The Spiritual Background of Human History

GA 174b — 13 February 1915, Stuttgart

Second Lecture

It must be emphasized again and again that the most essential point of our spiritual scientific endeavor is that which shows us how mere knowledge, mere knowledge living in ideas and conceptions, must increasingly and how we must seek a knowledge, a sum of ideas and perceptions, of feelings and will impulses, that becomes real life for us, that makes us alive in the most eminent sense of the word. It is necessary that we occasionally direct our contemplation, our meditation, to this cardinal point of our striving. For the light that can radiate from this point can only fully illuminate our souls if we return to it again and again in faithful contemplation. It must be a matter of heartfelt need for us, who want to profess spiritual scientific striving with our soul and heart in these serious times, to translate into real life, into the direct life of the soul, that which we can become through knowledge. We must do something to ensure that everything that is mere theoretical insight, that is, mere scientific endeavor, is gradually transformed into experience, so that it is enriched from the spiritual world by that through which it can become experience. Otherwise we are heading for a time of spiritual aridity; for theories, mere scientific convictions, are apt to dry up the human soul and human life in general. But deeply, deeply rooted in our time is the belief that one must get along in life with a conviction organized according to the pattern of scientific knowledge.

The great events that are taking place in our time should be a particular challenge to those souls inclined towards spiritual science to really come to terms with the difference between life and mere knowledge, between life and mere conviction formed according to a scientific pattern. We must try to arrive at a kind of self-knowledge, at purely human self-knowledge; we must try to consult ourselves about how much the demon of theoretical conviction lives in human hearts. We must clearly focus our soul's eye on how this demon of theoretical conviction wants to take root. And we will not make our innermost experience of what anthroposophy is meant to be for us if we do not try to do so, if we do not turn our eyes to facts that can also surprise the anthroposophist, so to speak, in his own soul life, that point out how far one stands from the direct experience of the spiritual when one is so devoted to modern soul life, and how close one stands to the search for a theoretical conviction. One must face such facts quite impartially.

I have been able – and what I am about to say is only meant as an example – to speak in various places in the German-speaking world about experiences related to our difficult times since serious events befell Europe and the world. I was also able to do so here in Stuttgart. I have spoken about such experiences here and there. What were some of the consequences of discussing such experiences? One of the consequences was that members of other spiritual realms came with the request that what had been spoken within our language area should also be brought to them. This was often demanded under the well-intentioned premise that the truth is the same for all people, of course, and that such a carrying over of what is spoken in one place to another place could readily serve to clarify the truth in our difficult time. It has become fashionable within our school of thought to write down everything that is said, including what is said out of the immediate impulse not only of the time, but also of the place and the people to whom it is spoken, and to have the belief that this must serve everyone in the same way because one makes the theoretical assumption that truth can only be formulated in one single way. Now, my dear friends, this nonsense, which consists of writing down the spoken word in a precise way and believing that it still has the content when it is now read out or spoken again as a written word, would become monstrous if one could believe what has just been suggested.

If the things that people in Europe and the world are currently facing could be defined by words, then the immense rivers of blood that must flow today from the eternal necessities of earthly development would not have to flow. If it were possible for souls to understand each other through national aspirations, then they would not have to confront each other with cannons. We must prove ourselves with the character of the experience that has been given, we must prove ourselves with spiritual-scientific knowledge, especially where it is important to face the great seriousness. Using occult truths in a playful way for everyday soul needs cannot be the task of our spiritual-scientific endeavor. As long as we are not able to understand that spiritual powers are really active in the world phenomena that confront us on the physical plane, and that we need spiritual science to assess and see through the value and inner truth of these spiritual powers, as long as we are not able to do this, we do not yet have the right relationship to our spiritual science.

We must be clear about this: when we are working on purely anthroposophical ground, when we are developing the high truths for our soul that touch on the highest essence of man, then we are on ground that is beyond nationality, even beyond racial differences. When we are standing firmly on the ground of what we can gain about the human being from spiritual knowledge, then the same truths apply throughout the world, and even within certain horizons for other planets in our solar system. As soon as we stand on this ground, as soon as the highest thoughts concerning the human being come into consideration for us. It is different when things come into consideration that speak and must speak of something other than this highest human essence: When nations face each other, we are not dealing with that which in the nature of man reaches beyond all the differentiations of humanity. When nations face each other, it is not just people who face each other, but spiritual worlds; it is such entities in spiritual worlds that are active through people and live in people. And to believe that what must apply to people must also apply to that complicated world of demons and spirits that works through people when nations fight with each other, to believe that one could determine something through simple human logic about what drives the demons against each other, that is to say, not yet to have found faith in a concrete spiritual world.

What do I mean by that? — It is true that when we look at what is happening in the outside world, we find — I will now completely disregard the actual painful events of the war — that people of different nationalities are facing each other. We find that one nationality sometimes overwhelms the other with its hatred in the most terrible way. Then people try to cope with it, that is, they ask themselves which nation has more right to hate, this nation or that nation, or which one should hate more than another. One also thinks about which nation is particularly to blame for this war. One reflects on these matters in much the same way as one would reflect during a court case, where one weighs up the various circumstances. But what are you really doing when you do what has just been characterized and what dominates the current literature? One thereby denies all spiritual life, even if one did not want to admit it, because one professes the dogma that those demons, for example, which have come over from the East and have brought discord into European life, are to be judged according to the pattern of the intellect, let us say, of understanding, that man has. For one does not believe that there is another mind, another power of judgment, than that which man has. All that is judged from the merely human point of view in the face of such events that stir up evolution is a denial of spiritual-scientific life. We profess a genuine spiritual-scientific life only when we realize that spiritual causes are being realized in physical events, causes that necessitate a different power of judgment than that of the physical plane. When people with different views fight each other on the physical plane, then one can perhaps decide according to human judgment. But this is not possible when nations fight each other, because invisible powers express themselves through the life of nations. Invisible powers also express themselves in man, but in such a way that they fit into human judgment. But they do not do that in the life of nations. There it is precisely a matter of our proving ourselves in the recognition of the concrete spiritual life and realizing that there are many other impulses speaking in the human soul than those that can be mastered with the earthly mind when such great events take place.

If one reads this or that today, which is said and which is also repeated abundantly by those who have received an impulse from spiritual science, then one finds that much of it is written or spoken as if the world's development had only begun on July 20, 1914. Even when seeking the causes of the present complications, people speak as if they had begun last year. One of the practical results of spiritual science, in addition to many others, must be that people will want to learn something, that they will want to form an opinion not from the immediate day, but from the larger context. That will be the most elementary thing; the further development will consist in examining the judgment against what spiritual science is able to give. Let us look at an example to see how this spiritual science must be applied when it comes to contrasting our understanding with our experience and then making our experience our own.

We have always emphasized that the development of the world, the evolution of the earth, proceeds in distinctly different cultural periods in the post-Atlantic era. We have enumerated these cultural periods: the ancient Indian cultural period, the Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Greek-Latin, then the one that is our own in the present; then we pointed out that a sixth, a seventh epoch will have to follow ours. But we were not satisfied with simply schematically presenting the succession of these cultural periods; we tried to characterize what is peculiar to the individual cultural periods. And in doing so, we tried to gain an understanding of our own time, of the transitional impulses that live in our time, in our fifth post-Atlantic epoch. And we have also realized that by no means can anything schematic be meant by such characterizations, for example, that one cannot say that the peculiarity of this cultural epoch extends over the whole earth. It occurs in certain places, other places on earth, other territories, lag behind. They need not necessarily lag behind, but they do lag behind with old forces, in order that these old forces may later be appropriately related to another cultural epoch in a different cultural epoch, as evolution progresses. We need not even think in terms of values, but only in terms of character peculiarities. How could it fail to strike people as profoundly different when it comes to the spiritual culture, say, of the European and Asian peoples? How could one not notice the difference in the skin coloration! If we look at the European-American being and the Asian being – leaving aside any value judgments for the moment – we have to face the fact that the Asian peoples have retained certain cultural impulses from past eras, while the European-American peoples have moved beyond these cultural impulses. Only if one is caught in an unhealthy soul life can one be particularly impressed by what oriental mysticism has preserved for oriental humanity from ancient times, when people necessarily had to live with lower powers of vision. Europe has indeed been seized by such an unhealthy spiritual life in many ways; people believed that they had to learn the way to the spiritual worlds through Asian yogism and the like. However, this tendency proves nothing more than an unhealthy soul life. A healthy soul life must be built upon the assimilation of the experiences of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch into spiritual life and spiritual knowledge, and not upon the practice of bringing up something in humanity that is quite interesting to study scientifically, so to speak, but which must not be renewed for European humanity without its falling back into times that are not appropriate for it. But other times will come about the development of the earth, following times. In these following times, outdated forces will have to join with advanced forces again. Therefore, they must remain in some place in order to be there, in order to be able to connect with the advanced forces. A sixth will follow the fifth cultural epoch. Abstract thinking, that terrible abstract thinking, which is a daughter of purely theoretical-scientific conviction, cannot but esteem the sixth age higher than the fifth, because the sixth is a later development. But we should realize that there are periods of decline as well as periods of rise. We should be fully aware that the sixth age, which follows the fifth in the post-Atlantean period, must of necessity belong to the decline and that what has developed in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch must be the germ for the following earth time of the seventh cultural epoch. One must look at things so vividly, not abstractly or theoretically, so that one lets the sixth age follow the fifth as a more perfect one.

In Atlantean times, the fourth epoch was the one in which the seeds for our present time lay. In our time, it is the fifth cultural epoch that contains the seeds for what must follow the post-Atlantean period. And what is the characteristic that must develop in this fifth cultural epoch in particular? This is the characteristic that has been particularly fanned by the Mystery of Golgotha: that the spiritual impulses have been led down into the immediate physical-human, that, as it were, the flesh must be seized by the spirit.

"It has not yet happened. It will only have happened when spiritual science has a firmer earthly footing and many more people express it in their immediate lives, when the spirit is in every hand movement, in every finger movement, one might say, when it is expressed in the most everyday actions. But it was for the sake of this carrying down of spiritual impulses that the Christ became incarnate in a human body. And this carrying down, this permeation of the flesh with the spirit, that is the characteristic of the mission, the mission of white humanity in general. People have their white skin color because the spirit works in the skin when it wants to descend to the physical plane. The task of our fifth cultural epoch, which has been prepared by the other four cultural epochs, is to make that which is the outer physical body a housing for the spirit. And our task must be to familiarize ourselves with those cultural impulses that show the tendency to introduce the spirit into the flesh, to introduce the spirit into everyday life. When we fully recognize this, then we will also be clear about the fact that where the spirit is still to work as spirit, where it is to remain in a certain way in its development — because in our time it has the task of descending into the flesh —, that where it lags behind, where it takes on a demonic character, the spirit does not completely penetrate the flesh, that the white skin coloration does not occur because atavistic forces are present that do not allow the spirit to fully harmonize with the flesh.

In the sixth cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean period, the task will be to recognize the spirit more in the elemental world than directly in itself, to recognize the spirit more in the elemental world, because this sixth cultural epoch has the task of preparing the recognition of the spirit in the physical environment. This cannot be achieved without difficulty if ancient atavistic forces are not preserved that recognize the spirit in its purely elementary life. But these things do not happen in the world without the most fierce struggles. White humanity is still on the path of absorbing the spirit deeper and deeper into its own being. The yellow race is on the way to preserving those ages in which the spirit is kept far from the body, in which the spirit is sought outside of the human physical organization, only there. But this must lead to the fact that the transition from the fifth cultural epoch into the sixth cultural epoch cannot take place otherwise than as a fierce struggle between the white race and the colored race in the most diverse fields. And what precedes these struggles, which will take place between the white and the colored humanity, will occupy world history until the great struggles between the white and the colored humanity are fought out. Future events are reflected in multiple ways in previous events. When we look at what we have acquired through the most diverse considerations in a spiritual-scientific sense, we are faced with something colossal that we can see as necessarily taking place in the future.

On the one hand, we have a part of humanity with the mission of introducing the spirit into physical life in such a way that the spirit permeates everything in physical life. And on the other hand, we have a part of humanity with the necessity of now, so to speak, taking over the descending development. This cannot happen otherwise than through that which truly professes to permeate the physical with the spiritual, to bring forth cultural impulses, to bring forth living impulses that are lasting for the earth, that cannot disappear from the earth again. For what follows as the sixth, as the seventh cultural epoch, must live spiritually from the creations of the fifth, must absorb the creations of the fifth cultural epoch. The fifth cultural epoch has the task of deepening the external idealistic life into a spiritual life. But that which is thus conquered as a spiritual life by idealism must be accepted later, must live on. For in the East there will not be the strength to productively create one's own spiritual life, but only to absorb what has been created. Thus, history must unfold in such a way that a spiritual culture is created by present-day humanity, which carries the actual cultural impulses within itself. This spiritual culture is the actual historical successor to the fifth culture, and it will be assimilated by what follows.

Let us try to understand objectively and without prejudice the difference between these two currents of humanity. Try to realize how, since the entry of that part of humanity called the Germanic peoples, there has been a struggle to permeate the external physical with the spiritual, and how the depths of Christianity have been embraced. One started from the external physical, from that which, as it were, contained the germ of a physical-spiritual. We may look back to the summer sacrifice, to the sacrifice at the summer solstice of the god Baldur. The true and deeper meaning of this was lost in early times, but what is the true and deeper meaning? It can only be grasped by directing our attention to the fact that, as the spring sun rises, in the light and warmth, spiritual powers also rise, as the god Lenz rises, and that, by lighting of the St. John's fire, man tends to connect with the spring forces that prevail in the forces of nature, and he lights a fire to symbolize that he connects his understanding with the death of the god of spring at the summer solstice. This is the Baldur saga: the god Lenz is burnt in the summer solstice fire because people sensed the fertility and germination in nature, in the outer physical world, because they loved the god Lenz and followed him into his death. But because in the outer physical world they had the model of the Christ, who does not die at the summer solstice but is born at the winter solstice — note this contrast between the physical and the spiritual —, because they had the summer solstice god as an example for the winter solstice god, because they had the reverse of the physical for the spiritual, and so they penetrated each other with what was related and yet opposite. If the god Baldur is the god of spring who dies during the summer solstice, then the Christian god is the one who is born during the winter solstice. The one and the other interpenetrate each other as it happens in the outer physical body, interpenetrating with the spiritual, which is veiled by the darkness of the body, by the winter darkness. The winter spirit permeates the summer body. And how do these things interpenetrate? In the immediate personal struggle of the cultural impulses. What is the history of Central Europe if not a continuous struggle for the awakening of the divine spark in the personal soul, for the spiritual to arise in the physical? One can disregard everything else, but one must see through the truth, recognize the characteristic of this Central European nature.

And take the other part of humanity. How far removed it is, fundamentally, from this personal impulse of the spiritual striving upward in the physical! One would like to say: “From the point of view of natural history” it is extremely interesting to observe how Chinese culture has preserved its Tao and Confucian religions, and how Asian religions in general have preserved the most ancient forms, the most abstract forms, those forms in which the theoretical mind feels so at home, but which are rigidity in the face of personal experience, which do not allow personal experience to come into play, because this personal experience is to be preserved until the time when the achievements of human culture are incorporated in such a way that they can be assimilated. In the fifth cultural epoch, something spiritual must be attained by one's own efforts; in the sixth cultural epoch, people will come and accept what has been worked out and achieved as their outlook, as their experience, but as something that they have not achieved themselves. It will be preserved in the forces that do not struggle, but accept the spiritual as something external and self-evident. And the prelude to that much more far-reaching struggle is the one that must gradually develop as the struggle between the Germanic and the Slavic world. One should only consider that the Slavic world is in a sense an outpost for that which is the sixth cultural epoch, indeed that in it lies the actual germ of the sixth cultural epoch. Consider this in a true, genuine, spiritual-scientific sense. Then you will realize that in this Slavic element there must be something receptive, something that has nothing to do with this struggle, that almost rejects one's own struggle. You can feel it with your hands. While in Central Europe the souls have fought, have fought with their inner selves, in order to grasp God through personal striving, the Slavonic element preserves religion, the grasp of God, the cultus, which is just there; it preserves, it does not make the spirit inwardly alive, but lets the spirit pass over it like a cloud and lives in this cloud, remaining alien to the spirit with the personality.

Central Europe could not stop at some old form of external Christianity because it had to struggle. The East has stopped, and even its cult forms have become rigid and abstract because it is to prepare itself to receive externally, to accept what the West acquires through personal struggle, because it is not prepared to receive things through personal struggle, this East. And how can we bring about mutual understanding between two such different spiritual impulses, when the model is purely theoretical? How can we possibly arbitrate between two different spiritual currents that behave as differentiated currents must behave? Do not misunderstand the comparison: How can one, I might say, distinguish the lion's custom from the elephant's custom? But events develop out of eternal necessities and proceed as the eternal necessities flow. The East had to struggle against what was and is becoming more and more necessary for it: the connection with the West and its culture. For basically, before its maturation, it could not be given the right understanding. And an outward expression is the conflict between what is called Germanic and what is called Slavic, that which is basically only just being prepared and will hover as a long concern over European life: the conflict between the Germanic and the Slavic. One could say that just as a child resists learning the achievements of the ancients, so the East resists the achievements of the West, resists them, resists them to such an extent that it hates them, even if it feels compelled to accept their achievements from time to time. To shine the light of truth on these things requires something different from what one loves today; although one sometimes senses this other thing, one is reluctant to turn one's eyes to these things and really understand them from their innermost impulses. Because if one is only slightly touched by these innermost impulses, much of the chatter will soon cease, and much of what is done must cease, which arises from confusion, the confusion that wants to remain in the external Maya.

What will be understood by the sixth cultural epoch? It will be understood as a cultural epoch in which a large part of the Eastern people will have sacrificed their humanity to that which has been achieved in popular culture, in that, like the feminine, the Eastern will have allowed itself to be fertilized by the masculine Western. That which will live in the souls of the sixth cultural epoch will be the same as that which has been achieved by the souls of the fifth cultural epoch. This means that from the East, immaturity and that which has not yet matured will surge forward and resist what must happen anyway. Just as the Greek-Roman once had to defend itself against the Germanic, so the Slavic must defend itself against the Germanic; but just as in the transition from the Greek-Roman to the Germanic in the ascending development, so in the transition from the Germanic to the Slavic in the descending one. By the Germanic element having taken over the actual mission of the fifth cultural epoch, it was this Germanic element that had to and will continue to have to insert the actual understanding of Christianity into the inner struggle of earthly evolution for this fifth cultural epoch. And the greatest misfortune would have occurred if the Germanic element had been defeated by the Roman element in the long run, because then what has happened through the fifth cultural epoch could not have happened: this Germanic element had to live through the personal struggle. And it would be the greatest misfortune if the Slavic element ever defeated the Germanic element. Note the difference. It would be the most dismal, most abstract schematism if one were to describe it as an misfortune in the transition from the fifth to the sixth cultural epoch, which one would have to describe as an misfortune in the transition from the fourth to the fifth cultural epoch. The victory of the Romans would have meant the impossibility of the mission of the fifth cultural epoch; the victory of the Slavic element would have meant the same impossibility for the sixth cultural epoch. For only in passively accepting what the fifth cultural epoch produces can the meaning of the sixth exist.

One must feel what follows quite independently of ambitions, of national aspirations, from these realizations, when these realizations become life. But one must also be clear about how difficult it becomes for people to understand when the truth contradicts their passions, when the truth contradicts their aspirations. If someone tries to convince a Western European or an Englishman from Central Europe, for example, using human reason, then one is doing something that should be recognized as unsuccessful, especially when it comes to national antagonisms. On purely humanistic ground, we understand each other as human beings. But if we leave this ground and enter into the struggles of nations, we should be clear about the difficulties standing in the way of mutual understanding. There is only one way to gain understanding, for example, in the French West of Europe, for what one is actually doing. It is the path that will one day arise from the realization of what unnaturalness it actually is to let oneself be pushed forward in the French west by the hand of the European east. Only the realization of what one has done oneself will bring some understanding of the matter, but not the word that comes from others, that comes from those who stand on a different national soil. Such things are sometimes sensed and sensed for, but then forgotten again. Because the most characteristic things that happen are usually forgotten. If only it had been possible, over the last forty years, to repeatedly print that meaningful correspondence that once took place between Ernest Renan, the Frenchman, and David Friedrich Strauß, the Württemberg German! It would have been useful if the decisive letters that were exchanged had been brought to people's attention once every four weeks, so to speak: then they would have sensed something of what was to come. One need only point out the one passage in Renan's letter where he expresses the desire to work together with Central Europe for Western European culture: this was an impulse flowing from the eternal forces. But then Renan immediately adds: “But that contradicts my patriotism.” Because if Alsace-Lorraine is taken from the French, then as a Frenchman I can only be in favor of Western culture being protected against the East. Everything that came later is already in the making in such a statement; that is the seed of what will happen later. It shows that even an enlightened spirit basically admitted: Yes, I can see where the path lies that is predetermined by eternal necessity, but I do not want to follow it because I want to be more French than human. I say one has felt, sensed, how things lie in the sense of eternal necessity; but one must gradually learn through spiritual science to follow one's intuitions, one's feelings with one's judgment. One must learn to arrive at the real facts by means of judgment. And one cannot grasp the real facts without understanding the spiritual world. It is impossible to do so without resorting to that which gives the facts their evolutionary impulses from the spiritual world.

We see how fruitful for us can be what comes out of spiritual science, how we can illuminate life in its most serious events when we unite with our minds what follows from real spiritual-scientific knowledge, for example, about the post-Atlantic cultural epochs. There we gain an objective standard, there we gain the possibility of rising above personal aspirations, even on the delicate ground of national experience. And that is the peculiar thing about the Central European experience, that this Central European experience really gives people the opportunity to rise above what is merely national. Just try to realize how, in the successive cultural epochs, Central Europe in particular — in that struggle of the human soul in Central Europe — overcomes the personal at the same time, where it is not based on passions and immediate instinctual impulses.

What beauty is, other peoples have surely felt as well. Only in Central Europe, however, has beauty and its place in human experience been so deeply reflected upon as in Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters”. Other nations have also fought battles, and will do so: but only in Central Europe have they intervened in a battle in such a way that it has invoked the deepest philosophical impulses in order to inspire the battle with these impulses, as Fichte did in his “Speeches to the German Nation”. Religious struggles were also fought elsewhere: nowhere in the world were they as closely connected with all branches of human experience as they were in Central Europe.

And take our Anthroposophical Society itself, take it as we have developed it among ourselves, how we have struggled, fought and also suffered in it, at least a number of us, in recent years. We were connected for a time with the Theosophical Society of English coloration. What then was the deep impulse that did not allow this connection with that theosophical movement to continue? Let us be clear about this, my dear friends, what was the deep impulse? Just look at the movement. What could lead to the absurdity of Krishnamurti and similar follies? It led to the conviction of spiritual life being attached to the rest of the culture as an external element. There are two things: the external and philosophical view of life in England, and then, attached to it, without the two having much to do with each other, a spiritual conviction. There is no need to interweave the two. Here we feel that we can only arrive at a spiritual conviction when it grows out of our body, as it were, out of everything that was driven by Johannes Tauler, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius iles in the mysticism of the Middle Ages, what has gone through German philosophy, through German poetry in spiritual preparation, when what we want and must want necessarily grows out of it like a new organic limb. We cannot attach the spiritual life to the rest; we need a living organism, not a living mechanism. One can realize such things without falling into arrogance, because one needs clarity about how the spiritual must be in life, and how one can grasp the rest of life through the spiritual. We, as confessors of the spiritual-scientific world view, must be able to become souls that want what must be in the sense of the just given characteristic in Central European spiritual life. Of course, this is also a struggle; the real issue is that one might say: the truth must first be achieved by pushing the errors to both sides of the road. - How difficult it is sometimes to recognize that one must push the errors to both sides of the road! One could have tragic experiences in the last decades.

I would like to paint a vivid picture for you. It has a certain significance, especially now, to show how the natural connection between the two Central European countries has come about in our time. — In Austria, in the second half of the 19th century, lived one of the most German poets, Robert Hamerling. He was also German in that he truly sought to give birth to the whole world in his own soul. In his novel “Ahasver in Rome” he traces the wandering human soul back to Cain, and in the confrontation between Ahasver and Nero he attempts to solve the profound riddle of the human soul. In his Aspasia he tried to bring Greek cultural life back to life from the German soul. He tried to solve the riddle of life for himself by delving into the religious life, which had been sought at a certain time, in his Anabaptist epic, The King of Sion. In his drama “Danton and Robespierre” he tried to understand the driving impulses of the French Revolution. And finally, in his “Homunculus” he tried to explain the impulses that reach into the future and overwhelm the spiritual. But I could cite many more examples to show how truly Central European, how truly German Robert Hamerling's spirit was. This Robert Hamerling spent a large part of his life in bed; for the last three decades he was almost always ill. He wrote his greatest works in bed, in pain. But no one would guess from these works that they were written by a seriously ill man. Everything is sound; one can judge it as one likes, but everything is sound. Certainly, the works have been reprinted in larger numbers; but in the eighties — I could say that it became vividly clear to me, as if in a symbol, what such a spirit could have become for a part of humanity in Central Europe if its impulses had flowed into the souls. Once, when such things as those brought about by Robert Hamerling in the development of the spirit were being discussed in a society, a man came in who was accustomed to hearing mainly himself and not paying much attention to what others say - there are such people who like to hear themselves. As if he had been hit by a bombshell, he declared that the greatest thing to happen to humanity was Dostoyevsky's “Raskolnikov”! Of course, one does not need to ignore the unique greatness of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, but the attachment to the material, to the soul that is stuck in the material and leaves the spiritual outside, contrasts tremendously with the interpenetration of the spiritual and the material that Hamerling sought. It may certainly be more interesting and sensational to look at the soul that does not want to emerge from the material and which Dostoyevsky describes so magnificently, but for the Central European human being, the recognition of the interpenetration of the spiritual and the physical means a recognition of his entire being and his entire task. There too, there is a struggle.

The inner struggle will be added to the outer struggle, that inner struggle against the opposing forces that rebel against recognizing the spiritual. We are already experiencing the strangest facts: from one side we are warned not to pay too much attention to how the spiritual powers in Europe are now juxtaposed; because if the purely German element were to prevail – we have been warned from the German side! then one would indeed have to fear a revival of the kind of ideas that a Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe produced: one would have to fear a metaphysical dreaming. It is a peculiar fear that is being talked about; but this fear could grow ever greater, and those who have this fear will indeed not be able to accept the spiritual. But in truth it must be realized that the idealism of Central Europe, just as the child does to the man, must develop into spiritualism; for this idealism of Central Europe is the child of spiritualism, the child that should become spiritualism. When Fichte spoke, he still spoke only of idealism, but of such an idealism that strives towards spiritualism. This impulse of spiritualism must not be allowed to disappear from the evolution of the earth.

Much of the meaning of the time can be expressed in these simple words. Individual human beings have indeed sensed and felt such things. But these intuitions pass by without being taken in their depth, without the main emphasis being seen in them. One fails to link the unimportant to the important. And that is why it is important not to lose sight of the big picture, to really see what is essential in the currents that flow over the development of the earth. And we come to the most essential when we allow ourselves to be taught by what this development of the earth shows us in spiritual light. In the particular case, if we really take seriously the teaching of the successive post-Atlantean cultural epochs - it must be said again and again - people should rise above that narrow point of view that cannot see the main thing.

Let me give you an example. Among ourselves, it is necessary to point out such things. Suppose someone were to say the following today, and then let us try to consider the idea that someone would say this today: As far as I am concerned, I am in no doubt for a moment that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic world is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the Orient, especially Turkey, or by the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will take the lead in the same on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spitting fire and flame against Germany. The German press is already sounding its warning cry. A long time has passed since Russia gathered after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered appropriate in St. Petersburg to take up the Oriental question again.

If the Mediterranean Sea is to become, according to the more pompous than true expression, “a French lake”, then Russia has the even more positive intention of turning the Black Sea into a “Russian lake” and the Sea of Marmara into a “Russian pond”. That Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia is a fixed goal of Russian policy, which finds its lever of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism. The Danube would then be closed at the Iron Gate by the Russian turnpike. —

Let us assume that someone would speak in this way. One could then say: Well, now he has been taught a lesson by what has happened – and those who emphatically preach that the war was only wanted by Central Europe and did not necessarily develop from the East could be right after all. But this was written in 1870! And in any case, not a year went by without something like this being written. How foolish it is to believe that the cause of what is happening today is not to be found in the forces that have been building up and playing out over long periods of time! These words were written in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. To believe that the events need not have occurred and to believe that all impulses did not come from the East is, to put it mildly, inconsistent and a failure to recognize the true effective forces. It must not be allowed to happen, and must be prevented by spiritual science, that people, including journalists, repeatedly judge as if the beginnings of the events that are now unfolding only formed five or six months ago! When people are trained through spiritual science to know that the great is prepared in the small, and that only from the great can the small be judged, then something will be gained for ordinary life from spiritual science, then in this ordinary life that which spiritual science makes us experience will be prepared.

I wanted to speak, indeed I could say I had to speak to you in this introductory lecture today again from a certain point of view, which is prompted by the experiences of the time. I had to speak of what spiritual science is to become for us in judging the world and our position in the world. I have had to speak of it. Basically, we must allow ourselves to be admonished again and again to take seriously, very seriously, what spiritual science wants to give us, and not to want to live two lives, so to speak: one life in which we explain things of the world in a spiritual-scientific sense, and the other life in which we are absorbed in everyday matters and do as other people do. But it is not so much through words as through the way I have dealt with things here in this narrower circle that I would like to evoke in you the feeling and the sensation that these words really do not want to be anything other than eternal truths in the sense that eternal truths are also the most individual. These words are spoken to you, my dear friends, with your feelings here in southern Germany, with the emotional nuance that these words deserve here. And if it were enough to simply write down these words and read them aloud everywhere to people with different life contexts, then it might also be enough if I just wrote down my words and did not travel around. That the words must be spoken out of the context of feelings and sensations, because wherever people come together there is a common human aura out of which one must speak, we must finally recognize this in spiritual life. What matters is that we bring things into life, not that we make the phrase that we have to bring things into life, but that we really bring them into life. And to do that, we have to take them individually. Things happen individually because they have to happen individually. And it is an abstract belief to assume, for example, that what I will say the day after tomorrow in the public lecture in that house, which is located across from the house with the Hegel memorial plaque, that what is contained in the living, individual, and immediate, that which is abstractly spoken for all nuances of feeling, as it were, for the conversion of the whole world. One must also realize that what one person can grasp, another cannot grasp. And if the anthroposophical lectures must bear a certain individual character here and there, then this is even more the case when one is confronted with such serious matters as we are now. But only if one takes the truth seriously and does not believe that that which is alive can be grasped with words that are lifeless and motionless and can therefore be applied anywhere, only then will one understand that which is universally valid in the most individual way. I would like you to reflect on this side of life as well. It will be a way to bring to life in your own soul and in your own way what I have to bring from the spiritual world in my own way, so that it is not just a repetition of what has to come through me in my own way. Just as sunlight is reflected differently in each little stone and yet is always the same sunlight because it is imbued with life, so spiritual science must become something that lives differently in each individual and yet is always and forever the same. Spiritual science cannot live in the Englishman, Frenchman, Russian, German in one way when national matters are concerned, and the other cannot be converted by that by which the feeling of the one is most fruitfully enlivened. Such a proselytizing urge arises from the theoretical bent of our time. What external, purely material science can do, namely, to categorize everything, cannot be the case with spiritual science, because it is a living thing, and because I must speak to you not as an abstract scientific spirit demands of me, but as it comes to life in me as I stand here before you. For it is not from my heart, but from your heart, that I do it as well as I can. And I would like to serve the spiritual scientific impulse, which instructs the one who can look up to the spiritual world to tune out and express what lies in the depths of the souls of those who are listening. In a sense, it may be said that What is expressed in this or that meditation arises from the depths of the souls of the listeners. Think about that too! We have to take spiritual science as something that is experienced and not as something abstract. What is abstract appeals to our pride, appeals to our stubbornness, which likes to indulge in persuasion. What is spiritual simply wants to be communicated. And what I have to communicate wants to be communicated, even if there is not a single person here who believes a single word I say. If we go to the other person with the intention of wanting to persuade him, with the opinion that he should accept our opinion, then we are not really experiencing the spiritual. And this experience, this direct grasp of the spiritual world, will produce the aura that humanity must have in the future.

It must be said again and again: What we are now experiencing under rivers of blood will only mean for humanity what it is meant to mean when something completely new also shows itself in culture, in humanity. But this new thing will sprout when there are people from whose souls spiritual thoughts arise; these thoughts are powers. And into the atmosphere that will be created when the twilight of war has passed and the sun of peace shines again, the thoughts that pour into the spiritual horizon must flow. Then those whose souls look down, those who had to leave their bodies prematurely on the battlefields, will know what they actually fell for on the battlefields. And the anthroposophist must say to himself that he is only living through this time in the right way if he takes in the living spirit of spiritual scientific striving. When certain souls in the consciousness of the spirit send their meaning into the spiritual realm, then a horizon of light will truly arise from our blood horizon for the future development of humanity.

We will continue this discussion tomorrow, when we will also discuss a specific topic. But today we want to bring to mind the thoughts that bring us together with the serious events of the time:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware
Their minds into the spiritual realm.