Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

GA 69d — 27 January 1913, Linz

26. The Nature of the Human Soul and the Meaning of Death

Linzer Tagespost, 49th year, No. 23, January 29, 1913, p. 4, also in: Heinrich Teutschmann, Rudolf Steiner in Linz, Linz 1981 (privately printed)

( The nature of the soul.) Yesterday, in the lecture hall of the Commercial Association building, a well-known figure in theosophical circles, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, gave a lecture on “Spiritual Research and the Nature of the Human Soul.” The speaker, a dreamy-looking man who nevertheless clearly became a zealot for his cause through tenacious study and stubborn adherence to the ideas he recognized as correct, first dealt with the two great mysteries of human life: the question of fate and the nature of the human soul. Theoretical understanding and our ordinary reason are not sufficient to get to the bottom of these two questions, especially the latter; but there is a means of recognizing the soul. This means, this power, is spiritual science, which shows the researcher that there are abilities within us that lie dormant in everyday life and are not bound to our physical body. Two alternating states of daily life show that the soul can be separated from its organism and can lead an independent existence; these are the states we refer to as “waking” and “sleeping.” Just as the “soul-spirit” leaves the body during sleep, through intensive training, concentration, meditation, and condensation [= contemplation], the soul can also be deliberately detached from the body, transported into the purely spiritual sphere, and thus led to self-knowledge. Moving on from this perspective of dualism, which holds fast to the existence of material and immaterial substances, the speaker developed his views on post-mortem life by arguing that the death of the body does not mean that the soul ceases to exist. On the contrary, since the disappearance of the most personal and individual, the most noble thing that man possesses, would contradict the world economy, the soul is reincarnated, generally in an ascending line. What we experience now is not only something inherited, but also the effect of what we have sown in a previous life; we must therefore seek the causes of our fate in a previous earthly life. “We ourselves are to blame if we were born into hardship and misery, and we ourselves have earned the gifts that fortune placed in our cradle as a godparent's gift.” And once the current spiritual core no longer fits our outer shell, this already shows the preparation for our future life on earth. The fact that Dr. Steiner repeatedly had to turn against the materialistic worldview in his remarks will become clear from this briefly sketched summary of his lecture. However, Dr. Steiner is convinced that the future belongs to spiritual science. “Humanity will one day perceive this science as a new elixir of life and thereby escape the shudders of death.” Following the lecture, he was asked various questions, including one about how and when the physical world began. He replied that the original was a spiritual being, from which the physical arose, whereupon further development took its course; when the spirit first deposited matter, human embodiment began. The event was attended by a large audience, some of whom were there out of genuine interest, others out of mere curiosity, which had been aroused by the otherworldly nature of the speaker and his followers who had come with him. True to the principle that everyone should be happy in their own way, we refrain from further criticism of the lecture. However, we hardly believe that the explanations and justifications that Dr. Steiner attached to several hypotheses were sufficient to convince his audience of their correctness; the childish views he expressed, for example, on the transmigration of souls, which he claimed to believe in and also used to argue against materialism, will probably have been shared by very few of his listeners.