The Founding of the Christian Community

GA 344 — 18 September 1922, Dornach

Twelfth Lecture

The first question that we have yet to answer, and which can only be answered by me making suggestions to you, my dear friends, is the question of the actual and ongoing constitution of the community of soul shepherds itself. This morning, after I had explained the meaning of the community to you, I was able to answer your question with a reply that was more inward and more spiritual, but of course the point is that this community should present itself to the world with real clarity. And so, before we discuss the other matters, we want to be clear about some of the fundamentals.

Of course, a spiritual aspect is decisive for admission. It must be clear that the decision about admission cannot be made in any other way than through what I have already said this morning about this question. But now, of course, some difficult things come into consideration, because especially in the early days there will not yet be any practice to follow. It would be good if you could become clear about these difficult things in your own context while you are here, so that we could also talk about them together.

On the one hand, your community has grown out of the conviction that it draws a certain content from the anthroposophical movement, so

on the other hand, what I have already very clearly stated when your community was established - which is now to be regarded as established - must be adhered to for all time: that the community is constituted entirely from within, that it arises from within, that it therefore goes hand in hand with the anthroposophical movement,

that it can never be understood as if the anthroposophical movement were in some sense the founder of the community or had anything to do with the founding of your community. We have often spoken about this, and it is something that should be clear. And if it is not clear, more can be said about it.

On the other hand, however, the community must be treated as a serious and responsible one in the truest sense of the word. Such a community cannot be about people joining and leaving at will. This may correspond to the tendencies of the present time, but it can never lead to real prosperity. You must bear in mind that the decision you took to establish this community led you to perform the consecration ceremony here, and that the community has thus been constituted from the spiritual realm as a Christian community in the sense in which we have been discussing it this morning. This has given the seal to the whole of this undertaking. And the prevailing attitude of people in the present time must not be allowed to enter the community: simply to participate or not to participate. In such a matter, when one has made a decision, one must also regard its execution as binding for life. Of course, in connection with the consciousness of the person of the present time, this is already associated with certain difficulties. I would like to say that the kind of togetherness, the kind of feeling of belonging together, does indeed arise in individual cases, for example in the case of Korn, who perhaps should also be discussed here. In the case of Korn, we can see that on the one hand he has the will to work in the way you do, but on the other hand there is the opinion that he cannot find a connection to you. And you also have the opinion that it might not be good for him to work within the community. This is something that can lead to discussion, not so much because of the individual case, which can be one way or the other, but because the principle by which something like this must be judged can be seen from the specific case, and in the right way.

These are things that have to be taken in a rather difficult way, especially at the beginning. Now, of course, it is important that all those who belong or will belong to this community of spiritual shepherds develop an awareness: firstly, that the decision to belong is a very serious and binding one; secondly, however, that a separation should not take place just like that; and thirdly, that in a certain way the affiliation should also be established.

As I said, you establish the community on your own initiative, and insofar as it is now in the process of being established, what I am about to read to you is only a proposal from me that is to be considered, but which is of course initially only meant as a proposal. It could be that you consider some of the wording in particular to be such that you would prefer a more specific wording or the like. But it would be good to be completely clear about the fundamentals, so that what should initially appear to be self-evident, at least in its main parts, as a result of the ongoing negotiations and the whole way in which you have come together, would at least yield the following. So it would be a matter of everyone who joins the community also making such a confession:

“I confess that after mature reflection I have entered into the office of pastor of souls” — we will determine the name in the next few days — “of the... that I have received the consecration in such a way that it has been performed by the ordained persons, whose commission to consecrate I recognize, that the performance has taken place as if it had been performed out of my own free decision.” The emphasis on the free decision must be firmly established in the person of the present. “I declare that I regard the consecration as binding for my future life as a friend, so that separation from the community is not in my present will. Should I bring about a separation, I will recognize that the present leaders or their rightful successors in the community will make the moral evaluation of this separation, which I will recognize.

I will never change anything related to the cult through my individual will or carry it out differently than in the manner recognized by the leaders and directors. I have complete freedom in preaching and teaching as long as my teaching is not recognized by the leaders and directors in community as one that contradicts the content of the cult I practice in the sense of its institution.

It is very important that you are clear about the fact that complete freedom prevails with regard to doctrine when there is cohesion in the cult of the community. The freedom of preaching and teaching is secured by the fact that cohesion does not depend on agreement, which has its limits. Of course, this freedom has its limits in that what is taught does not contradict the spirit and meaning of the cult in some easily recognizable way. That would be an absurdity in itself. So if someone were to perform the Mass sacrifice and at the same time teach that it is nonsense, he would not be able to remain within the community, or at least not be able to teach. Is that not so? In so far as it is possible, freedom of teaching is recognized. And, my dear friends, without freedom of teaching we really do not get anywhere today, especially in a Christian community. Only worship must be seen in the right light, then, I would like to say, it is precisely from the presence of worship that freedom of teaching arises.

The Catholic Church also still has some of this doctrinal freedom in itself, only of course it sins against it, I would say, not just every day, but every hour. But it still has some of it in itself. In this sense, I would like to mention an incident that happened to me several years ago, where I asked a question of a Viennese professor who was a Catholic priest and taught at the Faculty of Philosophy, who was closely monitored [by Rome] with regard to what he taught as a professor about ancient classical philosophy. The person in question was a Cistercian. I asked: How is it that you are being closely monitored? Actually, nothing comes out of your mouth that could be considered offensive in Rome, while Professor Bickell in Innsbruck, as a professor of theology, as a dogmatist, taught things in the most liberal way, which the church should have been paying attention to for a long time. “The professor said, 'Yes, Bickell is a Jesuit, the Church is safe with him, he can teach whatever he wants.' We Cistercians are not so well regarded [in Rome]; it is thought that we could very easily separate from the Church. — So it is not important to the Roman Catholic Church that someone teaches dogmatics freely, but it is important to be sure that the person in question does not find a contradiction to the church in the free teaching of dogmatics and perhaps comes to the idea of a separation.

These are the things that, where there is a real cult, actually make the freedom of teaching absolutely possible. For what is cult? Cult consists in actions that are set apart from the natural context in which man is interwoven on earth, and yet they are real processes. Cultic acts have only one reality in the outer world during their earthly existence, and that is the Mystery of Golgotha. There is only one reality on earth, namely that of the Mystery of Golgotha, which has the same reality as the cultic act, even though it is a physical act, a physical process. If we want to visualize the matter schematically, we can say (and draw on the board):

There are events in the physical world. These events, which take place in such a way that they can be seen with the eyes, are caused by forces that arise from the depths of matter, which we express with natural laws.

Plate 3

What we celebrate as a cultic act are also events in the physical world, but they correspond to forces in which we place ourselves, which come down from the spiritual world.

Panel 3

Thus, what is transferred into reality by means of the cult is not the image of a material event, but the image of a spiritual event. When you celebrate mass, the community that sits with you before the altar, the lay community, participates through its gaze in an action, in a process that eye outwardly reveals, outwardly presents, what is present in the spiritual world, so that what takes place at the altar is performed together with the community as an event of the spiritual world.

Let us understand this according to its inner meaning. Understood in terms of its inner meaning, in the sense of what has been discussed this morning, it means that during the celebration of the Mass, Christ becomes present within the community. When Christ is present within the community, the true self of each individual who devoutly participates in the Mass in the right way is called into this community, and it is now like this: Let us assume that we have the celebrating priest and, say, ten parishioners. The true self of these ten parishioners is present during that part of the Mass that extends from transubstantiation to the end, if the Mass is celebrated in the proper manner. Now, something similar is brought about in people as a result, let us say, in the sleeping and waking of daily life. If it were the case that we fell asleep and consciously experienced everything that I once described here in this building as the conditions during sleep, then we would indeed continue to live as human beings in such a way that we would inwardly hold on to that which we had experienced during sleep. If we were to lose our body at the moment of falling asleep, then we would, through the loss of the body, pass over to a certain consciousness of that which otherwise remains unconscious in sleep and we would thus continue to live; it would be very similar to what is also experienced between death and a new birth. But we wake up again, we return to our physical organism and experience something different in our physical organism than during sleep. But in the course of life, the experiences of sleep add up, and we go through death with the sum of these experiences, that is, with a very strong impact of what we experience during sleep.

This is also the case when we consider the human consecration ritual. There it is so that we must say: By the human being's presence at the act of consecration, the true self of each individual appears – at least initially in an ideal way, but of course it must continue to progress in your community precisely through the performance of the act of consecration. This is there. It disappears again during the usual experiences of the day, just as the experiences of sleep disappear during waking. It goes away again, but the Act of Consecration is repeated, and so it adds up and the person connects more and more with his true self through this continued sacrifice of Christ. It is indeed the case that an ever stronger connection with the true self takes place through an ever stronger overcoming of the separation from the self, as I have presented it this morning.

Let us assume that you read a human consecration ritual with a specific intention, let us say, with the intention of reading it for a number of dead people. You can do that. In the Catholic Church, this has led to the nonsense of paying for masses for the dead. That's not what I mean. But a mass can be read for a series of dead people, and in doing so, you can connect with the true selves of the dead, not only celebrating their memory but connecting with the true selves of the dead. In short, you are led everywhere to the fact that a cult that is rightly established is something in the physical world, that takes place in the physical world, but that points to fundamental spiritual forces, while the other phenomena of the physical world point to fundamental material forces. Make it clear to yourself that this is really to be understood with the ordinary mind. It is to be understood with the ordinary mind. When one says one does not understand it, one just does not want to think clearly.

You see, if you have the ground here, with a row of plants growing out of it (it is drawn on the board, top left), and if we now capture the moment when these plants begin to flower – I still want to draw the seed here – then you see, they flower, and the flower is there for a while, the flower fades again. Our eyes have seen something that is only there for a while and then disappears. There comes a time when it is no longer there; there was a time when this appearance began. What remains is that which is the power of the seed; this is something very inconspicuous in material terms. It is present as long as the plant species in question exists on earth; it is something rooted in the depths of matter. What appears in the blossom is a temporary phenomenon. If you look at what underlies the visible, you have to look at something completely different than at this temporary phenomenon. Just as you look at the blooming and fading of the flower for a while here, you look at the mass from the relay prayer, through the offertory, the consecration, the communion, to “ite missa est”. That is what the eyes have before them; it is exactly the same as what you have in the blooming and fading of the flower as a color phenomenon. Only in one case do the color phenomena point you to what is going on in the seeds in the depths of matter; in the other case, at Mass, the visible phenomena point you to the spiritual world. Thus, the ordinary mind needs no more ideas to understand a cultic ceremony than it needs to understand a physical phenomenon. That people today in the present civilization believe that they can more easily understand sensual-physical phenomena - which are, after all, the manifestation of a system of forces hidden in matter - than a cultic act as a manifestation of a spiritual one, is merely a prejudice.

If I am to point out to you something that has changed extraordinarily in relation to the relationship between man and the spiritual world in a relatively short period of time, it is the following: Do you see what happens today when a Protestant or Catholic clergyman is placed among freethinkers, for example in a discussion about transubstantiation? No. We want to be objective about things and not take what is said in a critical sense. What happens in such a case today? Of course there are exceptions, but I would almost say that the exceptions are the phlegmatic ones. Those, on the other hand, who are more intensively involved in the exercise of their ministry, initially become nervous when the discussion begins; they really do become nervous at first, especially the Catholic clergy, when something like transubstantiation is mentioned. Why? Because people today have lost all ground when talking about such a thing. People are so accustomed to the grossly sensual ideas that gradually dominate science that they have lost all ground to speak about such a thing in this way. Now I do not want to say something about myself, but I want to tell an historical fact. Sixty or sixty-two years ago in Austria there was a Catholic bishop who said the following about transubstantiation in his teaching: What forces are at work in any material context cannot actually be known from that material context. For – as he said – we need only refer to the chemist Liebig. Liebig, in the 1820s, as they say, 'flourished'. He once said, and had it printed: If people claim that the composition of a seed is inexplicable, they should consider that quartz or another crystal is just as inexplicable. The inorganic life, when it is formed, is just as mysterious as the seed in terms of the underlying forces. The good Austrian canon, then, argued that one cannot possibly know what is inside a wafer because one does not know what shaped it in the first place. I just want to make it clear to you that sixty-two years ago, even as a Catholic canon, one still engaged in philosophical discussions about the plausibility of such an idea. Today, a canon gets nervous when asked about transubstantiation because no one thinks anymore about using the human mind to explain supernatural facts. This is something you will have to thoroughly unlearn. You must acquire the courage to use the human mind to explain supernatural facts. It is only a prejudice to think that physical facts can be explained better than spiritual ones. First of all, spiritual facts have to be recognized; then they can be explained just as easily as physical facts, or just as difficultly. Without the recognition of this inner capacity for belief, you will naturally not fulfill your office.

But by recognizing the forms, you come to the cult and to an understanding of it. You see, the day before yesterday I gave our workers over there [at the Goetheanum building] a lecture, as I often do with them. In this lecture I tried to make them understand how, by observing the physical organism, one gradually comes to an appreciation of the soul and the spiritual. I said: What does a person mainly eat, what does he consume? — With the various foods, for example, he consumes starch. The starch is absorbed from the mouth, passes through the oesophagus into the stomach and intestines; it is transformed; through a triple salivation, through ptyalin, pepsin and trypsin, the starch becomes sugar. We eat potatoes, which are mainly starch, but we do not carry starch in us, but after digestion we carry sugar in us. We eat protein; after some time this protein is dissolved so that it is in us as liquid protein. However, there is one thing that is often exploited by medical and natural scientists in a harmful way: alcohol is constantly produced in the interaction of intestinal contents and the trypsin of the pancreas. You can't be completely teetotal. Even if you don't drink alcohol, you produce the necessary alcohol because the protein has to be preserved just so. Just as you put preparations from the animal kingdom in alcohol [for preservation], so our intestinal contents must be put in “alcohol,” and we produce that ourselves. There the protein is killed, but then preserved and only revived in the lymph vessels. I also said to the workers: We eat fats, which are also metabolized, they are not simply emulsified. When we consume fat, it is not simply distributed throughout the body; it first undergoes a transformation. The fat we eat becomes glycerin and various acids in us. Only salts remain essentially unchanged. So we eat starch-like substances. We only take sugar out of instinct, because as humans we are too weak to take the starch that turns into sugar; otherwise we would not need sugar. So while we enjoy starches, proteins, fats, and salts entering the mouth, after a while we have sugar, liquid protein - which is significantly different from the protein in the state in which we eat it - glycerin, fatty acids, and salts in our bodies. Only the salts go as far as our brain and accumulate there; the rest only goes part of the way to our brain. But essentially, part of it turns into phosphorous, a very volatile substance, and goes to the brain that way. I have made it clear to the workers, on the basis of these processes, how the soul can be easily understood if they just set the human mind in motion. It will be a long time before people are ready for this. In this way, it is easy to make even the simplest person understand the soul and spirit through the processes of bodily life.

Now just think about what is actually happening. Through the spiritual and soul life, a complete transformation is taking place in us. The person who ate two hours ago does not look very different from the one who is still about to eat. You cannot tell from his nose or eyes what is going on in his soul and spirit. What is performed in the Act of Consecration of Man is a spiritual act. The sensual image [in transubstantiation] does not need to be so very different from what it used to be; what is different can only be detected in its finer structure with spiritual instruments. To the clairvoyant eye, the transubstantiated host looks different from the non-transubstantiated one. So they have something that is a continuous analog of what is going on (physically).

So it is possible to understand the cult intimately inwardly as that which has a spiritual existence among us. When one professes the cult, when one performs the cult directly, then one has such strength in the practice of the cult that one may already rely on that on which one must rely in every proclamation of truth in a teaching: that one is on the right path in one direction. Then one can be completely free in the teaching itself. In the moment when the spirit is among us and finds its revelation in the cult, we can be considered free in the teaching. For the life in the cult will lead us not to abuse this freedom in the teaching. Therefore, there is a real and profound meaning here: “In preaching and teaching, I have complete freedom as long as my teaching is not recognized by superiors and leaders in the community as contradicting the content of the cult I practice in the sense of its institution.” I have only added this “in the sense of its institution” because we are at the beginning and because it is necessary for most people to insert here what is given as an interpretation in the course of time. This will gradually become something that is established simply by itself.

I want to put that before you first. Perhaps you could take these suggestions as a basis and then let me know tomorrow if you have anything to add. I can imagine that you are afraid of this formulation – but it would be an unfounded fear. And in particular, I believe that one must still be clear about such things, which, as with Korn, lead to the fact that he himself wants and yet does not want and one has the opinion that one cannot use him after all. Friedrich Rittelmeyer: When we were together in Nuremberg, he did frighten some of us.

Rudolf Steiner: It is the case that those to whom he speaks refer to the fact that he tends very strongly towards extremes in his decisions and that the reason for not taking him in could certainly be that he perhaps does not have sufficient discretion in saying things one way or the other. He didn't phrase it the way I did, but he said that they have the doctrine of reincarnation and that they simply have to teach it. He put it differently, but that depends entirely on the configuration of his mind. Of course you can say that they demand a certain spiritual balance. But such people, who have participated in too many things – he was at last year's course and he has actually come too far in participating – are in a difficult position, and the community is also in a difficult position because of him. And now he was with me today and said that he actually felt called to teach and to be a priest. I said to him: Yes, it's true, now the community is there; I can't do the slightest thing about it, but you must now either stand within the community and become one with it, then everything could be all right, or you must immediately place yourself as an individual and become a priest through yourself; there is no third way. He claims that he not only wants to teach, but also wants to baptize and perform other ritual acts; he therefore wants to do the same as you do. However, if he were to do this incorrectly, appointing himself and standing in no relation to you, then difficulties would arise. So I have said that he should deal with you.

I thought that after this had been presented to you by me, it would serve as a kind of standard for admissions.