Lecture XI

All that meets us from without can become a mirror of the soul. Do not take that as a mere superficiality, but as something that one can acquire from spiritual science. It will be as it was centuries ago, where in every lock, in every key, we met with something that reflected what the craftsman had felt and experienced. In the same way when there is again true spiritual life in humanity, the whole of life, all that meets us outside, will appear to us again as an image of the soul. Secular buildings are only secular as long as man is incapable of imprinting the spirit into them. Spirit can be imprinted everywhere. The picture of the railway station can flash up, artistically conceived. Today we have not got it. But when it is realized again what forms ought to be, one will feel that the locomotive can be formed architecturally and that the station can be related to it as the outer envelopment of what the locomotive expresses in its architectural forms. Only when they are architecturally conceived will they be mutually related as two things belonging to each other. But then too it is not a matter of indifference how left and right are used in the forms. When man learns how the inner expresses itself in the outer, then there will be a culture again. There have indeed been ages when as yet no Romanesque, no Gothic architecture existed, when those who bore in their souls the dawn of a new culture were gathered together in the catacombs below the old Roman city. But that which lived within them and could only be engraved in meagre forms in the ancient earth-caves, that which you find on the tombs of the dead, this lit up dimly there and is what then appears to us in the Romanesque arches, the Romanesque pillars, the apse. Thought has been carried forth into the world. Had the first Christians not borne the thought in the soul it would not meet us in what has become world culture. The theosophist only feels him-self as such when he is conscious that in his soul he carries a future culture. Others may ask what he has already accomplished. Then he says to himself: What did the Christians of the catacombs accomplish, and what has grown from it?