The Constitution of the General Anthroposophical Society

GA 260a — 20 January 1924

The School of Spiritual Science I

If the intentions of the Christmas Conference are carried out, the Anthroposophical Society will in future have to fulfill the esoteric aspirations of its members as far as possible. This fulfillment is to be achieved by integrating three classes of a school into the general society.

It is in the nature of spiritual knowledge that it initially addresses people who have been found by personalities who know the ways to spiritual contemplation. It is a prejudice to think that only those who are able to find such results themselves can recognize them. This prejudice then gives rise to another, namely that people who have such recognition surrender themselves to a blind belief in authority. By asserting this prejudice, one accuses a society such as the anthroposophical one of consisting of uncritical worshippers of leading personalities.

But just as one does not need to be a painter to appreciate the beauty of a painting, one does not need to be a spiritual researcher to understand a broad area of what the spiritual researcher has to say. Through the abilities within him, the spiritual researcher steps forward into the worlds in which spiritual beings live and spiritual processes take place. They see these spiritual beings and processes, and they also see how the beings and processes of the physical world emerge from the spiritual realm.

They then have the further task of shaping certain areas of their visions into ideas that do not depend on special abilities, but are accessible to ordinary consciousness. These ideas are grounded in themselves for everyone who brings them to life in their soul. Such ideas cannot be formed from mere intellectual ability; they can only be formed by refining spiritual visions into them. But once they have been created by the spiritual researcher, everyone can take them in and find their justification in themselves. No one needs to accept them on mere blind faith. If many people believe that what the spiritual researcher has presented in the form of ideas is not understandable in itself, this is only because they have blocked the way to such understanding. They have become accustomed to considering only what is based on sensory perception to be proven, and have no sense that ideas can prove each other. They are like a person who knows that all heavy objects on earth are supported and therefore believes that the earth itself must also be supported in space.

However, a personality who attains spiritual vision without first receiving the results of that vision in the form of ideas must be specially predestined by fate. For everyone else, understanding the content of ideas in that area of the spiritual world that can be put into this form is the necessary preliminary stage for attaining their own vision.

It is again only a prejudice when someone believes that one suggests to oneself the vision of a spiritual world after first receiving the image of such a world in the form of ideas. Just as little can one speak of suggestion when one sees a person one has only heard about before, so little can one do so when one perceives the effect of the spiritual world with all its characteristics of reality after first understanding it in ideas.

It will therefore generally have to be the case that people first get to know the spiritual world in the form of ideas. This is the way spiritual science is cultivated in the General Anthroposophical Society.

However, there will be individuals who want to participate in the representations of the spiritual world, which ascend from the form of ideas to modes of expression borrowed from the spiritual world itself. And there will also be those who want to learn the ways into the spiritual world in order to walk them with their own soul.

For such individuals, the three classes of the “school” will be available. There, the work will ascend to an ever higher degree of esotericism. The “school” will lead the participants up into the realms of the spiritual world that cannot be revealed through the form of ideas. They will need to find means of expression for their imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions.

The realms of artistic, pedagogical, ethical life, and so on, will then also be led into the realms where they can receive illumination and impulses for creativity from esotericism.

The constitution of the “school” and its division into sections will be discussed in the next issue of the newsletter.