The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Privately printed for the members of the College of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. No one is considered competent to pass judgment upon these writings who has not acquired the prerequisite knowledge demanded by this school, either through the school itself or in a manner approved by it. Opinions expressed by other persons will be disregarded; the authors of the writings in question will engage in no discussion regarding them.

This lecture was given at Basel in December of 1918, and is included in Volume 187 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 1 of 8 from the lecture series: How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again? It was published in German as, Wie Kann die Menschheit den Christus Wiederfinden? Das Dreifache Schnattendasein Unserer Zeit und das Neue Christus-licht. It has been translated from notes unrevised by the lecturer, by Olin D. Wannamaker.

Like two mighty pillars of the spirit have the two annual festivals, the festivals of Christmas and Easter, been set by the Christian cosmic feeling within the course of the year, which should be a symbol of the course of man's life. We may say that in the conception of Christmas and the conception of Easter there stand before the human soul those two spiritual pillars upon which are inscribed the two great mysteries of man's physical existence which he must look upon very differently from the way in which he views other events in the course of his physical life. It is true that a super-sensible element is projected into this physical life—through sense observation, through intellectual judgments, through the content of feeling and will. But this super-sensible element is in other cases clearly manifest as such—for instance, when the Christian cosmic feeling undertakes to symbolize it in the festival of Pentecost. In the Christmas conception, however, and that of Easter, attention is drawn to those two events occurring within the course of the physical life which are in their external appearance purely physical but which—in contrast with all other physical events—do not immediately manifest themselves as physical events. We can look upon the physical life of man as we look upon nature; we can thus look upon the external side of the physical life, the external manifestation of the spiritual. But we can never view with our physical vision the two boundary experiences of the course of human life—not even the external aspect, the external manifestation—without being brought face to face, even through our physical vision, with the tremendous riddle, the element of mystery, in these two events. They are the events of birth and death. And in the life of Christ Jesus stand these two events of man's physical life—and likewise in the Christmas and Easter conceptions, reminding us of them—confronting the responsive Christian heart.

In the thought of Christmas and the thought of Easter, the soul of man wills to look upon the two great mysteries. And, as it thus looks, it finds in this contemplation strength filled with light for man's thought, content filled with power for the will, an upright lift of the whole man, from whatever situation he needs this upright lift. As they thus confront us, these two pillars of the spirit—the thought of Christmas and the thought of Easter—they possess an eternal worth.

But, in the course of man's evolution, his capacities of conception have approached in manifold ways the great Christmas thought and the great Easter thought. During the earliest times of the evolution of Christianity, when the Event of Golgotha had penetrated with shattering effect into human emotions, men gradually found their way to the view of the Redeemer dying on Golgotha, as they came during the earliest Christian centuries to feel in the Crucified One hanging on the cross the thought of Redemption, and gradually formed for themselves the great and powerful imagination of the Christ dying on the cross. But in the later times, especially since the modern age began, Christian feeling—adapting itself to the materialism rising in human evolution—has turned to the picture of the childlike element entering the world in the newborn Jesus.

We can certainly say that a sensitive feeling will find in the way in which the Christian sentiment of Europe has turned during recent centuries to the Christmas manger something of a materialistic Christianity. The craving—this is not said in a bad sense—to caress the infant Jesus has become trivial in the course of the centuries. And many a song about the infant Jesus felt in our day to be beautiful—or charming, as many express it—will not seem to us to possess a deep enough seriousness in the presence of these more serious times.

But the Easter thought and the Christmas thought, my dear friends, are two eternal pillars, eternal memorial pillars, of the human heart. And we can truly say that our age of new spiritual revelations will cast a new light upon the Christmas thought; that the Christmas thought will gradually come to be felt in a new form and in a glorious way. It will be our task to hear in the present world events the call to a renovation of many an old conception, a call to a new revelation of the spirit. It will be our task to understand how a new conception of Christmas, for the strengthening and uplifting of the human soul, is working its way up through the present course of world events.

The birth and death of the human being, no matter how we may analyze them, how intensely we may look at them, manifest themselves as events which play their role directly upon the physical plane, and in which the spiritual is so dominant that no one who earnestly reflects upon things could deny that these two events, these earthly events of human life, give evidence as they work upon the human being that man is the citizen of a spiritual world. No vision of the natural world can ever succeed—in the midst of what can be perceived by the senses, understood by the intellect—in finding in birth and death anything other than events in which the intervention of the spirit is manifested directly in the physical. Only these two events manifest themselves thus to the human heart.

As to the Christmas event also, the event of birth, the human and Christian heart must have an ever deepening sense of mystery. We can say that men have seldom risen to the level whence they could, in the true sense, direct their look to the mysterious nature of birth. Very seldom, indeed, but then in concepts that speak to the utmost depths of the human heart.

So it is, my dear friends, in the conception associated with the spiritual life of Switzerland of the fifteenth century, with Nicholas von der Flue. It is related of him—and he himself related this—that, before his birth, before he could breathe the outer air, he had beheld his own human form, that which he would wear after his birth should have occurred and his life should have begun its course. And he had beheld before his birth the ceremony of his own christening, the persons who were present at the christening and who shared in his earliest experiences. With the exception of one elderly person who was then present and whom he did not know, he recognized the others because he had already seen them before he beheld the light of the world.

However we may view this narration, we shall not be able to escape the impression that it points in a way to the mystery of human birth, which confronts world history so magnificently symbolized in the Christmas conception. In the story of Nicholas von der Flue we shall find the suggestion that there is connected with our entrance into the physical life something which is concealed from the every-day view of humanity only by a very thin partition wall; by a wall which can be broken through when such a karmic situation exists as was present in the case of Nicholas von der Flue. Such a startling allusion to the mystery of birth and of Christmas still meets us here and there; but we must say that humanity has as yet become very little aware of the fact that birth and death, the two boundary pillars of human life facing us in the midst of the physical world, reveal themselves even in their physical manifestation as spiritual events, such as could never occur within the mere course of nature; as events in which, on the contrary, spiritual divine Powers intervene, as is evident in the very fact that both these boundary experiences of the course of human life must still remain mysteries, even in their physical manifestation.

The new revelation of the Christ now leads us to contemplate the course of man's life—so we may safely say—as Christ wills that we should contemplate it in the twentieth century. Let us recall today, as we desire to enter deeply into the thought of Christmas, a saying reported to have been uttered by Christ Jesus which can rightly lead us to the Christmas conception. The saying runs thus: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Except ye become as little children”—this is truly not an exhortation to strip away all the mystery character of the Christmas conception, and to drag it down to the triviality of “dear little Jesus,” as many folk songs and artistic songs have done—but the folk songs less than the artistic—in the course of the materialistic evolution of Christianity. This very saying—“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven”—impels us to look upward to mighty impulses surging through the stream of human evolution. And in our own present time, when all that is taking place in the world surely does not give occasion for lapsing into trivial conceptions of Christmas, when the human heart is filled with so much that is painful, when this human heart must reflect upon so many millions of human beings who have met their death in the last few years, must reflect upon countless multitudes who hunger for food,—in this time surely nothing is fitting for us save to behold the mighty thoughts within world history which impel humanity in its onward course, thoughts to which we can be guided by the saying, “Except ye shall become as little children,” which we can supplement by this other saying: “Unless you live your life in the light of this thought, you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

My dear friends, the very moment when the human being enters into the world as a child he withdraws from the world of spirit. For what occurs in the physical world, the procreation and growth of his physical body, is only the ensheathing of that event which cannot be described otherwise than by saying that man in his deepest being withdraws from the spiritual world. Man is born out of the spirit into a body. When the Rosicrucian said: “Ex deo nascimur,” he meant the human being to the extent that he enters the physical world. For that which constitutes the sheaths around the human being, which renders him a physical totality here on the earthly globe, is what is indicated by the saying: Ex deo nascimur. If we look at the centre of the human being, at the inner midmost entity, we must say that man journeys out of the spirit into the physical world. Through that which occurs in the physical world, that upon which he has looked down from the land of the spirit before his conception or his birth, he is enveloped in his physical body, in order that he may experience in his physical body things which cannot be experienced except in such a body. But, in his centre-most being, man comes out of the spiritual world. And he is of such a nature that in his earliest years—to the eyes of those who will to see things as they are in the world, who are not blinded by the illusion of materialism—he is of such a nature, this human being, that he reveals even in his earliest years how he has come out of the spirit. What we experience in connection with the child is of such a character, for those who possess insight, as to reveal to one's feeling the after effects of experiences in the spiritual world.

It is to this mystery that such narrations as that associated with the name of Nicholas von der Flue are intended to allude. A trivial view, strongly influenced by a materialistic mode of thinking, declares in its simplicity that the human being gradually develops his ego in the course of his life from birth to death; that this ego becomes more and more powerful and mighty, more and more distinctly manifest. This is a naive way of thinking, my dear friends. For, if we look upon the true ego of man, upon that which comes into a physical sheathing at the birth of the human being out of the spiritual world, we then express ourselves very differently about man's whole physical evolution. That is, we then know that, as the human being progressively develops in the physical body, the true ego actually vanishes out of the physical form, that it becomes less and less manifest; and that what develops here in the physical world between birth and death is only a mirrored reflection of spiritual occurrences, a dead reflection of a higher life. The right form of expression would be to declare that the entire fullness of the being of man gradually disappears into the body, becoming continually less and less manifest. As the human being lives his physical life here upon the earth, he gradually loses himself in his body, to find himself again in the spirit after death. So does one who knows the facts express himself. But one who is ignorant of the facts declares that the child is incomplete, and that the ego little by little develops to an ever greater perfection, growing out of the undefined subconscious levels of man's existence. He who knows what is beheld by the spiritual seeker must express himself in just this realm otherwise than is done by the sense-consciousness of our age, enmeshed in external illusions, still always materialistic in the trend of its sentiments.

Thus man enters the world as a spiritual being. His bodily nature, while he is a child, is still undefined; it has as yet laid small claim to the spiritual nature, which enters the physical existence as if there falling asleep—but appearing to us so little filled with content only because we can perceive this spiritual being, in ordinary physical life, just as little as we can perceive the sleeping ego and astral body when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies. But the fact that we do not perceive a being does not make it less perfect. This is what the human being has to acquire by means of his physical body—that he entombs himself more and more in the physical body for the purpose of achieving by means of this burial in the body capacities which can be acquired only in this way, only through the fact that the spirit and soul being for a time loses itself in the physical existence. In order that we may always remember our spiritual origin, that we may grow strong in the thought that we have journeyed out of the spirit into the physical world—it is for this reason that the Christmas conception stands there like a mighty pillar of light amid the Christian cosmic feeling. This thought, as a Christmas thought, must grow ever stronger in the future spiritual evolution of humanity. Then will the Christmas conception become powerful again for humanity; then will mankind once more approach the Christmas festival in such a way as to draw forces for the physical life out of the Christmas conception, which can remind us in the right way of our spiritual origin. Seldom can this Christmas thought be so powerful at the present time as it will then be in human hearts. For it is a strange fact, but rooted in the very laws of spiritual existence, that what comes to light in the world—bearing mankind forward, helpful to mankind—does not at once appear in its ultimate form: that it first appears, as it were, tumultuously, as if prematurely brought forth by unlawful spirits in world evolution. We understand the historic evolution of humanity in its true meaning only when we know that truths are not to be understood only as they first appear oftentimes in world history, but that we must consider in relation to truths the right moment for their entrance into human evolution in their true light.

Among many kinds of thoughts which have entered into the evolution of modern humanity—certainly inspired by the Christ impulse, but at first in a premature form—is the conception of the equality of mankind before God and the world, the equality of all men, a thought profoundly Christian but capable of an ever increasing profundity. But we should not place this thought before men's hearts in such a generalization as that given to it by the French Revolution, when it first appeared tumultuously in human evolution. We must be aware of the fact that this life of man from birth to death is involved in a process of evolution, and that the primary impulses working upon it are distributed in time. Let us reflect about the human being as he enters into the sensible existence: he enters life filled with the impulse of the equality of the human nature in all men. We sense the child nature with the greatest intensity when we see a child permeated through his whole being by the conception of the equality of all men. Nothing which creates inequality among men, nothing that so organizes men that they feel themselves different from other men—nothing of all this enters at first into the child's nature. All this is imparted to the human being in the course of the physical life. Inequality is created by the physical existence; out of the spirit human beings come forth equal before the world and God and before other human beings. Thus does the mystery of the child declare.

And to this mystery of the child the Christmas conception is united, which is to find its deeper meaning in the new Christian revelation. For this new Christian revelation will take into account the new Trinity: the human being, as he directly represents humanity; the Ahrimanic; and the Luciferic. And, as it comes to be known how the human being is placed in the world in a relationship of balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, it will be understood also what this human being really is in the external physical existence.

Most of all must understanding come about, Christian understanding, in reference to a certain aspect of human life. Clearly will Christian thought proclaim in future what has already been affirmed by certain spirits since the middle of the nineteenth century, though in stammering accents and never quite distinctly. When we grasp the fact that the thought of equality enters the world in the child, but that forces of inequality later develop in man, as if from the fact of his having been born, forces that do not seem to belong to this earth, then just in regard to the conception of equality another profound mystery faces us. To see into this mystery, and through seeing into it to gain a true conception of man, will belong from the present time onward among the weighty and essential needs in the future evolution of the life of the soul. This is the depressing problem that faces man: Truly, human beings grow to be unlike, even though they are not so in childhood, by reason of something that is born within them, that is in the blood: their varied gifts and capacities.

The question of gifts and capacities, which cause so many inequalities among men, faces us in connection with the thought of Christmas. And the Christmas festival of the future will always admonish men most earnestly, reminding them of the origin of that which differentiates them so widely over the earth, the origin of their gifts, capacities, talents, even the gift of genius. They will have to inquire about the origin of these. And a true balance within the physical existence will be attained only when the human being can point rightly to the origin of the capacities which differentiate him from other men. The light of Christmas, or the Christmas candles, must give to evolving humanity an explanation of these capacities; it must answer the profound question: Do individual human beings suffer injustice between birth and death under the ordering of the universe? What is the truth about faculties and gifts?

Now, my dear friends, many things will be seen in a different light when humanity shall have been permeated by the new Christian feeling. Most particularly will it be understood why the Old Testament occult conception possessed a special insight into the nature of the prophetic gift. What were the prophets who appear in the Old Testament? They were personalities who had been sanctified by Jahve; they were those personalities who were permitted to employ in the right way special spiritual gifts reaching far above those of ordinary man. Jahve had first to sanctify their capacities, which are born in men as if by reason of their blood. And we know that Jahve works on human beings between their falling asleep and awakening We know that Jahve does not work within the conscious life. Every true believer of the Old Testament said within his heart: That which differentiates men as regards their capacities and gifts, which rises to the level of genius in the nature of the prophet, is born, indeed, with the person, but it is not used by him for a good purpose unless he can sink down in sleep into that realm in which Jahve guides his soul impulses, and transforms from the spiritual world gifts which are otherwise only physical, inherent in the body.

We point here to a profound mystery of the Old Testament conception. The Old Testament view, including that in regard to the nature of the prophet, must disappear. New conceptions must, for the redemption of humanity, enter into the cosmic historic evolution. That which the ancient Hebrew believed was sanctified by Jahve in the unconscious state of sleep the human being must become capable of sanctifying in the modern age while he is awake, in a state of clear consciousness. But he can do this only if he knows, on the one hand, that all natural gifts, capacities, talents, even genius, are Luciferic endowments, and work in the world Luciferically. unless they are sanctified and permeated by all that can enter into the world as the impulse of the Christ. We touch upon a tremendously important mystery of the evolution of modern humanity when we grasp the central kernel of the Christmas conception, and call attention to the fact that the Christ must be so understood and so felt by men in their hearts that they stand as New Testament human beings before the Christ and say: “In addition to the inclination of the child, his aspiration, toward equality, I have been endowed with various capacities and talents. But they can lead permanently to good results, to the welfare of humanity, only provided these gifts, these talents, are dedicated to the service of Christ Jesus; only if the human being strives to permeate his whole nature with the Christ, in order that human gifts, talents, genius may be freed from the grasp of Lucifer.”

The heart permeated by the Christ takes away from Lucifer what works otherwise Luciferically in man's physical existence. This thought must powerfully influence the future evolution of the human soul. This is the New Christmas thought, the new annunciation of the influence of the Christ in our souls, bringing about the transformation of the Luciferic—which does not enter into us because we journey out of the spirit, but is to be found in us because we are clothed in a blood-permeated physical body which bestows upon us capacities derived from the line of heredity. Within the Luciferic stream, within that which works in the stream of heredity, do these characteristics appear, but they are to be conquered and mastered during the physical life by that which the human being can feel in connection with the Christ impulse, not through Jahve inspiration in sleep, but through the fruition of man's experiences in full consciousness.

“Direct yourself, O Christian, to the Christmas thought”—thus does the new Christianity speak—“and lay there upon the altar set up for Christmas every differentiation you have received as a human being from your blood, and sanctify your capacities, sanctify your gifts, sanctify even your genius as you behold it illuminated by the light which comes from the Christmas tree.”

The new annunciation of the spirit must speak a new language, and we must not be dumb and unheeding toward the new revelation of the spirit which speaks to us in this deeply serious age in which we live. When we are sensitive to such thoughts, we are living with the power with which man ought to live in this time in order to discharge the great duties which are to be assigned to humanity in this very age. The full gravity of the Christmas thought must be experienced: that in our day there must enter into the waking consciousness of humanity what the Christ willed to say to men when he uttered the words: “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” The thought of equality which the child manifests, if we look upon him in the right way, is not convicted of falsehood by reason of these words, for that Child whose birth we commemorate on Christmas eve, proclaims to human beings in the course of their evolution through the history of the world—revealing ever new thoughts—clearly and distinctly, that the differentiating gifts we possess must be placed within the light of the Christ who ensouled this Child; that all which these differentiating gifts bring about within us human beings must be placed upon the altar of this Child.

You may now ask under the inspiration of the Christmas thought: “How may I experience the Christ impulse within my own soul?” Alas, this thought is often a heavy burden in men's hearts.

Now, my dear friends, that which we may call the Christ impulse does not become rooted in our souls in a moment, forthwith and tempestuously. And in different ages it takes root differently in man. In our day man must take into himself in full clear waking consciousness such cosmic thoughts as have been stammeringly imparted by spiritual knowledge as guided by Anthroposophy, to which we belong. As these thoughts are proclaimed to him—provided he truly understands them—they can awaken within him the assurance that the new revelation, the new Christ impulse of our age, truly enters into him on the wings of these thoughts. And such a person will sense the new impulse if only he pays heed to it.

Make the endeavour, in the sense we intend, in living reality as is appropriate to our age, to take into yourselves the spiritual thoughts of the guidance of the world; seek to take them into yourselves, not as mere teaching, not merely as theory—-seek so to imbibe them that they will move your souls to their very depths, warming, illuminating, permeating them—that you shall bear them livingly within you. Seek to feel these thoughts so intensely that they shall become to you something which seems to pass through your body into your soul and to change your very body. Seek to strip away from these thoughts all abstractions, anything theoretical. Endeavour to discover for yourself that these thoughts are such as constitute a true nourishment of the soul. Seek to discover for yourself that, with these thoughts, not merely thoughts alone enter your souls, but spiritual life coming from the spiritual world.

Enter into the most intimate inner union with these thoughts, and you will observe three things. You will observe that these thoughts gradually eliminate something from within you, which appears so clearly in human hearts in our age of the consciousness soul: that these thoughts, however they may be expressed, eliminate self-seeking from the human soul. When you begin to notice that these thoughts kill egoism, destroy the force of self-seeking, you have then, my dear friends, sensed the Christ-permeated character of spiritual thought guided by Anthroposophy.

In the second place, when you observe that, in the moment when untruthfulness approaches you anywhere in the world, no matter whether you yourself are tempted to be too careless about truth or whether untruthfulness approaches you from another direction—if you observe that in the moment when untruthfulness enters the sphere of your life, an impulse makes itself felt by you, warning you, pointing to the truth, an impulse which will not permit untruth to enter your life, always admonishing you and impelling you to hold fast to truth, then do you sense, in contrast with the life of the present day, so strongly inclined toward mere appearance, the living impulse of the Christ. No one will find it easy to lie in the presence of spiritual thoughts guided by Anthroposophy, or to lack all feeling for mere appearance and untruth. A sign pointing your way to the sense of truth—apart from all other knowledge—you will feel in the thoughts of the new revelation of the Christ. When, my dear friends, you shall have reached the point where you do not strive for a mere theoretical understanding of spiritual science, as this is sought in relation to any other science, but when you have reached the stage where the thoughts so penetrate you that you say to yourself: “When these thoughts become intimately united with my soul, it is as if a Power of conscience stood beside me admonishing me, pointing me toward truth,”—then will you have found the Christ impulse in the second form.

In the third place, when you feel that something streams from these thoughts which works even into your body, but especially into the soul, overcoming sickness, making the human being well and vital, when you sense the rejuvenating, refreshing power of these thoughts, the adversary of illness, then will you have sensed the third part of the Christ impulse in these thoughts. For this is the goal toward which humanity strives through the new wisdom, in the new spirit—to find in the spirit itself the power to overcome self-seeking: to overcome self-seeking through love, the mere appearance of life through truth, the force of illness through health-giving thoughts which bring us into immediate unison with the harmonies of the universe, because they flow from the harmonies of the universe.

Not all that has been indicated can at present be attained, for man bears within him an ancient heritage. It is a mere lack of understanding when such a back-stairs politician as Christian Science twists into a caricature the thought of the healing power of the spirit. Yet, even though our ancient heritage renders it impossible for thought to become sufficiently potent at present to achieve what the human being craves thus to achieve—perhaps, from a self-seeking motive—nevertheless thought possesses healing power. In such things human thinking is always perverted. Some one who understands these things may say to you that certain thoughts give health, and the person who hears this may at a certain time be affected by this or that illness. Indeed, my dear friends, the fact that we cannot at present be relieved of all illnesses by the mere power of thought is due to an ancient heritage. But are you able to say what illnesses would have overtaken you if you had not possessed the thoughts? Could you say that your life would have been passed in its present degree of health if you had not possessed these thoughts? In the case of a person who has applied himself to spiritual science guided by Anthroposophy and who dies at the age of 45 years, can you prove that, without these thoughts, he would not have died at 42 or 40 years of age? Human beings tend always to think from the wrong direction when they deal with these thoughts. They direct their attention to what cannot be bestowed upon them, by reason of their karma, but do not pay attention to what is bestowed upon them by reason of their karma. But if, in spite of everything contradictory in the external physical world, you direct your look with the power of inner confidence which you have gained through intimate familiarity with the thoughts of spiritual science, you then come to feel the healing power, a healing power which penetrates even into the physical body, refreshing, rejuvenating—the third element, which the Christ as the Healer brings with his never ceasing revelations into the human soul.

We have desired to enter more deeply, my dear friends, into the thought of Christmas, which is so closely bound up with the mystery of human birth. What is revealed to us today out of the spirit as the continuing extension of the Christmas thought we desired to bring in brief outline before our minds. We can feel that it gives strength and support to our lives. We can feel that it places us amid the impulses of cosmic evolution, no matter what may befall, so that we can feel ourselves in unison with these divine impulses in the evolution of the world; that we can understand them, and can draw power for our will from this understanding, and light for our life of thought. Man is evolving; it would be wrong to deny this evolution. The only right course is to go forward with this evolution.

Moreover, Christ has declared: “I am with you always even to the end of the world.” This is not a phrase; it is truth. Christ has revealed Himself not only in the Gospels; Christ is with us; Christ reveals Himself continually. We must have ears to harken to what He is ever newly revealing in the modern age. Weakness will overcome us if we have no faith in these new revelations; but strength shall be ours if we have such faith.

Strength will come to us if we have faith in the new revelations, even should they speak to us from life's seemingly contradictory suffering and misfortune. With our own souls we pass through repeated earth lives during which our destiny comes to fulfilment. Even this thought, which empowers us to sense the spiritual behind the external physical life, we can realize only when we take into ourselves in the truly Christian sense the revelations following one upon another. The Christian—the true Christian—when he stands before the candles on the Christmas tree, should begin to work with the strengthening thoughts which can come to him today from the new cosmic revelation, to give power to his will, illumination to his life of thought. And his feeling should be such that the power and the light of this thought may enable him in the course of the Christian year to draw close to that other thought which admonishes of the mystery of death—the Easter thought, which brings the final experience of the earthly life of man before our souls as a spiritual experience. For we shall sense the Christ more and more if we are able to place our own existence in the right relation with His existence. The medieval Rosicrucian, uniting his thought with Christianity, declared: Ex deo nascimur; in Christo morimur; per spiritum sanctum reviviscinius. Out of the Divine have we been born as we contemplate ourselves as human beings here on the earthly globe. In Christ we die. In the Holy Spirit we shall be again awakened. This actually pertains to our life, our human life. If we turn our look away from our life to the life of Christ, then what is represented in our life is a mirrored reflection. Out of the Divine are we born; in Christ we die; in the Holy Spirit we shall again be awakened. This saying, which is true of our first-born Brother, the Christ living in our midst, we can so affirm that we shall feel it to be the Christ-truth raying forth from Him and mirrored in our human nature: Out of the Spirit was He begotten—as this is represented in the Gospel of Luke in the symbol of the descending dove—out of the Spirit was He begotten; in the human body He died; in the Divine will He rise again.

Truths which are eternal we can take into ourselves in the right way only when we see them in their contemporary reflection—not made into something absolute, made abstract in a single form. And if we feel ourselves as human beings, not only in an abstract sense but human beings existing actually at a certain time when it is our duty to act and to think in harmony with this time, then shall we seek to understand the Christ, who is with us always even to the end of the world, in His contemporary language as He teaches us and gives us light regarding the Christmas thought, filling us with the power of the Christmas thought. We shall desire to take this Christ into ourselves in His new language. For the Christ must become intimately related to us. Then shall we be enabled to fulfil in ourselves the true mission of Christ on the earthly globe and beyond death. The human being in each epoch must take the Christ into himself in his own way. This has been the feeling of human beings when they have looked in the right way at the two great pillars of the spirit: at the Christmas thought and the Easter thought. Thus did the profound German mystic, the Silesian, Angelus Silesius, contemplating the Christmas thought, declare:

Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.

And, contemplating the Easter thought, he said:

The cross of Golgotha must be upraised in thee
Ere from thy sin its power shall make thee free.

Truly the Christ must live within us, since we are not human beings in an absolute sense, but human beings of a definite epoch. The Christ must be born within us according to the sound of His words in our epoch. We must seek to bring the Christ to birth within us, for our strengthening, for our illumination, as He has remained with us until now, as He will remain with mankind throughout all ages even to the end of earthly time, as He wills now to be born in our souls. That is, if we seek to experience the birth of Christ within us in our epoch, as this event becomes a light and a power in our souls—the eternal power and eternal life entering into time—we then behold in the true way the historic birth of Christ in Bethlehem and its counterpart in our own souls.

Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.

As He creates the impulse in our hearts today to look upon His birth—His birth in human events, His birth in our own souls—so do we deepen the Christmas thought within us. And then we look away to that night of consecration which we ought to feel coming to pass within us for the strengthening and illumination of human beings for the endurance of many evils and sorrows which they have had to live through and will yet have to live through.

“My Kingdom,” said Christ, “is not of this world.” It is a saying which challenges us, if we look upon His birth in the right way, to find within ourselves the path to the Kingdom where He abides to give us strength, where He abides to give us light amid our darkness and helplessness through the impulses coming from the world of which He himself spoke, of which His appearance on Christmas will always be a manifestation. “My Kingdom is not of this world.” But He has brought that Kingdom into this world, so that we may always find strength, comfort, confidence, and hope out of this Kingdom in all the circumstances of life, if we only will come to Him, taking His words to heart—such words as these:

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Christianity commemorates in three yearly festivals that Being Who, for the Christian, gives earth-life its meaning, and from Whom the strongest force of this earth-life radiates.

Of these three festivals Christmas makes the greatest demand on our feeling, and seeks as it were to make this feeling inward. The Easter festival makes its chief demand on what we call human understanding, human comprehension; and Whitsuntide on what is termed human will.

Basically we only grasp what is contained in the Christmas Mystery through inwardising and deepening of that feeling which makes present to us our entire human being, our worth and dignity as man. Only when we can feel in the right way and with sufficient inwardness what man is in the whole cosmos, are we able rightly to appreciate the mood of Christmas. Only when we can attain to the full understanding of that wonder which is contained in the Easter Mystery—the wonder of the resurrection—shall we rightly value the Easter Mystery; and only when we perceive something in the festival of Whitsuntide which helps to develop our will-impulse, do we perceive in the right light what Whitsuntide should be.

Christ Jesus is related to the Father principle of the world, and this is represented for us by the Christmas festival. Christ Jesus is related to what we call the Son principle, and this is represented by the Easter Mystery; while the relation of Christ to that which undulates and weaves through the world as spirit is made present to us in the Whitsuntide Mystery.

We see nature around us, and we see also that man enters into his physical existence through the forces of this same nature. We know through our study of Spiritual Science that we do not rightly regard nature if we only pay attention to its external physical features. We know that divine forces permeate it and we only become aware of our origin from nature in the true sense of the word when we perceive this divine element that weaves and works within it In this we perceive the Father principle of nature. All that permeates nature as the divine is the Father principle in the sense of the old religions and also in the sense of a rightly understood Christianity—whether it be the flowers of the field that we observe, and how they grow, or the roll of the thunder and the flash of the lightning; or whether we watch the sun in its path across the heavens or gaze upon the shining stars; or whether again we listen to the brooks and the streams rushing along—when we become aware of what is revealed so mysteriously in this external revelation of nature as the origin of all ‘becoming,’ then we are at the same time aware of what places us as men within this world through the mystery of physical birth.

But just in this mystery of physical birth there always remains something inexplicable as regards the nature of man as long as we do not bring it into connection with what may be inwardly experienced in the commemoration of the Christmas Mystery—in commemoration of the childhood which entered into humanity with the Jesus boys.

What does the presence of these Jesus boys say to us? It tells us nothing less than that in order to be fully human it does not suffice merely to be born, that is, merely to be here in the world through those forces which, as the forces of physical birth, bring all beings including man into existence. This holy Christmas Mystery tells us, as we look at the childhood of Christ, that the true human being in us cannot merely be born, but that in the innermost part of the soul it must be born anew; that man must in the course of his life experience something within his soul which alone makes him fully man. And what he should experience can only come to pass when it is brought into connection with that childhood which entered into earth evolution at Christmas time.

As we look upon this Jesus-child we must say to ourselves: “Only through the fact that this Being came down amongst men in the course of human evolution does it first become possible for man to be truly man in the full sense of the word, that is, to connect what he receives through birth with what he can experience above and beyond him as a result of a feeling of devoted love towards that Being Who descended from spiritual heights that He might, through great sacrifice, unite Himself with human existence.”

For many men of the early Christian centuries it was a great experience to gaze on the entrance of the Christ Being into earth evolution. It made evident to them, as it were, man's two-fold origin—his physical and his spiritual origin. It is a birth through which Jesus passes—it is to a little earth-born child the Christian looks when he thinks of Jesus in the world's Holy Night. Yet he says to himself: “What is born here is something different from the rest of mankind, it is a Being through whom the rest of humanity can receive what they cannot receive through physical birth.” Our feeling is deepened when we understand in the right sense and with the right love what is signified in the words: “We must be born twice; the first time through the forces of nature, the second time reborn through the forces of Christ Jesus.”

This is our communion with Christ Jesus; it is this which through Christ Jesus first gives us the full consciousness of our human worth and human character. If we are able, or have the desire, to form a judgment as to the course of development in the centuries, then we must ask the question: “Has this feeling about the birth of Christ Jesus always maintained this depth?” As we look around the world, my dear friends, we cannot say that the same inwardness of feeling concerning the Christmas Mystery is experienced today as it was experienced even five or six centuries ago in Europe.

Think of the Christmas tree—how beautiful it is, and in what a graceful way it appeals to the heart. But the Christmas tree is not something ancient, it is scarcely two centuries old—it became naturalised comparatively quickly within the countries of Europe, but it is only in recent times that it has adorned the Christmas festival What does it actually represent? I might say it represents the beautiful, lovable, more sympathetic side of that which in another way, a way which is less sympathetic and less fair, appears before the soul in modern human development. We may seek ever so deeply to discover the impulses out of which the Christmas tree has originated in what are really quite modern times, and we shall find mysterious and secret feelings out of which the Christmas tree has come, but these secret feelings all tend in the direction of seeing the Christmas tree as a symbol for the Tree of Paradise. What does this signify? It signifies that the feelings which people once experienced as they directed their gaze to the crib and the mystery of the birth of Christ Jesus at the beginning of our era are no longer there, such feelings have become more and more strange to us. It means that for modern humanity, this being born again within the soul has in a sense been lost and modern humanity desires to look back from the Christmas tree that displays the Cross to the origin of earth humanity which knows nothing as yet of the Christ, to the natural starting point of human existence—from Christ back to Paradise, from the festival of Christmas day on the 25th to the festival of Adam and Eve on the 24th day of December. This has become something beautiful, since humanity's origin in Paradise is also beautiful, but it is a diversion from the real birth-mystery of Christ Jesus. This regard for the Christmas tree has preserved all depth and inwardness of feeling and it comforts those who are men of good will as they look at the Christmas tree out of the inwardness of the human heart; it comforts them concerning that other aspect which in modern times has led men away from the Christ mystery to the primal natural forces of birth in human evolution.

Christ Jesus appeared amongst a people who worshipped Jahve or Jehovah, that Jehovah-God who is connected with all that is natural existence, who lives in thunder and lightning, in the motion of the clouds and stars, in the springs and rushing streams, in the growth of plants, animals and men. Jahve is that God who can never, if man is connected with Him alone, give man his completeness, for He gives man the consciousness of his natural birth, with an intermixture of course of a spiritual element which is not merely natural; but He does not give man the consciousness of his rebirth which he must attain through something which cannot be given him by means of natural physical forces. So we see how modern humanity is led away and diverted from Christ Jesus for Whom there is no distinction of class, nation or race, but for Whom there is only a single humanity. We see how the thoughts and feelings of modern humanity have been led aside to that which has already been overcome by the birth of Jesus Christ; to that which lies at the basis of man's origin through the forces of nature and which is connected with the differentiation of men into classes, nations and races. And if it was the one Jehovah that the Jews worshipped when Christ came, then the modern nations have returned to many Jehovahs. For what is worshipped today—even if it is no longer described by the ancient name—the powers to which men do worship when they divide themselves up into nations and make war on each other as nations—they are Jehovahs. We see the nations fighting each other in bloody wars—each at certain moments calling upon the name of Christ—in reality, however, it is not Christ on Whom the nations call, but only Jehovah, not the one Jehovah but a Jehovah. The people have simply returned to him and have forgotten how great a step forward was taken when the Jehovah principle gave place to the Christ principle.

In a beautiful way does the Christmas tree lead us back to man's origin; in an ugly and hateful way does the national Jehovah principle lead us back. In reality that which is only a Jehovah, through an unconscious lie, is often addressed as Christ, and the name of Christ is thus misused. Terribly is the name of Christ misused at the present time, and we shall not acquire the real depth of feeling that is necessary today in order rightly to experience the Christian mystery again unless we see clearly that the way to this feeling concerning Christ Jesus must be sought. We need a new understanding of what has been traditionally handed down about the birth of Christ Jesus.

It was to two kinds of people, my dear friends, who were nevertheless representatives of our ONE humanity, that Christ Jesus was announced at the Christmas festival. First he was announced to the poor uneducated shepherds of the field who had absorbed nothing of culture but were quite simple men both in intellect and heart And then it was also announced to the wise men from the East, that is, from the land of wisdom. To them it was announced through the highest summit of their wisdom, through their ability to read the stars. Thus Jesus Christ was announced to the simple shepherd hearts and the highest wisdom of the three Magi from the East. And most deeply significant is this double contrasted announcement of Christ Jesus. On the one side to the simple shepherds, and on the other side to the wisest of the world.

And how was Christ Jesus announced to the simple shepherds of the field? With the soul's eye they saw the light of the Angel Their clairvoyance and clairaudience were awakened. They heard the deepest words which for them signified the future meaning of earth life: “The Divine is revealed in the heights and there shall be peace among men on earth who can be of good will.” Out of the depths of the soul arose the capacity by which in the Holy Night the poor simple shepherds without any kind of wisdom experienced feelingly what was being revealed to the world; out of the perfection of that wisdom that could reach even to the Mystery of Golgotha, out of the finest observation of the course of the stars this revelation came to the wise men of the East, to the Magi, the same revelation. In the one case it is read within the human heart, the heart of the poor simple shepherd, and it penetrates to the deepest point within the human heart; it is there that they became clairvoyant and the heart reveals to them by its clairvoyant power the coming of the Saviour of mankind. The others looked up to the breadths of heaven, they knew the mystery of the widths of space and the evolution of time; they had attained a wisdom by which they could experience and solve the mysteries of space and time. The Christmas Mystery was revealed to them. Our attention is directed to the fact that what lives in man's innermost soul and what lives in the widths of space flow from the same source. And both, in the way they had been developed up to the Mystery of Golgotha, were already in a declining condition. The clairvoyance that emerged from the quickened human heart, that of the shepherds, to whom we are told the announcement came, was still strong enough to perceive the voice that proclaimed: “The Divine is revealed in the heights, in heaven, and peace shall be on earth among men of good will.” We might say that the last remnants of this clairvoyance through inner piety were still present in the shepherds whose karma, or destiny, had brought them together to that place where Christ was born. And from that primeval holy wisdom which first flourished in the post-atlantean times among the original Indians, then especially among the Persians, and again was transplanted among the Chaldeans, and of which at all events the last remnants were present among those whom we find as the three Magi from the East, out of this primeval holy wisdom which comprehended the world of space and time—out of this wisdom, through its representatives who had raised themselves to the highest point, was the Christmas Mystery again revealed.

For us, however, in the 5th culture epoch, both ways are in decline. For humanity in general, that which led to clairvoyance in the poor shepherds, as well as that which led the Magi from the East to the penetration of the mysteries of space and time is no longer livingly active. We must find the human being, the man who depends on himself. As men we must pass through the being forsaken by God in order—in this forsakenness and loneliness—to find freedom. But we must find our way back to a union with that which on the one side was the highest wisdom of the Magi of the East, and on the other side was announced to the shepherds through a deepened insight of the heart.

All forces, my dear friends, develop further. What has become of that which the Magi of the East understood through the development of their intellect which was still clairvoyant? What has become of their astrology? Their kind of astronomy? We cannot understand human evolution if we do not look into such things. Today it has become cold and gray mathematics and geometry. Today we see the abstract forms that are taught in schools as geometry and mathematics. This is the last remnant of that which in the living radiance of the cosmic light was mastered by that ancient wisdom which led the three Magi of the East to Christ. The outer wisdom has become the inner theories of space and time. And whilst the Magi of the East, through their understanding of the mysteries of space, were able in vision to reckon “In this night will the Saviour be born,” our astronomy, which is the successor to that astrology, can only reckon the future eclipses of the sun and moon and similar things. And whilst the poor shepherds of the field out of the inwardness of their hearts were raised to that which certainly stood in close relationship to them, namely, the vision of the Christmas Mystery, and the hearing of the heavenly announcement, there has only remained to present-day humanity the perception of external nature. This perception of external nature through the senses represents the last transformation of the simplicity of the shepherds, just as our reckoning of future eclipses of sun and moon is the last successor of the wisdom of the Magi.

The shepherds of the field were equipped with something. They were equipped with depth of heart, with deep feeling whereby, through clairvoyance, they came to the vision of the Christmas Mystery. Our contemporaries are equipped with the telescope and microscope. But no telescope or microscope will lead to the solution of man's deepest riddle as did the hearts of the poor shepherds. No foresight through calculation of sun and moon eclipses and so on will lead man to comprehend the necessary course of the world as did the star-wisdom of the Magi of the East. How all human differences flow together into a single human feeling when we realize that what the shepherds of the field, without wisdom, experienced through the piety of their hearts is the same as what stimulated the Magi of the East as the highest wisdom! In a wonderful way both facts are placed side by side in the Christian tradition.

We have practically lost both ways by which an understanding of the birth of Christ revealed itself to man. We have gone back, from the crib and the Holy Night, to the tree of paradise. We have gone back from a Christ Who belongs to the whole of humanity to the national gods which are just so many Jehovahs and no Christ For just as truly as that which reveals itself in the deepest nature of man is something common to all men, so truly is that which is revealed through all the widths of space and the mysteries of time, something common to all men.

My dear friends, there is something in the depths of man's heart that speaks of nothing else than of what is purely human and dissolves all differences. And it is just within these depths that we find the Christ And there is a wisdom which extends far beyond all that can be discovered concerning single spheres of world existence, a wisdom that is able to grasp the world in its unity, even in space and time. And this again is the star-wisdom that leads to Christ We need to have again in a new form that which led on the one hand the shepherds of the field, and on the other hand the Magi of the East to find the way to Christ In other words we need to deepen our external perception of nature through what the heart can develop as spiritual perception of nature. We must learn once again out of the piety of the human heart to approach all that to which in modern times the microscope, telescope, roentgen-rays apparatus and such instruments are applied. Then will the growing plant, the rushing stream, the murmuring spring, the lightning and thunder from the clouds, not merely speak to us in an indifferent way. There will speak to us from the flowers of the field, from the lightning and thunder of the clouds, from the shining stars and the radiant sun, there will, as it were, stream into our eyes and into our hearts, as the result of all our observation of nature, words that proclaim nothing else than this: “The divine is revealed in the heights of heaven, and peace shall be among men upon earth who are of good will.” The time must come when our observation of nature sets itself free from the dry, prosaic, non-human method pursued in the laboratories and clinics of today. The time must come when our observation of nature must be irradiated by such life so that the life which can no longer exist in the way it did for the shepherds of Bethlehem will nevertheless be able to speak to us through the voices of the plants and animals, from stars and springs and rivers. For the whole of nature utters what was uttered by the Angel: “The Divine is revealed in the heavenly heights and there can be peace among men on Earth who desire to be of good will”

What the Magi possessed through an outer observation of the stars we need to obtain by an awakening of our inner life. Just as we must, once more, listen outwards into nature and hear the Angels singing as it were from external nature, so must we be able through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to bring forth an astronomy, a solution of the world riddle, out of the inner nature of man. It must be a spirituality, a Spiritual Science created out of the inner being of man. We must found that which is really man's true nature. And the real nature of man must speak to us of the world's ‘becoming’ through the mysteries of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. We must feel the arising of a whole Cosmos within us. All that man can experience as insight into the deepest mysteries of the world has been reversed since the Mystery of Golgotha.

There is an ancient way of presenting the spheres of heaven, which was already known to the Persian Magi. They looked up towards the heavens and saw with their physical eyes the constellation of the Zodiac which is called the Virgin (Virgo), and by means of spiritual vision they projected into the constellation of the Virgin that which physically is only perceptible in the constellation of the Twins (Gemini). This wisdom has been preserved. It is by this wisdom that man can perceive, can experience, the consonance between the constellation of the Virgin and the constellation standing at right angles to it, in quadrature, the Twins. This was represented in such a way that in place of the constellation of Virgo, the Virgin was depicted not only with the ear of corn, but also with the child. But this child in fact represents the Twins. It is the representative of the two Jesus children. This was an astrological conception especially at the time of the ancient Persians.

Then came a different time, the time of the Egypto-Chaldean development. Then it was the constellation of the Lion that was looked up to in the same way that the Persians regarded the constellation of the Virgin. But now, in quadrature to the Lion stood the Bull, and there arose the Mithras religion, the worship of the Bull, because into the constellation of the Lion was projected that of the Bull.

Then came the time when Cancer, the Crab, played the same role in the Greco-Latin period as the Virgin among the Persians, and the constellation of the Ram was seen in quadrature standing, as it were, within the constellation of the Crab. After that came the reversal After that matters took a different path. Up to the Greco-Latin time, until the Mystery of Golgotha, astronomy was something that could be attained as external science, and human understanding was of such a nature that in gazing out into space and the mysteries of the star-world, the secrets of space and time were discovered; also in experiencing the human inner life through the piety of the heart, a vision of the inner mysteries was possible. In the Greco-Latin time these relations were reversed. That which formerly could be experienced inwardly had ever more and more to be experienced by beholding outer nature.

My dear friends, with respect to nature's revelation we must be as pious as the shepherds were in their hearts. Just as they came to spiritual vision in their inner world, we must come to a spiritual vision in nature. And on the other side we must find the way of Cancer the Crab; we must come to an astronomy inwardly, so that by the inner powers of vision we may awaken the course of the world that leads through the Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods. An astronomy from within where formerly there was an external astronomy—a piety in the observation of nature where formerly there was the kind of piety possessed by the shepherds of the field. If we can deepen what today is so unspiritual in our observation of nature, if on the other side we can render creative what today is so prosaically experienced in mere mathematical and geometrical pictures, if we can raise mathematics again through inner experience to that glory which the ancient astronomy had, if we can deepen our observation of nature to that heart's depth and piety which the shepherds of the field had, if we can inwardly experience what the Magi experienced from the stars, if in directing our gaze to outer nature we can be as pious as were the shepherds of the field, then, through piety in outer observation of nature and through a loving pursuit of world-events with our hearts, we shall again find the way to the Christmas Mystery just as the shepherds of the field through inner piety and the Magi from the East through an outer wisdom found their way to the crib.

The way must be found again to the Christmas Mystery. We must become as pious with regard to nature as the shepherds were in their hearts; we must in our inward vision become as wise as were the Magi in their observation of planets and stars in space. We must develop inwardly what the Magi developed outwardly. We must in our intercourse with the outer world develop what the simple shepherds of the field developed in their hearts; then we shall find the way, the right way, to a deepened experience of Christ, to a loving comprehension of Christ; and then we shall find the way to the Christmas Mystery. Then we shall be able with right thoughts and with right feelings to place the crib beside the original tree of paradise which does not only speak to us of how man enters the world through nature-forces but of how he can only become conscious of his full humanity by re-birth.

Anyone speaking of the Christmas Mystery today must make a demand upon mankind that reaches into the future. We live in serious times and we must see clearly that we need again to become man in the true sense. We have not yet attained to the inwardness of the Magi wisdom nor to the piety which from the shepherds flowed into the outer world. The social question that confronts humanity is terribly urgent. Fearful things have come about in recent years and the social problem becomes ever more and more threatening; only those who are asleep in their souls can overlook this fact Europe as regards its culture, threatens to become a heap of ruins. Nothing can raise it from its chaotic condition unless men find it possible once again to develop a true, a real humanity in their common life. They will not be able to do this unless their feeling is deepened and made inward by an observation of nature in which they are as pious as the shepherds of the field when through their inner forces they received the Angel's revelation of God above and peace on earth beneath. Only with these forces can the social life be mastered. This will happen when the secrets of space and time are so understood inwardly that men comprehend the nature of the world-spirit as a unity just as the one sun is beheld by the Chinese and by the Americans and by the Middle European. It would be absurd if the Chinese demanded a sun for themselves, the Russians another sun, the Middle European another, the French another, and the English yet another. Just as the sun is a unity, so is the Sun-Being that bears humanity a unity. If we look out into the widths of space we find there the challenge to a unification of humanity. The spiritual that lies open to our view without does not speak of the differentiation of humanity or of discord; neither does what speaks in the inmost depths of our being. To the shepherds of the field, the voice they were able to hear by the power of their hearts announced that the Godhead was revealed in the widths of the world spaces and that by receiving the divine within one's own soul peace can be among men of good will. This must again be proclaimed to modern humanity from the whole circumference of nature. To the Magi from the East, the secrets of the stars told that here on earth Christ Jesus is born. This must be proclaimed to modern humanity from out of what can begin to be revealed in the deep places of the human heart.

My dear friends, we need a new path. Once again the voice sounds to us: “Change your hearts and minds, look in a new way on the course of the world.” When we look rightly on the course of the world and consider the way of the humanity to which we ourselves belong, then we discover the path to that Mystery which could be revealed to the shepherds as well as to the cultured sages, and that will be revealed to our hearts and in our external beholding of the world. When we have sufficiently deepened our inner and outer perception of the world, when we are able to do this and find the inner Magi-wisdom that leads us just as the outer Magi-wisdom led the sages of the East, as well as the outer wisdom that leads us to that piety by which the shepherds of the field were also led, then we shall be able again with the right inner feeling to perceive what lies in this mystery, namely, that for all without distinction—as formerly He appeared among men, put away as it were from humanity, turned out in the solitude—for all, there is born that which thereafter became the Christ.

We must find again the Jesus Christmas Mystery, and we must find it by cultivating all that within ourselves of which we have spoken today. We must find the Christmas light within ourselves as the shepherds did the Angel's light in the field; and as the Magi of the East, so must we find the star through the power of that which is true Spiritual Science. Then will be opened for us the only way to the content of the Christmas Mystery. We shall recognise it again and it will remind us of humanity's rebirth.

Yes, my dear friends, it is for this we must work—that the Christmas Mystery be born again among men. Then we shall rightly understand the mystery of the rebirth of the human being. This is what has been communicated to us in a singular manner. For in a gospel that is not recognised by the Church it is related that the Jesus-child spoke to His Mother immediately after His birth in definite words. We certainly approach the Child in the crib today in the true way when we rightly hear the words which He wishes to speak to us: “Awaken the Christmas light within you, and the Christmas light will then also appear to you and to your fellow-men with you in the world outside.”

If we look into the deepest inner secrets of man, there too we find the same demand.

Like two mighty pillars of the spirit have the annual festivals of Christmas and Easter been placed by the Christian world within the course of the year, itself a symbol of the course of human life. On these spiritual pillars standing before the human soul in its contemplation are inscribed the two great mysteries of mankind's physical existence. We must regard them very differently from the way we regard other events in the course of our physical life.

It is true that a supersensible element reaches into this physical life through our sense observation and our intellectual judgments, through the content of our feeling and will. In certain instances it proclaims itself clearly as supersensible—when, for example, Christian feeling undertakes to symbolize it in the festival of Pentecost. With Christmas and Easter, on the other hand, we must look at two events in earthly life that in external appearance would seem perhaps to be completely physical events; and yet, in contrast to all other physical events, they do not—indeed, they cannot by their very nature—present themselves as simply physical events. We can observe human physical life as we observe nature, perceiving with our senses the external manifestation of the spirit. But we can never observe the two boundary events of human life, not even just their physical occurrence, without confronting through physical perception itself their tremendous riddle, their profound mystery. These are the events of birth and death. In the life of Christ Jesus, and in our thoughts of Christmas and Easter reminding us of it, these two events of man's physical life stand before our soul, addressing the Christian heart.

As we contemplate these two great mysteries in their relation to Christmas and Easter, we find illuminating strength for our thinking, a powerful incentive for our willing, and an uplifting of our whole being. They stand there, these two pillars of the spirit, possessing an eternal value.

In the course of human evolution, however, men's capacities have changed for approaching the sublime conceptions of Christmas and Easter. During the early Christian centuries, when the Event of Golgotha had penetrated and shocked many hearts, men gradually found their way to the thought of a Savior dying on Golgotha. In the Crucified One hanging on the Cross they found the idea of redemption. And they gradually formed the powerful imagination of Christ dying on the Cross. But in later times, especially since our modern age began, Christian feeling has adjusted itself to the materialism rising in human evolution and has turned to the picture of the childlike element entering the world as the newborn Jesus.

One may certainly say that a sensitive person will find European Christianity decidedly materialistic from the way it has concentrated in recent centuries upon the Christmas manger. The desire to fondle the infant Jesus—this is not meant in a bad sense—has become trivial in the course of centuries. And many songs about the Jesus Child that today are still considered beautiful, or—as some people would say—charming, seem to us not serious enough for these grave times.

But the conception of Christmas and the conception of Easter are eternal pillars, eternal monuments of the human heart. One can truly say that this age of new spiritual revelations will cast new light upon Christmas, so that gradually it will be experienced in a glorious, new form. It will be our task to hear the call in present world events for a rejuvenation of many old conceptions, the call for a new revelation of the spirit. It will be our task to understand that a new meaning for Christmas is working its way out of world events for the strengthening and uplifting of the human soul.

The birth and death of a human being, however intently we may observe and analyze them, manifest themselves as events happening on the physical plane but in which a spiritual element prevails. No one who reflects earnestly can possibly deny that they give evidence in the way they occur that man is the citizen of a spiritual world. No physical observation of birth and death will ever find anything in what the senses can perceive and the intellect grasp, other than events in which the spirit is directly manifested in the physical. Only these two earthly events appear in this way to the human heart.

For the event of birth, the Christmas event, the human and Christian heart must develop an ever deeper sense of mystery. One may say that men have seldom looked from a high enough level upon the mysterious nature of birth. Seldom, indeed; but then at such moments its tidings speak to the depths of the human soul.

So it is, for instance, with the images associated with that spiritual genius of fifteenth-century Switzerland, Nikolaus von der Flüe.¹ It is related of him—and he himself told it—that before his birth, before he breathed the outer air, he beheld the physical form that he would have after birth and during the course of his life. Also, he beheld before birth the ceremony of his own christening, with the persons who were present and who were then around him in his early childhood. With the exception of one elderly person whom he did not recognize, he knew all these people because he had seen them before he saw the light of the physical world.

However one may view this story, one cannot but see that it points impressively to the mystery of human birth, which is so magnificently symbolized for world history by the Christmas imagery. The story of von der Flue suggests that there is something connected with our entrance into physical life that only by a very, very thin wall is hidden from our everyday view, a wall so thin that it can be broken through when a karmic situation exists as in the case of Nikolaus von der Flüe. Such moving allusions to the mystery of birth and Christmas still meet us here and there. But one must say that as yet mankind is hardly aware of the fact that birth and death, the two boundary pillars standing there in the physical world, reveal themselves even in their physical appearance as spiritual events that could never occur in the ordinary course of nature, as events in which, on the contrary, divine spiritual Powers actually intervene. This is evident from the fact that both these boundary experiences still remain mysteries, even in their physical manifestation.

The new revelation of the Christ now moves us to contemplate the course of human life—allow me to express it in the following way—as Christ wishes us to contemplate it in the twentieth century. As we try today to grasp the meaning of Christmas, let us recall a saying attributed to Christ Jesus that points truly to the Christmas event: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Except ye become as little children”: this is certainly not encouraging us to strip away all the mystery of the Christmas conception, and to drag it down to the banality of “dear little Jesus,” as many folk songs and other songs have done—the folk songs less than the art songs—during the materialistic development of Christianity. This very saying—“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven”—impels us to look up to mighty impulses flowing through human evolution. And in our own time, all that is happening in the world can surely be no reason for lapsing into trivial ideas of Christmas, when the human heart is filled with pain, when it must look back upon millions of human beings who have met their death in these last years, must think of countless human beings hungering for food. At this time surely nothing is fitting but to contemplate the mighty thoughts in world history that have impelled and inspired humanity. One can be brought to such thoughts by the saying, “Except ye become as little children.” And one can supplement it by these words: “Unless you live your life in the light of this thought, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

When a human being enters this world as a child, he has come directly from the spiritual world. What happens in physical life, the procreation and growth of his physical body, is only a covering for the event that cannot be described otherwise than by saying: man's central being leaves the spiritual world. He is born out of the spirit into the body. When the Rosicrucian says “Ex Deo Nascimur,” he is speaking of the human being entering the physical world. What first en-sheathes him, what makes him a complete physical being here on earth: this is what is referred to by the words “Ex Deo Nascimur.” If one would speak of the kernel of the human being, his innermost core of being, one must say: he comes down from the spirit into this physical world. Through what takes place in the physical world—which he is able to observe from spiritual regions before his conception and birth—he is clothed with a physical body, in order that he may have experiences that are only possible in such a body. But he has come, in his central core of being, out of the spiritual world. And he reveals—to one who wants to see things as they really are in this world, who is not blinded by materialistic illusions—he reveals in his very first years by his very nature that he has come out of the spirit. One's experiences with a child, if one has insight, are of such a character that one feels in him the after-effects of his recent life in the spiritual world.

This is the mystery that is indicated by such stories as the one associated with Nikolaus von der Flüe. A trivial view and one strongly influenced by materialistic thinking asserts in its simplicity that a human being develops his ego gradually in the course of his life from birth to death, that his ego becomes more and more clearly manifest and more and more powerful. This is a naive way of thinking! If one observes the true human ego that comes from the spiritual world into its physical sheath through birth, one speaks quite differently about the entire physical development of the human being. For one knows that as the human being grows physically in his physical body, actually his true ego slowly vanishes into the body, becoming continually less and less manifest. One knows that what develops here in the physical world between birth and death is only a mirrored reflection of spiritual happenings, a dead reflection of a higher life. One is expressing it properly if one says, the entire fullness of a man's being gradually disappears into the body; it becomes more and more invisible. He lives his life here on earth by gradually losing himself in his body. At death he finds himself again in the spirit. That is what one says who knows the facts. Someone ignorant of the facts will declare that a child is incomplete, that his ego gradually develops to greater and greater perfection, growing out of vague subconscious levels of human existence. A knowledge of what the spiritual investigator sees, causes one to speak differently about these things than is done from today's sense-consciousness, enmeshed as it is in external illusions and materialistic feelings.

Thus the human being enters the world as a spiritual being. His bodily nature while he is a child is still undefined; it has as yet laid small claim to his spiritual nature, which is entering into physical existence as if it were falling asleep. This spiritual nature only seems so empty of content to us because we cannot perceive it in ordinary life, just as we cannot perceive the sleeping ego and astral body when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies. But the fact that we do not perceive a being does not make it less perfect. This is what the human being has to accomplish in regard to his physical body: that he shall bury himself in it more and more deeply, in order to acquire faculties that can only be acquired in this way. His soul and spirit being must lose themselves for a while in physical existence. In order that we may always remember our spiritual origin, in order that we may grow strong in the thought that we have journeyed out of the spirit into the physical world: it is for this reason that the Christmas festival stands there like a mighty pillar of light within the Christian world.

The Christmas imagination must grow ever stronger in the future spiritual evolution of humanity. It will then become powerful again for humanity. Human beings will once more be able to draw strength from it for their physical life; it will remind them in the right way of their spiritual origin. Seldom in our present time does it have so powerful an effect upon human hearts as it will have in the future. For it is a strange fact, but rooted in the very laws of spiritual existence, that what appears in the world to help mankind forward does not appear at once in its ultimate form. It appears first, as it were, tumultuously, as if it were launched prematurely by unlawful spirits of world evolution. We only understand the historical evolution of humanity properly when we realize that truths are not always to be taken up as they first appear. The right moment must also be considered for their entrance into evolution in their true light.

Among various thoughts that have entered into the evolution of modern humanity—inspired, certainly, by the Christ Impulse but appearing at first in premature form—is that of human equality before God and the world, the equality of all men. This is a profoundly Christian conception capable of ever increasing in depth. But it should not have been presented to human hearts in such vague form as it was given by the French Revolution when it first appeared among mankind so tumultuously. We must realize that human life is involved in a process of evolution from birth to death, and that the chief impulses working upon it are distributed in time. Think how it is with the human being as he enters sense-existence: he is filled with the idea of the equality of human nature in all men. We experience the child nature most intensely when we regard the child as permeated through his whole being by this idea. Nothing that creates inequality among men, nothing that organizes men so that they feel different from other men: nothing of all this enters at first into the child's nature. It is all imparted to him in the course of his physical life. Inequality is created by men's physical existence. They come from the spirit equal before God and the world and their fellowmen. This is proclaimed by the mystery of the child.

This mystery is closely related to our understanding of Christmas, which will be made more profound by new Christian revelations. For these will have to do with the new Trinity: the human being, representing all humanity; the forces of Ahriman; and the forces of Lucifer. As one learns how man is placed in world existence in a situation of balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, one comes to understand the real significance of the human being in external physical life.

Most of all, understanding must come about, Christian understanding, for a certain aspect of human life. Someday Christian thought will announce a fact that has already been put forward by some minds since the middle of the nineteenth century—may I say, in stammering accents, but quite distinctly. When one has first grasped the fact that a child enters his earth life with a consciousness of human equality, then one must go on to the fact that as the child becomes a man, unequal powers develop in him—as if from just the fact of being born—powers that are obviously not of this earth. One is then confronting another great mystery of human existence, one that is in direct contrast to the idea of equality. To see into this mystery will help one to form a true picture of mankind—something that already at this present moment in time has become earnestly necessary for the future evolution of the human soul. One faces the startling fact that human beings begin to differ from one another while they are growing out of childhood, by reason of something that obviously is born in them, something in their blood: that is, their various gifts and capacities.

One meets the question of gifts and capacities that create such inequality among men in connection with the thought of Christmas. Future Christmas festivals will point to the origin of this vast difference throughout the world in human capacities, talents, even genius. A person will only attain balance in his life when he has learnt to know the origin of certain capacities that are distinguishing him from other men. The light of Christmas, of the Christmas candles, must provide an explanation for evolving humanity. It must answer the question: Do individuals suffer injustice between birth and death from the way the universe is ordered? What is the truth about capacities and talents?

Dear friends, many things will be seen in a different light when mankind has become permeated by the new Christian feeling. Particularly, it will be understood why an esoteric knowledge of the Old Testament included special insight into the nature of prophecy. Who were those prophets who appear in the Old Testament? They were individuals who had been sanctified by Jahve and authorized by Him to use special spiritual gifts that reached far beyond those of ordinary men. Jahve had first to sanctify those capacities that are born to men through the blood. We know that Jahve influences human beings in the time between their falling asleep and waking; He does not work in their conscious life. Every true believer of the Old Testament said in his heart: The capacities and talents that differentiate men, rising to the level of genius in the case of a prophet, are indeed born with the individual. But they are not used by him beneficently unless he sinks in sleep into the realm where Jahve guides his soul impulses. Jahve, active from the spiritual world, transforms his talents; otherwise they would only be physical, only part of his bodily organism.

We point here to the deep mystery of an Old Testament conception. But this must die away, including the belief in the nature of a prophet. New conceptions must enter the evolution of world history for the salvation of mankind. The talent that the ancient Hebrew believed was sanctified by Jahve during unconscious sleep must now in this modern age be sanctified by the human being himself when he is awake and in a state of clear consciousness. But he can only do this if he knows that all natural gifts, capacities, talents, even genius, are luciferic endowments, that they work luciferically in the world unless they are permeated and sanctified by all that enters the world as the Christ Impulse. One touches upon a tremendously important mystery in the evolution of modern humanity if one grasps this central fact of the new Christmas thoughts. The Christ must be so felt, so understood that a human being can now stand before Him as a New Testament believer and say: In spite of my childhood sense of equality, I have been endowed with various capacities and gifts. But they can only contribute to the salvation of mankind if I dedicate them to the service of Christ Jesus, if I permeate my whole nature with the Christ, so that they may be freed from the grasp of Lucifer.

A heart permeated by the Christ tears away from Lucifer what otherwise works luciferically in human physical existence. This must be the powerful thought that will pervade the future evolution of the human soul. It is the new Christmas thought, the new annunciation of Christ's activity in our souls, transforming the luciferic influence. Lucifer's power in us is not due to our having come out of the spiritual world, but to the fact that we are clothed by a physical body permeated by blood. We have our talents through heredity. Our individual capacities come to us through the luciferic stream of heredity. They must be mastered and put to use during physical life not through inspirations we receive from Jahve during sleep, but through the Christ Impulse that we can feel working within us in our fully conscious life.

“Oh, Christian,” says the new Christianity, “turn your thoughts to Christmas! lay upon the Christmas altar all the differentiation you have received through your blood! sanctify your capacities, gifts, genius as you behold them illuminated by the light coming from the Christmas tree!”

The new revelation of the spirit must speak a new language, and we must not be dull and unheeding as it addresses us in this extremely serious time. If we remain receptive, then we will find the power that mankind must find for the great tasks that will confront us in this very age. We must experience the meaning of Christmas in all its gravity. Today we must realize in clear waking consciousness what the Christ was really saying when He spoke those words, “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” The sense of equality that is natural to a child is not—if we regard him properly—proved false by these words. For the Child Whose birth we commemorate on Christmas Eve reveals ever new thoughts to mankind in the course of our evolution. He now proclaims that we must place all the distinguishing capacities we possess within the light of the Christ who ensouled this Child. All that our different talents achieve must be brought to the altar of this Child.

Perhaps, stirred by the earnestness of this Christmas thought, you will now ask, “How am I to experience the Christ Impulse in my own soul?” This question is often a burden in men's hearts.

Dear friends, what we may call the Christ Impulse does not become rooted in our souls in a moment, suddenly and tempestuously. It has taken root differently at different periods of evolution. In our present time a human being must take up in full, clear waking consciousness the cosmic truths that have been imparted stammeringly by our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. As these truths are made known and as he comes to understand them, they will awaken in him the assurance that a new revelation, the new Christ Impulse for this age, has been brought to him. He will perceive the new Impulse if only he is attentive.

Try—in a truly lively way such as is appropriate for this age—to take into yourselves the spiritual thoughts of the cosmic Powers; try to take them up not merely as a teaching, or a theory, but so that they move your souls to their very depths and warm them, illuminate them, permeate them, so that you carry the thoughts living within you! Try to feel them so intensely that they seem to enter your soul by way of your body and change the body itself. Try to strip away from them all abstractions, all theory. Try to realize that they are true nourishment for the soul; they are not just thoughts, they are spiritual life coming from the spiritual world.

Enter into the most intimate inner union with these truths and you will observe three things. First you will observe that gradually—however they may be expressed—they eradicate from your soul something that usually appears so obviously in human beings in this age of the consciousness soul: self-seeking. When you begin to notice that they kill egotism and disarm self-seeking, then you will have perceived the Christ-permeated character of the thoughts of our anthroposophical spiritual science.

Secondly, observe the moment that untruthfulness approaches you, untruthfulness in any form, either when you yourself are tempted to be careless about the truth or when the falseness approaches you from the outside. If at such a moment you can also observe that immediately there is an impulse moving within you, warning you, pointing to the truth, admonishing you and impelling you to hold fast to the truth, wanting to prevent falsehood from entering your life—in contrast to ordinary present-day life, so much inclined to sham—then you are again experiencing the living Christ Impulse. No one will find it easy to lie, or to be casual about sham and pretence, in the presence of the spiritual thoughts of anthroposophy. A sign pointing the way to a sense for truth—apart from all other aspects of understanding: this you will find in the thoughts of the new revelation of the Christ. When you have reached the point where you do not seek a merely theoretical understanding of spiritual science, as is sought for any other science, but where the thoughts so penetrate you that you say to yourself, “Now that these thoughts are united with my soul, it is as if a Power of conscience stood beside me admonishing me, directing me toward the truth”: then you will have found the second aspect of the Christ Impulse.

In the third place, when you feel that something streams from these thoughts even down into your body, but especially into your soul, working to overcome illness, making you healthy and strong, when you sense the rejuvenating, invigorating power of these thoughts, the adversaries of illness: then you will have experienced the third aspect of the Christ Impulse. This is the goal toward which mankind strives through the new wisdom, in the new spirit: to find in the spirit itself the power to overcome egotism and the falseness of life, to overcome self-seeking through love, the sham of life through truth, illness through health-giving thoughts that put us into immediate accord with the harmonies of the universe, because they flow from the harmonies of the universe.

Not all these things can be attained at the present time, for man carries an ancient heritage around with him! There is a foolish lack of understanding, for instance, when such a backstairs politician as Christian Science twists into a caricature the thought of the healing power of the spirit. Even though, due to our ancient heritage, our thinking is not yet sufficiently powerful to accomplish what we long to accomplish—perhaps from a selfish motive—nevertheless thought does possess healing power. But in regard to such things people's ideas are always distorted. Someone who understands may tell you that certain thoughts give you health, and then he is suddenly stricken with this or that illness. It is indeed due to that ancient heritage that we cannot today be relieved of all illness merely by the power of our thought. But are you able to say what illness you would have had if you had not possessed these thoughts? Can you say that you could have passed your life in your present state of health if you had not had these thoughts? Can you prove that a person who has interested himself in our spiritual science and then has died at forty-five years of age, would without these thoughts not have died at age forty-two or age forty? People think the wrong way around! They concern themselves with what their karma cannot bestow upon them and pay no attention to what their karma does bestow upon them. If—in spite of every contradiction in the external world—you will watch and observe through the power of inner trust that you have gained from an intimate acquaintance with the thoughts of spiritual science, you will perceive the healing power that is penetrating even your physical body, the health-giving, freshening, rejuvenating force that is the third element which Christ the Healer brings with His continuous revelations to the human soul.

We wanted to enter more deeply into the thought of Christmas which is so closely related to the mystery of human birth. We wanted to bring in brief outline what is revealed to us today from the spirit as a continuation of the thought of Christmas. We can feel that it gives strength and support to our lives. We can feel that it places us, no matter what happens, in the midst of the impulses of cosmic evolution. We can feel ourselves united with those divine impulses; we can understand them and draw power for our will from this understanding, and light for our life of thought. Humanity is evolving—it would be wrong to deny it. Our only right course is to go forward with this evolution.

And Christ has declared: “I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” This is not just a phrase, it is truth. Christ has not only revealed Himself in the Gospels; Christ is with us; He reveals Himself continually. We must have ears to hear what He is ever newly revealing in this modern age. Weakness will overcome us if we have no faith in these new revelations; but strength will be ours if we have such faith.

Strength will indeed come to us if we accept the new revelations, even if they speak to us from life's seemingly contradictory suffering and misfortune. We journey as individual souls through repeated earth-lives during which our destiny comes to fulfillment. Even this thought, which enables us to sense the spiritual working behind external physical life, even this we can only accept if we take into ourselves in a truly Christian sense the revelations that follow one another. The Christian in this age, the true Christian, when he stands before the candles on the Christmas tree, should begin to work with the strengthening thoughts that can now come to him from the new cosmic revelations, bringing power to his will and illumination to his thinking. And his feeling should support the power and light of his thought in the course of the Christian year, to help him approach that other thought that points to the mystery of death: the Easter thought, which brings the final experience of human earthly existence before our souls as a spiritual experience. We will feel the Christ more and more livingly as we are able to place our own existence in the right relation to His life. The Rosicrucian of the Middle Ages, uniting his thought with Christianity, declared: Ex Deo Nascimur; in Christo Morimur; Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus. Out of the Divine we have been born, if we think of ourselves as human beings here on earth. In Christ we die. In the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. This all pertains to our life, our individual human life. If we look away from our own life to the life of Christ, then we see our life as mirrored reflection. Out of the Divine we are born; in Christ we die; in the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. This saying is true of the Christ living in our midst as our first-born Brother. We can so affirm it that we feel it to be the Christ-truth raying forth from Him and reflected in our human nature. Out of the Spirit was He begotten—as it stands in the Gospel of Luke, represented by the symbol of the descending dove—out of the Spirit was He begotten; in the human body He died; in the Divine will He rise again.

We can only perceive eternal truths in the right way if we see them in their contemporary reflection—not in a single, absolute, abstract form—and if we feel ourselves not as abstract humanity but as live, individual human beings whose duty is to think and act in harmony with the time in which we live. Then we will try to understand the Christ, who is with us “always, even to the end of the world,” to understand Him in His contemporary language as He teaches and enlightens and empowers us through the thought of Christmas. We will want to take the Christ into ourselves in His new language. We must become intimately related to Him. Then we will be able to fulfill in ourselves His true mission on this earth and beyond death. In each epoch human beings must take the Christ into themselves in their own way. This has been people's feeling when they have beheld in the right way the two great pillars of the spirit, Christmas and Easter.
That profound German mystic, Angelus Silesius,² expressed it in this way:

“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”

And, contemplating Easter, he wrote:

“The cross of Golgotha must be upraised in thee
Ere from thy sin its power shall make thee free.”

Truly, the Christ must live within us. We are not human beings in some abstract sense, we are human beings of a definite epoch, and the Christ must be born within us in our epoch in accordance with His words. We must endeavor to bring the Christ to birth within us, for our strengthening, for our illumination. As He has remained with us until now, as He will remain with mankind throughout all ages, even to the end of earthly time, so He wills now to be born in our souls. If we try to experience the birth of Christ within us in this epoch, as it becomes a light and a power in our soul—the eternal Light and eternal Power entering into time—then we perceive in the right way the historical birth of Christ in Bethlehem and its image in our own souls.

“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”

As He creates the impulse in our hearts today to contemplate His birth—His birth in the course of human events, His birth in our individual souls—so we deepen the thought of Christmas within us. And so let us look toward that “night of consecration” (Weihenacht), which we should feel is bringing a new strength and a new illumination to mankind, to help them to endure the many evils and sorrows they have had to suffer and will still have to suffer.

“My Kingdom,” Christ said, “is not of this world.” It is a saying that challenges us, if we regard His birth in the right way, to find in our own souls the path to His Kingdom where He will give us strength and light for our darkness and helplessness, through the impulses coming from the world of which He Himself spoke, which His appearance at Christmas will always proclaim. “My Kingdom is not of this world.” But He has brought His Kingdom into this world, so that we may always find strength, comfort, confidence, and hope bestowed upon us in all the circumstances of life, if only we will come to Him, taking His words to heart, words such as these:

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

• 1. Nikolaus von der Flüe: 1417–1487. Urged arbitration as a method for resolving disputes.
• 2. Angelus Silesius: 1624–1677. See Rudolf Steiner, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, GA 7 (Blauvelt, New York, Steinerbooks, 1980).

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A truth, intimately united with human aspiration and for centuries closely associated in the human heart with the festival whose modern symbol is the Christmas tree, is expressed in the words that have resounded ever since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and that must be impressed still more deeply into the evolution of the earth. This truth, which has shone down through the ages, is associated with the words, et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine (and is born of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary).

Most of the people of today seem to attach just as little significance to these words as they do to the Easter mystery of the Resurrection. We might even say that the central mystery of Christianity, the resurrection from the dead, appears to modern thought, which is no longer directed to the truths of the spiritual world, just as incredible as the Christmas mystery, the mystery of the Word becoming flesh, the mystery of the virgin birth. The greater part of modern humanity is much more in sympathy with the scientist who described the virgin birth as “an impertinent mockery of human reason” than with those who desire to take this mystery in a spiritual sense.

Nevertheless, my dear friends, the mystery of the incarnation by the Holy Spirit through the Virgin begins to exert its influence from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; in another sense it had made itself felt before this event.

Those who brought the symbolic gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the babe lying in the manger knew of the Christmas mystery of the virgin birth through the ancient science of the stars. The magi who brought the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh were, in the sense of the ancient wisdom, astrologers, they had knowledge of those spiritual processes that work in the cosmos when certain signs appear in the starry heavens. One such sign they recognized when, in the night between December 24 and 25, in the year that we today regard as that of the birth of Jesus, the sun, the cosmic symbol of the Redeemer, shone toward the earth from the constellation of Virgo. They said, “When the constellation of the heavens is such that the sun stands in Virgo in the night between December 24 and 25, then an important change will take place in the earth. Then the time will have come for us to bring gold, the symbol of our knowledge of divine guidance, which hitherto we have sought only in the stars, to that impulse which now becomes part of the earthly evolution of mankind. Then the time will have come for us to offer frankincense, the emblem of sacrifice, the symbol of the highest human virtue. This virtue must be offered in such a way that it is united with the power proceeding from the Christ Who is to be incarnated in that human being to whom we bring the frankincense.

“And the third gift, the myrrh, is the symbol of the eternal in man, which we have felt for thousands of years to be connected with the powers that speak to us from starry constellations; we seek it further by bringing it as a gift to him who is to be a new impulse for humanity; through this we seek our own immortality, in that we unite our own souls with the impulse of the Christ. When the cosmic symbol of world power, the sun, shines in the constellation of Virgo, then a new time begins for the earth.”

This was the belief held for thousands of years, and as the magi felt compelled to lay at the feet of the Holy Child the wisdom of the gods, the virtues of man, and the realization of human immortality, symbolically expressed in the gold, frankincense, and myrrh, something was repeated as a historical event that had been expressed symbolically in innumerable mysteries and in countless sacrificial rituals for thousands of years. There had been presented in these mysteries and rituals a prophetic indication of the event that would take place when the sun stood at midnight between December 24 and 25 in the sign of the Virgin, for gold, frankincense, and myrrh were also offered on this holy night, to the symbol of the divine child preserved in ancient temples as the representation of the sun.

Thus, my dear friends, for nearly two thousand years the Christian words, “incarnatus de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine” have resounded in the world, and so it has been ever since human thought has existed on the earth. In our times we can now present the question, “Do human beings really know to what they should aspire when they celebrate Christmas?” Does there exist today a real consciousness of the fact that, out of cosmic heights, under a cosmic sign, a cosmic power appeared through a virgin birth—spiritually understood—and that the blazing candles on the Christmas tree should light up in our hearts an understanding of the fact that the human soul is most intimately and inwardly united with an event that is not merely an earthly but a cosmic earthly event? The times are grave, and it is necessary in such serious times to give serious answers to solemn questions, such as the one raised here. With this in mind we will take a glance at the thoughts of the leading people of the nineteenth century to see whether the idea of Christ Jesus has lived in modern humanity in such a way as to give rise to the thought: the Christmas mystery has its significance in the fact that man wills to celebrate something eternal in the light of the Christmas candles.

Firstly we will take the words of a writer, Ernst Renan, who has given much study to the personality of Jesus and who has tried to give a picture of Christ Jesus out of the consciousness of the nineteenth century. We will listen to some of the voices of leading thinkers of the nineteenth century. Ernst Renan regarded the cities of Palestine with his physical eyes in true materialistic fashion. He desired to awaken in his own soul, from a materialistic standpoint, a picture of the personality known through the centuries as the Redeemer of the world. This is what he says:

“A beautiful outer nature tended to produce a much less austere spirit—a spirit less sharply monotheistic, if I may use the expression—which imprinted a charming and idyllic character on all the dreams of Galilee. The saddest country in the world is perhaps the region round about Jerusalem. Galilee, on the other hand, was a green, shady, smiling district, the true home of the Song of Songs, and the songs of the well-beloved. During the months of March and April the country forms a carpet of flowers of an incomparable variety of colors. The animals are small and exceedingly gentle—delicate and lively turtle doves, blue birds so light that they rest on a blade of grass without bending it, crested larks that venture almost under the feet of the traveler, little river tortoises with mild, lively eyes, storks with grave and modest mien, which, laying aside all timidity, allow man to come near them, seem almost to invite his approach.”

Ernst Renan never tires of describing this idyll of Galilee, so remote from the world's historic events, so as to make it seem natural that in this idyll, in this unpretentious landscape, with its turtle doves and storks, those things could happen that humanity for centuries has associated with the life of the Savior of the world.

So, my dear friends, that truth from which the earth received its meaning, the truth toward which humanity has looked for centuries, is attractive to a thinker of the nineteenth century only as an idyll with turtle doves and storks.

Ernst Renan proceeds, “The whole history of infant Christianity has become in this manner a delightful pastorale. A Messiah at the marriage festival, the courtesan and the good Zaccheus called to his feasts, the founders of the Kingdom of Heaven like a bridal procession—that is what Galilee has boldly offered and what the world has accepted.”

This, my dear friends, is one of the voices of the nineteenth century. Let us listen now to another, the voice of John Stuart Mill, who also desires to find his way from the consciousness of the nineteenth century to the being whom humanity for hundreds of years, and to the prophetic mind of man for thousands of years, has recognized as the Savior of the world.

John Stuart Mill says, “Whatever the rationalist may destroy of Christianity, Christ remains, a unique figure as different from his predecessors as from his successors, and even from those who enjoyed the privilege of his personal instruction. This estimate is not diminished if we say the Christ of the Gospels is not historical, for we are not in a position to know how much of what is worthy in Him has been added by His followers, for who among His disciples, or their followers, has been able to think out the speeches ascribed to Jesus, or to imagine a life and personality such as is portrayed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fisher-folk from Galilee, nor even St. Paul, whose whole character and inclination are of quite another kind, nor the early Christian writers. The kind of words that could be added and inserted by a scholar can be seen in the mystical part of the Gospel of St. John, who borrowed words from Philo and the Platonists of Alexandria and put them into the mouth of the Savior, who said many things about Himself of which not the slightest trace appears in the other Gospels. The East was full of people who could have stolen any number of such sayings, even as the many sects of the Gnostics did in later times. The life and teachings of Jesus, however, bear the stamp and impression of such profundity and personal originality that, if we deny ourselves the expectation of finding scientific exactitude, the prophet of Nazareth is placed in the foremost rank of venerated people of whom the human race may boast, even in the estimation of those who do not believe his divine inspiration. As this extraordinary spirit was equipped with the qualities of the greatest reformers and martyrs who have ever lived on earth, we cannot say that religion has made a bad choice” (Made a choice! We even choose in the nineteenth century!) “that religion has made a bad choice in setting up this man as an ideal representative and leader of humanity; also it would not be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better way of giving concrete expression to the abstract laws of virtue than to accept Christ as the model for our way of living. If, finally, we admit that even for the skeptic there remains the possibility that Christ was actually the person He said He was—not God; He never made the slightest claim to that; He would have seen in such a claim as great a blasphemy as would the people who judged Him—but the man expressly entrusted by God with the unique mission of leading humanity to truth and virtue, we may surely conclude that the influences of religion upon character, which would remain after the rationalistic critic had done his utmost against religion, are worthy of retention and, though they may lack direct proof as compared with other beliefs for which better evidence exists, the greater truth and correctness of their morality more than compensate for this lack.”

There we have the picture that the rationalists of the nineteenth century, by denying their own spirit, have given to that being whom humanity for centuries has recognized as the Savior of the world. Let us hear another voice, the voice of the international spirit, Heinrich Heine, and what he has to say:

“Christ is the God whom I love most, not because He is a God by inheritance, whose Father was God who had ruled the universe from time immemorial, but because He had no love for courtly, ceremonial display, although He was born the prince of heaven; I love Him because He was no aristocratic God, no panoplied knight, but a humble God of the people, a God of the town, a good citizen. Verily if Christ were not a God, I would choose Him for one and would much rather listen to Him, the God of my choice, than to a self-decreed, absolute God.”

“Only so long as religions have to struggle with each other in rivalry, and are more persecuted than followed, are they beautiful and worthy of veneration, only then do we see enthusiasm, sacrifice, martyrs, and palms. How beautiful, holy, and loveable, how heavenly sweet was the Christianity of the first centuries, as it sought to equal its divine founder in the heroism of His suffering—there still remained the beautiful legend of a heavenly God who in mild and youthful form wandered under the palms of Palestine preaching human love and revealing the teaching of freedom and equality—the sense of which was recognized by some of the greatest thinkers, and which has had its influence in our times through the French Gospel” (of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity).

Here we have this Heine Creed which regarded Him, whom humanity for centuries has recognized as the Redeemer of the world, as worthy of praise because we ourselves would have chosen Him, in our democratic fashion, even if He had not already held that exalted position, and because He preached the same Gospel as was preached later, at the end of the eighteenth century. He was therefore good enough to be as great as those who understood this Gospel.

Let us take another thinker of the nineteenth century. You know that I think very highly of Edward von Hartmann. I mention only those whom I do admire in order to show the manner in which the thought of the nineteenth century about Christ Jesus expressed itself.

“We see,” says Edward von Hartmann, the philosopher, “that the spiritual faculties of Jesus could not have achieved such good results without the magic of an impressive and loveable personality. This personality was endowed with unusual oratorical power, but His quiet majesty and personal tenderness must have been extraordinarily charming to his followers, not only to the men but to the women who made up so large a part of his following, in which prostitutes (Luke 7:37), married women of high rank (Luke 8:3), and young maidens of all classes mingled without discrimination. They were mostly eccentric persons, the epileptic, hysterical, or crazy, who believed themselves to be healed by Him. It is a well-known fact that such women are very prone to project or individualize their religious emotions and enthusiasms onto the person of an attractive male whom they proceed to make the center of a cult. Nothing is more obvious than that these women were of such a kind, and that even if they did not awaken in Jesus the idea of His Messiah-ship, yet it was so nourished by their adoring homage that it struck deep roots. According to modern psychological and psychiatrical opinion it is not possible for healthy religious feeling to flourish in such unhealthy soil, and today we would advise any religious reformer or prophet to shake off such elements in his following as much as possible, for they would merely end in compromising both him and his mission.”

Yet another voice I wish to quote, the voice of one of the principal characters in a romance that exercised a wide and powerful influence during the latter third of the nineteenth century over the judgment of the so-called “educated” humanity. In Paul Heyse's book, Die Kinder der Welt, the diary of Lea, one of the characters in the book, is reproduced. It contains a criticism of Christ Jesus, and those who know the world well will recognize in this judgment of Lea's one which was common to large numbers of human beings in the nineteenth century. Paul Heyse has Lea write, “The day before yesterday I stopped writing because an impulse drove me to read the New Testament once again. I had not opened the New Testament for a long time; it had been a long time since its many threatening, damning, and incomprehensible speeches had estranged and repelled my heart. Now that I have lost that childish fear, and the voice of an infallible and all-knowing spirit can be heard, since I have seen therein the history of one of the noblest and most wonderful of human beings, I have found much that greatly refreshed and comforted me.

“But its somber mood again made me depressed. What is more liberating, gracious, and comforting than joy in the beauty, goodness, and serenity of the world, yet while we are reading this book (the New Testament) we hover in a twilight of expectation and hope, the eternal is never fulfilled, it will only dawn when we have struggled through time; the full glory of joy never shines, there is no pleasantry, no laughter—the joy of this world is vanity—we are directed to a future that makes the present worthless, and the highest earthly joy of sinking ourselves deep in pure and loving thoughts is also open to suspicion, for only those can enter heaven who are poor in spirit. I am such a one, but it makes me unhappy to feel so, yet at the same time if I could break through this limitation I should no longer be what I am, thus my salvation and blessedness are not certain, for what transcends me is no longer. And then this mild, God-conscious man, in order to belong to the whole human race, departed from his own people with such strange hardness that he became a homeless one—it had to be so, but it chilled my feeling. Everything great that I had formerly loved, even when shrouded in majesty, was yet happily and comfortably linked with my being by ties of human need.”

Here you see the New Testament represented as it had to be if it was to provide satisfaction to such a typical person of the nineteenth century. Thus she says that everything great that she had formerly loved, even when shrouded in majesty, was yet happily and comfortably linked with her being by ties of human need. Because the New Testament contains a power that cannot be described in these terms, therefore, the Gospel failed to meet the needs of a person of the nineteenth century.

“When I read the letters of Goethe, of the narrow home life of Schiller, of Luther and his followers, of all the ancients back to Socrates and his scolding wife—I sense a breath of Mother Earth, from which the seed of their spirit grew, which also nourishes and uplifts mine own which is so much smaller.” Lea thus finds herself more drawn even to characters like Xanthippe than to the people of the New Testament, and this was the opinion of thousands and thousands of people in the nineteenth century.

“But this picture of a world forlorn alarms and estranges me, and I am unable to justify it by any belief that everything is guided and ordered by God.”

It is fitting, my dear friends, to ask in these grave times what is really the attitude of soul of people today with regard to the candles they burn at Christmas? For this attitude of soul is a complex of such voices as we have just examined and that could be multiplied a hundred or thousand fold. But it is not fitting in serious times to ignore and disregard the things that have been said about the greatest mystery of earthly evolution. It is much more fitting today to ask what the official representatives of the many Christian sects are able to do to check a development that has led human beings right away from an inwardly true and genuine belief in that which stands behind the lights of Christmas time. For can humanity make of such a festival anything but a lie, when the opinions just quoted from its best representatives are imposed upon that which should be perceived through the Christmas mystery as an impulse coming from the cosmos to unite itself with earthly evolution? What did the magi from the East desire when they brought divine gifts of wisdom, virtue, and immortality to the manger, after the event whose sign had appeared to them in the skies during the night between December 24 and 25 in the first year of our era? What was it these wise men from the East wished to do? They wanted, by this act, to furnish direct historical proof that they had grasped the fact that, from this time onward, those powers who had hitherto radiated their forces down to earth from the cosmos were no longer accessible to man in the old way—that is, by gazing into the skies, by study of the starry constellations. They wished to show that man must now begin to give attention to the events of historical evolution, to social development, to the manners and customs of humanity itself. They wished to show that Christ had descended from heavenly regions where the sun shines in the constellation of Virgo, a region from which all the varied powers of the starry constellations proceed that enable the microcosm to appear as a copy of the macrocosm. They wished to show that this spirit now enters directly into earthly evolution, that earthly evolution can henceforth be understood only by inner wisdom, in the same way as the starry constellations were formerly understood. This was what the magi wished to show, and of this fact the humanity of today must ever be aware.

People of today tend to regard history as though the earlier were invariably the cause of the latter, as though in order to understand the events of the years 1914 to 1917 we need simply go back to 1913, 1912, 1911, and so on; historical development is regarded in the same way as evolution in nature, in which we can proceed from effect to impulse and in the impulse find the cause. From this method of thinking, that fable convenue which we call history has arisen, with which the youth of today are being inoculated to their detriment.

True Christianity, especially a reverent and sincere insight into the mysteries of Christmas and Easter, provides a sharp protest against this natural scientific caricature of world history. Christianity has brought cosmic mysteries into association with the course of the year; on December 24 and 25 it celebrates a memory of the original constellation of the year 1, the appearance of the sun in the constellation of Virgo; this date in every year is celebrated as the Christmas festival. This is the point in time that the Christian concept has fixed for the Christmas festival. The Easter festival is also established each year by taking a certain celestial arrangement, for we know that the Sunday that follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox is the chosen day, though the materialistic outlook of the present time is responsible for recent objections to this arrangement.

To those who wish, reverently and sincerely, to tune their thoughts in harmony with the Mystery of Golgotha, the period between Christmas and Easter is seen as a picture of the thirty-three years of Christ's life on earth. Previous to the Mystery of Golgotha, with which I include the mystery of Christmas, the magi studied the heavens when they wished to investigate the secrets of human evolution or any other mysterious event. They studied the constellations, and the relative positions of the heavenly bodies revealed to them the nature of events taking place upon earth. But at that moment in which they became aware of the important event that was happening on earth, by the sign given to them through the position of the sun in Virgo on December 24 and 25, they said, “From this time onward the heavenly constellations themselves will be directly revealed in human affairs on the earth.”

Can the starry constellations be perceived in human affairs? My dear friends, this perception is now demanded of us, the ability to read what is revealed through the wonderful key that is given us in the mysteries of the Christian year, which are the epitome of all the mysteries of the year of other peoples and times. The time interval between Christmas and Easter is to be understood as consisting of thirty-three years. This is the key. What does this mean? That the Christmas festival celebrated this year belongs to the Easter festival that follows thirty-three years later, while the Easter festival we celebrate this year belongs to the Christmas of 1884. In 1884 humanity celebrated a Christmas festival that really belongs to the Easter of this year (1917), and the Christmas festival we celebrate this year belongs, not to the Easter of next spring but to the one thirty-three years hence (1950). According to our reckoning, this period—thirty-three years—is the period of a human generation, thus a complete generation of humanity must elapse between Christmas festivals and the Easter festivals that are connected with them. This is the key, my dear friends, for reading the new astrology, in which attention is directed to the stars that shine within the historical evolution of humanity itself.

How can this be fulfilled? It can be fulfilled by human beings using the Christmas festival in order to realize that events happening at approximately the present time (we can only say approximately in such matters) refer back in their historical connections in such a way that we are able to perceive their birthdays or beginnings in the events of thirty-three years ago, and that events of today also provide a birthday or beginning for events that will ripen to fruition in the course of the next thirty-three years. Personal karma rules in our individual lives. In this field each one is responsible for himself; here he must endure whatever lies in his karma and must expect a direct karmic connection between past events and their subsequent consequences.

How do things stand, however, with regard to historical associations? Historical connections at the present time are of such a nature that we can neither perceive nor understand the real significance of any event that is taking place today unless we refer back to the time of its corresponding Christmas year, that is 1884 in this case. For the year 1914 we must therefore look back to 1881. All the actions of earlier generations, all the impulses with their combined activity, poured into the stream of historic evolution, have a life cycle of thirty-three years. Then comes its Easter time, the time of resurrection. When was the seed planted whose Easter time was experienced by man in 1914 and after? It was planted thirty-three years before.

Connections that reach over intervals of thirty-three years are essential for an understanding of the time rhythms of historic evolution, and a time must come when people in the holy time that begins with Christmas Eve will say to themselves, “What I do now will continue to work on, but will arise as outer fact or deed (not in a personal but in a historic sense) only after thirty-three years. Furthermore, I can understand what is happening now in the events of the outer world only by looking back across the thirty-three years of time needed for its fulfillment.”

When, at the beginning of the 1880's, the insurrection of the Mohammedan prophet, the Mahdi, resulted in the extension of English rule in Egypt, when at about the same time a war arose through French influence between greater India and China over European spheres of control, when the Congo Conference was being held, and other events of a like nature were taking place—study everything, my dear friends, that has now reached its thirty-three years fulfillment. It was then that the seeds were sown that have ripened into the events of today. At that time the question should have been asked: what do the Christmas events of this year promise for the Easter fulfillment thirty-three years hence? For, my dear friends, all things in historic evolution arise transfigured after thirty-three years, as from a grave, by virtue of a power connected with the holiest of all redemptions: the Mystery of Golgotha.

It does not suffice, however, to sentimentalize about the Mystery of Golgotha. An understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha demands the highest powers of wisdom of which the human being is capable. It must be experienced by the deepest forces that can stir the soul of man. When he searches its depths for the light kindled by wisdom, when he does not merely speak of love but is enflamed by it through the union of his soul with the cosmic soul that streams and pulses through this turning point of time, only then does he acquire insight and understanding into the mysteries of existence. In days of old the wise men who sought for guidance in the conduct of affairs of human beings asked knowledge of the stars, and the stars gave an answer; so, today, those who wish to act wisely in guiding the social life of humanity must give heed to the stars that rise and set in the course of historic evolution. Just as we calculate the cyclic rotations of celestial bodies, so must we learn to calculate the cyclic rotations of historic events by means of a true science of history. The time-cycles of history can be measured by the interval that extends from Christmas to the Easter thirty-three years ahead, and the spirits of these time-cycles regulate that element in which the human soul lives and weaves in so far as it is not a mere personal being but is part of the warp and woof of historic evolution.

When we meditate on the mystery of Christmas, we do so most effectively if we acquire a knowledge of those secrets of life that ought to be revealed in this age in order to enrich the stream of Christian tradition concerning the Mystery of Golgotha and the inner meaning of the Christmas mystery. Christ spoke to humanity in these words, “Lo! I am with you always even to the end of the world.” Those, however, who today call themselves His disciples often say that; though the revelations from spiritual worlds were certainly there when Jesus Christ was living on earth, they have now ceased, and they regard as blasphemous anyone who declares that wonderful revelations can still come to us from the spiritual world. Thus official Christianity has become, in many respects, an actual hindrance to the further development of Christianity.

What has remained, however? The holy symbols, one of the holiest of which is portrayed in the Christmas mystery—these constitute in themselves a living protest against that suppression of true Christianity that is too often practiced by the official churches.

The spiritual science we seek to express through anthroposophy desires, among other things, to proclaim the great significance of the Mystery of Golgotha and the mystery of Christmas. It is also its task to bear witness to that which gives to earth its meaning, and to human life its significance. Since the Christmas tree, which is but a few centuries old, has now become the symbol of the Christmas festival, then, my dear friends, those who stand under the Christmas tree should ask themselves this question, “Is the saying true for us that is written by the testimony of history above the Christmas tree: Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine? Is this saying true for us?” To realize its truth requires spiritual knowledge. No physical scientist can give answer to the questions of the virgin birth and the resurrection; on the contrary, every scientist must needs deny both events. Such events can only be understood when viewed from a plane of existence in which neither birth nor death plays the important part they do in the physical world. Just as Christ Jesus passed through death in such a way as to make death an illusion and resurrection the reality—this is the content of the Easter mystery—so did Christ Jesus pass through birth in such a way as to render birth an illusion and “transformation of being” within the spiritual world the reality, for in the spiritual world there is neither birth nor death, only changes of condition, only metamorphoses. Not until humanity is prepared to look up to that world in which birth and death both lose their physical meaning will the Christmas and Easter festivals regain their true import and sanctity.

Then, and only then, my dear friends, will our hearts and souls be filled with inner warmth of tone, fortified by which we shall be able again to speak to our little ones, to speak to them even in earliest childhood, of that Child who was laid in the manger, and of the three wise men who brought to him their gifts of wisdom, virtue, and immortality. We must be able to speak of these things to children, for what we say to the child about the Christmas mystery will be celebrated by him as an Easter festival, it will reappear in his life when he has lived through thirty-three years. For in historical evolution the responsibilities of humanity are such that one generation can only express as Christmas impulse those forces that the next generation will experience as Easter impulse. If we could realize this with consciousness, my dear friends, one generation would think of its successor in the following way: in the Christmas star I teach you to receive into your soul as truth that which will arise as the Easter star after thirty-three years. If we were conscious of this connection of the present generation and its successor, each one of us could say, “I have received an impulse for work that extends far beyond the limits of the day, for the period between Christmas and Easter is not merely the weeks that lie between these festivals but is really a period of thirty-three years; this is the true cycle of an impulse that I have implanted in the soul of a child as a Christmas impulse, and that after thirty-three years will arise again as an Easter impulse.”

Such things, my dear friends, should not encourage pride in mere theoretical knowledge; they achieve value only when they are expressed in practical deeds, when our souls become so filled with conviction concerning them that we can do nothing but to act according to their light. Only then is the soul filled with love for the great being for whom the deeds, in this light, are done; then this love becomes a concrete thing, filled with cosmic warmth, and quite distinct from that sentimental affectation that we find today on all lips but that has led, in these catastrophic times, to some of the greatest impulses of hatred among humanity. Those who for so long have talked about love have no further right to speak of it when it has turned to hate; to such persons falls rather the duty of asking themselves, “What have we neglected in our talk of love, of Christmas love, that out of it deeds of hatred have developed?” Humanity, however, must also ask, “What must we seek in the spiritual world in order to find that which is lost, that love that rules and lives warmingly in all beings but is only real love when it wells up from a vital understanding of life.”

To love another is to understand him; love does not mean filling one's heart with egotistical warmth that overflows in sentimental speeches; to love means to comprehend the being for whom we should do things, to understand not merely with the intellect but through our innermost being, to understand with the full nature and essence of our human being.

That such a love, springing from deepest spiritual understanding, may be able to find its place in human life, that desire and will should exist to cherish such love, may still be possible in these difficult times for him who is willing to tread again the path of the magi to the manger. He may say to himself, “Just as the wise men from the East sought understanding to find the way, the way of love, to the manger, so will I seek the way that will open my eyes to the light in which the true deeds of human love are performed. Just as the magi surrendered their faith in the authority of the starry heavens, added to their knowledge of the stars their sacrifice of this knowledge, and brought the union of immortality with this stellar wisdom to the Christ Child on that Christmas night, so must humanity in these later times bring its deepest impulses of soul as sacrifice to that being for whom the Christmas festival stands as the yearly symbol. Inspired by such a consciousness, the Christmas festival will again be celebrated by humanity sincerely and truly. Its celebration then will express not a denial but a knowledge of that being for whom the Christmas candles are lit.”

It is not possible to say everything in the first lecture, and I mentioned many things only as a sort of introduction; later I will present them in more detail. Therefore there may be some questions that I will answer in their full context in subsequent lectures. Nevertheless I would like to ask if you have any questions today. Perhaps you can write your questions down, and I will attempt to answer them in later lectures. That way I can answer them within the full context. It is not at all superfluous to pose such questions today, or perhaps, even better, tomorrow, after you have had some time to think.

I have a written question here asking how to handle a boy in the third developmental stage of childhood, that is, after puberty, who is one-sidedly gifted in mathematics and the natural sciences, but who has absolutely no talent for foreign languages.

That question is related to a great deal that I will discuss in detail later. In the next lectures, I will discuss these special but one-sided talents and show how you can place them in the service of developing the entire human being. I will also show how you can harmonize them by proceeding in a particular way pedagogically. Nevertheless I would like to say something about it now.

There are some girls who have this kind of talent, but it happens so seldom that you can often find complete biographies of these women because they then became famous mathematicians. The one-sided talent for mathematics and natural sciences that we find in boys is generally based upon the fact that an organ that appears quite unimportant is very subtly developed in these young men. Perhaps some of you are aware of such families as the Bernoulli family,1 in which individual members of the family were particularly gifted in mathematics over a period of eight generations. In another famous case, we have the Bach family,2 which produced a large number of “little Bachs” who were extremely talented with regard to music. I should also mention that there are many boys who are highly talented with regard to the physical and mathematical sciences, but whom we cannot observe so well because their talents lie more in the direction of botany and zoology. At the same time, they are also highly talented in the area of mineralogy, but are not particularly gifted in observing the physical characteristics of minerals.

Such things can take on many different nuances. In these boys, the three semicircular canals in the human ear are particularly well developed. It may be that these three tiny vertical bones within the human ear are so arranged that they bring with them a highly developed sense of space and numbers. In other cases, they are much less well developed. These talents are connected with that development. If the human organism is particularly well developed in that way, a special talent arises out of the ear.

Within the organ of hearing are all the organs necessary for hearing, but these are further connected with the organs for speaking, for balance, and for a sense of numbers. In a certain sense, they all meld together. If these small bones that appear as three semicircular canals within the ear are one-sidedly developed within a person, then that development occurs at the cost of the development for hearing the sounds in speech and so forth, namely, for hearing the proper structure of language. This weakens the talent for hearing language, with the result that particularly those children who are very gifted in mathematics have less talent in language. The only thing we can do with such children is to begin teaching them language as soon as we notice that they are particularly gifted in mathematics. We teach them language without placing a strong value upon the intellectual aspect, that is, upon grammar. Rather we teach them language through the rhythm of the language itself. If you have the children memorize things without going into the actual content, but so that they simply enjoy the rhythm of the foreign language in short poems, then teach them the content through the sounds and what the sounds carry within them, you will see, if you begin this early enough, that these children will overcome this one-sidedness.

As we have shown in practice at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, it is absolutely necessary to avoid beginning with an intellectually oriented education when children are seven or eight. Instead we need to work from the more artistic aspect. We do not teach writing in an intellectual way, by working with the forms of the letters. Instead we teach it by beginning with a kind of primitive drawing. In that way, we develop the will more than the intellect, whereas the common way of teaching writing today speaks too strongly to the intellect. Thus we attempt to engage the entire human being. In that way, the individual one-sided talents balance out.

If you ask how to awaken the memory for correct spelling, my answer would be that you need to observe the differences in human strengths during the three periods of human life, that is, until the change of teeth, until puberty, and then after puberty until the age of twenty. You need to develop a sense for observing these three periods of life and the differences in the specific forces of life that develop. Then you will notice that people who, until the age of fifteen, have absolutely no sense of correct spelling or correct grammar will develop it if they are treated in the way I just mentioned. If you draw their attention to the rhythm of the language, they will develop this sense out of the depths of their souls after the age of fifteen.

This is why it would be totally inappropriate to keep children who have well-developed talents from progressing through the grades simply because they do not demonstrate any particular talent for grammar. If you look at what Goethe wrote as a young boy and then see that when he was older, he stood in a very exclusive group with regard to grammar, you will think about him very differently than the way people usually think about a boy or girl who cannot spell properly at the age of thirteen or so. Instead of wringing our hands about how poorly such children spell and continually asking what we should do to teach them to spell, it would be much better to think about what capacities the children actually have, seek out those special talents, and then find a way to teach the children what they need to learn from those talents.

You will see that if you emphasize the artistic element when teaching children who are one-sidedly gifted in mathematics, you will always achieve a balance.

To our modern way of thinking, it can be difficult to describe the particular characteristics of spiritual science. It is natural to judge something new according to what we already know. Spiritual science, in the way I mean it here, differs from what we normally call science. It does not give things another content or put forth other ideas, but it speaks about a very different human being. It is because of this other perspective that spiritual science can be fruitful for education. If I were asked to explain this difference, I would give the following preliminary description.

When we study something these days, we think we gain some ideas about this or that. Then, depending upon the strength of our memory, we carry those ideas with us for the rest of our lives. We remember things; therefore we know them. Spiritual science is not to be practiced in that way. Certainly people often see it that way, out of habit, but those who take it up like a collection of notes do not value it properly. They approach reality in a way that is just as foreign to life as our sensory, material manner of consideration is. For instance, if someone were to say that she ate and drank yesterday and having done that, she would not need to eat or drink again the rest of her life, you would think that is nonsense. The human organism must continually renew its connection with those things it needs from external nature. It can do nothing other than enter this process of receiving and working with what it takes in time and again.

In a way, it is the same with spiritual science. Spiritual science gives something that enlivens the inner human being and must be renewed for it to remain alive within the human being. For that reason, spiritual science is much closer to the creative powers of the human being than normal knowledge, and that is why it can actually stimulate us from many directions to work as with this most precious material, the developing human being.

It is not immediately obvious that spiritual science is alive in that regard. However, if you patiently consider those things that our modern habits say must be presented more abstractly, you will notice that they slowly become genuinely alive. We then not only have knowledge of facts, but also something that at each moment, in each hour, we can use to give life to the school. If you are patient, you will see that spiritual science goes in quite a different direction, and that those people who treat it like any other knowledge, like a collection of notes, damage it the most.

I wanted to offer these preliminary thoughts, as you will need to consider the things I need to say today in that light. Yesterday I mentioned that we can genuinely understand the human being from various perspectives, and that these lead us to a unified view of the body, soul, and spirit. I said that in spiritual science we speak of the physical human being, the etheric human being, the astral human being, and the I. Each of these aspects of human nature has three aspects of its own.

Let us first look at the human being from the physical perspective. Here the modern physiological perspective is often inaccurate and does not arrive at a truly mobile view of the nature of the human being. After a thirty-year study, I mentioned these things in my book, Riddles of the Soul, published two or three years ago. At the beginning, I spoke of the natural division of the physical human being into three parts. Now I will present these at this point in our course more as a report to substantiate what I say. If we consider the human being first from the physical perspective, it is important to first look at the fact that it perceives the external world through its senses. The senses, which are, in a way, localized at the periphery of the human organism, are brought further into the human being by the nerves. Anyone who simply includes the senses and nerves with the rest really does not observe the human being in a way that leads to clear understanding of its nature. There is a high degree of independence, of individuality, in what I would call the nerve-sense human being. Because modern people consider the whole human being as some nebulous unity, science cannot comprehend the fundamental independence of the nerve-sense human being. You will understand me better when I describe this further.

A second independent aspect of the physical human being lies within our organism. I call it the rhythmic organism. It is the part of our respiratory, circulatory, and lymphatic systems that is rhythmic. Everything that has rhythmic activity within the human being is part of the second system, which is relatively independent from the nerve-sense system. It is as though these two systems exist alongside one another, independently, yet in communication with one another. Modern science’s vague concept of a unified human being does not exist.

The third aspect is also relatively independent of the whole human being. I call it the metabolic organism. If you look at the activities of these three aspects of the human being, the nervesense being, the human being that lives in certain rhythmic activities, and the human being who lives in the metabolism, you have everything that exists in human nature to the extent that it is an active organism. At the same time, you have an indication of three independent systems within the human organism. Modern science creates quite false concepts about these three independent systems when it states that the life of the soul is connected with the nerves. This is a habit of thought that has established itself since about the end of the eighteenth century.

In order to develop a feeling for these three aspects of the body, I would like to discuss their relationship to the soul. Allow me to state first that everything that is concentrated in the human metabolic system, that is an activity of the metabolic system, is directly connected with human willing. The part of the human being represented by the circulatory system is directly connected with feeling, while the nerve-sense system is connected with thinking.

You can see that modern science has created some incorrect concepts here. It says that the human soul life is strongly connected with the life of the nerves, or with the nerves and senses, and that thinking, feeling, and willing are directly connected with the nerves; through the nerves the soul indirectly transfers its activity to the circulatory, the rhythmic, and metabolic systems. This brings considerable confusion into our understanding of the human being. People become more removed from their own nature instead of being brought nearer to it.

Just as thinking is connected with nerve-sense life, feeling is directly connected with the human rhythmic system. Feeling, as soul life, pulsates in our breathing, blood circulation, and lymphatic system and is connected with these systems just as directly as thinking is with the nerve system. The will is directly connected with the metabolism. Something always happens in the human metabolism when a will activity is present. The nerves are not at all connected to willing, as is usually stated. The will has a direct relationship to the metabolism, and the person perceives this relationship through the nerves. That is the genuine relationship. The nerve system has no task other than thinking. Whether we think of some external object, or whether what we think about occurs in our metabolism in relation to the will, the nerves always have the same task.

Modern science speaks of sense nerves, which it presumes exist in order to provide impressions of the external world from the periphery of the body to the central organ. We also hear that motor nerves exist to carry will impulses from the central system to the periphery of the body. I will speak more of this later. People have created very clever theories to prove that this difference between the sense and motor nerves exists. But this difference does not exist. More important than these clever theories is the fact that you can cut a motor nerve and then connect one end to the end of a sense nerve that you have also cut. This then becomes a nerve of one kind. It shows that we can find no real differences in function between the motor and sense nerves, even in an anatomical or physiological sense. The so-called motor nerves do not carry will impulses from the central organ to the human periphery.

In reality motor nerves are also sense nerves. They exist so that if I, for example, moved a finger, there is a direct relationship between the decision and the metabolism of the finger, so my will can exercise a direct influence upon the metabolism of the finger. The so-called motor nerves perceive this change in the metabolic process. Without this perception of a metabolic process, no decision of the will can follow, since the human being depends upon perceiving what occurs within himself. This is just like our needing to perceive something in the external world if we are to know things and participate in them.

The differentiation between sense and motor nerves is a most willing servant of materialism. It is a servant that could have arisen in materialistic science only because a cheap comparison could be found for it in modern times, namely, the telegraph. We telegraph from one station to another and then telegraph back. It is approximately a picture of the process of telegraphy that people use to describe how the sense and motor nerves communicate between the periphery and the central organ. Of course, this whole picture was possible only in an age like the nineteenth century, when telegraphy played such an important role. Had telegraphy not existed, perhaps people would not have formed that picture. Instead they might have developed a more natural view of the corresponding processes.

It may seem as though I want to trample all these theories into the ground simply for the sake of being radical. It is not that easy. I began to study nerves as a very young man, and it was very earthshaking for me when I noticed that this theory served materialism. It did this by transforming what is a direct influence of the will upon the metabolism into something merely physical, into an imagined physical strand of nerves carrying the will impulse from the central organ to the periphery of the human being to the muscles. People simply imposed material processes upon the human organism.

In an act of will, there is in truth a direct connection between the will impulse of the soul and some process in the metabolism. The nerve exists only to transmit the perception of this process. To the same extent, the nerve also exists to transmit the perception necessary when there is a relationship between the person’s feeling and a process expressed in circulation. That is always the case when we feel. Essentially, the basis is not some nerve process; it is a modification of our circulation. With any feeling, there is a process that does not exist in the metabolism, but in the rhythm of circulation. What happens in the blood, in the lymphatic system, or in the non-metabolic aspects of the exchange of oxygen (the exchange of oxygen is actually metabolic, and to that extent it is a part of the transfer of will)—to the extent that we are dealing with the rhythmic processes of breathing—belongs to feeling. All feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic processes. Again, the nerves exist only to directly perceive what occurs between the feeling in the soul and the rhythmic processes in the organism. Nerves are only organs of perception. In a sense, spiritual science allows us to first see what it really means when time and again we find in textbooks on physiology or psychology: “We can make the hypothetical assumption that human beings have sense and motor nerves.” However, anatomically they are differentiated at most by small differences in thickness; certainly not by anything else. I will return to the speculations made by Tabes and others. Today I wanted only to give some indication of what is shown by an objective observation of the human organism as consisting of three aspects: namely, that the nerve-sense organism is related to the imaginative, thinking life of the soul. We have the rhythmic organism, which relates to the feeling life of the soul, and finally, the metabolic organism, which, in its broadest sense, is related to the willing life in the soul.

To clarify this, we can look at some part of life, say, music. The musical part of life is the best evidence (but only one among many we will encounter) of the particular relationship of feeling to the rhythmic life of the organism. The imaginative, thinking life connected with the nerve-sense organism perceives the rhythmic life connected with feeling. When we hear something musical, when we give ourselves over to a picture presented in tones, we quite obviously perceive through our senses. Those physiologists, however, who can observe in more subtle ways, notice that our breathing inwardly participates in the musical picture; how much our breathing has to do with what we experience; and how that musical picture appears as something to be aesthetically judged, something placed in the realm of art.

We need to be clear about the complicated process continuously going on within us. Let us look at our own organism. The nervesense organism is centralized in the human brain in such a way that the brain is in a firm state only to a small extent. The whole brain swims in cerebrospinal fluid. We can clearly understand what occurs by noticing that if our brain did not swim in cerebrospinal fluid, it would rest upon the blood vessels at the base of our skull and continuously exert pressure upon them. Because our brain does swim in cerebrospinal fluid, it is subject to continuous upward pressure—we know this from Archimedes’ principle—so that of the 1300–1500-gram weight of the brain, only about 20 grams press upon the base of the skull. The brain is subject to a significant pressure from below, so that it presses only a little upon the base of the skull. This cerebrospinal fluid participates in the entirety of our human experience no less than the firm part of the brain. The cerebrospinal fluid continually moves up and down. The fluid moves up and down rhythmically from the brain through the spinal column. Then it radiates out into the abdominal cavity, where inhalation forces it back into the cerebral cavity, from whence it flows back out with exhaling. Our cerebrospinal fluid moves up and down in a continuous process that extends throughout the remainder of the organism; a continuous vibrating movement essentially fills the whole human being and is connected with breathing.

When we hear a series of tones, we encounter them as breathing human beings. The cerebrospinal fluid is continuously moving up and down. When we listen to music, the inner rhythm of the liquid moving up and down encounters what occurs within our hearing organs as a result of the tones. Thus there is a continuous clash of the inner vibrating music of our breathing with what happens in the ear when listening to music. Our experience of music exists in the balance between our hearing and our rhythmic breathing. Someone who tries to connect our nerve processes directly with what occurs in our musical perception, which is filled with feeling, is on the wrong path. The nerve processes exist in musical perception only to connect it with what takes place deeper in our I, so that we can actually perceive the music and transform it into imagination.

I have attempted to follow these questions in all possible directions. There was a time when people in Europe were more interested in such questions. As you probably know, there was quite an argument about the understanding of beauty in music between Richard Wagner and his students and the Viennese musicologist Hanslick.2 There you can find the question of musical perception discussed in all possible nuances. You will also find mention of some experiments we can do to more fully comprehend musical perception. It is particularly in the perception of music that we can find the direct relationship between our circulatory processes and human feeling; at the same time there is a direct relationship between the nervous system and imagination or thinking. However, we find no direct relationship between the nerves and feeling or between the nerves and willing.

I am convinced that the incorrect hypotheses about sense and motor nerves that modern science has incorporated as a servant of materialism (and incorporated more strongly than we may think) have already taken over human thinking. In the next, or perhaps the following generation, it will become the general attitude. I am convinced that this materialistic theory about the nerves has already become the general mentality and that what we find today as theory in physiology or psychology has entered so deeply into our thinking that this attitude actually separates people. If you have the feeling—and many people do—that when we meet another human being, we make only sense impressions upon that person, and the other person upon us; that the other person is a closed entity with its own feeling life, separate from us; and that this person’s feelings can be transmitted only through her own nerves, we create a wall of separation between people. This wall leads to the most peculiar views. Today we hear people say that when they look at another human being, they see only that the other being has a nose in the middle of her face, or that she has two eyes in the same location where I know that I have two eyes. The other human being has a face formed just like my own. Thus, when I see all this, I draw an unconscious conclusion that there is an I just like my own in that organism. There are people today who accept that theory exactly and who understand the relationship between two human beings in such an external way that they think they must come to an unconscious conclusion based upon the form of the human being in order to determine that another human being has an I similar to their own. The perspective that connects the life of the nerves with our ability to creatively picture our thoughts, that connects our living circulation and respiration with feeling, and connects our entire metabolism with willing, will bring people together again once it becomes the general attitude, once it finally becomes actual experience. For now, I can only use a picture to describe this reunion.

We really would be separated in spirit and soul from one another if, when we met, all our feeling and willing developed within our nerves, enclosing us completely within our skin. Modern people have that feeling, and the increasingly antisocial condition prevalent in modern Europe is a true representative of that feeling.

There is, however, another possibility. We are all sitting together in this hall. We all breathe the same air; we cannot say that each of us is going around enclosed in our own box of air. We breathe the air together. If we limit our soul life to the nervous system, then we are isolated. Someone who, for example, connects breathing with the soul makes the soul into something we have in common. Just as we have the air in common, we also have our soul life in common when we reconnect it with the rhythmic organism. Even though in today’s society some people can purchase better things and others must purchase poorer things, a rich person still cannot get his food from the moon, from a different heavenly body, just so he won’t have to eat the same things as a poor person does.

Thus we have a commonality in our metabolism, and our willing takes on a commonality when we recognize the original and direct relationship of our will to our metabolism. You can see the endless effects of recognizing the connection of our feeling life with the rhythm within human nature when you also recognize that the rhythms of our being are connected to the external world. You can see the same thing in regard to our will when we recognize its connection with our metabolism. From this, you can see how well-equipped spiritual science is to understand matter and its processes. Materialism, on the other hand, is destined to not understand anything about matter.

Here you have a preliminary view of the three aspects of human life: the nerve-sense life, life in the rhythmic organism, and life in the metabolism. I will explain this in more detail later. In connection with the life of the soul, we have discussed only physical life. We can consider the simple division of our soul life into what people normally consider as its three aspects: thinking, feeling, and willing. However, we will not understand it well if we make that division, however justified, our primary viewpoint. As you probably know, many psychologists separate the life of the human soul into imagining, thinking, feeling, and willing. For an objective observer of human nature, however, it should become clear that this perspective cannot offer a good picture of soul life. Now there is a phenomenon, or rather a whole complex of phenomena, that is more characteristic of our soul life than these abstractions. To understand the life of our soul in a living way, it is better not to begin with thinking, feeling, and willing. If we instead concentrate on something that permeates our entire soul life, we can recognize it as a primary characteristic of our living soul. We can see that the soul lives alternately in sympathies and antipathies, in loves and hates. Normally we do not notice how the soul swings between loves and hates, between sympathies and antipathies. We do not notice it because we do not properly evaluate certain processes of the soul.

People make judgments, and these judgments are either positive or negative. I could say that a tree is green, and in doing so I connect the two ideas of “tree” and “green” in a positive way. I could say you did not visit me yesterday, and in doing that I connect two ideas or complexes of ideas in a negative way. Something of sympathy or antipathy forms the basis of such judgments in our souls. Positive judgments are always experienced with sympathy and negative judgments with antipathy. The accuracy of the judgment is not based upon sympathy or antipathy; rather the accuracy is experienced through sympathy or antipathy. We could also say that a third situation lies clearly between sympathy and antipathy. That is the situation when someone has to choose between the two. In our souls, we do not merely have sympathy and antipathy; we also clearly have alternation between the two, which is also a positive state. Though this is not as clearly differentiated as in the physical body, since we are dealing with a process and not with clearly defined organs, we can divide our soul life into sympathies, antipathies, and something in between.

We can see these different aspects much more clearly when we look at what is spiritual in the human being. Modern psychology just tosses this in with the soul. We will see that we can gain a genuinely flexible view of human nature only when we can keep these three aspects separate. The physical consists of the nerve-sense processes, the circulatory processes, and the metabolism. The soul aspect of the human being consists of experiencing antipathy, sympathy, and the alternation between those two.

The spiritual aspect of the human being also exists in three parts. When we want to understand the human being spiritually, we must in the first place take note of waking experience, which we all know as a state of spiritual life and which is a part of us from waking until sleeping. Another spiritual state, sleeping life, exists from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. Finally, we have a third state between those two, which we encounter at the moment of awakening, namely, dream life. Waking, dreaming, and sleeping are the three aspects of spiritual life. But we should not associate trivial ideas about these things with a genuine understanding of spiritual life. Instead we need to acquire a sense of how that sleeping spirit actually exists. We can speak of sleep as a state when a human being becomes motionless, when he or she no longer perceives sense impressions, and so forth. But we can also try to see things from a different perspective.

We can acquire some understanding of the meaning of sleep for our life by approaching it in the following way. When we look back upon our life, we usually believe that we are looking at an uninterrupted stream. We collect all our memories into a continuum. However, that is an error. You remember what happened to you today since you awoke, but before that there was a time when your consciousness was asleep. The period of sleep thus interrupts the stream of your memory. Daily life comes again and is then again followed by a period of sleep. What we carry in our consciousness as a uniform stream toward the past is actually always interrupted by periods of sleep. You can see this has a certain significance, even for consciousness. We could say that we are trained to perceive periods when something is missing in just the same way as periods that are filled, but we do not always make that clear to ourselves. If I were to draw a white area here on the board, so that I leave out black circles, you would look at the white area, but actually pay less attention to the white area than to where nothing is, that is, to the black circles. If we have a bottle of seltzer water, in a sense we do not see the water; what we mostly see is the little bubbles of carbon dioxide. We see what is not in the water. In the same way, when we look backward, we do not actually see our experiences. We overlook them much as we overlook the white area here on the board. We directly perceive something else, something that we must understand much more exactly. We realize this when we really try to understand the basis of our actual sense of I. I will discuss the reasons in later lectures, but slowly we come to realize that our perception of these periods of sleep gives us our sense of I. Thus we destroy our feeling of I when we do not properly sleep. The interruptions of sleep must be strewn in among our memories for us to achieve a proper sense of I. If you study those disturbances that can arise in your sense of I through an improper sleep life, you will be able to grasp the idea that an I-sense is based upon these holes in consciousness. Please note that I am not referring to the concept of I, but to the sensing of I.

It is not only what we could call the content of waking consciousness that lives in human beings. Sleep also directly affects what exists in the human being, perhaps to an even greater extent. Those who can genuinely observe human subjectivity will find that when they are accurately aware of the waking state, it is present only in thinking. It would be impossible for us to have the same level of wakefulness in our feeling. Feeling is not directly present in our consciousness in the same way as thinking is. In fact, feeling has the same relationship to our consciousness as dreaming. As strange as it may sound, those who can gain clarity about the differences between thinking and feeling as pure phenomena of consciousness will conclude that the same kind of experience occurs when we perceive our dreams as occurs in our feeling.

We also find the same kind of experience in willing that we find in the unconscious state of sleeping, in dreamless sleep. You need only consider for a moment that, when you raise your hand or your arm, you perceive the result of willing. The impulse of willing, that is, the direct spiritual impulse, is connected with the metabolism. You do not perceive the inner process that occurs between the will impulse and the metabolism any more than you consciously experience what occurs within you during dreamless sleep. The conscious experience of the actual processes of will and of dreamless sleep are equivalent. The processes of your feeling life and of dreaming are also the same. True wakefulness exists only in thinking. We do not sleep only between falling asleep and awakening; we also partially sleep when we are awake. We are awake only in regard to thinking, we dream in regard to feeling, and we sleep in regard to willing.

Now please do not assume that willing should remain unconscious. It is notalways unconscious. If I had here a white area with four black circles within it, then where there is nothing, where I left something out, I would perceive something just as I consciously perceive the left-out content, the content of the will that I sleep through in my normal waking life.

If we look at the human being in a more flexible way, we will see the inner activity of clearly separated aspects of three spiritual states. In thinking, the waking spirit is active; in feeling, it is the dreaming spirit, and in willing, the sleeping spirit. We need to be able to differentiate wakefulness and sleeping as more than alternating states in day and night. We need to be able to observe how these states interact in a human being who is awake.

This has an extremely practical implication for education. We need to ask how we can learn to understand the interactions between willing and thinking and how can we learn to best teach a child at the age of six or seven, when we especially need to take this interaction between thinking and willing into account. The answer is to learn to observe the interaction between willing and thinking in other phenomena, the ways it occurs in a concrete form, in a way we can see, namely, in waking and sleeping. If I study waking and sleeping, I will have something I can compare with thinking and willing.

We needed to discuss this at the beginning of this course because it is through spiritual science that our psychology first acquires some genuine content. If you pick up any modern psychology textbook, you will find definitions of willing and definitions of thinking, but they more or less remain mere definitions of words. We need to understand such things in a real way, but we can do that only if we can relate them to things that exist in the world, for example, to study them through the relationship of wakefulness to sleeping. That is something we will do, and in so doing we can also throw some light upon the relationship of thinking to willing. Thus we can penetrate the real world, and that is just what spiritual science tries to do.

Spiritual science does not consider spiritual life out of some purely subjective need, simply because it is nice for people who have nothing else to do, and who, rather than making small talk about some other subject, prefer to chat about the fact that human beings consist of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an I. Many people have such a superficial attitude. What is important in spiritual science is not to offer material for small talk. What spiritual science can contribute to our understanding of the spirit is, in fact, necessary to illuminate human life so that we can work with it as a practical reality, something we have forgotten how to do. The chaos we now find in Europe, the absurd events of the last five or six years, is the result of that forgetfulness. There is a direct connection between our collective denial of the real content of the world and the distress within our civilization. Those who believe we can keep our old attitudes make a serious error. We are working with the adults of the future, and we must think first and foremost about the future of humanity. It is particularly here, in the area of education, that we should first think about those forces that enable us to give something to the future generation that is more than what we received, and which has brought about the terrible conditions of our society. In this way we open our eyes beyond the somewhat confined realm of education, as wholesome as it may be, onto the entire development of humanity.

I have tried to give you some insight into the nature of the human being and thereby into the nature of the developing child. For pedagogical artists, such insights are quite practical in that they enable us to guide this human material into life in a fruitful way. From what I have already indicated, you can see that the question I posed in the first lecture can be at least partially answered. I believe that question is particularly important for today’s teachers. The question is: How is it that we have, on the one hand, such a wonderful science of teaching, with all its well-thought-out principles and, on the other hand, so much justifiable public criticism of education and current teaching methods?

The reason is that although pedagogical geniuses developed our principles through a kind of instinctive intuition, although we have many theories about how to teach, this recently assembled collection of principles that has permeated our entire worldview is not related to a genuine understanding of human nature. We cannot develop an art of education from the sciences as they are practiced today. I certainly do not want to trivialize the great progress and triumphs of modern science. Nevertheless we must understand the developing human being from a very different perspective. The sciences have remained theoretical and have created a contradiction between external physical existence and the spirit-soul. We can therefore say that they offer no support or help to our pedagogical principles. Putting those pedagogical principles into practice depends upon teachers who are highly skilled at practicing them instinctively.

Pestalozzi, Diesterweg, and others obviously had a marvelous pedagogical instinct and developed an instinctive understanding of the human being. However, we live in a time when we can go no further on instinct alone. In older patriarchal societies, we could survive more or less instinctually. However, we live in a time when we must become more and more conscious of everything, and we therefore need to consciously understand human beings. We can do that only by bringing the practical perspective needed for teaching into a closer connection, a systematized understanding of human nature. What science tells us about human physiology or biology offers us no basis for the development of pedagogical principles. What modern science tells us gives us no direct help in seeing how we can best use a child’s talents when they are unequally developed.

For that to be possible, our understanding of the human being must be different than that of modern science. I have already mentioned some basic goals for such an understanding. We still need to learn what can create a bridge to a genuine art of education. I would like to stress that in this age of materialism, we are less and less in a position of genuinely understanding the physical human organism. On the other hand, we have hardly anything other than language as a means of approaching other human beings. Although illustrative materials can be very useful in certain areas of education, the method of teaching through illustration should not be the only one used. We need to ask whether language, when used as the primary means of communication with growing children, can really bring us closer to the nature of the child. We cannot answer that question without penetrating a little deeper into the nature of the human being.

Everyone who attempts to form a picture of the human being from normal pedagogical texts or texts on psychology, who attempts to fill education with principles from natural science or psychology, ends up with the idea that a human being is just a collection of various forms. Such people would have the perspective that here we have a human organism, and within the skull there is a firm brain (or at least a semi-solid one). They would also think here are the other organs, the liver, the lungs, and so forth. If we look at things superficially or clinically, the drawings we see would convey the idea that these firmly delineated organs are the only things that exist within a human being. But remember that people consist of at least 80 percent fluid, that they are actually a column of fluid; therefore they consist of only a very small amount of something solid. Is it really possible to assume that a human being really consists only of sharply delineated individual organs? The human being is a column of fluid and is moreover filled with gases. Yet these texts describe the nervous system as more or less solid strands, or possibly as a somewhat softer solid. They have no awareness that these are in fact imbedded in liquid or even in gas, a gas that exists in the human organism in the form of vibrations or rhythmic movements.

Aside from the gaseous aspect, the human being is actually a liquid column and the brain is imbedded in cerebrospinal fluid; indeed much of the life of our organs is connected with the up-and- down motion of the cerebrospinal fluid as we inhale and exhale. If we become aware of these things, we will not ascribe parallel organic processes to spiritual and soul facts; we will not assume they are firmly delineated. Instead we will form a picture that describes how while I am thinking, while I am feeling or willing, the moving fluid portions of my organism take on certain liquid structures which again dissolve.

We need to ask ourselves why, for example, we should connect the process of thinking with some vibrations or similar processes in the nerves. Of course they are not. Why shouldn’t they be connected with the vibrations within the liquid portion of the human being? This is a question natural science, under the influence of our materialistic period, have not even asked. We can be satisfied with what science discovers when we accept its common goals. Modern science has brought about numerous practical results in the area of solid or liquid technology where the liquid exists in an external form in space. It has also been very successful in working with gases, such as in steam technology, where the steam exists in space and can be worked with there.

When we are working with the results of conventional science in a technology, working with inorganic substances, we need to take into account how things operate. For that reason, conventional science in this era of materialism has had such great success, since it has had to closely follow advances in technology. Consider this example: if someone constructed a railway bridge using the principles of mechanics incorrectly, we would very soon see how such a bridge would collapse when one or two locomotives went over it. Such a catastrophe would occur because the proven results of conventional scientific testing were not applied; this is how incorrect principles are corrected in practice.

The further we go into areas where inorganic technology can no longer have a correcting effect, the less we can base our practice upon theory. We need think only of how slowly medicine has advanced in comparison with modern technology. You can very quickly see the significance of incorrect principles in the process of building a railway bridge or similar things. However, when a physician treats someone, it is not at all common to try to determine whether the physician has done everything necessary to restore the person’s health, simply because that is impossible to determine. Here the situation is very different; it is simply not possible to correct theories through practice. You will forgive me if I make a comment here, but I think it is important for teachers, since everything in life is important for teachers. In the areas of jurisprudence or economics, for instance, if we followed the way people’s principles were applied, we would very quickly see how lame the concept of control through practice is. What is officially determined in legal matters is then made correct through laws. This is true in all countries. Whether we can justify such things from the perspective of a genuine understanding of human beings is a question that is just as neglected today as it was when Goethe gave Faust the question of which rights we are born with.

Furthermore people have not the slightest interest in finding out how our use of externally superb pedagogical principles relates to what then transpires with the developing generation. That, however, is just what I want to draw your attention to. We hear a great deal about the terrible social things now occurring in the eastern part of Europe and in Russia. The things being done in Eastern Europe under the influence of Lenin’s1 and Trotsky’s2 theories are horrible. However, people today give no thought to what is actually happening. People today have no idea of what the results of those things being done today will be in twenty or twenty-five years, what kind of barbarism will fall upon Europe. It is, however, the task of teachers to observe what will happen to human development.

Now here is something unusual. You see, in Zurich, Avenarius, an honest and upright citizen, once taught philosophy. Somewhat later, Vogt, a student of Ernst Mach, taught together with the philosopher Adler, who was the same Adler who shot the Austrian Minister Stürgkh. We can certainly not say of Adler that he was as honest a man as Avenarius, but Avenarius was an honest, upright man. Nevertheless he taught a philosophy that was possible to teach only because of the materialism at that time. If you now look into the “state philosophy” of Bolshevism, you will find it is none other than that taught by Avenarius. After two generations, what was once taught in Zurich as an appropriate philosophy has become the theory the Bolsheviks put into direct practice.

People pay no attention to the relationships of different periods because they are not at all clear about what happens when the views of one generation are inherited by the following generation. Of course, I do not mean just physical inheritance. The honest and upright Avenarius taught a philosophy which, after a relatively short time, led to the barbarization of Europe. It is important not to simply accept abstract judgments when we want to see what value a viewpoint has for human development. Instead we must look into the way that viewpoint takes effect. An important responsibility of all education is to look at what will become of what we do in the classroom in twenty or thirty years. All education has the task of placing itself consciously in human development, but we cannot do that without a thorough understanding of the human being, an understanding that spiritual science can give to a renewed natural science. A natural science renewed through spiritual science will not be some fantasy or figment of the imagination. Rather it will provide a good understanding of the material human organism as the physical vehicle for the soul and spirit.

Today I want to mention an important aspect of our soul life that you all know well and that will prove particularly important as we move on to the actual pedagogical subject. The phenomenon I refer to is how what we think about as children eventually becomes memory. You all know that to maintain a healthy soul, we must properly transform the ideas we develop from our sense impressions, that result from our judging and so forth—we can discuss the details of this later—and that we must take the results of this thinking into our memory. When we then describe something, we recall from within our souls what we previously experienced in the external world or in our interactions with other human beings. We bring it back into our consciousness. But what actually takes place here?

The general view has moved more and more toward looking at this process in a one-sided, abstract way, as simply a process within the soul. People ask, what becomes of our thoughts once we take them into our soul? What have they become, once they are taken in and returned to us as memory? How does this process take place? We cannot study this process if we have not first looked into the relationship between the spirit-soul and the physical body in some detail. There are some so-called idealists who might say spiritual science is basically materialistic, since it is always referring to physical organs. To believe that, however, would be an enormous error. Spiritual science recognizes the great effects of the soul on the formation of the organs. It sees the soul as having a greater influence than simply working on abstractions, and in fact sees the soul as actually having the power to form the organs. Spiritual science primarily seeks to understand the soul during childhood, when the spirit-soul continues to work upon the formation of the organs after birth.

In my opinion, Goethe’s color theory offers the first beginning of a really reasonable consideration of the soul and physical life, something that has been previously unrecognized. Yet today all one needs to do to be immediately branded a dilettante is speak about it in a positive way. I believe, however, that physicists will soon see it much differently from the way it is seen at present. I do not intend to go on praising Goethe’s theory of color today, I only want to direct your attention to the wonderful chapter where Goethe begins to speak about physiological colors, and to another chapter toward the end, where he speaks about the sensory and moral effects of colors. Physicists have attempted to refute the portion in between. The beginning and the end have been of more interest to people with an artistic nature, and they can more easily understand them. However, for us to develop a scientific foundation of education, we need to accept some of the help offered by Goethe’s considerations of the world of colors. In the beginning, Goethe draws our attention to the lively interaction between the eye and the external world. That lively interaction exists not only while we are exposing the eye to some color process in the external world, but also afterward. Goethe specifically discusses the after-images that result from the direct impression. You all know these after-images, which occur in the eye itself. You need only expose your eye to, say, a green surface and then turn away from this sharply delineated green area. You will see the same area as an after-effect that is subjectively red. The organ is still influenced for a time by what it experienced in the external world. This is the basic process as it occurs in the sense organs. Something happens in the sense organs while they are exposed to a process or to things in the external world, and something else happens afterward, which then slowly subsides. From an external perspective, we also can see a certain similarity between what briefly takes place in a sense organ and what happens in the human organism in regard to memory. Just as the green surface continues for a short time as red, a thought with its associated images resulting from a direct experience exists in our organism, only the time periods are quite different.

There is another difference that brings us closer to an understanding of the difference in duration. If we expose the eye to a color impression and then see an after-image, it is something partial, an individual organ on the periphery of the human organism that brings forth that after-effect. When a memory arises from within the human being, it reproduces something that existed years before. This is something we can feel, that is apparent, that participates in this reproducing—thus it is the entire human being that participates in this after-effect.

What actually occurs within the human being? We can understand this only when we have a detailed understanding of certain interactions within the human being. Here I want to draw your attention to a fact that our modern scientific way of thinking has put into an incorrect light, namely, the function of our heart in connection with the whole human organism. You now find the heart described everywhere as a kind of pump that pumps blood throughout the organism. Actually, the blood circulation is forced upon the heart. The fact that embryology contradicts the standard view and more detailed observations of the heartbeat and such things also offer contradictions is something modern people still do not want to hear. Only a few people have noticed this: for example, the physician Schmid,10 who wrote a treatise about it in the 1880s, and the criminologist Moritz Benedikt. That was not enough, though. There are only a few who have realized that the movements in the heart are a result of the movement of the blood, and that the blood circulation itself is what is fundamentally alive. Thus the heart does not pump; rather its movement is due to the influence of the living movement of the blood. The heart is nothing more than the organ that creates a balance between the two blood circulatory systems, that is, between that of the upper human being, the head, and that of the limbs. These two movements of blood form a pool in the heart. The blood, however, is not something dead; it is not simply pumped like a stream of water. The blood itself has an inner life and is subject to its own movement. It passes that movement on to the heart, which simply reflects the movement of the blood in its own movements. Just as we can say that there is a parallel between the more or less solid organs and processes in the soul, there is also a parallel, which I mentioned yesterday, between the movements of the blood and soul processes.

What is the task of an organ such as the heart in relationship to the soul? I would like to ask that question in the following way. If, under the influence of a genuinely correct science, we say that the blood itself has life and the movements of the heart, the entire activity of that organ results from the blood circulation and are only inserted into the living blood circulation, then what is the task of the heart?

Unprejudiced observation shows that if we expose the eye to the external world, the eye’s experiences create an afterimage that soon disappears. When we develop the world of feeling, that world has a close connection with the circulation of the blood. It has a connection with other things also, but here I am speaking only of the blood circulation. Recall for only a moment that when we feel shame, we turn red. Everyone knows this is because the blood comes to the surface. If we are fearful, we turn pale as the blood moves toward the inside. The physiologist Lange12 from Copenhagen has done a number of good studies about the connection between blood circulation, and other organic processes, and processes in the soul. Just as in the extreme cases where the soul’s experience of fear or shame has an effect upon blood circulation, the normal life of the soul also continuously affects our circulation. Our feeling life is always active, but it influences normal circulation toward one direction or another only when our feelings move toward one extreme or another. Just as we are continuously breathing, we also continuously feel. Just as our blood circulation is uninterrupted, our feeling is uninterrupted. If we were to follow these processes further, you would see that we even feel during sleep.

What circulates in the blood is the external physical expression of our feeling. Furthermore, our feeling is connected with our thinking. What we imprint upon the circulation also vibrates within the heart. Goethe used the word “eye” to mean an inner, living organ, and the heart is just as much a living organ. It does not just move the blood. It has an enormous significance within the entire organism. Whereas the eye is affected for only a short time by light outside it, the heart continuously responds to feeling and thinking as it relates to feeling with small vibrations that are then carried into the blood. After a time, the heart’s vibrations include what lives specifically in feeling and in feeling-related thinking. The heart is a part of the body that influences us when we remember experiences. All human organs that partake of the currents of organic human fluids, that are included in the liquid currents—whether it is the kidneys imbedded in this flow or the liver connected to it in the digestive stream—all these organs vibrate in unison, vibrate with our feeling and willing in circulation and metabolism. Just as an after-image arises in the eye, in the same way a memory arises within the entire human being, though in differentiated and specific ways; it is a memory of experiences in the outer world. The whole human being is an organ that vibrates, and the organs people normally say are placed next to each other are there in reality so that human beings can process and retain spiritual-soul experience in a certain way. We will see that this only appears to be a materialistic perspective. We will see that it is precisely this that allows us to properly recognize the human being as a spiritual being. Today, however, now that I have mentioned this, you can see how we can grasp the entire human being through such a perspective. We can comprehend the human being not only in the way materialistic science does, by placing the individual organs alongside each other, even assuming that they interact mechanically. The spiritual-scientific perspective shows that the entire human being is unified as body, soul, and spirit, but our thinking separates these three perspectives. In reality, body, soul, and spirit are always interconnected within the human being.

You need learn only a little embryology to learn that the heart slowly develops in the organs of the blood circulatory system, in the system of vessels. You can see that the heart is not there first, with the circulatory system developing from it, but that the circulatory system develops slowly, with the heart as the final result. You can see directly from embryology that the situation is just as I have described it. Therefore, when we consider things from a spiritual-scientific perspective, we need to think of the human liver not simply as a liver, the human spleen not simply as a spleen in the way these things appear when we dissect a corpse in the laboratory. Instead we need to try to investigate the significance of these organs in the spirit-soul life. We do not see the eye, or any of the other organs, as merely some physical tool. Although it is commonly believed that the liver is only an organ in the digestive system, it has a great deal to do with human spiritual life.

We can often learn much from language itself. Ancient peoples, who still had a kind of primal, instinctive knowledge, did not always consider things as abstractly as we do. Take, for instance, hypochondria, which in Greek means “below the cartilage of the breast bone,” an anomaly of the soul that has its origins in the human abdomen, which is indicated in the word itself. In the English language, which in comparison to the languages of Central Europe is still at an early stage of development, the word spleen, as an emotional state, has something to do with the soul. However, spleen also refers to an organ, and for good reason, since the spleen of the soul has much to do with the spleen organ. Such things are nearly all lost. Materialism has nearly lost an understanding of the physical organs, particularly those of the human being. How can we work with a human being if we are not in a position to understand what the human being is physically? We must first understand that the human being is built up piece by piece out of the spirit-soul, so that there is nothing physical that is not a revelation of the spirit-soul.

We need to be able to see the physical properly if we are to have a solid foundation for education. When I say such things, some people may think I want to throw out everything in the world that has been learned through hard scientific work. I certainly do not do that light-heartedly, you can be certain of that. In general, it is much more comfortable to play the same tune as everyone else than to counter prevalent views from genuine understanding and from the realization that a true cultural renewal in our decadent times requires such an understanding in the area of spiritual life. Personally, I would much prefer to present all the scientifically recognized perspectives rather than argue against many of them, particularly where the concern is an understanding of the human being.

We also need to resist the standard scientific perspective when we consider human interactions in practice. Instruction and education are essentially a special case of human interaction. We need to differentiate human life before the change of teeth and then again until puberty. I have attempted to characterize how different the forces are during the first period of human life in comparison to the second. It requires a very different kind of soul experience for these two periods, for the simple reason that the forces connected with imaginative thinking are directed toward an inner hardening of the human body during the first period of life. This activity culminates in the change of teeth at about the age of seven. The most important means of communicating with human beings during that time lies in the principle of imitating the surroundings.

Everything a person does during the years before the change of teeth is done out of imitation. What occurs in the surroundings of a child is enormously important, since the child only imitates. Imitation is one of the strengths of children at that age, and that imitation is directly connected with the same forces that produce the second set of teeth. They are the same forces, and, as we have seen, they are the forces of thinking, of inwardly picturing and understanding the world around us. Thus the forces associated with representational thinking are also the forces connected with physical development. These are the forces active in the child’s motive for imitation. Imagine what it means when you grasp that not only intellectually, but when with the entirety of your being, with your soul, when you have a universal, human understanding of it. It means that when I do something in front of a child who is not yet seven years old, not only do I do it for myself, but my doing also enters the child’s doing. My deeds do not exist for me alone.

I am not alone with my deeds, with my willing, with my feeling. I am not alone with my thinking; there are intangibles that also have an effect. There is a difference in whether I live alongside a child with a good attitude and allow the child to grow up alongside of me, or whether I do it with a poor attitude. These intangibles have an effect but they are not yet recognized. If we do not honor the connection between the spirit-soul and individual physical human organs, then we do not honor what exists between human beings as a real force, the spirit-soul itself.

When we look at the period between the change of teeth and puberty, the will begins to predominate in the way that I characterized it. With boys, we experience this eruption of the will in the change in the voice. In girls, this is expressed in a different way that we will discuss later. What is active in children at elementary school age shows us that it is connected with the will. Something wants to enter the physical body from the will; something wants to become firmer. There is more than simply a desire to imitate, although, as we will see, that remains important in the curriculum until the age of nine. Something more than simple imitation wants to develop, and that is the desire to honor authority. If I do not live as an authority alongside a seven- to fourteen- or fifteen-year-old child whom I am to bring up and educate, for the child that would be the same as if I cut off a finger or an arm so that he or she could no longer physically behave in the way natural to children. I would take something from the child that wants to develop, namely, the experience of having older people nearby, people who, as genuine authorities, are to educate and raise the child.

We now come to something we will have to make understandable to growing children in a way other than through example or through language. We now come to the role of love in education and upbringing. One of the intangibles we are justified in exercising in educating a growing child is authority over that child, and that our authority be accepted as a naturally effective force. We will not have that authority if we are not permeated in a certain way by what we have to present to the child. If, as teachers, we carry our knowledge within us just as some dry, memorized facts, if we teach only out of a sense of duty, then we have a different effect upon children than when we have an inner warmth, an enthusiasm for what we are to teach them. If we are active in every fiber of our soul, and identify ourselves with that knowledge, then the love for what we carry in our souls is just as much a means of communication as demonstrations and language. An education made fruitful through spiritual science enables us to understand the importance of this kind of intangibility.

Dr. Steiner(responding to some objection):Today I would like to say only a little about this. It is tremendously tempting to assume, for example, that the drawings made by children are similar to those made by primitive peoples. However, this is based upon the unfounded assumption that the peoples who create such drawings today are the original peoples. Of course, we see that modern children’s drawings are similar to those made by primitive peoples, but these people are not primitive; they are decadent. Anthropology errs in saying that those contemporary peoples who live primitively in the wilds are to a certain extent the same as those from which we all descended. We cannot base education upon such errors in science, for if we were to do that, we would overvalue the childlike peculiarities of today’s primitive people. Such an overvaluation of those characteristics has been quite thorough in modern times. We can certainly acknowledge the facts of the matter, but the attributed significance of such facts is based upon a misunderstanding of the genuine relationship between the development of individual human beings and that of humanity as a whole. It is also not tremendously important that we find children’s rhymes that go back far into the time that I have referred to here as the Fifth Period. Such children’s rhymes do not go back any further. Were we to go back further through spiritual science than is possible through anthropology, we would discover that what we find in children’s rhymes today did not exist during earlier periods of human development.

Anthropology, which follows human development from the present back to its beginnings and finds a resonance of original human beings in contemporary people, must undertake a new path toward a spiritual-scientific consideration of the development of humanity. Along that path we must, of course, develop a feeling for what remains original, instinctive human culture. I would remind you of the Vedantic literature and of the extremely significant Taoist sayings of Lao Tsu. A person who presents a spiritual-scientific perspective of human development will certainly take everything historical into account before arriving at what I have mentioned here.

It is much easier to go with the flow of general opinion than to fight. Today there is a dangerous pedagogical idea that draws a parallel between what children do and what contemporary primitive peoples, or those of earlier times, have done. What is important is that we find genuine sources of spiritual life. and we must actually seek them first in children.

Then there is something else. Remember that I have said we should develop everything out of the child. We hear that today in all its variations and find that people believe they are doing it. But now try to discover what it means not to perceive the nature of a child as some unknown mystery that develops as it should, but rather as something needing to prepare itself through self-education, which is possible only through spiritual science. Try to get an idea through spiritual science for what genuinely lives in children.

I certainly have nothing against the idea that we should not present children with anything from the outside but instead find everything in the child. But first we must learn to see the child. In order to do that, the human being must first become transparent, and what I have presented enables us to truly see human nature from various and differing sides. Through much of what arises from a normal materialistic perspective, many different sides of human nature are obscured. Much of what is now called the spirit or soul is simply an abstraction, an intellectual idea. Of course, much of what is needed to prove what I have just said will be presented only in the later lectures. Nevertheless I am certainly not against people saying that we need to value and develop those things that exist within the child, nor am I against people saying that we should not force into the child what exists within ourselves. On the contrary I consider both of these ideas perfectly obvious. What is important to me is to show how to comprehensively consider both of those ideas.

As you have probably noticed, our previous discussions have differed not only in their content but also in their entire manner of consideration from what we normally find in anthropology or similar areas. Those unwilling to develop the feeling I spoke of at the end of the last lecture will not immediately recognize how such an understanding of the human being can arise in any way other than that which is currently acceptable. It can, however, arise when we comprehend the entire developing human being, that is, the body, the soul, and the spirit, in terms of lively movement. By comprehending the living human being in movement, by placing ourselves in human nature, we can create within ourselves an understanding that is not dead but alive. This understanding is most appropriate if we are to avoid clinging to external materialistic perspectives or falling prey to illusions and fantasy. What I have presented here can be very fruitful, but only when we use it directly, because its primary characteristics first become apparent through direct use.

I would like to mention a few things about our attempts to make this thinking fruitful in the Stuttgart Waldorf School. That school was created because Emil Molt, the director of a factory in Stuttgart, wanted a school based purely upon spiritual-scientific principles for the children of the factory’s workers. The school has long since grown beyond its initial boundaries, and it is the first attempt at forming a school whose curriculum and learning goals have been based upon a spiritual-scientific understanding of the human being. Of course we need to recognize that we are still in the first year of the Waldorf School, and that we have students from all possible classes of other schools. For that reason certain compromises are necessary in the beginning.

In the curriculum, our concern is not simply to come to terms pedagogically with a single child or even with a small class where we could work with individual children(an idea that is commonly held). We want each teacher to be so permeated with understanding that even when standing before a large class, he can represent this type of education. Each teacher should be permeated by a living comprehension of the human being so that he understands that the heart does not simply pump the blood through the organism, but that the human being is living, and the movements of fluids and the heart result from that aliveness. When a teacher has absorbed this way of thinking, particular forces within him become active in regard to the development of children. This activity can result in significant insights, even in regard to a child who is part of a large class and with whom we have worked for only a few months. If you have trained your spirit in this way, and thus created a strong contact with it, your spirit can look somewhat clairvoyantly at the individual child. It is not so important that we know that the heart is not the cause of the circulation of the blood. What is important is that we develop within ourselves the possibility of presenting such things in a way contrary to our modern materialistic thinking. Those who develop this possibility within themselves, who configure their spirit in this way, make themselves alive in a different way in regard to developing children, even in large numbers. They gain the capacity of reading the curriculum from the nature of the developing child.

In Stuttgart I had to compromise, since under present social conditions it is not possible to develop a school purely on the basis of this kind of education. I said we needed to take three stages into account. We need complete freedom in how we present the curriculum during the first, second, and third grades, but we want the children at the end of third grade to have learned the same things as children in other schools. The same is true until age twelve, that is, the sixth grade, and again when they leave the school. All we could achieve was to present the curriculum in these stages: in the first three school years, the second three, and in the third stage, the last two school years. These are simply things that we must accept as compromises under today’s social conditions. Nevertheless, within these three periods, we have been able to achieve some things. We can, for example, base our work upon the sound principle that we do not begin with the intellectual, as modern instruction generally does. We do not need to begin with this one characteristic of developing human beings—the intellect—instead we can begin with the whole human being.

It is important to first acquire a clear concept of what the whole human being actually is. Today, because people cannot observe how thinking relates to human nature, they believe that we learn to think by logically teaching children how to think. I have to admit that during the first six decades of my life I used to consider people in that way. Those who can observe developing human beings, who can compare the developing human being with what a person becomes, can see certain connections spread out over the various periods of life, which go unobserved if a certain kind of insight has not been developed.

I would like to mention something I often refer to because it shows certain connections in human nature in a textbooklike way. In observing children, you can see how, when those around them relate to them properly, they develop a feeling of respect toward people. If you follow what becomes of these children later in life, you will find that this feeling of respect has so transformed these individuals that, through their words or sometimes simply through the way they look at you, their presence is a deed of goodness. This is simply because when you have learned to respect (or, I could say, to pray) later in life you will have the power to bless. No one can bless later in life who has not learned to respect or to pray in childhood.

We need to look at such things. We need to gain such vision through a living science that can become feeling and will, and not through some dead science such as we have today. Thus we can see how to avoid teaching children mere conventional knowledge, instead taking into account the entire human being.

We have, of course, the task of teaching the children to write, but today writing is a kind of artificial product of culture. It has arisen in the course of human development out of a pictorial writing and has become what we now have today, a purely conventional and abstract writing. If we try to gain a feeling for older writing, for instance Egyptian hieroglyphics, and to understand their basic character, we will see how people originally tended to reproduce the external world in their writing through drawing.

Writing and drawing things in the world are, in a way, also the basis of human speech development. Many theories have been put forward about the development of speech. There is, for instance—I am not making this up, they are called this in the technical papers—there is the so-called Ding-Dong Theory that assumes speech is a kind of model of some inner tonal qualities of our surroundings. Then there is the Bow-Wow Theory,3 which assumes that speech is based upon sounds produced by other beings in our surroundings. None of these theories, however, begin with a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of human nature. A sufficient comprehension of human nature, particularly one based upon a trained observation of children’s speech, shows that human feeling is engaged in a much different way when learning the vowels. They are learned through feeling. If we train our own powers of observation, we will see how all vowels arise from certain human inner experiences that are like simple or more complicated interjections, expressions of feeling. Inwardly, we as human beings live in the vowels. People express external events in consonants. People copy external events through their own organs; nevertheless they reproduce them. Speech itself is a reproduction of external events through consonants, and vowels provide the color. Thus, writing is, in its origins, a pictorial reproduction.

If, as is done today, we teach conventionalized writing to children, it can affect only the intellect. For that reason, we should not actually begin with learning to write, but with an artistic comprehension of those forms that are then expressed through writing or printing.

If you are not very clever, you can proceed by taking Egyptian hieroglyphics or some other pictorial writing, then developing certain forms out of it in order to arrive at today’s conventional letter forms. But that is not necessary. We do not need to hold ourselves to such strict realism. We can try to discover for ourselves such lines in modern letter forms that make it possible for us to give the children some exercises in movements of the hands or fingers. If we have the children draw one line or another without regard to the fact that they should become letters, or allow them to gain an understanding throughout their entire being for round or angular forms, horizontal or vertical lines, we will bring the children a dexterity directed toward the world.

Through this approach, we can also achieve something that is extraordinarily important psychologically. At first we do not even teach writing but guide the children into a kind of artistic drawing that we can develop even further into painting, as we do at the Waldorf School. That way the children also develop a living relationship to color and harmony in youth, something they are very receptive to at the age of seven or eight. If we allow children to enjoy this artistically taught instruction in drawing, aside from the fact that it also leads to writing, we will see how they need to move their fingers or perhaps the entire arm in a certain way that begins not simply from thinking, but from a kind of dexterity. Thereby the I begins to allow the intellect to develop as a consequence of the entire human being. The less we train the intellect and the more we work with the entire human being so that the dexterity of the intellect arises out of the movements of the limbs, the better it is.

If you visit the handwork classes at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, you will perhaps find it somewhat paradoxical when you see that both boys and girls sit together and knit and crochet, and further, that everyone not only does “women’s work” but also “men’s work.” Why is that? The success of this approach can be seen in the fact that boys, when they are not artificially restricted from doing the work, take the same joy in these activities as the girls. Why is that? If we know that we do not develop our intellect by simply going directly to some intellectual education, if we know that someone who moves their fingers in a clumsy way also has a clumsy intellect, has inflexible ideas and thoughts, and those who know how to properly move their fingers also have flexible thoughts and ideas and can enter into the real nature of things, then we will not underestimate the importance of developing external capabilities. The goal is to develop the intellect to a large extent from how we work externally as human beings.

Educationally, it is an enormously important moment when we allow the written forms that are the basis of reading to spring out of what we have created artistically. Thus instruction in the Waldorf School begins from a purely artistic point of view. We develop writing from art and then reading from writing. In that way, we completely develop the children in relation to those forces that slowly want to develop out of their nature. In truth we bring nothing foreign into the child. As a matter of course, around the age of nine the children are able to write from what they have learned in drawing and then go on to reading. This is particularly important, because when people work against rather than with the forces of human nature, they damage children for the rest of their lives. If, however, we do exactly what the child’s nature wants, we can help human beings develop something fruitful for the rest of their lives.

When we turn from external toward more internal things, it is important to see that a child at the age of six, seven, or eight has no tendency whatsoever to differentiate itself from its surroundings as an I-being. In a certain way, we take something away from the healthy nature of the human being when we develop this difference between the I-being and its surroundings too early. You need only observe children as they look at themselves in the mirror. Look at them before the age of nine and then again at ten, and train your eye for their physiological form. Your eye for the physiological form will show that as children pass beyond the age of nine (this is of course approximate, for one child it is one time and for another, another time), something extraordinarily important occurs in human nature. We can characterize this important occurrence by saying that until the change of teeth, human beings develop primarily as imitators. In principle, human beings imitate their surroundings. We would not learn to speak if we were not imitators during that period of our lives. This principle of imitation continues on in the following years until about the age of nine. However, during the change of teeth, a principle begins to develop under the influence of a feeling for authority to validate what respected persons in the child’s surroundings recognize as correct. It is important that we really know how to maintain this feeling of authority, which is certainly justifiable during the period from the change of teeth until puberty, because that is what human nature wants.

Some say we should allow children to judge everything, to decide what they need to learn, but such statements ignore the needs of human nature. They ignore what we will carry into later life. Human beings continue to imitate beyond the age of seven up to the age of nine or so, and this principle of imitation affects the feeling for authority. From the age of nine, this principle of authority develops in a purer form. Beginning at the age of twelve, it is again mixed with something new: the capacity to judge.

It is of fundamental significance for all education that we do not force developing human beings to judge at too early an age. Certainly everything we now call illustrative instruction has a certain, though limited, justification. It has great significance in a limited area. However, when we extend illustrative teaching to the point of presenting children only with what can be understood from direct observation, we are ignoring the fact that there are things in the world that cannot be seen but must be presented.

There are things that cannot be seen, for instance, religious things. The same is true of moral things; they also cannot be seen. At best, we can show the effects of these things in the world, but not those things themselves. Aside from that, there is something else that is important. We need to teach children how to properly accept something because an authority presents it or to believe something because an authority believes it. If the children are incapable of doing this, we take something away from them for the remainder of their lives. Just look at what happens then. If someone at the age of thirty or thirty-five looks back on something they were taught in school, they will recognize that they did not understand it at that time. But because they loved their teacher, they accepted it. Such a person had the feeling that she did not learn but that she experienced. She had a feeling that she needed to honor, to respect the teacher, and since the teacher thought something, she should think it also. Thus, at the age of thirty or thirty-five, a person may recall something she did not understand but accepted out of love. Now, however, that person is more mature and looks at what arises out of the depths of her soul as an older person and realizes the following: what was accepted many years before out of love resurfaces later in life and now becomes clear. We need only consider what that means. It means that through such a resurfacing of something that is now understood for the first time at maturity, a feeling for life—which we need if we are to be useful human beings in social life—increases. We would take a great deal away from people if we took away the acceptance of truths through love, through a justifiable feeling for authority. Children must experience this justifiable feeling of authority, and we need to use all the powers of our souls in practicing education to work toward maintaining that justifiable authority for the child between the change of teeth and puberty.

The fact that we must divide elementary school into three periods gives us the basis of discovering the curriculum and the learning goals. During the first years of elementary school, imitation is affected by the principle of authority. From the ages of nine until twelve, the principle of authority becomes more and more important and imitation recedes. After the age of twelve, the power of judgment awakens. At the age of nine, children begin to separate their I from their surroundings in their inner experiences, and it is the I that awakens the child’s power to judge at about the age of twelve.

In this realm there is a strong connection between the way we think and feel about life and the way we think about the proper way to teach. You have, perhaps, heard of the philosopher Mach, whose views arise out of a natural-scientific perspective. He was a very honest and upright man, but throughout his life he represented the modern materialistic attitude. Because he was so honest, he also lived the inner structure of materialistic thinking. Thus he tells with a certain kind of naive honesty how once, when he was very tired, he jumped onto a bus. Now, just as he entered the bus, at the same time someone who looked like a schoolmaster jumped on the bus from the opposite side. This person made quite a special impression upon him. He first realized what it was after he had sat down. He realized that there was a mirror opposite the entrance to the bus and that what he had seen was himself. That is how little he knew his external form. The same thing happened to him another time. There was a mirror placed behind a display window, and he looked at himself but did not recognize himself. There is a connection between the fact that this man had so little capacity to recognize himself and the fact that he was a fanatical representative of certain pedagogical principles. In particular, Mach was a fanatical enemy of working with children’s youthful fantasy. He did not want any fairy tales told to children, or to teach children anything other than scientific trash about external sense-perceptible reality. That is how he brought up his own children, something he told me with a naively honest openness.

People can think what they want about the spiritual content of external, sense-perceptible reality, but it is poison for developing human beings when, from the ages of six or seven until the age of nine, their capacity for fantasy is not developed through fairy tales. If a teacher is not some radical, then he or she will present everything concerning the surroundings of a human being to a child, everything that is to be taught about animals, plants, or other things in nature to the children in the form of fairy tales. Children do not yet differentiate between themselves and their surroundings; that occurs only later, at the age of nine. If only people would learn what an enormous difference it makes whether children are read fairy tales or if you create such fairy tales yourself. No matter how many fairy tales you read or tell your children, they do not have the same effect as when you create them yourself and tell them to your children. The process of creation within you has an effect upon children; it really is conveyed to them. These are the intangible things in working with children.

It is an enormous advantage for the child’s development when you attempt to teach children certain ideas through external pictures. For example, if I want to teach the child at the earliest possible age to have a feeling for the immortality of the soul, I could attempt to do that by working with all the means at my disposal. I could attempt to do that by showing the child how the butterfly emerges from the cocoon and by indicating that in the same way the immortal soul flies off from the body.

Now certainly that is a picture, but you will only succeed with that picture when you do not present it as an abstract intellectual idea but believe it yourself. And you can believe it. If you genuinely penetrate into the secrets of nature, then what flies out of the cocoon will become for you the symbol for immortality that the creator placed into nature. You need to believe these things yourself. What you believe and experience yourself has a very different effect upon children from what you only accept intellectually. For that reason, during the children’s first years of school, we at the Waldorf School attempt to imaginatively present everything connected to the surroundings of the human being. As I said, a teacher who is not lost in dreamland will not cause the children to become lost in fantasy no matter how many stories about bugs or plants, about elephants or hippopotami they are told.

It is important to begin artistically, with a genuine enthusiasm for artistic writing. Allow writing to develop out of drawing, and for these first years of elementary schools, allow it to have an effect upon the imagination. Everything you teach in the way of scientific descriptions is damaging before the age of nine. Realistic descriptions of beetles or elephants or whatever, in the way we are used to giving them in the natural sciences, are damaging for children before this age. We should not work toward a realistic contemplation, but toward imagination.

We need to genuinely observe students when we stand before a class. It does not seem to me to be so bad if classes are very large as long as they are healthy and well ventilated. What we might call individualization occurs of itself if the teacher’s work arises out of a living comprehension of human nature and the nature of the world. In that case, the teacher is so interesting for the students that they become individualized by themselves. They will become individualized and do it actively. You do not need to work with each individual student, which is a kind of passive individualization. It is important that you always attempt to work with the entire class, and that a living contact with the teacher is present. When you have shaped your own soul to comprehend life, life will speak to those who wish to receive it.

If you develop a genuine talent for observation, you can perceive something when standing even before a large class. You can see that when you artistically present things that will become abstract and intellectualized only later, the physiognomy of the children changes. You will see how small changes in physiognomy occur, and that between the ages of seven and nine the children understand themselves. You can see how their faces express something healthily and not nervously active. It is of enormous import for the remainder of the children’s lives that this takes place. If the physiognomy develops healthily and actively, later in life people can develop a love of the world, a feeling for the world, an inner power of healing for hypochondria and superfluous criticism and similar things. It is terrible if you as teachers do not achieve that, for children after the age of nine have externally a quite different physiognomy than before.

I also think it is best for the teacher to not change classes throughout the entire elementary school period. I believe it is best for a teacher to begin with a class in the first grade of elementary school and continue moving up with the class through the grades until the end of elementary school, at least as far as this is possible. While I am aware of all the objections to this approach, I believe it can create an intimate connection with the students that outweighs all the disadvantages. It will counterbalance all the problems that can occur at the beginning because the teacher is unacquainted with the individuality of the class or the students. The teacher and students will achieve a balance over the course of time. They will grow together more and more with the class and will learn in that connection. It is not easy to see the subtle changes in the physiognomy of the children.

For me it is not important to describe some theoretical basis for following the spiritual and soul forces of human beings in such a way that you can see their connection with the physical body. What is important is understanding that the human being is a unity and actually being able to see this in individual cases. By developing these skills, you can train yourself to observe how people become different. Perhaps you will even develop a talent for observing how a person will listen later in life. You can read in the physiognomy whether people listen as a whole, that is, whether take in what they hear with thinking, feeling, and will, or whether they only allow what they hear to affect their wills, as a choleric might. It is good for teachers to develop such a talent for observation for life in general. Everything we learn in life can help us when we want to teach children. When you see, as I can see at the Waldorf School, how the teacher works in a way appropriate to her own individuality, you will notice how each class becomes a whole together with the teacher. Out of that whole arises the development of the child. This process can be very different with each individual teacher, since these processes can always be individualized. One teacher who instructs nine-year-old boys and girls could do something very well in a particular way and another who teaches quite differently could teach them just as well. In that way there is complete individualization.

I also believe it is possible to determine the curriculum and learning goals for each grade in the elementary school out of the nature of the human being. For that reason it is of great importance that the teacher be the genuine master of the school, if I may use the term “master.” I do not mean that there should be any teaching directives. Instead the teacher should be a part not only of the methods but also of the plans of the school. Whether she is teaching the first grade or the eighth, the teacher should be totally integrated with the whole of the school, and should teach the first grade in the same manner that the eighth grade will be taught.

In my lecture the day after tomorrow, I want to characterize the curriculum in more detail and also justify the learning goals for each year. Today, of course, since we are stuck in a materialistic culture that also has an effect upon our curriculum and learning goals, we can view such things only as an ideal for the future and put them into practice only to a limited degree. If there is a loophole in the law somewhere, as there is in the elementary school law in Württemberg, it is possible to make some compromises. Nevertheless such things need to be taken up since I believe they are connected with what must occur for us to move beyond the misery of the past five or six years.

I would now like to answer a few questions. To begin with, I would like to go into the question of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a child of our materialistic times. In our time, people do not try to seek the harmony between the sleeping spirit, which I might refer to as the artist of the body, and the physical organization of our bodies. Both of these aspects stand next to one another. Psychological theories attempt to form bridges between them. Just think of all such bridges we have seen in modern times that were to be formed between the spirit-soul and the physical body, beginning with the views of Descartes,1 psychophysical parallelism, and so forth. All these theories have essentially been born out of an incapacity to view the human being as a whole. People do not see how the physical is formed out of the spiritual and how the spiritual is revealed simultaneously in the physical body. We need only to understand how the one has been separated from the other through abstractions. Thus certain things have been totally misunderstood in modern times, even though they are understandable when we recognize the harmony between the physical and the psychological.

Take, for example, a young person who has had a traumatic experience. Every traumatic experience that occurs before the age of twenty has an effect upon the physical body. Even in later years such an effect is present, though to a much lesser extent. Today the only thing that is seen in that regard plays out only at the most extreme, superficial level. People see, for example, how a person reddens when he or she is ashamed, or turns pale when afraid. They do not see how a traumatic experience that perhaps over a period of several weeks pushes human feeling in a particular direction also causes the physical body to develop in a different direction than it would have otherwise taken. The body begins with a normal structure, but this structure changes as a result of traumatic experience.

Since human life follows a rhythm, after a particular number of years a special kind of repetition of the original organic trauma will occur. If you meet a person who is thirty-eight years old and has some anomalies in his or her soul, you understand that this anomaly indicates an earlier experience that must have occurred as many years before the age of thirty-five as the recurrence does after that age. Thus the psychic anomaly that we observe in the thirty-eightyear- old can be connected with an experience that person had at about the age of thirty-two. We can also understand the recurrence of this experience at the age of thirty-eight when we recognize the relationship between the traumatic experience at the age of thirtytwo and certain physical organs. In other cases, the present experience may be related to an experience that occurred just as many years before the age of twenty-eight as the number of years that have passed since that age. We need to acquire a capacity of observation in order to recognize the connections between experiences in the spirit-soul and their relationship to the organs.

But what is done in modern times? If you are a physician, regardless of how materialistically you think, you still cannot deny that there is some life of the soul. Materialism is characterized by the fact that it understands nothing of the material, and in our time of materialism we experience the tragedy of how materialism does not even understand material processes. It is just for that reason that people do not relate things experienced in the soul to material things. On the contrary, they erroneously say that an isolated experience that has been hidden for many years now suddenly has risen to the surface and we must become conscious of it. What is important is to study the person’s organic state of health rather than poking around in that person through psychoanalysis.

The same is true with regard to the use of psychoanalysis in education. People do not understand the interaction between the spirit-soul and the physical body. Only for this reason do they speak about the use of psychoanalysis in education. We cannot simply work one-sidedly with the spirit-soul.

I would now like to say something about the difficulties that arise during puberty. These arise only when children have not been properly brought up. If children have the kind of introspection and inner experience that I described today, then that will have an effect upon the entire physical body and soul of the child. The child will have different perceptions and a different relationship to the external world than it would have had had it developed it too intellectually or with too little experience in art when the child was about seven or eight years old. The errors made in teaching children when they are seven or eight years old reappear in their problematic feelings during puberty. If we were to speak about the things that we often hear mothers and fathers tell about their children, we would be able to see how materialism has taken control of our feelings. People come to me and tell me about their five- or six-year-old child who has undesirable sexual behaviors. This shows only that people can no longer differentiate. If a knife has been made into a razor blade, then it is no longer a pocketknife. In the same way, activities that occur with children and which at a superficial level appear to expose some sexual desires are in fact not actual sexual activities, but simply demands that the child be brought up according to his or her own nature. When that is done, then abnormal feelings will not occur during puberty. It is no more a sexual act if a child scratches herself in the region of the sexual organs because there is a small sore (which may be easy to miss) than it would be if she were to scratch herself on the nose or cheek.

If we understand this, we will not fall into the craziness of Freud.2 Instead of recognizing that it makes no difference whether a child scratches herself on the cheek or somewhere else, he claims that it is a sexual act when a child enjoys sucking on a pacifier. Freud’s perspective puts everything into one hat. This is something that Goethe tried to do with one of his most humorous poems, “The World Is a Sardine Salad,”3 in which he attempted to counter the argument that the world consists simply of so-and-so-many different atoms and the views of the world according to which will and unconscious existence are simply constructs. Gustav Theodor Fechner, the humorist, did something really funny in his book, The Moon Is Made of Iodine, which appeared in the early nineteenth century. He proves through formal logic that the moon is made up simply of iodine. We could use that little book as an example of the way people think of the world today.

Steiner replies to an objection that he has referred only to Freud and has not mentioned other directions.

To fully answer your question, I would need to hold a whole series of lectures. Since that is not possible, I would like to say only the following. How strongly the fanaticism for particular views is in our time is especially clear with supporters of psychoanalysis. In answering a question, I used an example indicating the Freudian position with regard to sexuality. It is, of course, correct that other psychoanalysts have a view different from that onesidedly sexual interpretation. In recent months, some psychiatrists have strongly distanced themselves from the original Freudian direction, and even from Jung’s5 direction. However, those who can judge psychoanalysis in connection with the development of civilization in modern times will never be able to see something new, not even a seed of something new, in psychoanalysis. They will always see only the final consequences of materialism.

It is characteristic of materialism that instead of examining the relationship of the spirit-soul with the physical, in a living way it attempts to characterize the physical in only the most superficial ways, in the ways that are valid for physics and chemistry. On the other hand, it remains an abstract characterization of the spirit- soul, which has been carried to an extreme in the way that psychoanalysis simply follows the path of the status of the soul throughout the life of the human being. I certainly do not deny the positive things that some people have in mind when they speak of psychoanalysis today when those things are correct. It is certainly correct that certain experiences in the soul have a lasting effect and can be recognized and observed as causing a particular change. What is important here, though, is that during the period lying in between, an interaction occurs that psychoanalysis considers to be something isolated in the soul. The effects upon the physical organism that become apparent as a strong one-sidedness are not recognized.

Such theories, of which psychoanalysis is one, have something unusual about them at the present. I have studied these things intensely. What is important to recognize here is that there is a tendency today to take theories that are correct for a particular and limited situation and extend them into general laws. Psychoanalysis exemplifies that. Summarizing theories into a law is justifiable only when they can be used in all practical situations. This is not true of psychoanalytical theory. Since the psychoanalyst does not understand the true relationship between the physical and the psyche, he or she tends to relate the psychic facts only to earlier psychic states. This is something that is quite strongly apparent with Jung. Jung is quite far from a comprehensive consideration of events in the world. We should, however, recognize that Jung has understood certain complexes and has traced them back in the evolution of the soul. The so-called Oedipus complex is, in the way that some psychoanalysts have described it, something that is very interesting and captivating. The problem lies in the way that the described series of symptoms does not comprehensively include all other symptoms connected with it.

What I mean here can be demonstrated through a simple picture. If you place a rose and a crystal on a table, you can say that both are objects. Equating a rose and a crystal through the concept of “object” is, however, only justified in an extremely superficial way. A rose is not simply an object alone, and you cannot consider it in the same way as you would a crystal, which is,in a certain way, something complete. (Of course, we should not forget that a crystal also needs to be considered in relationship to its normal surroundings.) Thus we need to seek the full context of symptoms in which we place a complex. We cannot simply take the most obvious things into account. The blossom of a tree, for example, cannot be simply considered as an object in itself. The tree must also be taken into account. Looking still further, we would need to take into account the qualities of the soil and of the air and so forth as well.

The primary error of psychoanalysis is that it considers symptoms in isolation that can only be explained in connection with other symptoms. I previously referred to the sexual example because psychoanalytic literature declares the fish symbol to be the symbol for the male sexual organ, and this is proven in a completely unscientific way. Such declarations are simply grotesque. Nor should the so-called Oedipus complex and its symptoms be considered in isolation. Instead we need to bring it into relationship with the entire development of humanity.