Augustine, the Fourth Century, and Humanity's Spiritual Crossroads

GA 325 — 24 May 1921, Stuttgart

Lecture IV

It may well be that the fourth century A.D. has emerged from our considerations as a particularly significant turning point in human development, and I would like to say a few words about what actually took place in this 4th century.

One of the characteristic minds of this 4th century is, of course, Augustine, and when we look at Augustine, we have a true representative of this period before us. To a certain extent, with a part of his being, which he lived out primarily in his youth and in his early years, Augustine points quite clearly back to ancient education. And then we see a rather abrupt transition in his case, which led him to absolute submission to the Roman Catholic Church, so that Augustine became the one who, in a certain respect, set knowledge and insight aside for himself and inwardly and subjectively practically took the concepts of faith completely seriously by professing the opinion that he did not see what the basis of the truth was that he should recognize, and that he professed the truth to which he had finally decided only because the Catholic Church prescribed it. Augustine came to this opinion through hard struggles in life. For a certain period of time, he paid homage to the doctrine known as Manichaeism, the orientalizing doctrine of Mani. This doctrine is one of those that I have already characterized from a certain point of view in these evening reflections. I said: Again and again, from the times that we have come to regard as Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Egyptian, from these ancient times, views emerge as a kind of reaction against what is built up from the development of the primarily intellectual capacity of humanity. The Manichaean doctrine was one such. It just so happens that in those days, in the times when Augustine became acquainted with the Manichaean doctrine in his African homeland, such views actually appeared in a somewhat dubious form. Augustine was initially quite captivated by the Manichaean doctrine. But then he came into contact with a bishop of the Manicheans, Faustus, and the whole way in which this man represented the Manichean doctrine then disgusted Augustine. But through much of what was presented to Augustine, certainly not only as shallow dialectics but perhaps as empty verbiage, one must nevertheless glimpse something essential in this Manichaean doctrine, and this essence can only be inwardly understood if one approaches this Manichaean doctrine from the points of view have been asserted in these considerations, this Manichaean doctrine.

Not much of the true records of such teachings to mankind in modern times has been preserved; only what the Christian teachers of the first centuries quoted and then fought against has been preserved. Thus the most important information from ancient times has come down to us only through the quotations of opponents. But perhaps someone who can empathize with such things will also sense something of the essence of the Manichaean doctrine itself from Augustine's particular attitude towards it. Augustine turns away from the Manichaean doctrine for the reason that he says he has sought the truth, sought the truth in the sun, in the stars, the clouds, the rivers, the springs, the mountains, in the vegetable, in the animal beings, in short, in all that which could confront him as visible. He did not find it there, because all of this offered him only external material things, but he was looking for the spiritual. Then Augustine turned away from the Manichaean doctrine to Neoplatonism, which I have already characterized from a certain point of view. Neoplatonism turned away from the sensual world. It took little account of it and wanted to connect with the All-One in its inner being in a kind of mystical abstraction. This is what attracted Augustine in his later years, and what he presents against the Manichaean doctrine already contains what he had acquired through his immersion in Neoplatonism, in the non-representational, immaterial, non-sensual, abstract world. In relation to the world in which he now placed himself, what Manichaeism could offer him seemed to him, to a certain extent, to be no more than a registering of external, material things, which are then passed off as the divine. But those who come to spiritual science today will first learn to see these things in the right way. Let us consider, from the point of view of today's spiritual science, what may actually be at hand. I have already characterized to you: when one ascends to imaginative, to inspired knowledge, then one gradually becomes acquainted with the inner organs of the human being, concretely acquainted, and it does not result in that mystical world of fog that so many false mystics dream of, but rather it results in an objective insight into the inner organicity of the human being. It is precisely by understanding this inner organicity of man as a result of the spirit, by being able to see through it spiritually, that one gets to know it as material. I will give you an example of this. Let us say that a person who thinks more abstractly gets to know a so-called hypochondriac. An abstract thinker will easily say of a hypochondriac: There is actually nothing particularly wrong with him physically, he is only mentally ill. He is always dwelling too much on his own inner life, he lives entirely absorbed in introspection, as it were, and as a result judges the things of the outer world wrongly, often judging them as if they were persecuting him or the like. In any case, however, he comes into a false relationship with the outer world. And so it easily comes about that we say of the hypochondriac: there is nothing actually wrong with him physically, he is only mentally ill. Such an abstraction comes about because we have not yet penetrated to the actual inner structure of the human organization. This inner structure of the human organization is such that the human being is a threefold creature. There we have the head organization, which, as I have often explained, extends throughout the whole organism, but whose main seat is in the head and is therefore referred to as such; there we have the rhythmic organization of the chest organs, which includes breathing and blood circulation; and there we have everything that exists in the metabolic organism and the limb organism that is connected to it.

Now the fact is that in the head organization the individual organs are turned towards the outer world and are therefore outer sense organs. But in the other limbs of the human organism, too, we find that the organs, in addition to being digestive organs, are also sensory organs to a certain extent, and we find a kind of correspondence, a kind of polarity, between the organs of the head and the organs of metabolism. The organs of metabolism are also sense organs, only they are sense organs that are not directed outwards, but rather to the processes within the human skin. And so we find, for example, that the human being, in his head organization, directed outwards, has the sense of smell; with this he smells what is outside in his environment. Corresponding to this sense of smell, among the digestive organs, is the liver. The liver, so to speak, smells what is inside the person, in its environment. These things must be spoken about quite objectively if one wants to ascend to knowledge at all.

Now, you see, you have to direct your attention to the fact that what is, so to speak, the relationship of the organ of smell to the outside world corresponds to the relationship of the liver to the inner human processes. Now, in a hypochondriac, the liver is always out of order, quite simply as, if you will, a physical organ out of order. That is precisely what occurs in spiritual science, that it not only leads up into a nebulous spiritual realm, but that it also recognizes the material in its essence through the application of its methods, that it can therefore look into the functions of the material. And because liver complaints are usually associated with very little or no pain, they do not appear as a physically perceptible illness, but rather as a mental experience when the liver is not in order and therefore smells wrong on the inside. To the person who really sees through things, the hypochondriac is no different than someone whose liver is not in order and who therefore internally perceives what it very easily perceives as not exactly pleasantly smelling, not in a normal way, but in an overly sensitive way with his sick liver. He constantly smells himself inside, and this smelling, that is what actually underlies the hypochondriacal disposition. You see, you cannot characterize spiritual science as nebulous mysticism, because it leads to a truly objective knowledge of the material world as well. Materialism in particular does not come to these things because it only ever looks at them in abstract forms. Imaginative and inspired knowledge always explains so-called mental illnesses in terms of their physical foundations. From a spiritual scientific point of view, there are many more reasons to explain so-called physical illnesses from a spiritual point of view than there are to explain so-called mental illnesses. As a rule, mental illnesses are the most physical, that is to say, they are based on the most physical causes. And so it must be clear that anyone who sees through the spiritual world will also come to recognize the working of the spiritual in the material. He does not see the liver merely as what it presents itself as to the anatomist who dissects the corpses, but he sees the liver as an organ formed within, which in its outer form differs from the organ of smell, but nevertheless represents a metamorphosis of this organ of smell. And so much of what the spiritual researcher has to say about the material world will be, because he traces it back, I might say, to its spiritual causes, that he points precisely to the revelations of the material, because one recognizes the spiritual much more through the revelation of the material than through all kinds of mystical ravings and mystical nebulous so-called immersions into the inner self. They all arise, after all, from a certain reluctance to concern oneself with real knowledge and to brood over it in one's innermost being, which, after all, arises from nothing more than a certain disposition of physical organs. To practice mysticism in a nebulous sense is itself a kind of mental illness on a physical basis.

You see, something like the seeing of the spiritual in the material, that was what Augustine encountered in Manichaeism. But he was already too much born into - as is well known, he had the Greek mother Monica - the longing to get out of the physical, so that he could not have stuck with it. Therefore, he turned to Neoplatonism, and in this detour through Neoplatonism, he turned to Roman Catholicism.

We can see, then, how in this 4th century, in which the formative years of Augustine's education fall, people actually turned away from the spiritual contemplation of the external world and also of the inner world of man. This turning away was bound to happen. This turning away was bound to happen because man could never have become free, could never have become a free being, if he had felt himself to be only a part of the outer world, as I characterized it in the past evenings. Man had to, so to speak, get out of this amalgamation with the outer world. He had to turn away from the outer world for once. And the culmination of this turning away from the outer world, I would say, the point where man left consciousness: You are a member of the outer world, as the finger is a member of your organism - the culmination lies in this 4th century AD. What characterized the period before this fourth century AD was an evolution of humanity that basically came entirely from the human organism, I would say from the blood. In the southern regions of Europe, in North Africa and the Near East, human beings had already come to be abandoned, as it were, from their own human essence, in so far as it is a physical, an etheric one, and to ascend to an indeterminate state. For one might say that people had to develop into such an emptiness, into a void, where nothing is dependent on blood any more, where what is the view of life is no longer formed from the racial nature of man, people had to develop into such an emptiness in order to enter into intellectuality. What all the individual peoples had developed in terms of worldviews, knowledge and so on before this 4th century AD - of course, this is an approximation when specifying such a point in time - had arisen from their blood blood, just as we develop up to the change of teeth, which we also do not form out of our intelligence, but out of our organic substances, or how we develop up to sexual maturity, finally also out of the organism, and at the same time to the maturity of judgment. Thus everything that these peoples had produced in their old, instinctive imaginations and inspirations developed out of the blood. This had a racial origin everywhere. And when two races, two peoples of different bloods mixed somewhere, then the one people remained down below, they became slaves, while the other population rose to a certain extent, forming the upper ten thousand. Both these social differences and that which lived in the knowledge in the souls of men was entirely a result of race, of blood. But now these southern peoples, these peoples sitting around the Mediterranean, worked their way out of their blood. Now they worked their way through to a, if I may say so, purely spiritual level. For it was in the sphere of the purely spiritual that intelligence had to be developed.

You see, if man had continued to develop only from these Mediterranean peoples after the 4th century AD, he would have been, so to speak, without a foundation. The blood had nothing more to give. From the racial foundations nothing more developed in the way of soul abilities. Man was, so to speak, dependent on developing out of these regions into a vacuum, figuratively speaking.

This vacuum, that is to say this area of development free of racial factors, was now entered by the people of this Mediterranean region. They had to have something else to lean on. They had to receive from outside what used to come to them through their blood. And they received it in that calculating people, who at that time still knew from the old wisdom teachings how things actually are, transferred the old state views of the Roman Empire to the religious realm and founded the outer Catholic Church. This outer Catholic Church preserved what had previously emerged from the different races in the way of spiritual life; it preserved what the ancient times had kept and condensed it into dogmas. These dogmas were to be propagated. Nothing more was brought forth from man, but what was there was condensed into dogmas. And with that, an inanimate element was introduced from which man could really receive from outside what he had previously received from within. For the Latin language was propagated as a dead language, and the life of knowledge proceeded in the Latin language.

And so one had the one spiritual current, which consisted in the fact that what the old view of life had brought ran out, so to speak, in a dead element. If nothing else had come, this dead element would gradually have had to die out. The whole so-called culture would have had to die out. Admittedly, one would have had a high point, for it was a high point that had been lived up to at that time. The Catholic Church itself has taken over many Gnostic, Manichaean elements, only it has discarded the terminology. It has propagated the old world views. She also took up the old cult forms, preserved them and passed them on in a dead language. What thus continued to live was just as incapable of bringing forth anything that could have advanced civilization as, for example, a woman alone is incapable of bringing forth a child.

That was only one side of the being that was now necessary to move forward. The other side of the nature consisted in the fresh blood that the Germanic and other peoples migrating from Eastern Europe had in them. There was blood again. And the peculiar thing was that these peoples, in their development, if we do not take the word now in a judgmental way, but purely objectively in terms of terminology, were lagging behind the southern peoples. The southern peoples had, as it were, advanced at a gallop to the highest level of civilization, from which intellect then emerged. This stood at its highest level of development in the 4th century AD and was now to become established, to continue to live on as a dead intellect. Thus we have the survival of this dead intellect and the emergence of the Germanic blood of the other peoples who emerged to meet it.

If we now study the external historical processes, we come to something extraordinarily interesting. We come to say that in a certain period of time a complete transformation, a metamorphosis of Western life, is taking place. We see, in fact, that in a large, wide area of Europe, the old culture is dying out and a kind of peasant culture is emerging as a result of the so-called migration of peoples. What the upper crust had as their culture in the old Roman Empire is dying out. What remains is what the broad, settled population had, and something similar, albeit different, was also brought by the Germanic tribes. Within this rural way of life, where people actually lived in small village communities and told each other very different things in these small village communities than what the Catholic priests preached to them, within these areas where the village communities were, the Catholic religion was now spread by external power.

That was the one current that was in Latin. What did the people know who saw how their churches were built, how wisdom was passed on in Latin? What did these people, who were the mainstay of the villages at the time, know about what was going on? What they knew about were the stories they told each other in the evening after work, stories that consisted largely of musings, as we have come to know them from the ancient Egyptians and the like.

It was quite a worldview here, going through the time from the 4th to the 8th, 9th, 10th century through the village communities, which had long since been abandoned in the southern regions, at least among the upper crust. A fine culture had long since emerged from these foundations among the upper classes. And now, in the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries, we see - I have recently explained this in more detail in Dornach, I will only mention it here briefly - how the cities gradually crystallized from the mere village communities. The culture of the city begins, and it is as if the human being is torn away from the outer nature when he is concentrated together in the cities. This city culture, which we can follow from Brittany to Novgorod, deep into the Russian Empire, from above down to Spain, into Italy, everywhere this strange pull towards the city.

And if we look at what actually lives in this transition to urban life, then for those who can study history inwardly, it has a great similarity, an essential similarity to what happened when, after the Trojan War, the cities in Greece developed more out of a farming culture. What happened in Greece in the year 1200 BC was repeated up here now, around the year 950 or thereabouts – all these numbers are approximate – and much as 1200 and 950 years make a difference, so much were these people, who came over from the east as Germanic people, actually behind those in whose area they were now invading. If you add these numbers, the pre-Christian to the post-Christian, you get 2150 or 2160 years, and that is approximately the number of years that lies between two such successive cultures. You can see this from history if you really want to study history. If you ask yourself: how far behind were these Germanic peoples? - it is the length of a cultural epoch. A cultural epoch has lasted just that long, and so one can calculate the degree of maturity of backward peoples by their degree of backwardness.

Now we can also gain a certain clue as to why the fourth cultural epoch, which brought about the actual development of the intellect, begins around 747 BC and, let us say, ends in 1413. That gives you 2160 years. That is the length of such a cultural epoch. Of course, if we go further back, these numbers become somewhat blurred. But that is natural, because historical development cannot be characterized with mathematically exact numbers. These peoples brought something into the blood of the other, the southern population, which was basically there earlier. That was the other current.

And now the world-historical marriage was concluded between what was floating over in the Latin language and what was working its way up to the surface in the vernaculars, in very backward vernaculars. What could develop further had to emerge from these two elements. This then led to the development of the so-called consciousness soul in the 15th century, as I have often mentioned.

The old culture would have had to disappear completely if this new element had not been integrated into it, which in turn was now surrounded by this southern element. The backward and the advanced balanced each other out, and in place of a purely intellectual culture there arose a culture of consciousness.

In this culture, the intellect became a mere shadow. One no longer lived in it as in a grave, but it became a shadowy product, something that only lives in inner activity. And in this way the human being was, as it were, freed from being inwardly possessed by the intellect. He could apply the intellect in his inner activity and could now pass over to the outer observation of nature, as Galilei, Copernicus and Kepler did. But first the intellect had to be freed. If you look at everything that has emerged in European civilization since the beginning of the 15th century, you will see everywhere how it can be traced back to the penetration of this Germanic element into the old Latin-Roman. You can see this quite clearly down to the individual personalities.

Man had, so to speak, stepped into the void by developing from the south. But there was a strong awareness among the leading spirits that with the development of the intellect one enters into something empty. Certain personalities did not want to steer towards something new. If I now hypothetically put this under the aspect of historical development, then what could be said in the time that followed the 4th century AD can be expressed something like this. One could say: We either release the intellect, we let it develop, then the following happens. Whereas in the past what permeated man inwardly with spiritual and soul forces arose from him, he has now reached a highest point where his development has become free, so that he can develop into the void. What no longer clings to his body must, further developed, lead to man penetrating into a spiritual world from without. That was one thing one could have said to oneself. Or one could also say: We retain the old wisdom, we preserve it. Then we can say to people: By developing yourself intellectually up to the 4th century, you have now come to an end. You must not go further. You have come to nothing. Look back now, behind you, not ahead of you; do not continue to walk in the void, so that you may find a new spirituality by walking further. Steeped in this instinct to preserve the old and to hold the intellect back so that it does not develop further, the Eighth General Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869 was convened, which made a Catholic dogma out of what is then expressed in the words: Man has “unam animam rationalem et intellectualem”, he has a soul that is thinking and spiritual. But beyond this soul he has nothing, nothing further that is spiritual, for if anything spiritual had been ascribed to him, the way would have been open for him to develop into a new spirituality. Therefore, the tripartite human being was denied the spirit after body, soul and spirit, and only individual spiritual properties were attributed to his soul. He did not have body, soul and spirit, but body and soul, and the soul had thinking and spiritual properties, was rational and intellectual. It could not go further. That had now become dogma. It was nothing more than a statement of what actually existed in the matter of preserving the old and rationally processing the old, which was also intended to prevent further progress on the path of spiritual development. What was to become the child of the two merging currents was to be extinguished.

And that is what has continued to have an effect over the course of the 15th century and into our time. On the one hand, the human being has instinctively matured to gradually engage the intellect, of which he was already completely master, in inner activity. On the other hand, he was unable to keep this activated but shadowy mind in his spiritually empty interior, where it could have become active only on its own shadowiness. Although one would think that one would not try to process a shadow inwardly, that became the subject of all philosophy of that time, which therefore has only a shadowy quality. This is how Kantianism ultimately came about, which only has forms and categories, and which, like the other philosophies of the time, only splashes around in this shadowy realm.

It thus became clear that a shadowy intellect alone could not be used; it had to be filled with something else, and that is now the other side, and that could only be the outside world, that could only be external nature. This did not happen for some reason, for example, because man was once childlike and now gradually came to an understanding of nature, but because man needed it for his development. He needed fulfillment. In the last four to five centuries, we have experienced this fulfillment. The shadowy mind has taken hold of nature. This led to a climax. Right in the middle of the 19th century, the mind had become most shadowy.

While the mind itself is the most spiritual, it had been completely disregarded because it had become a shadow. But they had a developed, extensive natural science. The intellect had become filled with what nature offered from the outside, but the possibility of seeing the soul was fading more and more. This soul could be seen less and less, because when one turned to the outside world, one actually had only the shadowy intellect. That is why psychology, the study of the soul in the 19th century, became more and more, I would say, nominalistic, pure word skirmishing. It is downright bleak to read in the psychologies of the 19th century how people keep talking about feeling, wanting, thinking, and actually only have the words, until Fritz Mauthner finally comes and makes the great discovery that all knowledge consists of words and that people have only ever been mistaken when they sought for something behind the words.

This is characteristic of the 19th century, not of humanity, but of the 19th century. In this respect, Mauthner's discovery is not so bad after all. The 19th century, especially when it spoke of the soul, only wove in words, until people finally recognized this weaving in words, this constant juggling with thinking, feeling and willing, apperception ion and perception and everything possible, that which has emerged in English psychology since Alume, especially in the 19th century since John Stuart Mill, this juggling with mere words, until it became too stupid for people. And they said: Now we have found out something so beautiful in natural science through experimentation, so we also experiment with the soul. - Devices had been developed that could emit signals when a person had a perception. One could then know when this perception became conscious, when a person moved his hand as a result of this perception; one could experiment nicely. Until recently, the tendency has been to assess children's abilities, not by putting oneself in the child's place, by a certain devotion to this childlike mind, but by using apparatus to test memory, thinking, and all sorts of other things, as is reported, for example, in Russian schools, where the old style of testing is no longer used, but where abilities are determined from the outside with the help of apparatus. However, this Bolshevik view has already penetrated into our areas. Certain opponents of anthroposophy would also like to determine in such an external way whether this anthroposophy is based on truth, but that only corresponds to a Bolshevik prejudice. All this has its origin in the fact that, by ignoring the spirit, people have gradually come to apply the shadowy intellect to nature and, while producing a magnificent natural science, have left the soul-life unconsidered. But now this soul is asserting itself again, from the depths of the human being, and wants to be explored. To do this, it is necessary to go back the way we came, to remember it, so to speak.

Even if modern science believes itself to be independent, it is still under the influence of the dictate of the Church that man consists only of body and soul and has no spirit. We must come to the spirit again. And basically, spiritual science is just this striving to come to the spirit again and thus to explore the soul of man again, that is, to explore man himself. One will pass through an element that is indeed unpleasant for many, through the organization of man; but it is precisely through this that one will find the truly spiritual in man. But that means that spirit must be reintroduced into the contemplation of humanity. Today, however, there is a considerable obstacle to this, a formidable obstacle. One would almost be afraid to speak of this obstacle, because it is very slippery ground, but the whole signature of the time must be examined. People must become aware of what is actually the impulse of our time. You see, we must consider the following.

Since the middle of the 15th century, when man has lived in the shadowy mind and actually experienced his entire soul existence as a shadow, since that time man has been completely dependent on external nature. And so he gradually came to investigate the external phenomena of nature experimentally, not only in the way that Goethe, who was still inspired by the spirit of antiquity, investigated them, but to seek behind the phenomena for something that is basically also only a kind of phenomenon, but which must not be placed within them. Man came to atomism. Man came to think of the sense world as having another invisible sense world, smaller beings, demonic beings, the atoms. Instead of moving on to a spiritual world, he moved on to a duplicate of the sensual world, again to a sensual but fictitious world, and in this way his cognitive faculty froze for the external sense world. And in the course of the 19th century, this produced more and more something that had always been present, but which only emerged with full radicalism from this complete paralysis of the ability to perceive the external sensory world in the 19th century. That was the over-intellectualization of the law of the conservation of energy. It was said: In the universe, new forces do not arise, but the old ones merely change; the sum of the forces remains constant. If we consider any given moment, so to speak cutting out of world events, then up to this moment there was a certain sum of energies; in the next moment these energies have grouped themselves somewhat differently, they have moved around differently, but the energies are the same; they have only changed. The sum of the energies of the cosmos remains the same. You could no longer distinguish two things. It was perfectly correct to say that measure, number and weight remain the same in the energies. But that is confused with the energies themselves.

Now, if this energy doctrine, this law of the constancy of energy, which today dominates all of natural science, were correct, then there would be no freedom, then every idea of freedom would be a mere illusion. Therefore, for the followers of the law of the constancy of energy, freedom increasingly became an illusion. Just imagine how people like Wundt, for example, explain the freedom that one does feel after all. If I, let us say, am the donkey of the famous Buridan between two bundles of hay, left and right, which are the same size and the same taste, then if I were free, that is, if I were not pushed to one side or the other, I would have to starve to death because I could not make up my mind. When I have to decide not only between two such things, but between many, then, according to such psychologists, I am driven to it nevertheless, but because there are so many concepts that shoot into each other, what obsesses me inside and what works in confusion there, I decide at last and, because I cannot see what actually compels me to do it, I get the feeling of freedom. Yes, it is not ridiculous, it is really not ridiculous for the reason that what I have told you now – I did not expect at all that one would begin to laugh – is stated in numerous very learned works as a great achievement of modern thinking, which is born out of natural science; thus it is actually indecent toward science to laugh about something like that. Well, you see, freedom would be impossible if the law of conservation of energy were true. Because then I would be determined by everything that has gone before at every moment, the energies would merely be transformed, and freedom would have to be a mere illusion. This is what has happened as a result of the development of mankind in the 19th century, through the establishment of the law of the constancy of energy, that we have a view of nature that excludes freedom as an idea, makes it impossible, that makes man unconditionally a product of the necessary order of nature. Things were already prepared, I would like to say, people have felt this way for centuries. What about things like moral responsibility, ethics, religious conviction, which really cannot exist if there is only a natural order? The materialists of the 19th century were honest in a way, they therefore denied these ethical illusions of the old days and really did explain man as only a product of natural necessity. But others could not go along with this, partly because they did not have the courage, like David Friedrich Strauf? or Vogt, or partly because they had sinecures within which they were obliged to speak of freedom, ethics, and religion. You can't go into such things there. The matter had been awkward for a long time, and so it came about that people said to themselves: Yes, with science, you can only do something about necessity. This science proves that the world has emerged from a primeval nebula and that each successive state has always necessarily developed from the earlier one, that the sum of forces has remained constant and so on. With this science, there is no starting point for ethics, religion and so on. So away from this science! Nothing with science, only faith! You have to have a double accounting, on the one hand for the outside world, for the natural world: science; on the other hand, faith, which now determines ethics, even proves God. So we save ourselves to a completely different area than that of science.

The after-effects of this peculiar state of affairs can be seen everywhere since the emergence of newer spiritual science. Those who want to save this belief are called Zaun, Niebergall and Gogarten, and I could tell you a whole series of people, Bruhn, Leese, who think that the field of faith must be saved; when science breaks in, things get bad. So science, everything is accepted, everything is allowed to go, only what we want is called something else: faith. Now, as I said, it was the law of the conservation of energy, but that is only a dogmatic, now a scientific-dogmatic prejudice. Because in the end, what does it actually mean? You see, someone can do the experiment, can say: Yes, I stand in front of a bank building and watch how much money is brought in, and form statistics from that. And then I observe how much money is carried out and also make statistics about that, and I see, nevertheless, the same amount of money is carried out that was carried in. Now I am supposed to still rise to the idea that people work in there! What comes out is only the converted money. It is purely the law of the constancy of the size of money. Very nice experiments have been carried out, which, it seems, have been extended to students. The heat energy of the food has been calculated, and it has been calculated what these people have done, and it has been correctly calculated what was eaten and worked out: the law of conservation of energy! This law of conservation of energy is based on nothing more than a whole series of such prejudices. And if we do not rise above this law of conservation of energy, we will continue to extinguish the spiritual with this law of conservation of energy. For this law of conservation of energy is the implantation of intellect in external nature and the disregard of the soul.

We can only penetrate further into the soul if we in turn penetrate into the spiritual , and to penetrate into this spiritual realm means nothing other than to truly understand what actually entered into world evolution at the beginning of the Christian era as a completely new impulse, the Christ Impulse. I have already mentioned that it was understood in the way that it could be understood by one or other school of thought. But today we are compelled to understand it anew. For a time it was understood in such a way that people did not want to admit that the intellect, going out into the void, could come to a new spiritual realization. I have already told you that Neoplatonism took the Christ into the human soul. This has remained the custom until now. As we penetrate outwards, we must also think of the Christ as being connected with the outer world, that is, we must bring him into the evolution of the outer world. But that is precisely what is being fought against in anthroposophy: not only talking about the Christ in empty phrases, but also seeing him in connection with the whole evolution of the world. And when it is said that it is truly a cosmic event, that a cosmic being has really appeared in a human body, in Christ, that just as sunlight on the earthly plane unites with the earth every day, permeating the earth as something cosmic, so too in the spiritual realm such things take place, this is still not understood, especially by today's scholars. But it is necessary that what has been gained in the field of natural science should be applied to the inner world, so that this intellect, which has become a shadow, but precisely for that reason has become applicable to the outer world as a free human faculty, should also become applicable to the inner world. Therefore, the ascent to imagination, to inspiration, must come about, and thus the ascent to real spiritual knowledge must come about.

The necessity of natural science arises from the historical development of humanity, and the necessity of ascending to spiritual science arises from the existence of natural science. Turning to spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense is not a quirk, but an historical fact of development in itself. But, as I said, it is necessary to tread on thin ice in order to point out where the obstacles are. On the one hand, the obstacles are to be found in something like the law of the conservation of energy. In the 19th century, two laws were intended to limit the human intellect in two ways to that which lives only in the earthly-sensual, in the material. One of these laws was decreed by a council of natural scientists as the law of conservation of energy. If this law is correct, then human knowledge cannot advance to the acknowledgment of the spiritual and of freedom, but must remain at the level of a mere mechanical necessity, and then it must remain at the level of a mere soul, which gradually becomes shadowy. But then one cannot go beyond what has already been established by the eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869.

These are the two councils: one that started from the natural science side. The other council stands in polar opposition to it. It is the one that in 1870 declared the infallibility of the papal chair when it speaks ex cathedra. In order to arrive at knowledge, people no longer appeal to the spiritual, but to the Roman Pope. The Pope is the one who decides ex cathedra on what is to be true or false as Catholic doctrine. The decision about truth and error is brought down from spiritual heights to earth, into the material world. Just as our knowledge is immersed in the material world through the law of the constancy of force, so is the living development of the human being in the spiritual immersed in the material through the dogma of infallibility. The two belong together, the two relate to each other like the north and south poles.

What we need in the development of humanity, however, is a free spirituality. The ruler must be the spiritual itself, and man must find his way into the spiritual. Therefore, we need the ascent into the spiritual. We need this ascent to raise ourselves up, on the one hand, from the defeat that the spirit has suffered as a result of the law of the conservation of force being established, and from the other defeat that it has suffered as a result of all that is religious having been materialized by the decision about right and wrong being brought down to earth from Rome. It is understandable that a breakthrough in the path of the spirit is not easy today, because the world is thoroughly superficial and is terribly proud of its superficiality. It lets authorities decide, but the authorities sometimes decide in a very strange way. I recently read an article written by a professor who teaches here but lives in a neighboring town, because a local paper had asked him to give an authoritative judgment on this anthroposophy. This professor wrote all sorts of things in this article. Then, in the middle of it, you come across a strange sentence. It says that I claim, in describing the spiritual world, that one can see in this spiritual world how spiritual entities move freely like tables and chairs in physical space. Now that is Traub's logic! Seeing tables and chairs move in physical space – I don't want to examine the mental state of the author at the moment when he wrote such a sentence! But today the journals turn to people of such spiritual caliber when an authoritative decision is to be made about spiritual science. People are strange sometimes. For example, there is a fence. Because I have to give a lecture tomorrow, I read this booklet by Laun yesterday. I always asked myself: Yes, why does Laun talk such nonsense? I actually couldn't understand it because I didn't hear any human voice; it was something very hollow. However, I did come across a very strange sentence, which roughly reads – I don't have the pamphlet here –: It is true, however, that a Catholic Christian, if he were to judge anthroposophy, would actually be like a person who could not know anything about anthroposophy. – That is literally what it says. You can really believe Canon Laun, because then he says quite correctly: Yes, it would be self-evident that a Catholic Christian cannot know anything, because since July 18, 1919, Christians have been forbidden to read the books. They are not forbidden to write counter-writings, but they are forbidden to read the books! - They are not allowed to know anything. There are really strange people.

And that is just the other extreme, this state of having arrived at a completely passive devotion, now not to a spiritual thing, but to something very worldly, to something that definitely exists in the material world. And so one could enumerate many more examples. If one wanted to describe the morality of our time in a little cultural history, one would find many a cute little document. But I will give you just one more example. Here a dangerous heresy – you can guess what it is – is discussed in a feature from Göttingen. But the editors apparently count on the fact that the readers who read this have not read anything at all, have actually not heard anything correct about the subject under discussion. Therefore, a note of fourteen lines is made, and in these fourteen lines, Anthroposophy and Threefolding. I will spare you the treatise on Anthroposophy; I will just read you the last sentence, which is about the threefolding: “The movement strives for the highest possible development of humanity. It has also defined its views with regard to the state. It seeks a division into economic, financial and cultural states!” There you have the threefold order: in the economic, financial and cultural state! So you see, this is how one tries to educate those one is addressing in such criticisms, and one can educate them in such a way. One writes such articles by making comments in which one shows oneself to be so well informed! It is difficult to really struggle through to an understanding of the spiritual world, especially when on the one hand there is the impulse of world-historical development and on the other hand there is the scientific way of thinking, which, one might say, has only been perverted into its opposite with the discovery of the law of the constancy of energy or power. Much will rise up against this work, which consists in the cognizant grasping of the spiritual world. But this work must be done, and even if the opponents have the power to crush it for a time, it must arise again, because if we are to learn from history, we must not only learn to speak from this history, but we must learn to fuel our will and warm our hearts from this history! If we allow history to have this effect on us, then it will show us what our deeds must fulfill, what must penetrate into the spiritual, into the legal-national, into the economic as spiritual.

That is what I wanted to say in conclusion. I wanted to give you an objective presentation of how natural science grows out of the course of human development, and to give, at the end, this perhaps only as an appendix, the realization that it is a lesson of real history, not an agnostic history, that we have lived through in the 19th century, but that it is a teaching of real history: we human beings, we must through to spiritual knowledge!