The Founding of the Christian Community

GA 344 — 20 September 1922, Dornach

Fifteenth Lecture

My dear friends! The first thing you need to take with you on the way to your work is enthusiasm, which must live in you all through the decision you have made. The second thing is to live the word with the spirit, and that is precisely the point that will found your free relationship to anthroposophy. For it is basically anthroposophy that has inspired you to such a re-founding, to a religious renewal in general. And there is, after all, much that you can gain from Anthroposophy in terms of enlivening the gospel message, which you will certainly have to reshape in one way or another for your own purposes, casting it in a different form, but which must be the basis for a lasting, friendly relationship with Anthroposophy. And the third thing, which I spoke about yesterday, is what, when understood in the right sense, must be called the healing of sins. For only when you allow everything you draw from the Act of Consecration of Man, everything you imbue your teachings with, everything that lives in your own heart, to culminate in the healing of sins, will your office become truly priestly. That is why I had to explain to you yesterday what the healing of sins consists of.

Let us now consider once more from a different point of view what this healing of sins consists of. We look first into human nature and compare it with

what it is in its earthly environment. Let us imagine for a moment this duality before the soul: earthly human nature, that is, the inner nature of earthly human nature, and now the whole earthly environment. We cannot do otherwise if we proceed calmly than to imagine, in the sense of a truly spirit-imbued cosmology - which is also a Christian cosmology - that this environment of ours, if we want to use religious terms, is a revelation of the divine that permeates this earthly environment. But it will not be difficult for you to imagine that within human nature, something else is at work than in the earthly environment of man. In his inner nature, man is actually only completely similar to the outer world in what are intermediate earthly processes, which take place between water and air on the one hand and between water and solid earth on the other. Processes are constantly taking place in the outer world between the airy and the liquid, which play into the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. Processes take place between water and the earth, external processes that natural science observes as geology, geognosy, mineralogy, paleontology, but also as biology, and which, insofar as they take place between the solid and the aqueous, play into human nature almost unchanged. All that takes place in this interplay between the airy and the watery and between the watery and the solid, and what also takes place in this relationship in the environment of man, was described by an earlier clairvoyant art, which, however, was able to see through these things to a higher degree than the mercurial.

Now, however, we also have those processes that take place between air and warmth, air and light, which, to a certain extent, lie above the mercurial. These are processes that take place primarily in the human head and are quite different from those processes that take place between air, warmth and light outside of the human being. Only the middle earthly processes, the mercurial ones, are almost the same outside and inside the human being. What takes place, on the other hand, in the sulphuric processes, as they were called in earlier times – for solid sulphur is indeed a Maya image of the actual effects of sulphur – which essentially take place between air, warmth and light and also in the life ether, these are processes that take place within human nature in a very different way. And the processes that take place in the middle human being, which are quite similar to external natural processes, undergo a strong metamorphosis in the human mind, so that something completely different takes place in the mind than outside of it.

Likewise, the metabolic processes that extend into the movement processes of the limbs involve completely different processes than those outside in nature. The external natural processes that, for example, lead to the formation of phosphoric acid lime in nature are quite different from those processes that take place within the human body to form phosphoric acid lime in the bones or teeth. Such processes, which, for example, cause a human thigh bone to develop in such a way that it appears as a wonderful framework, these processes, which form the phosphoric acid lime and the carbonic acid lime as mineral processes in the human being, are not found in the external natural world. But such processes, which are not found in nature, which are found in the head processes and in the organization of movement in the human being, are, because they are also connected with the soul and spirit of the human being, now also dangerous for this soul and spirit again, and indeed the head processes become dangerous in the luciferic sense, the metabolic-limb processes in the ahrimanic , and external healing can only be brought about – as I described yesterday – by supplying the head processes with the salt that remains almost unchanged in the human nutritional process and the limb processes with the volatile, fluctuating phosphorus present in grape juice, which then continues to work in the metabolic organization and permeates the limb system. Thus we have [in humans] a chemo-biology that brings about something quite wonderful, namely that something happens to the salt that in the external world has actually only been done by the gods. For we have to imagine that in the human environment the Luciferic and Ahrimanic are not present in the same way as in the human being; after all, it works from the human being into nature and is present in the salt effects [of nature]. By consuming salt, we therefore send a decisive fight against the luciferic processes into our head, while by absorbing the phosphorus and causing it to overflow into our limbs, we send a fight against the ahrimanic into them. This is the outer process, which the believing person must also follow in his inner soul processes. If it is the outer process that you bring about in the souls of the faithful through Communion, then Communion can naturally only work in the right way if the inner inspiration is also renewed again and again from time to time. This must be done by taking the healing of sins in the broadest sense, so that everything that can be a temptation to sin through the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in human nature is now truly healed through the priestly work.

And so the priestly work must add to the communion, if not to everyone, then at least now and then, that which is no longer preserved in its purity in the Catholic Church, but only in a terrible distortion . It is necessary to add the counseling of the person that precedes Communion, that which in the Catholic Church has become confession, especially auricular confession, which is an entirely Ahrimanic distortion of what needs to be willed. That is what makes up the difficulty with respect to Catholicism. If, for example, a Catholic anthroposophist asks whether he can participate in the overall practice of the Catholic Church, one is always confronted with the Ahrimanic aspect of auricular confession, which one cannot advise the [anthroposophical] Catholic to take; but by doing so, one deprives him of Holy Communion, because the Catholic Church has the coercive law that Communion can only be given if auricular confession has been made beforehand. This is, of course, the most difficult of spiritual requirements. But if you handle the counseling, which must be linked to Communion at certain intervals, correctly, you will not only be able to appear as enthusiastic priests proclaiming the word, but also as priests who forgive sins, and you must be clear about what you can also be as a counselor to your parishes. You will need to take a stand on the matters with which your parishioners come to you as their inner soul concerns. You will not, of course, introduce compulsory confession, but you will notice when the community is properly established how much the community members will come to you with trust and will entrust you with the most diverse inner matters, and how most of them will even feel a certain relief in being able to entrust these matters to you.

This is all you have to do in your movement, going beyond what anthroposophy will essentially remain as teaching and knowledge and what should not, to some extent, be adapted to the individuality of each person: counseling individuals with regard to what can inwardly trouble them in their soul condition as a result of sinful human nature. Of course, you will achieve the least if you indulge in general, theoretical and didactic phrases when counseling your parishioners before Communion. At this moment, anything doctrinal is actually the least appropriate. Only a priest who, when he is such a “confessor”, can put himself in the position of how the difficulties in the soul of the penitent actually arose, what role they play, and how far back they go in time, will give this advice correctly. In short, I would say that you will have to implement in a pure form what has already emerged as nonsense in the development of culture because the churches have withdrawn from it. The Catholic Church has so thoroughly Ahrimanized confession that the confession of children and young people is often a source of moral aberration in the Catholic Church. There are areas where what Catholic children are supposed to do in the so-called examination of conscience is preprinted - I cannot say in small “booklets” because it is usually four pages long - where the possible sins that someone might have are printed in advance, so that some boys, who see through these things, simply cross out what they do not want to have sinned and then just read their confession according to the form. But this also leads to great harm in many other respects. These forms often state, for example, that the child should ask itself whether it has the habit of keeping its hands under the blanket. You can imagine that, from a very early age, the child is made aware of sexual mischief precisely through the obligation required of him by confession. In short, what has become of auricular confession is already a great, great difficulty. That is one side of it; the other is the following.

People live strangely blindly in the world. You know that in Spengler's “Decline of the West” it is said that the priest actually has no influence on world events, that he is a kind of theorizing, contemplative person, and that the world is basically run by people of the nobility, princes and so on. Spengler really talks as if he did not know that there are confessors, that princes, before they come to their decisions, first sit with their confessors, and that from the way the auricular confession is handled there emanates the greatest possible influence on the great affairs of the world. You must realize that in the world, the origins of the most important events must be sought with the confessors. But people are blind; they describe what happens on the outside and have no sense of where things come from. No, you must not forget that this is something that tends to be extremely secretive and that it is something through which one can rule the world in a very wonderful secretive way. The Pope sits in Rome, the Archbishop N.N. in some very distant place and has his archdeacons, canons, provosts and the lower clergy; all of whom, through the confessional, have access to the most intimate affairs of those people who are subject to them. Of course, the Pope in Rome does not need to know what the individual penitent says to the confessor, but he knows that he has someone sitting in these places who carries out the Roman orders with an enormous amount of in-depth knowledge. In this way, the Catholic Church has made confession extraordinarily difficult, both for the individual and for the whole world context. And the Protestant Church? It is not just one Protestant preacher, but a whole series who, in the course of my life, have been with me and said: We long to have something that is like the Catholic confession; we need a method to gently enter into the matters of the heart with which people come to us; we need a kind of active catechesis. Some Protestant pastors have clearly presented this to me. I then advised them to develop the idea from “How to Know Higher Worlds,” whereby, if adopted from the priestly side, one could actually arrive at a tactful confession. That was too difficult for them. So some of them came to me and said: Yes, insofar as these instructions morally coerce, I can agree with them, but where it becomes a matter of inner technique for a person, we certainly do not need such a thing in religion. — In short, the difficulty is this: First one is asked: what should we do? —, one says so, and then the person concerned replies: We have no need of it.

This shows that precisely these innermost things point to something that must come. And because it is not offered to people by either the Catholic or the Protestant side, psychoanalysts do it. Familiarize yourself with the methods of psychoanalysts, to whom people flock in droves today, and see how psychoanalysis is praised by outstanding writers. You will see: What psychoanalysis wants to give to people in a crude way is what the churches of all denominations actually withhold from them. Today we have a psychoanalysis that is spreading more and more every day, from a neglect that can be attributed to the churches. Take any English weekly or monthly magazine. I have convinced myself: you will find an essay on psychoanalysis in it almost every time. This is the materialistic degeneration of what should have been the duty of the pastor, and the matter takes on its serious character when one then comes to what takes the place of communion at the psychoanalyst. One cannot think of the development of Christianity without thinking of all that has been left out of the development of denominations out of human complacency.

You must be aware of these things. You must educate yourself to be able to live with the inner difficulties that people approach you with. You can only do this if you approach everything humanly, without emotion, if both joy and indignation essentially remain silent, and if you can immediately raise the judgment of what you have to approach to a higher sphere, to the sphere of spiritual life. Then you will find that even in the most specific details you have the opportunity not to teach theories or doctrines to the penitent, but to formulate little by little what is indeed doctrine, always in the specific case, and thus to bring it into your teachings. You must, of course, make it clear to the penitent how he has an inner tendency to sin in the Ahrimanic and Luciferic sense, but do not speak of Luciferic and Ahrimanic every time; rather, the treatment of each individual case must always be an essentially individual matter, formulated in concrete terms. You must make it clear to the penitent how the person belongs to another earth, from which he has brought in the Ahrimanic and Luciferic as an inclination, and how he helps himself by really experiencing the means of his religious community to overcome what gives him difficulties within.

In this direction you must become an adviser. You must be able to advise the penitent on some point of difficulty, so that he may rise above it. This will come to you if you apply yourself to a constant and careful study of human nature, in the sense in which it is possible today. The various representations that have been given on an anthroposophical basis contain so many indications of how one or the other aspect of human nature is connected with karma, with the individual destiny, and even with the physical human organization, that they will shed light on many things for you if you study the subjects not just by take a book or a cycle, read it and then be able to say what you have read, but when you study it in such a way that, immediately after you have read it, you bring it to life in your own thoughts, bring it to life as it lives in one or other case during earthly existence, when you study it in a lively way. This is how anthroposophy should be studied. I often have to say to people: you should not read an anthroposophical book like any other book, but in such a way that you feel you want to 'eat it up', so that it then works in you as a force. The comparison can really be taken to the extreme: what you have eaten up has disappeared for the others. That is how one would like an anthroposophical book to disappear, to no longer be there, but to go through a process in the person. If it is read in this way, one learns to understand human nature in a concrete way.

In this way, an enormous amount can be done in the preparation for the act of communion. And every such consultation should actually, I would say, end with a half or three-quarters ritual, in that the penitent is released in a living way with a thought that I would like to put before your souls in the following six lines. It is not necessary for you to express this thought in a formulaic way to each person after every confession, as the Catholic Church does, but the direction that the end of every communion counseling should take is indicated in these six lines.

Learn to sacrifice your thoughts to the Divine
And receive thy will by God's grace.
Then your soul will feel peace;
you will lovingly admire God's revelation and lovingly serve people.
Love for God will enter into your entire being,
love for people will enter into your heart.

If the penitent experiences what lives in these words through you, then you have certainly achieved something with the confession. In this way, you have developed the whole meaning of Johannine Christianity at the end of each confession and can then lead your penitent to Communion with what really inspires them in that Communion. That is what essentially needs to be said about what confession should become through you, what makes confession a real sacrament in connection with Communion.

It will then be my task tomorrow to familiarize you with the last rites and perhaps with some of the things you have notified yourself. But then I will have given you everything I think you need to start your work. After tomorrow's session, we will only need to complete the fundamental issues we have discussed in our joint deliberations, and it will be necessary to say a mass before you leave, with communion for the others.

A participant asks a question about the confession formula. (The stenographer did not note down the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: The difficult sentence of the creed was already felt by me in its difficulty, but it already had a little history from us. The point is that we formulate it - in the real it is not about craziness, but about activity - so that this is expressed in a sentence in the creed: He who joins this community recognizes that what he has become through this community, can only initially become through this community; that is to say that he receives the rituals and what radiates from the rituals from this community and also receives from it the right, in the sense of these rituals, to found communities. So that the person in question has received the evaluation from the supreme leaders and leaders of this community for everything he does on behalf of this community, and that he acknowledges that he has no right to carry out these rituals other than as a member of this community. But you must not make that dependent on whether his will is to recognize this today and may be different in three years, but you must decide today that his will must not be different in three years. So it would not be for him to decide, but for the community. He would have to acknowledge that, with regard to everything he has received on behalf of the community, the community can decide in its superiors, and also that he renounces deciding on it himself in the future. That is the meaning of the matter. We cannot get around this meaning, otherwise you make the rituals a free gift, otherwise you do not establish something, but teach something, and it is gradually carried into the world in dilution, in change, without connection to what it started from. So what I am saying now should be taken into account in some way. But I only want to be available to advise on these matters.

Then someone asked me what the relationship between the community and the Waldorf school teachers will be, since they not only teach the children but are also active in the religious services in the Sunday and other celebrations; and since at the beginning of this course there was the view that Mr. Uehli should not participate in this course, there was something dubious about this relationship. A real basis for such things must be found within the constitution. I do not know whether there is still a rule for this within the community, but there must be. For it is undoubtedly the case that the Waldorf School - and it would be very similar in other schools set up in this way - already has religious education in the sense sought here, and also religious practice. You should be aware that the whole of the teaching in a Waldorf school is imbued with this, so that at least something should be struck in this respect.

A participant: How should we imagine the early development of the work in the community? How should the community be led, and who should take part in the first service? How should we counter the accusation of stealing the mass from the Catholic Church? Rudolf Steiner: With such things, we have to be clear about how the natural process will be. So let's start with this case of the mass. Here we must place ourselves on very firm ground. The Catholic Church regards the reading of the Mass as something that is an outgrowth of apostolic succession. It therefore recognizes as having the right to read a valid Mass only that person who can prove his apostolic succession in the way that the Catholic Church understands this apostolic succession. The Catholic Church interprets succession in such a way that it only recognizes it if it itself effects it, so that in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church only those can read masses who can trace their authority back to a priest ordained by the church itself. Among the Old Catholics, the Old Catholic priests themselves claim that they also fulfill the apostolic succession, also in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church, that they can trace it back to those who were ordained by the Roman Catholic Church in the sense of the apostolic succession. That is what will lead to the Catholic Church not recognizing your masses as valid. But you cannot expect that either. Since there is no Catholic among you or, insofar as there is one here, he is not a priest – a Catholic priest is not with you, otherwise the whole thing would have had to take a different course, we would have had to count on the Catholic priest, but we did not need to – so it is therefore a matter of the Catholic Church not being able to apply the disciplinary measures it has against a renegade Catholic priest who has been deprived of the right to say mass and who then does say it anyway. So there remain the Catholics who are within your community; you must have some. These Catholics naturally expose themselves to excommunication. One must realize quite clearly that the Catholic Church will also apply the disciplinary measures it has, and there is no objection at all within the Catholic Church to excommunication for reading Mass and hearing confessions. If the Catholic Church now decides that it would be wise not to make a fuss about it, then that would be wise of her. That may well be the case as long as you have not exceeded the third thousand, because the Catholic Church does not concern itself with trivialities. If you do not sit together too much or too intensely on one point, you are a bagatelle for the Catholic Church. It already said in 1909: As long as the anthroposophical movement is small, we will only observe it, but not deal with it. But in 1919, she found that she had to deal with it very strongly. And it will also come about that all Catholics who read mass or hear confessions [at your place] will be excommunicated. Of course, she will also take issue with priestly ordinations in the first place, while she will take less offense at all other ceremonies.

That is the one thing that can happen, and a theoretical justification that the Catholic Church itself got the mass from somewhere else is of no significance at all; it does not recognize that and it decides it as a mere question of power. So any theoretical objections would naturally be ignored by the Catholic Church with a wave of the hand. The important thing is that you simply have to accept the excommunication and count on those who are your followers remaining so despite being excommunicated Catholics. That is the real process. The more you enter into the real practice of religion, the more you have to get rid of Protestant theorizing, which aims to prove something to someone. This has even less significance for the Church than it has for the sciences. In the real world, 'proving' something has basically no real meaning. So you can't make anything dependent on the fact that you want to prove to the Catholic Church that you are reading the mass “by right”. You are reading it in the sense of the Catholic Church absolutely wrongly, and you can put forward the most cunning or spiritual proofs, so that would not be able to help you the slightest bit on this point. You cannot take any other direction than the one in which you succeed in getting more and more people to recognize that you are right to read the mass. You cannot do this in any other way than by winning your followers through the three means I have mentioned. In general, this will not be particularly difficult for you at the present time. If you look at the matter superficially, you will find that there is a very strong yearning for worship in humanity today throughout the civilized world, except that this yearning for worship and also for confession is not being met in the right way by the religions.

Of course, you can deal with the faithful by making an impression of truth through your whole behavior, through the way you work and through the inspiration of your work, when you tell them in the appropriate way: The property of the Catholic Church is the Latin Mass; this has taken on a dead character because the Latin language itself is dead. We do not in the least deny that the Latin Mass was once the right Mass; but we must point out that only the German Mass - or the French Mass or the English Mass and so on - which we read, is the present form of the Mass, and that we hold this in the sense of the living Christ, just as the Roman Catholic Church reads the Latin Mass in the sense of mere remembrance of Christ. And you must make this concept understood. It is important that you do everything so that this concept simply prevails. That is not so difficult. Because there is a deep need in humanity for a renewal of the forms of worship. The Latin Mass is also felt by Catholics today as something insufficient. The only thing you have to do is to show by your whole behavior that you have a spiritual impact, that your holding of Mass is not from men, but from God.

With regard to the Mass, you have only one task with regard to those who join you as parishioners. Even in Luther's time, it was possible to discuss with the Roman Catholic Church, as Luther did. Of course, you can't do that anymore, but you can only gather followers who assert what you yourself assert. The Catholic Church today no longer enters into a discussion in the same way as it did in Luther's time. So I think that everything depends on your strength, whether you can get the reading of the mass recognized or not.

I have already told you this in connection with other things a long time ago. You must be clear about one thing: a movement like the one you have in mind has the peculiarity that it should only be started when you are sure that it will succeed! And as far as this certainty is based on your own inner strength, it depends on you simply not letting up. You must have this certainty. And for that you will need a certain broad-mindedness today, both in the way you deal with religious matters and in the way you deal with the faithful, and especially in administrative matters. I can only express such things radically, they are perhaps a little gentler in reality. You feel today that Breitbrunn has bound you together. It has done that, and you must hold on to it. But if you do not continue what you began in Breitbrunn, then the picture of a large part of you hitting your heads in no time at all is not so far-fetched. You must therefore realize that you need to keep that which you believe to be firmly established in constant exercise and liveliness. For think for yourselves how it is with those who join you – after all, you will not always remain just these forty. You must bear this in mind when you begin to found your communities. You have already begun. A large number of you will return to these communities, but for another part the communities will have to be sought. And above all, you will first have the task of dealing with the proclamation of the word in a somewhat freer way, in connection with advising the people who come to you. And if you succeed in speaking about Christ as you speak, if you take into account everything that we have been going through for a long time, especially in these days, then you will see that you will win your followers through your speaking, much more easily than followers can be won on the basis of anthroposophy, where you have to speak in different terms. And you will find that precisely because you are also taking on the task of healing sins, you will be able to retain these followers as very loyal ones.

You must be satisfied with every small flock, for only by being satisfied with a small flock will that small flock gradually become larger. This is not possible in any other way. Those who want a large flock right away will not get one. So you have to be satisfied with everything that arises out of the world as a possibility, and you will see what can be meant by this loyalty in the first instance. And if you are careful enough with the teaching and with the confession-like treatment of the faithful, you will be able to move on to the cultic acts very soon. It is much easier to move on to the cultic acts than the Protestant preacher or the one who wants to become one imagines. The more naturally you let the community arise, the better it will be.

That is it, [what is to be said about it,] how just such a thing would be treated, which lies in such questions as they have been asked here. I will begin to answer the other questions this evening.

A participant: What about the criteria for worship and what would be advisable for the beginning of worship? In Bremen, for example,

people are already prepared for it, and there is even a church available. Would it be advisable to exclude the public?

Rudolf Steiner: The early Christians also had guidelines, but they did not formulate them, because it was often necessary for the early Christians to hold services underground in order to create the possibility of holding them at all. It has happened that such a longing was present in the first priests to hold services that they held the service even when they were tied hand and foot, but were surrounded by a wall of believers who prevented anyone from watching. And only gradually did it actually emerge in the post-Constantinian period that services could be held in public.

I find it hard to believe that you will have any particular luck if you say a German mass in a public church in front of unprepared people. On the other hand, I think it's a very good thing that you say this mass as soon as possible in front of people who will all say yes. So you have to prepare your people, and for a long time you will simply be forced to say your mass in such a way that you only say it in front of prepared people and only allow prepared people. Because of course, if a dyed-in-the-wool atheistic social democrat goes into your mass today and afterwards starts his things, which he will most certainly start, then you will see that you will most certainly have difficulties that you should actually avoid. You have to take such things into account and you have to look out into the world in what you do every day. The smaller the movement still is, the more you will be able to do that. The more it grows quickly, the more others will do what you shouldn't do.