusion. If, for example, this feature article were to say: “In the forthcoming establishment of the statutes of the colony, it would be valuable for our members to clarify the relationship with the Johannesbau Association,” and further: “The colony strives for a close togetherness, a close unity, a oneness with those who are working spiritually in the present Johannesbau Association, which will have a different significance in the future. Now you recognize the intended path: in the future, the colony is to take over everything material, except the spiritual. And then it will be said that the work of the Johannesbau Association should only be a purely spiritual one, an inspiring one. It should in no way undertake anything in the outside world without the mediation of the colony, which will represent all matters to the world. The colony should then consider it one of its duties to construct the individual buildings, found a university, own the land, and so on.

Once the colony had achieved victory over the Johannesbau Association, it would appear as the world's organ for the Johannesbau; it would now endeavor to realize all the ideals of the Johannesbau Association. However, the funds would not be provided by the colonists, but raised through voluntary contributions. In other words, the Johannesbau-Verein would have to disappear, that is, it would be restricted to the construction of the Johannesbau, and the Johannesbau-Verein's further work would be transferred to the colony. So there would be two links, so to speak: a Johannesbau-Kolonie and a Johannesbau-Rat with an advisory, non-voting voice. Those with an advisory vote: these are the people who are listened to and allowed to speak, but not to vote; only the others are allowed to vote. The members of the Johannesbau-Verein can then continue to work as the Johannesbau-Beirat, but the members of the colony as the executive power, as a major power, one might say.

Isn't it true that you just need to put it in a somewhat exaggerated form and spread it around, then it becomes self-evident, as we have seen here, that the Johannesbau Association is such a crazy thing that it needs to be taken over by practical people as soon as possible. These practical people will then put right what those people have made a mess of. And that will then be spread as a mood. And very soon we will hear that it must happen that way.

I think it's really about how to move from one thing to another. Because mistakes were made in this regard, it happened that lately these things were carried around so much; I mean, this word, that there was a conflict between the Johannesbau Association and the colony, should not have been said at all. Right? It shouldn't have been said at all, it doesn't really have any content. So I mean: why is it necessary to create difficulties that don't need to be there at all?

If it really is the case that everyone is of one heart and one soul, that no one distrusts anyone, then everything should be done to affirm this trust, to put it on a firm footing. This is precisely where we face a major difficulty: those who, in a sense, sacrifice themselves for our cause, who devote all their spare time to our cause, are often, and I cannot put it any other way, misunderstood in the most acute way. You hear words like, “It's a terrible economy, you don't know what's behind it!” Such words have already been said; of course it is not worth investigating who said them. It is true that such words have been said, and they are passed on. But why is this not avoided, especially by those who could avoid it? Why don't they see to it that the trust is reaffirmed, as is only right? Why don't they see how the chairmen of the Johannesbau Association devote themselves to our cause and put all their available manpower at the service of the cause? Why don't they want to consolidate and reaffirm the trust when they have it in their hands? Why do they instead do things that are likely to cause misunderstandings?

It is important, my dear friends, that a matter such as the one we have just heard is discussed afterwards, so that we can see how wrong things can turn out. It is wrong, of course, to come up with such documents as those read to us today. And what is wrong does not cease to be wrong if someone says afterwards: I only did it for idealistic reasons. The person who wrote the document may have had an idealistic reason, and another person may have had one as well, but when you send out such a letter, you are responsible for what you have done. You are not only responsible for what you intended, but also for everything that follows from it. Of course, the best of intentions may be behind it, but that does not change the bad effect. And there is also not a very thoughtful piece of work behind such a document. One should really pay attention to what one says.

I say all this on the assumption that there is now complete harmony here, in the fullest, most luminous sense. Why does it appear as if that were not the case? There are things that have happened, but did not have to happen.