The Founding of the Christian Community
GA 344 — 22 September 1922, Dornach
Nineteenth Lecture
[At the beginning of the meeting, the wording of the loyalty oath was discussed again. The conversation was not
- Before handing over the beret to Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Rudolf Steiner speaks:]
This is therefore the last action to be undertaken out of the spirit, out of which I have undertaken the attempt to realize this movement as a ritual-bearing one in the world, directly out of the spiritual world. In the future, this ceremony is to be performed each time before the first mass is celebrated by the ordained priest. It should be a different kind of action from all the others, and therefore less bound to fixed forms. But in spirit it should briefly contain what I now want to express with the following words. It will therefore not be clothed in the ceremonial words of making the cross or of “Christ in you”, but will be performed directly without an introduction and without the usual concluding sentence. It will be carried out in the way that I describe with the words:
All the symbols of Your actions in the sense of this spiritual movement that have come to You so far express Your communion with the divine worlds that reign over the earth. The symbol that You now receive expresses Your different relationship from You to the people for whom You administer Your office. That is, through the preceding rituals You have received Your communion with the divine essence. Through this sign you receive your power over those who place their trust in you as members of the community. You lead them by virtue of the office, which is symbolized in this protection of your own head. The baretti is placed on the head of the newly ordained.
You always wear this to express your relationship to the lay community; you wear it on the way to the altar, you wear it on the way from the altar; you wear it wherever you go to a solemn ceremony or a sacrament. Accept this symbol of your authority, an authority within which you perform priestly acts.
When the priest reaches the altar, the beret is given to the altar server; he places it on the side table until the end of the service. If the service is interrupted for any reason, in other words wherever the priest moves away from or towards the altar, the beret is put on, never at the altar itself. At the end of the service, after the words “That was the Act of Consecration of Man,” the priest takes the chalice in his left hand, puts on the beret with his right hand, and then walks away, with his right hand now resting on the chalice again.
[Friedrich Rittelmeyer now celebrates the Act of Consecration of Man. After its conclusion, Rudolf Steiner speaks:)
My dear friends! The last ceremonial act that was to be performed here in this place for the inauguration of your mission to the world has been performed, and you will now take what has been done here into your thoughts, into your feelings, into your will, and you will, according to your own judgment and insight, henceforth carry out everything that has been conceived by you in the spirit, everything that has been initiated here.
These are the last few words I shall speak to you. You will find that you have a difficult path to tread. Your attention has already been drawn to the individual difficulties that have been mentioned. But it is certainly good if you now, before you go out into the world to do your own work, face your soul impartially and frankly, that what you are thinking of undertaking is not fenced off in the world today, but is fought over, and you will have to all that you undertake out of the spirit, which is to begin here through you, what you undertake for those who will entrust themselves to you, you will have to have an alert eye for the fact that what you want to make the soul of your work will be fought over. We could also cite many things today, on this occasion, when it is a matter of adding the watchful eye for the world to the heart inspired by God, but I will bring only one of the testimonies before your soul, which will make you realize how strong you yourselves will have to be if you want to penetrate all the judgment that the world presents today against what you, as the soul, have taken up in your teaching work, what penetrates against what is called the anthroposophical worldview.
We see, don't we, how people sometimes fight with almost devilish activity against the anthroposophical worldview. We do not want to focus on that today, but we do want to draw attention to how difficult it is in our time, even for those who want to retain at least a small degree of impartiality, but absolutely cannot, for the reason that what has been accumulating over centuries now envelops human souls and really obscures their clear view of the spiritual forces. Therefore you will have to penetrate through this darkness, for believe me, in many an hour this darkness will also envelop your soul. This darkness will approach you and will ask you many a question along the lines of: Is it really the case that the spiritual world has begun to speak to people in a new way in the last three to four centuries? It is so! And you will have to struggle to the realization that it is so. But you will have to be strong to struggle through.
And so I would like to bring an example to your mind that is currently occurring, which will show you how these darkening clouds come upon people's souls and obscure their further view into the spirituality that is flowing into the earth today.
Not so long ago, a Benedictine priest from the Catholic Church, that is, one of those who express their thoughts most freely in the Catholic Church, wrote a nice little book about the journey of the human soul in the divine face. This little book, which appeared in German in an inexpensive book collection, could actually be of great use to many. Not for those who seek to walk in the light of the spiritual in the sense of our time, but for those who want to get a real idea of how, in that time, in which what was still present in the first Christian centuries of older mysteries was already darkening, the better souls sought to deepen their minds by always keeping in mind the perpetual wandering of the human soul in the face of God. In this respect, the account of the Benedictine monk is precisely a confession that even an excellent person today can no longer escape the bleakness of the darkened worlds. The same person who wrote this booklet, which is good in some respects, about the path of the human soul in the presence of God, recently wrote a condemnation of anthroposophy in the sense that he denies that today's humanity, without exception, has any possibility at all of coming to the spiritual through the paths that the human soul can take. He imagines that the divine-spiritual lies in a cosmic distance from the human soul, that in the human soul there is always a yearning to live together with this divine-spiritual, but he asserts that only in two cases was it possible for a human being to connect with the divine-spiritual world from the human soul, and that only for a very short time and in an insufficient way, but still in a distinct way. He assumes these two cases with Plotinus and with Buddha. The Benedictine monk therefore asserts today that only these two human personalities, through a special dispensation in the development of the earth, were able to bring their soul close to the divine spiritual world and thereby, in a certain sense, achieve a divine spiritual enlightenment for the other human personalities. But with that, he claims, humanity's power to do anything from the human soul to come close to the divine spiritual world is exhausted. Therefore, apart from these two personalities, everything that comes with the claim that the divine spiritual world, the spiritual existence, can really be connected to the earth through human powers is a misconception. He says that weak humanity has no other choice than to accept the historical appearance of Jesus of Nazareth and, in unillumined faith, to attain through the power of Christ that which cannot be attained in the light. Mager explains this in a rather strong way. He sees the situation of humanity in relation to the divine-spiritual world as that of an army that wants to storm the seat of the divine-spiritual. It is as if an army had set itself the task of storming a fortress; only a few of the boldest storm the wall, and the attack collapses. And so man has no choice but to renounce a connection of his consciousness with the divine spiritual world.
From such a point of view, Mager, the Benedictine monk, cannot, of course, see anything in anthroposophy but what he sees in it. These are indeed characteristic words that he speaks, but they are words of complete darkness of the human soul. He says the following words: “My innermost scientific conviction is that Steiner's Anthroposophy cannot be characterized otherwise than as the skillful systematization of hallucinations into a world view.” — And what emerges from Anthroposophy in this way, he must reject as coming from hallucinations. He cannot find any real “religious renewal of the people” in anthroposophical efforts and must therefore raise a warning voice against it. This is the judgment of a Catholic educator. Numerous other judgments are exactly the same, including the judgment of numerous Protestant recognized pastors, who cannot raise the warning voice often enough.
Now, my dear friends, these warning voices will also be raised against you. You must realize that even those who see things as they are, due to the darkness in people's souls today, do not find it easy to understand that in the evolution of the world, at the time when humanity is to receive the first impulse towards freedom in the course of modern evolution, there have always been souls that have found the way to the divine spiritual world. The voices that come from there are simply not heard because they are not illuminated by any light. For in order to make them resound, they must be illuminated by the right light. Darkness also takes away from people that which would resonate with them as the voice of the spiritual. Therefore, you may take into yourself the vigilance for all that you carry out into the world in the way of enthusiasm through being filled with the living word, in the way of the power of healing sin, and that you have to include, so to speak, in what humanity calls prayer and meditation, so that your truth can be effective.
You will have to be vigilant, first of all, to the extent to which the spirit of darkness obscures the soul itself, and you will have to be vigilant that at no hour, at no minute, at no second of your effective existence, the spirit of darkness itself takes hold of you. That is why I say to you, my dear friends, since you must decide to go out to your mission, as I speak again the words that have often been spoken, out of this spirit that is now to inaugurate your movement:
Watch and lift up your souls to the Spirit that reigns throughout all cosmic spaces, throughout all circles of time. If you develop the strength to do so, you will be able to do it, then you will not be alone. These spiritual powers themselves will help you. They will enlighten your thoughts, they will permeate your mind, they will strengthen your will. And with thoughts enlightened from the spiritual world, with feelings strengthened from the spiritual world, with a will strengthened from the spiritual world, you will be able to work. Take with you the assurance that my thoughts will always accompany you and that wherever you need help in the right sense, you will always find me ready to give you that help.
These are the words I give you now at the end, when you set out on the path to the mission you have chosen for yourselves, willed out of the power of Christ.
Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We feel the need to say a few words about something that cannot really be expressed in words: the deep and immense gratitude that we all feel in our hearts towards you. You have become for us a strong, extraordinary mediator to Christ, and I believe I can make the promise on behalf of all of us that we will fight like lions for what you have given us and for what will come to us from you in the future. First of all, we are all deeply impressed by the great kindness we have experienced from you. When we think back to the hours we have experienced in Dornach, from the first serious hour in the Glass House, where we discussed the farewell of our friend Geyer, through the ceremony you celebrated with us, through the lectures in which you so kindly wanted to convey to us, to this last day that we are able to experience with you, we are filled with the memory of a truly unique wisdom and kindness and an extraordinary earnestness with which you have led us from day to day. May they become our example for our own pastoral work. We have often sought comparisons in our circle of friends for what we have experienced, so as not to oversleep its full significance while we are in it. We have thought of this and that, which is known to us from history. We have found nothing that can be compared since the time when the Christ came to earth. We feel very deeply that we, who have now been called by Providence to fight through this, we feel in the deepest reverence that we have to stand up for what has become ours with the sacrifice of our entire independent being, and that we have to see our freedom in realizing the greatness of what has come over us.
It is in this spirit that we want to continue our work. We are aware that we cannot do it alone. Apart from the help of the spiritual world and of Christ Himself, which we want to seek daily ourselves, we ask that you too, as you have so promisingly promised, may stand by us with your advice and your deeds at all times. We feel far too weak and small to stand up for what we want to stand up for.
In this spirit, we want to conclude our conference by expressing our heartfelt thanks, albeit weakly, and asking you from the bottom of our hearts for your continued support.