V. The Inflow of Spiritual Knowledge Into Life

There you see how the healthy in the environment can also be understood when we realize that we also have an ego. Now we ask: Does this also show in our materialistic humanity in relation to art? Yes, it shows very characteristically and actually. If people were really confronted with what is presented, for example, in Hauptmann's or Sudermann's dramas, how many would faint! In the presentation they can endure what in real life would plunge them into sadness and move them to intervene. This is not possible on stage. Where does such a reversal of facts come from? It comes from the fact that in our materialistic age people live mostly on the periphery, where the I does not reveal itself. Indeed, what can make us most sad is what happened as the most terrible thing in the evolution of the world in the Mystery of Golgotha, in the suffering, in the whole tragedy of Christ Jesus. And we can be most jubilant where the victory, the victory of life over death, which was directly portrayed for the realms of eternity, was won in the resurrection. No other victory exists in which the highest hallelujah is so united with the deepest sadness, all suffering in the death on Golgotha and all the glory of the Easter season in the resurrection - there is no other event in which both the deepest sadness and the highest exultation are so expressed.