Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century

GA 171 — 29 October 1916, Dornach

Fifteenth Lecture

In including some contemporary historical observations in the present discussions, it is really not my intention to criticize or to find fault with this or that. Rather, what it is about is to tie in with external phenomena of the physical plane in such a way that one can see how certain great aspects, which we do indeed consider from a spiritual-scientific point of view, are shown to be true in this or that individual phenomenon. For it is my concern that, precisely in these reflections, we gain an understanding of the essential in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantic period, how the forces that have been at work in the last few centuries are flowing into our present and how they can and must be observed by those who really want to understand how spiritual science has a specific task for each individual in our present. I shall only include such episodes to illustrate the larger points of view when I insert such contemporary historical observations.

I would also like to point out that those of our contemporaries or their immediate predecessors who, after all, must be presented in a certain way in their powerlessness in the face of real spiritual impulses, that these, which must apparently be criticized, are not intended to be criticized in order to somehow personally offend them, but to show how such people are captured, as it were, by the offshoots of the materialistic world view and world shaping. For it is indeed not easy for the modern human being to find the path to real spiritual-scientific insight. The way the spiritual culture of our time has developed makes it difficult for many people to find a connection, as it were, to what spiritual science has to give to our present and immediate future. From a certain point of view, it is easy to see how people who are now completely absorbed in contemporary thinking cannot find any connection between their thinking and that which must after all underlie our movement, must underlie it as a real engagement with the spiritual worlds. One can see that even people who are well-disposed towards our movement often say: Well, what these people want to achieve by elevating idealism and ethical human culture is all very well, but in doing so, these anthroposophists — as even well-disposed people say — go so far as to come up with all kinds of fantastic theories about the spiritual worlds. Even well-meaning people do not realize that this engagement with the spiritual worlds must really be the foundation on which work must be done today, and they cannot see it if they cannot free themselves from certain prejudices of our time.

It is extremely difficult for someone who is so completely immersed in the intellectual life of the present day to imagine that the human being itself is a kind of switch for impulses that flow down from spiritual beings into the world of physical life and have an influence on this physical life. And we can particularly well imagine this if we point out the difficulties that stand in the way of understanding the spiritual world for people who, with great dedication and also with certain insights taken from contemporary culture, devote themselves to reform ideas or similar endeavors with regard to contemporary life. It is true that today, and for a long time, there have been many people who know that social conditions in the world have become such that the rest of life has also become the same, and that many things need to be tackled in order to give life, especially the social structure, a new shape. We, who recognize the nerve of spiritual science, must be clear about the fact that the most incisive questions of the present can only be grasped by our soul in the right sense if they are based on the foundation of spiritual-scientific insight. But many people who are working energetically in the present cannot come to this insight, to this knowledge. And so they are left without a foundation on the one hand, and on the other hand they are left in such a way that they cannot be given an answer to the most important questions. Let us also present an example in this regard.

There was a man who, more than any other, was sincere about the great social problems of the present day: Jaurès, who met a mysterious death on the eve of that ill-fated war, a death that may never be fully explained by external investigation. Jaurès, the socialist, who was certainly one of the most honest of the ambitious personalities of the present, was intensively concerned with all the fundamental questions of social life in the present. And it can be said that he gathered together for his understanding everything that a person today can gather from knowledge of nature, from history, from social observation, in order to arrive at views on what needs to be done to solve the issues facing people today in a practical way. Jaurès was not one of those superficial people who develop a social system out of a few subjective ideas they happen to like, a system they then want to impose on the world. He was not someone who just wanted to get to know contemporary human life in order to gain social insight; rather, J Jaurès was one of those people who also look at history, at how various social and other problems in the lives of different peoples have developed and led to crises and change, so that we can see what becomes of certain conditions when they are shaped in this way. Jaurès carefully studied these things.

Now, for a person who is considering such things, the most important thing is to understand what has happened in the course of human life in the last three to four centuries. For if, on the one hand, a transformation of all human striving in the field of knowledge has taken place in these three to four centuries and the two one-sided impulses, as I have presented them to you in these reflections, have gradually emerged for knowledge, it is equally true, on the other hand, that a similar development has taken place for social currents and social longings. Anyone who wants to understand the situation in which humanity finds itself today, one can already say the whole earth, must understand how the impulses that now dominate people's minds have gradually crept into the human soul since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, largely unconsciously, they know nothing about it. But when people like Jaurès, who could not but build his honest endeavors on the materialistic outlook of the present, look at this period in particular, questions arise for him everywhere, which he does not really know how to deal with. Thus, I would say, in the case of such an honest endeavor as Jaurès', we can discover two remarkable dark spots – among others that we cannot list here – that should be considered from a spiritual-scientific point of view.

Before Jaurès' soul, as he surveys the life of the past five post-Atlantic periods, stands as a question: What has actually led the people of the present time to the members of a certain caste, class, having this or that feeling, and another class or caste having different feelings? Such a person looks at what preceded the fifth post-Atlantean period, looks at life, which was confined within narrow limits in those days. One need only recall how much has changed in the world of human life since the 14th or 15th century; how much impact was made by the discovery of America, by more recent scientific discoveries and institutions, by the art of printing, and so on. What has come upon humanity! Think back to the times when there was no printing, when people could not read the Bible, but only gathered in their own church and heard what had been personally communicated to them by those who wanted to convey something to them personally in a very specific direction. Far too little attention is paid to this very different way of life before the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period. And what lives in the souls today, what forms the principles of governments today, what forms the principles of those who lead the commercial, industrial and other enterprises, what forms the principles of those who in turn educate people for these enterprises, but what also forms the principles for those who, as the working population, are involved in these undertakings, what principles are for those who own the land and so on, all this, as it lives in the soul today, has only emerged over the course of the last few centuries. The radical difference between the present thinking and feeling of even the simplest peasant and what it was in the past is far too little considered. But of course, people who face the great, burning social questions realize this.

And so we see that Jaurès is faced with the following question: What has actually caused this peculiar thinking of civilized humanity today? What has happened since the relatively small circle of people who used to have direct access to the spiritual life and who led the others now only guides the others with regard to the external material life, but in a certain way no longer guides them with regard to feelings and emotions? There is a great difference, an enormous difference, when we think of earlier conditions, where the person who provided people with work also provided them with a chaplain who said what needed to be said, what they needed to be told according to his meaning, compared to later times, when certain things became accessible to everyone. The question arose in Jaurès' soul: How has the thinking and feeling of modern humanity actually changed in this regard? — Admittedly, this question arose in his soul first in a form that is completely colored by the color nuance that modern socialist thinking has; but we can detach it from that. Jaurès first asks himself: why should we accuse the people in the small circle who give work to the others, so that we might say: well, they have made the means of education available to the people who are supposed to work for them, in schools and through reading and so on, precisely in order to get more profit out of them. – Certain socialists have always repeated that it was actually a ruse of the employing population to make the means of education accessible to the workers, because educated workers work more and work more rationally than the other way around. But Jaurès does not agree with the thoughts of some socialists. Therefore, in a certain way, what he has to think becomes an unsolvable problem for him. And it is very interesting to see how Jaurès comes to terms with the question of how to deal with the impulses of feeling, thought and soul that have emerged in recent centuries.

In one of Jaurès' most interesting political writings, we find the following passage. He says:

"That the bourgeoisie in these times of their development believed they were being fair to the workers is proven by the fact that they gave them schooling from the very beginning: that is, they wanted to give them as much education as possible. The Reformation, of which the bourgeoisie was a powerful agent, was enthusiastic about popular education. If the bourgeoisie had had secret pangs of conscience, it might have doubted the judgment that the workers, whom it rigorously educated through the power of its example as well as the compulsion of laws, would pass on it and its work: it would have kept them in ignorance as much as possible. At the risk of obtaining less useful labor from an untrained mass, she would not have exposed herself to the terrible judgment of the proletariat she exploited. She would not have opened up for her work of injustice all those thousands of eyes that were accustomed to long darkness."

So Jaurès says to himself: No, the bourgeoisie cannot be accused of wanting to dupe the workers in order to make useful tools out of them; on the contrary, it wanted everyone to be able to read. And now comes the significant part, the part that, so to speak, opens the eyes of a modern, educated person, who is fully immersed in knowledge, and immediately closes them again because he has not come to spiritual science. He says:

"But on the contrary, it wanted everyone to be able to read. And what book! The same one from which it also drew life. From the reading of the Bible, which was translated everywhere into the vernacular, the nations should learn to think: From that Bible full of struggle and harshness, full of grumbling, of the cry and rebellion of an unlearned people, whose pride, even when it chastises and breaks it, seems to love God; from that Bible, in which even the chosen leaders are continually haranguing the people and in which they must win the right to command by their service; in that strangely revolutionary book in which the dialogue between Job and God is such that God appears as the defendant, who can only defend himself against the righteous man's outcry with the crude noise of his thunder; from that Bible in which the prophets have left their appeal to the future and their curses against the unjust rich, their Messianic dream of universal brotherhood, all the heat of their anger and hope, the fire of all the glowing coals that burned on their lips. This terrible book has put the industrial bourgeoisie into the hands of the people, into the hands of poor workers in the cities and villages - the same ones who were or were to become their laborers - and told them: See for yourselves, hear for yourselves! Do not rely on intermediaries; the connection between God and you must be direct. Your eyes must see his light, your ears must hear his word! I repeat: how could a class that doubted itself, the word and the justification of its work, have freed the conscience of the people it was preparing to guide for their own good from all sense of authority? If it had a 'guilty conscience', if it had come into the world like a thief, it would have come by night, fur in nocte. But her first concern was, on the contrary, to increase the light. She was obviously convinced that the order of work, activity and strict moral discipline, which she brought to a world full of laziness, superstition, disorder and infertility, was useful precisely for those who occupy the lowest rank in this order."

Then we see the question raised by a reformist thinker of our own time, who asks: How did all the ideas that dominate the masses today come into the world? — They came about, we can now discard political nuances, because people got their hands on the Bible, the most revolutionary book the world has ever known; it is so revolutionary because it is so effective. Jaurès finds in the minds of men the consequence of reading the Bible, which only came about because Bibles were printed; for in earlier centuries the people did not have the Bible, and the church even carefully guarded that the people did not get their hands on the Bible. It is far too little considered that all newer questions are connected with the fact that only since the times of the fifth post-Atlantean period have the people known the Bible, known it in such a way that the Bible impulses have now become impulses in the souls of people. Christianity was handed down to the people in a completely different way in the past than through the Bible. So a thinker who is completely immersed in the present looks at the development of the fifth post-Atlantic age and asks: Yes, what actually happened? What is the connection between the fact that the Bible has been made accessible to people and the other facts that we now see around us? He finds no real connection. Incidentally, he expresses this very precisely. He says:

“It would be a great enticing problem - far more complicated and much more human than the one Marx was concerned with - to examine how this kind of moral certainty, this certainty of conscience, could become comfortable with all the violent and deceptive practices, the cruelties in the colonies, the swindling in trade, the whole variety of forms of exploitation, which characterized the first period of capitalism, its appearance and growth. This problem is beyond my ability; one would have to extract the countless elements of a moral-philosophical investigation from the documents of all kinds that the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries have left us. And only a highly intuitive and divinatory talent could get to the bottom of the problem."

He does not ascribe this to himself. So you even see, admittedly, the powerlessness of one of the most honest seekers to solve the question: What have souls become in the present day?

The other point we must consider is that, of course, a person striving in this way cannot have the intuitive and divinatory gift that would be necessary for this problem because he is quite distant from the basic problem of spiritual science. To understand how the spiritual flows down from the spiritual worlds, as it were through the switch, through the human soul, and flows into the physical world, this real flowing down of spiritual impulses from the forces and labors of the beings of the higher hierarchies, is indeed quite far removed from such a mind. Therefore, such a spirit sees that and that has been going on since the beginning of modern times, since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period. But he does not see what lives and weaves in it; nor does he see, in a concrete case, the conscious penetration of spiritual impulses, as it were, from the undertakings of the beings of the higher hierarchies. This can only be traced with spiritual science. But everything is preparing itself. The world was never without spirit, even if this spirit has worked unconsciously in one way or another. I have often drawn your attention to the fact that everything that has flooded over a certain area of modern Europe has been deeply influenced by spiritual powers. From external history, too, it can be shown that at a certain time, at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, something truly wonderful actually happened, something that the materialistically thinking person must regard as a fantasy if the matter is taken seriously. But again, if he does not take it seriously, he cannot explain the whole course of modern history.

This event, to which I have often referred, is the appearance of the simple country girl with a great historical task, Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. The map of Europe today would be quite different – the historian knows this very well – if Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, had not appeared. Why are people today amazed — one need only think of Anatole France — by an impulse, or even a system of impulses, sent from the spiritual worlds through a kind of half-tavistock, half-visionary clairvoyance at a time when this could not yet consciously happen? But they cannot do anything with it! A man like Anatole France, of course, comes to terms with it by saying, “Well, it does happen that people do all sorts of things under the influence of suggestion, of fantastic powers that come from people like the Virgin of Orleans.” Such a point of view recalls that of modern theologians, who curiously resign themselves to the emergence of Christianity through Paul's vision before Damascus, who declare this Pauline suggestion before Damascus as a proven fact and should ultimately be able to trace all of Christianity back to it, but they are careful not to do so, because otherwise they would have to admit that Christianity stems from a suggestive experience of Paul's. And they would be careful to avoid saying that. This half-heartedness is extremely detrimental to the entire intellectual life; this half-heartedness is an expression of the fact that one is powerless in the face of such questions. It is good to look around for an answer on this point from someone as honest as Jaurès.

He is trying to understand the significance of the impulses that emanated from the landowners in the fifth post-Atlantic period, and those that emanated from the urban population. We do not need to touch on this socialist nuance again; I just want to point out that Jaurès believes that during this period it matters less whether the social question is considered by the landowning class or by the industrial class: this is not the issue here. Peasant uprisings were the movements dependent on land ownership; these are not the most important thing to him. And that is precisely what he wants to see in Joan of Arc, that although she is a peasant girl, she does not work for the landowning population, that is, the peasant population, but for the larger group of the urban population. Jaurès says:

"Joan of Arc fulfills her mission and sacrifices herself for the salvation of the fatherland in a France where land is no longer the only source of vitality; the municipalities already play an important role, Louis IX had sanctioned and solemnly proclaimed the letters of craftsmanship and the guild law, the Parisian Revolution under the governments of Charles V and Charles VI, had seen the mercantile bourgeoisie and the artisanry emerge as new powers on the scene. The most far-sighted among those who wanted to reform the kingdom dreamed of an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the peasantry against lawlessness and arbitrariness. In this modern France, which was soon to be ruled by the “citizen king” – the son of the ruler whom Jeanne d'Arc was about to save - was about to reign, in this diverse, sophisticated and refined country, touched by the delicate, literary pains of Charles d'Orleans, whose captivity touched the heart of the good Lorraine, in this society, which was rural rather than anything else, Joan of Arc appeared.

So she appeared, in a sense, to Jaurès, not for the peasant population, not for the population that was connected to land ownership, but precisely for that which was connected to modern life, to urban life. Jaurès says:

"She was a simple country girl who had seen the pains and hardships of the peasants around her, but to whom all these afflictions were only an example of the greater and more sublime suffering that the plundered kingdom and the invaded nation were enduring. In her soul and in her thoughts, no place, no piece of land plays a role; she looks beyond the Lorraine fields. Her peasant heart is greater than all peasantry. It beats for the distant, good cities that the stranger surrounds. To live in the fields does not necessarily mean to be absorbed in the questions of the soil. In the noise and bustle of the cities, Jeanne's dream would certainly have been less free, less bold and less comprehensive. Solitude protected the boldness of her thinking, and she experienced the great patriotic community much more intensely because her imagination could fill the silent horizon with a pain and a hope that went beyond, without confusion. She was not inspired by the spirit of peasant revolt; she wanted to liberate the whole of France in order to consecrate it to the service of God, Christianity and justice. Her goal seems so lofty and pleasing to God that in order to achieve it she later finds the courage to oppose even the church and to invoke a revelation that she claims is superior to all others.

Thus the other, I would say, is immediately evident to Jaur&s. He lets his gaze wander over what has happened and finds that what has happened there happened under the influence of a spiritual impulse, so to speak, was switched through the soul of Joan of Arc and penetrated into the physical world. But it is self-evident that a person who thinks in this way cannot fully recognize that spiritual impulses and spiritual forces are the most important things. So he again does not know what to do with what is even vividly shown to him. You see, the failure to recognize what is actually there, even by the best minds of the present day, the failure to recognize the spiritual impulses that they grasp with their hands, that is, the failure to recognize what can be grasped historically with hands, lies at the root of the great life-lie of modern times, which has infected even the best striving people. They want to grasp what is there; but they cannot grasp it because they cannot see the spirit at work in it. Those who think like Jaurès cannot do that. But neither could the others, even in the time of Joan of Arc, who, based on traditional wisdom, stood before the direct appearance of a spiritual fact in the Maid of Orleans, because, as paradoxical as it sounds, the fact that someone is a theologian does not make him a spiritualist, and the fact that someone defends theological dogmas does not make him a recognizer of the spiritual world.

The theologian, of whom I gave you some examples yesterday, is of course not a recognizer of the spiritual world, but is just as much a materialist as Büchner or Moleschott, except that Büchner and Moleschott were truer than such a theologian with his materialism. What you say is not important, but what you absorb in your living experience is important: whether you really recognize the spiritual when it comes to you. But even the theologians could not do that when they were confronted with Joan of Arc, and this fact is something that Jaur&s points out very well when he says:

“Her goal seems so high and pleasing to God that in order to achieve it, she later finds the courage to oppose even the church and to invoke a revelation that stands above all other revelations. To the theologians who urge her to justify her miracles and her mission from the holy books, she replies—”

So the theologians, these exponents of spiritual life, who once had a revelation of spiritual life before them, did not argue about this revelation of spiritual life, but came with the parchment, which is the source from which divine revelation flows, and said: “Prove to us from the Holy Scripture that what you tell us can be true.” Not from the living connection with the spiritual world was the Maid of Orleans to be allowed to prove that she had any mission, but she was to prove it from the old books. And she answers:

"There is more written in the Book of God than in all your books.” Jaurès says: “A wonderful saying, which in a certain respect stands in contrast to the soul of the peasant, whose faith is rooted above all in tradition. How far removed is all this from the dull, narrow-minded, limited patriotism of the landowner! But Jeanne hears the divine voices of her heart by looking up to the radiant and gentle heights of heaven.”

Imagine on the one hand honesty and on the other profound falsehood; for of course, a person of the present day recognizes only as self-suggestion, as fiction, what is in the Virgin of Orleans, and only pictorial, poetic expressions he sees in what he says:

“How far removed from the dull, narrow-minded, limited patriotism of the landed gentry!” Joan hears the divine voices of her heart by looking up to the radiant and gentle heights of heaven.

These divine voices of her heart are something quite abstract for such a man. It is not something real that flows down: the powers of life flowing in through a source like the Virgin of Orleans, so that one absorbs it in order to do reformist social science with this spiritual impulse! No, Joan of Arc speaks of it; but if he wants to do anything, he does not look up to what flows in from the radiant heights of heaven, but he sums, divides, potentiates and reasons abstract terms, purely materialistic thoughts. That is the profound untruth that people do not even realize, that does not even occur to the best of them.

Examples such as these make it clear how people who are immersed in the intellectual life of the present cannot possibly arrive at an appreciation of the most important thing: the spiritual facts themselves, which they must consider fantastic in the light of contemporary life. I said: In the 19th century, what has been indicated here, the prevalence of the materialistic attitude, experienced a crisis. It came to a certain climax. And it is good to see how things are looming; for you will have seen from the example of a theologian just yesterday how 'theology is most strongly influenced by what has emerged from the materialistic attitude of natural science. It is most fatally influential because it most strongly leads to insincerity, to unconscious insincerity. That is the important thing to realize. And a theologian like the one who represented the reformed Christianity in Aarau in May of this year, who said that we all want to unlearn thinking and that we all want to become Christs, is just a personality who stands on the ground of the same attitude. For example, his pamphlet contains the view that these people want to explore the mysterious; but that is precisely what we do not want, this man believes from his point of view, the mysterious is valuable precisely because it remains mysterious. We want to leave the mysterious as it is; we do not want to reveal it. For if we are once confronted with the revealed mystery, then it is no longer mysterious and that is irreligious, that is unchristian to reveal the mystery. — The man takes this view.

And yet, in a sense, this man is typical, also for our time, which develops intellectual defects right into the sphere of moral defects; for what he says about our understanding of the Christ-principle and much of what he says otherwise borders not merely on misunderstanding, but on conscious deliberate falsification, since he could know otherwise and does not feel conscientiously enough obliged to look at this other, to get to know it, but instead says what is incorrect: the intellectual misunderstanding begins to become a moral defect, which then draws itself quite fatally into the souls. What he said there is so right a plant of our time, and it is still interesting to realize how it was not always so. If you look at things in detail, you can see that it has not always been so. This brochure reproduces a lecture given in Aarau on 22 May 1916 on the subject of “Modern Mysticism and Free Christianity” at the Swiss Reform Day. So that is the attitude that was incorporated into the aura of Aarau in May 1916.

Now, in such a case, it is good to really study and look in the same aura to see how things have developed: In Aarau, in 1828, with Heinrich Remigius Sauerländer, Dr. Troxier's “Naturlehre des menschlichen Erkennens” (Natural History of Human Cognition) was published! So we see that this 'Natural Science of Human Cognition' found a place within the same aura in those days, in 1828. At least most of you know Troxler from my last book 'The Riddle of Man'. This Troxler was born in Switzerland, was first a professor in Lucerne, then in Basel and in Bern, and died in 1868. He is not yet on the standpoint of present-day spiritual science, that is to say, he lacks the possibility of presenting the worlds that spiritual science can describe to people in concrete terms. But he is, I would say, on the way. And it is interesting to see how the same subject was once spoken of differently. For this, I will just quote a few passages from Troxler that I am bringing before you today so that you can see how differently the same subject was spoken of. I would like to say first that Troxler admittedly does not yet have spiritual science, but that he does put forward concepts that are initially like hypotheses, which may not be accurate, but can essentially be found again when viewed from the standpoint of spiritual science. There we speak of the physical body, of the etheric body, of the astral body and of the I. These four concepts roughly correspond, even if Troxler has no concept, with what he calls the body in man, the body, the soul and the spirit. He divides man into four parts: body, soul, and spirit, and he sharply criticizes the philosophers who have worked before him for not realizing that it is nonsense to say that man consists of spirit and body, but that one only understands man when one regards him as this four-part system: body and soul as the internal, body as the external, lower, spirit as the upper. And as I said, even if Troxler did not advance as far as spiritual science, he still managed to recognize the human being to a high degree through an insight into the mind. And from this point of view, the man says the following, for example. Referring to earlier philosophers who had mixed up everything in man, he says:

"In general, we criticize this philosopher, as well as all the philosophers and theologians mentioned above, for drawing their anthroposophy more from reflection and speculation, or authority and dogmatics, than from their original consciousness, or their own spirit perfected in religion. Only the original and direct knowledge of the divine in its nature leads man to self-knowledge of his essential personality and living spontaneity, for which only individual derived and indirect works and forms of subordinate and one-sided species and degrees of consciousness have been regarded so far."

He continues:

"The theosophists are as little united among themselves as the philosophers. Thus, for example, Daumer opposes Boehme, Schelling and Baader in the following, which seems to me to be a very correct observation that approaches our view. He says on page 39: “It is to be noted that in the case of Böhme, as in that of Schelling, there is a confusion of the God who has been divested (the Ungrund) with the unconditional in God, and the error prevails as if God had found and investigated Himself through the reason.”

So, once again, the confusion of these very things that are at issue here.

“Here it is also worth mentioning how mysticism, while usually losing the human being in God, and philosophy, while losing God in the human being, has transferred this primal relationship of human nature, which the human being should content himself with fathoming anthroposophically, to God himself in theosophical speculations” and so on.

This was the most intense endeavor of this Troxler, especially in the area I have indicated: to work towards an anthroposophy. One might say that Troxler appears as a kind of harbinger in this area in particular. Now just consider how things would be different if Troxler, who worked in Lucerne, Bern and Basel, had been heard at the time when he wanted to introduce anthroposophy, albeit in his own way. If that had gained ground, how different it would be now that anthroposophy, which has progressed to the point of concrete spiritual knowledge, is being presented here with a building. When you consider such things, especially when you study this wonderful case of direct anthroposophy, which was taught in the 1930s by name, wanting to appear again, and as now in the same Aarau, where this book was published, in which the sentences about anthroposophy are found as they could be at that time, a lecture is given on “Recent Mysticism and Free Christianity”, in which it is said: These anthroposophists want to make it their principle to unlearn thinking and become all Christs - if you think about it, you will get an idea of the materialistic crisis that occurred in the course of the 19th century. And it is good to get an idea of such things, to know that today, when one stands on the ground of the outer spiritual life, one has no right to speak otherwise than by being aware that one is expressing a Wagnerian spirit and not a Faustian spirit when one says:

It is a great pleasure
to place oneself in the spirit of the times,
to see how a wise man thought before us,
and how we have then finally come so wonderfully far.

For just imagine, the man who spoke in Aarau, looking at Troxler, who had his book published in Aarau, would now say – he would certainly say it from his point of view – the present-day speaker on newer mysticism and free Christianity:

It is a great delight
to place oneself in the spirit of the times,
to see how a wise man thought before us,
and how we have then finally come so gloriously far!

The Troxler, who has not yet come so far as to realize that these anthroposophists want to unlearn thinking and become all Christs, that they want to reveal the secret and not leave the secret, and thereby rebel against all honest, human endeavor. Troxler would not say: I have finally realized that these anthroposophists are to be condemned because they all want to become Christs, want to give up thinking and feeling and want to reveal the secrets; but man is not there to research anything, but he is there, as the theologian believes, to think, which the anthroposophists want to give up!

As you can see, mutual understanding will not be possible; but it is still an example of whether or not there was a crisis, a materialistic crisis, in the 19th century, and to what extent it is true that we have come “so wonderfully far”! I believe that we have come wonderfully far from Troxler to Joß in the field of the Aarau aura! But not forward, but backward! We will continue this discussion tomorrow.