Spiritual Science as a Life's Work

GA 63 — 20 November 1913, Berlin

3. Spiritual Science and Religious Belief

Before I move on in this series of lectures to the individual findings of spiritual science, which will be presented in the course of this winter, starting with the next lecture, let me begin today with a consideration of one of the many misunderstandings that our present-day education has toward spiritual science as we understand it here.

Time and again, among the various objections, one hears that spiritual science detracts from what is valuable and dear to people as religious belief, religious life, and religious worldview, and perhaps even intimately necessary to them. And why should one not have such a fear in the present, in a certain justified way, especially when spiritual science, as has already been emphasized here and will have to be emphasized even more often, wants to be the true successor and fulfillment of natural science, as it has developed in our spiritual life over the last three to four centuries. How could one not fear this, since in wide circles of our present-day educated people the opinion is held that the scientific way of thinking, that a worldview which, as they say, is built on the solid ground of natural science, can have nothing to do with the presuppositions that underlie religious life? It is indeed the opinion of many that anyone who in the present day truly works their way up to the level of what is called the “true science” of the present must free themselves from what has been called religious life and religious confession throughout long periods of human development. And in many circles it is considered that religious thinking and religious feeling and thinking correspond to a kind of childlike stage of human development, whereas we have now entered the mature age of human spiritual development, which is called upon to cast off the old religious prejudices that correspond to a childlike conception and to move on to what is a purely scientific way of thinking or perhaps a worldview.

If one looks around at many people today, one will very often find the kind of mood that has just been described. But even a historical overview of the most recent phase of human spiritual life, of the last years of the nineteenth century, can give rise to an impression that can be characterized in the following way: Religious minds, people who were concerned with saving and nurturing religious sentiment, felt—and this is a characteristic phenomenon of the nineteenth century in particular—that, since they believed religion to be endangered, they were compelled from a certain point of view to save the realm of religious life from the onslaught of modern scientific life. This continues to this day. And there are numerous writings and works of literature, especially in our time, which, from philosophical or other points of view, set themselves the task of explaining the necessity of religious life for the human soul in the face of all the demands of scientific thinking and worldviews. However, much would have to be discussed if one were to point out the foundations that justify such numerous assertions as have just been made. For example, because this is a characteristic, symptomatic phenomenon that testifies to how something that lay dormant in the hearts of many lived on in individual thinkers, reference could be made to the endeavors of the Ritschl-Hermann school of theology. This is not to characterize this school, nor to characterize the distinguished religious thinker Ritschl, but rather to characterize what Ritschl and his followers were striving for. The actual content of the Ritschl-Hermann view is less important here than the mood from which it grew.

Ritschl is seen as a thinker, a deeply religious thinker who felt called upon to protect religion, as a religious asset, from the onslaught of scientific knowledge. How did he seek to accomplish this? He sought to accomplish it by saying: If we take science as it has developed over the last three to four centuries, it shows how it has achieved one accomplishment after another in terms of knowledge of nature, how the human mind has penetrated the secrets of the material world. And when one looks back on everything that has been achieved in the course of the last three to four centuries, one must say: to extract from all this something that could grasp the human soul in the way that religious truths and religious confession should grasp the human soul — that is not possible, Ritschl said to himself. Therefore, Ritschl and his students seek a completely different source for religious confession. They say to themselves: Religion will always be endangered if one wants to base it on the kind of knowledge that is common in natural science, and one will always be faced with the impossibility of squeezing something out of the scientific way of thinking that could inspire and penetrate the human soul. Therefore, one must once and for all refrain from mixing anything that is the subject of science into religion. But there is an original life of faith in the human soul that must remain free, must remain completely separate from any invasion of science, and that, when it unfolds and becomes alive within, can lead to experiences that exist in themselves, to inner facts that connect the human soul with what must be the content of religious belief.

Thus, this school seeks to save religious confession by attempting to purify it of any invasion of the scientific. If the soul thus renounces having anything in its religious life that could even remotely resemble what is achieved by scientific means — if the soul thus develops this life purified within itself, then what signifies its connection with the divine origins of existence rises up within it; then it feels that it carries within itself, as a spiritual fact, its connection with the divine.

If one now delves deeper into such endeavors as those of the Ritschl-Hermann school, which still dominates many, especially theological thinkers today, one immediately sees: Yes, as human beings are today, as their present soul life is with everything that lives in this soul life, then in a certain way, one might say, a kind of highly distilled mysticism can be extracted from this soul; But when it comes to having real individual religious or faith truths, as the Ritschl school shows, then such a school of thought is forced to fill the soul with content from somewhere, because otherwise it would have to remain trapped in a very narrow mystical life. And so, on the other hand, this same Ritschl school takes up the Gospel, takes up the truths conveyed by the Gospel, and leaves a deep gulf between its demand to develop the truths of faith, the divine truths, solely from the soul itself — whereby, however, in this school, no single soul could ever develop from within itself the same content that is found in the Gospels — leaves a deep gulf between what the soul can gain from within itself and what the soul then takes in from outside through the revelations of the Gospels. Yes, an even deeper gap can arise, and the followers of this school themselves noticed this when they said: Every human being, if he or she surrenders uninhibitedly to what springs and sprouts in his or her soul, can come into a certain connection with the divine that speaks into his or her soul. You are, after all, in a divine-spiritual connection with your soul. But individual souls could not come to such inner experiences as Paul or Augustine had. Such experiences must therefore also be taken in from outside. In short, at the moment when such a direction, which wants to arrive at religious confession purely through religious feeling, with the expulsion of all scientificity, when such a school desires real content, when it not only desires to weave mystically in the general feelings of divine inner experience, but when it strives to express in thought how the soul is connected with the divine: then it is forced to break with its own principle! And we would be led to the same contradictory views if we tried to let the religious-philosophical views of the nineteenth century, as they have developed up to our time, pass before our souls.

But this must be said: it is characteristic that many serious, very serious thinkers in the field of religious research have struggled only for a concept, an idea, a definition of religion, and that, when one tries to take stock of what has been achieved in this field, one cannot even find a satisfactory concept of what religion is, how religion arises in the human soul, from what impulses of the human soul it springs. This is something that, especially in the serious religious studies of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, is thoroughly entangled in a wide web of polemics. There are people who say that humans have risen from a certain way of worshipping nature to suspect something divine, something spiritual behind natural phenomena, and then to worship this divine, this spiritual in nature. There are researchers who hold the opposite opinion, that the religious need originated from what could be called soul worship. To give a concrete example, people saw those who were dear to them die, and they could not imagine that what constituted their innermost essence had passed away; so they transferred them to a world in which they could continue to worship them. Ancestor worship, the cult of souls, according to such researchers, is the origin of religious feeling and sensation. Then, they say, people went further and transferred what they felt and revered in human beings to nature, so that the deification of the forces of nature arose from the fact that originally only the souls of ancestors were believed to live on, but these revered ancestral souls were elevated to the divine and made rulers over the forces of nature and the worlds. — A third school of thought, whose opinion has been clearly expressed in particular by the religious scholar Leopold von Schroeder, says that human nature reveals, and research into even the most primitive peoples attests to this, an instinct, a real instinct and impulse, to assume behind all phenomena a good being who watches over the good in the world; and the development of this instinct and impulse can be seen in the various religions and religious confessions.

It can be shown that every such view — there is not enough time today to do so, I can only hint at it — does not fit with something that, if one simply has an understanding of religious life and the religious beliefs of human beings, must be called religion according to this understanding. Since spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to place itself in human development as something new in our spiritual education, it would be of little use if this spiritual science wanted to deal with all these views on the foundations, origin, and nature of religious confession. For it must be said that, when all these debates are considered, one question remains unanswered: What is the place of religious belief within the totality of human nature, of the human personality? Therefore, I will proceed in a similar manner this time as I did last time with the discussion of “antisophy.” Just as I did not go into what antisophy is here or there, but rather tried to show, from a spiritual scientific point of view, how antisophy is grounded in human nature as such, and how one need not be surprised when it appears here and there. I will attempt to describe the basis of religion in human nature in order to then show how spiritual science, which as such addresses the whole of human nature, or at least aims to do so, fits into life as a whole, which in the human soul wants to be supported by a religious confession.

Spiritual science, by its very nature and essence, is less inclined to engage in polemical debates; its primary purpose is to describe how things are, and then to leave it up to each individual to decide what relationship spiritual science may have to the various branches and currents of human soul life. Therefore, it is not my task today to deal with religious confession as such from a spiritual scientific point of view, but rather to show what spiritual science aims to be and what religious confession can be, and then to leave it up to each individual to draw their own conclusions about the relationship between the two. The main thing will be to draw attention to some of the points already made in these introductory lectures on the characteristics of spiritual science and to relate them to some of the deeper foundations of human nature.

Spiritual science and spiritual research, as has been explained, are based on the fact that the human soul is capable of transformation, of undergoing an inner, intimate development, through which it grows beyond the ordinary view of everyday life and also beyond the ordinary views of external science, and rises to a special kind of knowledge. Spiritual science presupposes that its research is based on a soul that has been made independent of the physical body, a soul that has become independent of physical corporeality in its experiences. When this soul experiences itself and the world through its development in the spiritual realm, it arrives at perceptions that do not concern the sensory world, but the spiritual world. Through the exercises already mentioned, which will be discussed further in the following lectures, the spiritual researcher transports himself with his soul, after he has transformed it, into the spiritual world. He is then in the spiritual world and, standing within it, speaks of the beings and processes of the spiritual world. This entering into the spiritual world is achieved in various stages, and I have basically described this development that the soul undergoes in my book How to Know Higher Worlds. We will have to characterize these stages somewhat for today's consideration.

When, through such an increase in attention and devotion as has been indicated in the two lectures “The Spiritual World and Spiritual Science” and “Theosophy and Antisophy,” the human soul comes to experience independently of the physical body, then its experience is at first such that the ideas, the feelings, the whole content of the soul to which the soul then comes, can be called an imaginative world, an imaginative world, not because this world is mere imagination, but because what the soul experiences within itself when it detaches itself, as it were, from its experience of the sensory world, rises up as if from the sea of inner being, and is initially an inner, purely spiritual world of images, a fully saturated world of images. It would be wrong for anyone to see in this world of images, which springs forth from the sea of human soul life, an immediate manifestation of the spiritual world itself; for this world of images, this imaginative world, initially testifies to nothing other than that the inner, soul life has strengthened itself, so that it can not only experience ideas, feelings, and inner impulses based on external sensory impressions, but that it has strengthened itself to such an extent that a world of images springs forth from its own bosom, in which the soul can live. This world of images, which is achieved in particular through an intensification of what we call attention in ordinary life, is, so to speak, initially only a means of penetrating into the real spiritual world. For no one can ever say whether this world of images corresponds to spiritual reality or not; but something else must be added, which is again achieved through an increase in devotion, so that content now springs into these images from a completely different source than humans are accustomed to, namely from the spiritual world. Through his further development, the spiritual researcher achieves the point where he can say of such an image: Spiritual content flows into it; through this image, which you have felt rising up in your soul, a being or a process of the spiritual world is revealed to you. Just as you regard the outer colors as an expression of the outer sensory processes and the outer sensory beings, so you may regard this world, because the spiritual world is absorbed into it, as an image of the spiritual world. You must reject anything else. In this way, you learn to experience this world of images in relation to the spiritual world in the same way as letters are experienced in ordinary life. Just as letters only express something when one knows how to combine them in the mind to form words that are meaningful, just as letters are only a means of expression, so the images of the spiritual world are only truly manifestations of a spiritual world when they become a means of expression for a world into which the soul of the spiritual researcher is able to transport itself. In fact, what takes place here is what could be called a complete erasure of the entire imaginative world. For the images transform themselves, combining in the most manifold ways. Just as letters are taken from the typesetter's case and formed into words, so the imaginations are, as it were, thrown together in spiritual perception and become means of expression for a spiritual world when the spiritual researcher rises to the second stage of higher knowledge, which can be called — if you will pardon the expression — inspired knowledge, knowledge through inspiration. Within this inspired knowledge, the objective spiritual world fits into these images, which the soul has become capable of experiencing. But in this inspiration, one only attains what could be described as the outer side of spiritual processes and beings. In order to truly enter the spiritual world, one must, so to speak, immerse oneself in things, become one with the things of the spiritual world. This happens in intuition, in the third stage of spiritual knowledge. Thus, through imagination, inspiration, and intuition, the spiritual researcher ascends into the realm of the spiritual world. With intuition, he stands so firmly in the spiritual world that his own spiritual-soul self has become independent of everything physical, as described in more detail in “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” and has immersed itself in the spiritual beings of the world, as far as his abilities allow. This characterizes what can be called the relationship of spiritual research to the spiritual world: standing within the spiritual world, empathizing with it, and experiencing the spiritual in conjunction with the beings and processes of the spiritual world. This must be understood as the characteristic feature of spiritual science.

Now the question is: When such a spiritual science arises, as it can arise through such research, how can we conceive of the relationship between this spiritual science, this spiritual research, and religious belief?

This will become clear when we now consider the life of the human soul and personality, as it exists within the whole world, in its totality, in its entirety. Here we encounter something that could be called the climax of soul development, and it is this climax of soul development that I would like to speak to you about today.

In fact, the human soul develops in real, full life, one might say, in four stages. To avoid any misunderstanding, so that no one might think that the word climax implies that one stage is more noble or higher than another, I would just like to say that four different stages, about whose value nothing is to be said, are distinguished in the unfolding of the human soul. First, we have the stage that we can describe as the sensory experience of the outer world. In the sensory experience of the outer world, the human being is indeed present in all world events, even if only in material world events; and it is not at all possible to view the human being differently, insofar as he is at the stage of sensory perception, than as standing in the midst of the material world.

In relation to what is meant here, one experiences very strange things, especially in the present. As those who are now more or less well past the first half of their lives, were young and perhaps studied philosophy at the time, it was taken for granted that one would profess, at least in one form or another, the Kant-Schopenhauerian statement: "The world is my idea. " I have already pointed out that ordinary experience, as trivial as it may sound, must overturn this statement. For if one wants to stand in reality, despite all the explanations that have been made in this area and which are based on nothing but misunderstanding, one must say: the healthy experiencer must distinguish between his idea and what he is called upon to call perception. If there were no difference between imagination and perception, if the whole tableau of the outside world were my imagination, then a person would have to feel a piece of hot iron at 500° Celsius, which he only imagines, in the same way as a real piece of iron at 500° when he puts it to his face. By perceiving with their senses, people must stand within the flow of the outside world. And now we can see philosophers such as Bergson attempting to restore what was called naivety in youth. It was called “naive realism” when people saw humans as standing directly within the flow of the material world. Bergson seeks to show once again, as if philosophy were just beginning again with him, that this view is the correct one, that one must think of humans as sensory perceivers standing within the world of sensory laws. So we stand in the world with our sensory perception, and the characteristic feature is that the individual senses perceive separate world structures, as it were: a world of colors and light, a world of sounds, a world of temperature differences, a world of hardness and softness, and so on. At this first stage of human experience of the world, the individual senses stand within the stream of world events. Through perception, standing directly within the sensory, material world, we obtain a worldview. This worldview accompanies us through life; we act with this worldview, we act under its influence, it dominates us, and we in turn dominate a part of the world from this worldview. Thus, by living entirely in the sensory world, human beings stand within the stream of world events, insofar as these are material. They are, as it were, themselves a part of these world events, feeling and experiencing themselves and thus acquiring their world view.

A second stage of this world experience can be called the stage of aesthetic experience, regardless of whether it occurs in artistic creation or in artistic perception and contemplation. If one wants to clarify only superficially: How does one experience aesthetic experience? - then one must say: First and foremost, aesthetic perception, as opposed to mere sensory perception, is an inner experience. When one perceives light and colors, one is devoted to light and colors through the eye; when one perceives sounds, one is devoted to the world of sounds through the ear; one is, as it were, partially devoted to the outside world and stands with a part of one's being inside the world. But anyone who has thought about artistic creation or artistic enjoyment, about artistic viewing and aesthetic perception, will know that aesthetic perception is, first of all, much more internal than mere sensory perception; and secondly, it is more comprehensive in that it arises from the unity of human nature. Therefore, for aesthetic perception, it is not enough for us to see a sum of colors or hear a sum of tones; enthusiasm, the inner joy of aesthetic experience, must also be present. When I merely perceive, I perceive colors and seek to obtain an image of the thing given to my senses; when I look aesthetically, my whole personality comes alive. What flows into me from an image that has artistic content completely captivates me. Joy, sympathy or antipathy, pleasure, elation flow through me; but they captivate my whole personality. In the course of these lectures, we will hear that a second element of human nature is necessary for such an experience, which is internalized even when it relates to things in the outside world, to works of art, or to beautiful nature. Even if such an assumption is frowned upon in our present intellectual life, even if the very expression for such an element of human nature is frowned upon, the assumption will justify itself. When human beings confront the external world with their physical, sensory perception, when they allow the stream of external events to come to them, as it were, and thus experience events with their physical bodies, they experience something as aesthetic observers that is much more closely connected with their inner being, with their essence: he experiences with what we call the aesthetic human body or the aesthetic human being, which is not bound to a single organ but permeates the whole human being as a unity. In aesthetic enjoyment, man frees himself from the sensory world, even though he starts from it. This liberation, this inner freedom, was much more of a concept in Goethe's time than it is in ours. Our time is—we will have much more to say about these phenomena—the time of materialism, the time of naturalism. It already feels it is something unjustified when human beings want to separate themselves in artistic contemplation from external sensory contemplation, from sensory perception; therefore, in today's naturalism, artistic creation that detaches itself from external, sensory contemplation is, as it were, prohibited.

The Goethean era, especially Goethe and Schiller themselves, did not consider what is merely an imitation of nature, what presents something that already exists in nature, to be real art, but demanded that what is to be art must be inwardly grasped and transformed by man. But it also looks at another idea. Goethe expresses it, expresses it particularly beautifully, as he wanders through Italy, where his ideal of studying ancient art has been fulfilled. After previously studying the Spinozistic God at home with Herder and others, he writes home: "The great works of art have been produced by humans according to true and natural laws, just as the highest works of nature have been. Everything arbitrary and conceited falls away: there is necessity, there is God." This is the same sentiment as when Goethe once said: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that could not be revealed without it. Or when he says: the artist does not deal with fantasy, but rather enters into the artistic realm precisely by observing the external physical world. That is why Goethe and Schiller speak of truth in art and bring together the experience of the artist with the experience of the perceiver. They feel that although the artist separates himself from external nature, he is closer in his inner experience to that which spiritually governs and acts behind all natural phenomena. That is why such people speak of a truth in this aesthetic vision, in this aesthetic experience. Goethe even says very beautifully, when discussing Winckelmann, an aesthetician he admired, that art is a continuation and human completion of nature, "for, being placed at the summit of nature, man sees himself again as a whole nature, which has within itself a summit to produce once more. To this end, he elevates himself by imbuing himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony, and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art." — It would be going too far if I were now to show how, in fact, man, by distancing himself from the external view of nature in his aesthetic view, but inwardly grasps a truth, how it actually has a profound meaning for those who are capable of aesthetic experience to say, in response to a picture, a drama, a sculpture, or a musical work, on the one hand, “This has an inner truth,” or, on the other hand, “This is false,” without meaning that it is an imitation of nature. To speak of artistic truth in aesthetics is something that is deeply rooted in human nature. There is truth and error in this field, which does not consist merely in poorly imitating external nature.

Nevertheless, when one advances to aesthetic contemplation, one leaves the realm of that perception which in the ordinary sense can be called real, and enters the realm of fantasy, a world of images. Even when viewed externally, the fantasy world of art, compared to the imaginative world of the spiritual researcher, presents itself as a real shadow image, but still as a shadow image. The imaginative world of the spiritual researcher, on the other hand, is fully saturated with a new reality. The fantasy world of art is that which withdraws from immediate sensory perception and, as in inner experience, retains a connection with the human soul, but a connection that is not with the sensory world. Therefore, art—one need only refer to Schiller's letters on the “aesthetic education of man” for clarification—is that which elevates man in a free manner above the slavish acceptance of the perceptions of the sensory world. Art is what detaches human beings from the sensory world and gives them the awareness for the first time: you experience, even if you do not merely allow the sensory world to flow into you; you stand inside the world, even if you detach yourself from the world in which your body is sensually placed. This mood, which is given by art, is what gives human beings a sense of their destiny in their development, of their not being merely spellbound by the physical world. But in fact, it is as if the imaginative life were revealed in art as in a shadow image. The imaginative life is more saturated with life than the mere life of the imagination. This would be the second stage in the climax of human soul development.

The third stage in this climax can now be characterized by saying that through this third stage, human beings internalize themselves even more. In art, they have moved from the outside to the inside, detaching themselves from externality. Now it is conceivable that the human being completely overlooks external experience, experiences purely internally, focuses only on himself, focuses on himself in such a way that, unlike in art, unlike in the creation of fantasy, he does not saturate what he imagines with what he has perceived, even though he frees it from perception, but does not allow anything perceived into himself at all. Then they would stand even further removed from the sensory world with their completely isolated, utterly emptied inner life, the outer world around them dark and silent, a longing for something in their soul, but nothing present, unless something could enter this soul from a completely different side, a soul that is thus emptied of all externality. Just as the material world approaches us from outside when we hold our senses out to it, so the spiritual world approaches us inwardly when we do not allow anything to enter our soul in the manner described, yet remain awake and waiting. What we experience there is what can convince us of our true human nature; it is what shows us our truest independence, our truest inner self. And the fact that something can enter that does not come from outside testifies to the existence of religious ideas throughout the ages. When moving from sensory perception to aesthetic contemplation, human beings in normal life move, as it were, toward a stream of forgetting, of non-experience. He floats across this stream into his inner life. When content from a completely different world enters his inner life, this content is religious content. It is the content through which human beings can know that there is a world beyond the sensory world, a world that cannot be reached by any external sensory organs, nor by processing sensory impressions as the imagination does, but which, with the exclusion of all imaginative life, allows the invisible to flow in through pure inner devotion, which now spiritually carries and sustains the soul from within, just as our body is carried and sustained by external nature, which could not exist at all if it did not exist as a part of external nature. To feel oneself as a part of the supersensible, spiritual world is as natural to human beings as it is natural to them, when perceiving colors externally, to presuppose objects when they perceive such colors.

At this point, attention must be drawn to something very important. As we shall see, there were times in human development when it would have seemed just as absurd to humans to say: I feel something, but this feeling is not stimulated by a divine spiritual world, just as it seems absurd today to humans, when they think clearly, to feel warmth when they stretch out their hand and not say: there is an object that is burning me. For the entire human soul life, when one feels something like this, it is just as healthy to say, “A spiritual world is intruding into us,” as it is healthy to point to a burning object when something burns us. Now there is something here that will become clear to us when we consider views that have not yet fully emerged today; but these views already live at the bottom of the soul worlds. The view that everything a person experiences is only their imagination is becoming more and more widespread through natural science. I have already pointed this out. It is already quite common among natural scientists to say: What I perceive as colors exists only in my eye; what I hear as sounds is only in my ear; out there are only moving atoms everywhere. — How often can one read: when I perceive a color, ether waves vibrate outside at such and such a speed; out there is only moving matter! It is, of course, inconsistent to deny colors and still accept matter! That is why there are already so-called immanence philosophers today who say that everything we perceive is only a subjective world. And it is conceivable, although this still lies in the future, that it will be said: It is certain that I perceive light and colors with my eyes; but to know anything about what causes light and colors is impossible; that I perceive sounds with my ears is certain; but to know anything about what produces the sounds is impossible. What those who want to be scholars say in this field has already been said for centuries by people in general who are advancing toward a materialistic view of the world in contrast to inner experience. As the prejudiced philosopher says today: The color I perceive is only in my eye; I do not know what causes it — so humanity in general says: I have my feelings within me; but how they are brought about by the spiritual world, nothing can be known about that. With regard to inner experience, for centuries, indeed for millennia, prejudice has prevented people from relating their experiences to something objective, which in this case would be something spiritual, just as certain philosophers no longer want to relate impressions of the outer world to actual events in outer life. However, a healthy human soul feels, just as it feels itself to be present in the material sensory world through its perception of colors, so too does it feel itself to be present in the world of spirituality, in the stream of spiritual experience, through its feelings. And just as it is absurd for a healthy soul life to believe that color speaks only from the eye, so it is absurd for a truly healthy soul life to claim that feeling speaks only from the soul, that it is not stimulated by a divine-spiritual world outside of us. And this healthy feeling of the soul corresponds to a third member of human nature, that member which we shall show moves out of the physical body during sleep, but is within it during waking life: we have called this the astral body of the human being. Our etheric body conveys aesthetic perceptions to us; our astral body, if it does not indulge in the unhealthy belief that its content springs from nothingness within itself, but if it knows that feelings and so forth arise from the spiritual world when it lives within it — our astral body experiences itself religiously. It is naturally the part of our nature that must experience itself religiously. It is no wonder that very easily, directly out of the human organization, a denial, a rebellion against religious truths can arise, or rather, against religious experiences can arise; for ordinary human experience is organized in such a way that when this astral body leaves the physical body during sleep, it becomes unconscious, that it then has no experiences of its own, but only has experiences again when it submerges into the physical body, when it perceives through the physical organs. Therefore, only in physical life can the astral body's own experiences emerge as if from dark, unknown depths.

Thus, religious experiences emerge as if from dark, unknown depths into the ordinary life of human beings, which takes place in the sensory world in the waking state of day. But then, when the spiritual researcher empowers the soul in such a way that it consciously experiences what remains unconscious in normal life during sleep, independently of the physical body, then this soul, prepared by spiritual research, lives itself into what shines forth as religious content, as religious experience, as if from dark, unknown depths of the soul in healthy human beings. Religious experiences are justified precisely by this spiritual-scientific view. What remains unknown to the human being when he returns from his separation in the body to the womb of spiritual life in the state of sleep, and what he would experience there if he knew during sleep, emerges in religious feeling, stimulated by external life. In spiritual scientific research, however, what stimulates this religious feeling in the land of the unknown appears in its clarity as immediate intuition. Therefore, what can be religious feeling in everyday life becomes spiritual intuition in spiritual scientific knowledge. Apart from the world of the senses, in which we live with our physical bodies, we also live in the world of the spirit. This world of the spirit remains invisible to the external human organization. But human beings nevertheless live in this spiritual world, and it would be absurd to believe that only what human beings can see in physical life exists. When human beings strengthen their soul life to such an extent that they can see the spiritual around them, they see the beings and processes of the spiritual world, which otherwise only inspire what rises up as religious life from unknown depths. In their spiritual experience, spiritual researchers attain a view of those beings and processes of the spiritual world that otherwise remain unknown to religious life, but which must send their impulses into religious life and permeate human beings with the feeling of their connection to the spiritual world. But here we also see how, when we consider religious life in terms of its essence, we must enter into our own human nature. We enter, so to speak, into the subjective realm of human nature.

If we take this into account, however, it also becomes clear to us that, because this subjective aspect is much more diverse than the external physical aspect, what enters from the spiritual world will depend to a greater extent on the subjective nature of the human being than the external physical reality depends on the external nature of the human being. We know that our view of the world changes when our eyesight improves or deteriorates; we also know that color blindness exists, for example; but the external physical nature is much more universal to all human beings than the internal individual nature. Therefore, what is perceived internally will be much more varied and, if one sees through the matter, will naturally not appear as a religious creed spread across the entire earth. The spiritual world, which is naturally the same everywhere, will appear to be colored according to the predispositions and particular characteristics of the human organization. People differ in their beliefs, especially according to differences in climate, race, and the like.

Thus, we see the various religions emerging across the globe and throughout historical development, graded according to the different individualities of the soul life. If we view religious beliefs as nuanced by human nature but rooted in the same spiritual world in which all human beings are rooted with their astral bodies, we do not have the right to attribute “truth” to only one religion, but must say: These different religions are what can arise from unknown depths in the human soul, originating from a special manifestation of the spiritual world through the human astral body.

Now we find here that the spiritual researcher, at the climax of human soul development, ascends to what represents a fourth stage, where intuition enters. At this stage, the actual experience of full human inwardness only occurs, but in such a way that the human being, with his inwardness, is now truly outside his physical senses and now truly lives within the spiritual world. There, regardless of how they are organized as human individuals on earth, they experience the unified spiritual world. The fact that we are this or that particular person with such and such feelings and sensations stems from the fact that the soul-spiritual coexists with the physical. This individualizes what we are. As spiritual researchers, however, we become independent of physicality. When we perceive completely outside the physical realm, we perceive the unified spiritual world, in which human beings are every night when they fall asleep, but unconsciously. The spiritual researcher has only strengthened his soul life to such an extent that the even weaker forces that keep human beings unconscious in the spiritual world have been strengthened in him, so that he is consciously in that world in which human beings are unconscious during sleep. Then he experiences the spiritual beings and processes that send their impulses into the human astral body, but which can only be experienced in their true essence when the ego, the self of the human being, has become completely independent. Then one experiences what people who, from their point of view, have attempted to penetrate these depths of human being have beautifully indicated as the greatest thing in human experience — as, for example, Goethe in the wonderful poem “The Secrets,” where the various experiences that human beings can have with the religions spread across the globe are presented to us are presented to us in twelve people who have gathered together in a monastery-like building to experience together — to experience mutually what they have brought with them from the most diverse regions of the earth, from different climates, races, and epochs as their individual religious beliefs, and what they now want to let interact with each other. This takes place under the guidance of a thirteenth person, who shows us how the twelve represent the different religious beliefs based on a unified spiritual foundation. Goethe depicts in a wonderful way how a marvelous organism is poured out over the earth in the religious creeds, which are nuanced according to race and epoch, and how, with the ascent into the real spiritual world, what lives and is nuanced in the individual religious creeds is seen in a great, coherent whole. In this way, he anticipates what spiritual science is to achieve in relation to religious creeds: that they should be recognized in their inner essence, in their inner truth. For spiritual science experiences the spiritual directly in the spirit.

If, for example, one wanted to speak about the Christian creed in terms of spiritual science, one would have to show how, through this spiritual science, the content of the Christian creed is recognized from the spiritual world, and indeed could be recognized, even if, hypothetically speaking, any tradition or any document. Let us assume for a moment that everything contained in the Gospel documents did not exist, for the spiritual scientist first places himself outside all these documents; then, when observing the course of history in the spiritual realm, he would perceive how humanity, from primeval times to a point in the Greco-Roman era, underwent a downward development in inner experiences and perceptions, and how an impulse had to come for a renewed upward development, which we call the Christ impulse, which entered into human development and which is a unique impulse, just as the center of gravity of a scale can only be one. From spiritual knowledge, the entire position and function of the Christ being in the world would become clear. Then, with such knowledge, one would approach the Gospel documents and find in them this or that statement about how the Christ Being emerged as if from indefinite depths and inserted itself into human development, but how it can be recognized when spiritual scientific research advances from inspiration to intuition. The whole of religious life becomes visible to spiritual scientific observation from a unified source, where it rises to intuition.

Thus, at the climax of human soul development, as represented by the totality of human nature, it becomes apparent that intuition is life in the ego, just as religious life is life in the astral body, artistic perception is life in the etheric body, and sensory perception is life in the sensory body. And just as true as this climax expresses what human nature is, so true is it to the whole of human life that human beings develop a religious life; and just as true as this climax, this fourfold human soul development, exists, so true is it that spiritual scientific experience directly reaches the perception of what is experienced in religious life from unknown depths. Therefore, for an unbiased assessment, spiritual science can never be an enemy of any religious creed; for it shows precisely the fundamental source, the fundamental nature of religious creeds, and it also shows how these creeds all spring from a unified spiritual world foundation, — even if it must be pointed out again and again that this view, as it has now been developed, is worlds apart from those abstractions and dilettantisms that speak of the “equality of all religions” and the equivalence of all religious creeds. For in terms of their logic, these stand on no other ground than if one were to emphasize only that the snail is an animal and the deer is also an animal, and that one must always seek out the “same” everywhere. It is, of course, merely religious-philosophical dilettantism to speak of an abstract equality of all religions, for the world is in a state of development. And anyone who truly overlooks this development, who overlooks it from the spiritual world, will also see how the individual religious confessions, in their various manifestations, tend toward what appears to be a religious embrace of all religious confessions in Christianity. Christianity—through its unique position in its emergence from Jewish monotheism—loses nothing of its cultural task in the world by viewing these things spiritually.

However, one thing must still be said if we want to be thorough in our description of the relationship between human beings and religious beliefs. When we face the outside world, we face it with our physicality. As human beings, we can only take a rather indirect part in the relationship between physicality and the entire physical-material outside world. Without us really experiencing it fully within ourselves, the relationship of our body to the entire cosmos is regulated. And how much can human beings do when this relationship becomes disordered, to restore it to regularity through remedies and the like? How much lies in the relationship of human beings to the cosmic external world, which our senses can convey to us, in which human beings do not directly participate? But the moment a person begins to place their inner being within the spiritual cosmos, everything within them will experience what pulsates into them from this spiritual cosmos. Therefore, inner experiences immediately come to the fore when a person becomes aware of their relationship to the spiritual cosmos. They feel carried, supported, and sustained by this spiritual cosmos, and they feel their relationship to it in such a way that they say to themselves: Here I am, standing inside the spiritual cosmos, and I want to feel this standing inside in my consciousness! Religious life thus becomes an inner experience in a completely different sense than the experience of the material cosmos through the physical body outwardly. Inner destiny becomes the religious experience. What one experiences in this way is expressed in reverence, in worship, in a feeling that spiritual life comes to one in grace. This means that this religious life is expressed primarily in human feeling. This gives us the reason why we can say that religious belief is rooted first and foremost in feeling. But we must first ascend to the realization of why it lives itself out in feeling by its very nature. What is felt, what is there in terms of spiritual processes and spiritual beings to be felt, to stimulate feelings, is then revealed by spiritual science. Therefore, when we enter into spiritual life in a religious way, we naturally enter into the emotional life of human beings, we enter the realm where human beings seek their hopes for their humanity, where they seek the strength to be fully placed in the world, to stand securely in the world. Therefore, entering the spiritual world by way of religion is nothing other than arriving there by way of feeling. This will become particularly apparent to those who learn to recognize how necessary it is for human beings, even though they rise to insights in spiritual science that are valid for all, they must nevertheless pass through their emotional life as preparation for objective spiritual experience, through the subjective emotional life that they must go through with all its joys and sorrows, its disappointments and hopes, its fears and anxieties.

I believe that some might say that my remarks lacked what constitutes the emotional element in religious confession, what makes religious confession so warming to the human soul and so inwardly fulfilling. However, anyone who considers the whole attitude that is necessarily generated by spiritual science will understand that the spiritual researcher simply presents things and allows feelings to arise from the things themselves. He would consider it a kind of impurity if he were to capture feelings suggestively through his words. Every soul should feel freely for itself. Spiritual science must present things as they reveal themselves to spiritual research.

The extent to which spiritual science can illuminate and shed light on the reasons for religious belief should be discussed today in terms of the fourfold nature of the human being and the climax of human soul development. Religious belief is rooted in human nature. True science that rises to the spiritual level will never be an enemy of true, genuine religious experience, which is necessary for human beings, especially if it is spiritual science. The fact that human beings basically experience everything they experience spiritually in the same way as spiritual research experiences through its methods will become clear to us through various explanations in the following lectures; and that the objections raised against spiritual science, both from the scientific side and from the side of certain religious denominations, are unfounded, will be seen in particular when one considers the individual results of spiritual science. Today, however, I wanted to show, not by polemically addressing a single religious denomination, how religious denominations relate to the fullness, to the wholeness of human nature. This, too, makes one feel that spiritual science is in harmony with all those human souls who, in the course of human development, sensing the truth as revealed in spiritual science, have put their faith in it. Once again, let us remember Goethe; as I was allowed to remember him in the lecture “Theosophy and Antisophy,” so may we do so again today. Even though spiritual science did not yet exist in the scientific sense in Goethe's time, his whole soul mood was nevertheless one of spiritual research, one of theosophy; and what flowed from this soul mood was thought and felt in the sense of spiritual research. Therefore, he felt that science that truly delves into things must find the spiritual and therefore cannot be foreign to religion. Goethe therefore also felt that when humans free themselves from external nature in art, they do not free themselves from what underlies nature as spiritual. Goethe was convinced that those who experience the phenomena of the world through science and art experience them in the same way as religious people, who feel their inner selves rooted in the spiritual world. No one who possesses science and art can therefore be irreligious, according to Goethe. If one approaches the world with true science, one learns to recognize it purely spiritually and therefore cannot experience oneself as elevated above the spiritual world, but only as placed within it. if one finds the truth through art, then the soul, experiencing this truth, must gradually also become pious, that is, experience religiously what underlies the world as spiritual. Therefore, he was also clear about that area of external life where, for those who truly understand things, it is impossible not to feel the divine directly in this area of external experience. Kant still assumed that the so-called “categorical imperative” is necessary for the moral life of human beings: if the categorical imperative can speak in the soul, then duty can live its way into human life. This is as if this imperative were to speak into the soul from a world in which human beings do not exist. Goethe did not feel this way. Instead, he was clear that those who experience duty experience God, who lives into the soul through duty. Goethe's view was that by lovingly experiencing duty, one experiences God directly in moral life. For him, morality is the direct experience of the divine in the world. But if one can feel God pulsating through the soul in morality, then one is not far from the point where one can experience him in other regions. For Kant, it was still a daring “adventure of reason” to experience the divine directly. But Goethe replied: "If we are to rise to a higher realm through morality, through faith in God, virtue, and immortality, and approach the first being, then it may well be the same in the intellectual realm that, by contemplating an ever-creating nature, we make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in its productions. Having first unconsciously and out of an inner urge relentlessly pursued that archetypal, typical image, I had even succeeded in constructing a natural representation, so that nothing could now prevent me from courageously undertaking the adventure of reason, as the old man from Königsberg himself calls it." Kant still called it an “adventure of reason” to experience a spiritual world directly. Goethe is already at the point where he wants to courageously undertake the “adventure of reason.” But he is convinced that one cannot enter the spiritual world other than with reverence, worship—that is, with a religious mood. Religion, as true, genuine religion, opens the gates to the spiritual world. Therefore, Goethe believes that anyone who has already experienced this, whether scientifically or artistically, and brings with them a religious mood, thereby brings with them the possibility of experiencing the spiritual world. Therefore, spiritual science must feel in harmony with Goethe. And in summary, we can apply the confession he expressed in a few words to today's consideration, summarizing what can be called the “spiritual-scientific creed”: Those who have real science, those who have real art, are so immersed in real life that they have the best preparation for experiencing a spiritual world; but those who have neither science nor art should try to kindle in their souls that longing which will first enable them to experience religious reverence, and then, through the detour of religious sentiment, they will be able to enter the spiritual world. Goethe expressed this precisely in the following words:

Those who possess science and art,
also has religion;
Those who possess neither of these two,
let them have religion!