The School of Spiritual Science I

The Anthroposophical Society will, if the intentions of the Christmas Conference are carried out, in the future have to fulfill the esoteric aspirations of its members as far as possible. This fulfillment should be sought by incorporating three classes of school into the general society.

It is in the nature of spiritual knowledge that it first addresses such results to people who are found by personalities who know the ways to spiritual insight. It is a prejudice to think that such results can only be recognized by those who are able to find them themselves. This prejudice then gives rise to the other, that people who have such an acknowledgment indulge in a blind belief in authority. By asserting this prejudice, one accuses a society like the anthroposophical one of consisting of uncritical worshippers of leading personalities.

But just as you don't need to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, you don't need to be a spiritual researcher to understand a great deal of what the spiritual researcher has to say. Through the abilities present in him, the spiritual researcher steps forward before the worlds in which spiritual beings live and spiritual processes occur. He sees these spiritual beings and processes; and he also sees how the beings and processes of the physical world emerge from the spiritual.

He then has the further task of shaping certain areas of his visualizations into ideas that do not depend on special abilities but are accessible to ordinary consciousness. These ideas are self-founded for everyone who brings them to life in his soul. One cannot shape such ideas out of mere intellectual capacity; one can only form them by imprinting spiritual vision upon them. But once they are there through the spiritual researcher, everyone can receive them and find their foundation in them. No one needs to accept them on mere blind faith. If many people believe that what is presented by the spiritual researcher in the form of an idea is not understandable in itself, it is only because they have lost the way to such understanding. They have become accustomed to considering as proved only what is supported by sense perception, and have no sense that ideas can be mutually self-proving. They are like a person who knows that all heavy objects on earth are supported and who therefore believes that the earth itself must also be supported in space.

Now, however, a personality who attains vision in the spirit without first receiving the results of vision in the form of ideas must be specially destined for this by fate. For all others, comprehension of the content of ideas in that region of the spiritual world which can be given expression in this form is the necessary preliminary to arrive at direct vision.

Again, it is only a prejudice if anyone believes that one suggests to oneself the vision of a spiritual world after first having received the picture of such a world in the form of an idea. Just as little as one can speak of suggestion when one sees a person whom one has only heard of before, so little can one do so when one hears the effect of the spiritual world, which appears with all the qualities of reality, after one has first understood it in ideas.

It will therefore generally be the case that people first get to know the spiritual world in the form of ideas. This is how spiritual science is cultivated in the general anthroposophical society.

But there will be personalities who want to participate in the presentations of the spiritual world that arise from the idea form to forms of expression that are borrowed from the spiritual world itself. And there will also be those who want to get to know the paths to the spiritual world in order to travel them with their own soul.

The three classes of the “School” will be there for such personalities. The works will reach an ever higher degree of esotericism in ascending order. The “School” will guide the participant into the realms of the spiritual world that cannot be revealed through the form of ideas. Here it becomes necessary to find means of expression for imaginations, inspirations and intuitions.

Then the fields of artistic, educational, ethical life, etc. will be led into the areas where they can receive illumination and creative impulses from esotericism.

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

(continued in the next issue).