Ninth Lecture

Let us take another case: a man who is not exactly lacking in vanity found himself years ago, after first objecting to anthroposophy in general, in this anthroposophy. I was the very last person to have sought out this personality. He presented himself. It turned out that there were many things that did not exactly mean that this personality was striving for completely impersonal goals in our society. That cannot be demanded, of course, so it cannot be criticized if sometimes personal goals are also accommodated to some extent. Sometimes such personal aims are accommodated because in this way many people can be led to what is right after all. And so it happened that at first the person concerned was quite satisfied with us. He wrote a pamphlet, in fact. I even condescended to write an epilogue to it, and the pamphlet was also taken up by our publishing house. He was on good terms with us; we were people who could be talked to. Then the person in question had another work printed, and after this work had had various fates, which are now of no concern to us, he offered it to the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House again. However, it was impossible to include this work in the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House. On the first pages of this writing, it says that I had only hinted at certain things about the Christ problem, and that the gentleman in question would like to elaborate on them. I am not saying this out of hurt vanity, although in this case I am being accused of it; but the sentence in which it is attributed to me is a blatant untruth, because the matter mentioned did not take place. Without taking into account the fact that I might have had reason not to go further, things are then elaborated in a way that may remind one of another story that took place, of which this story is at least a miniature version. I will have to come back to this other story as well, and I will do so briefly in a moment. In this writing by the gentleman in question, all kinds of things that I had only said in lectures were simply stated. Dr. Steiner was quite right to take umbrage at this and rejected the manuscript for publication. And because his manuscript was rejected, the man became an opponent. Now, of course, if you are writing an article for a journal, you cannot say: The Anthroposophical Society is fundamentally bad because the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House rejected my manuscript. That won't do! But that would have been the truth! So, despite the fact that the person concerned has been informed about the matter countless times, the fairy tale about contradictions is invented. The person concerned knows very well what the situation is regarding these contradictions, but he writes newspaper articles about them! What these newspaper articles say is of no significance, because the person concerned did not become an opponent because of this matter. He could have known about this long before he joined. He became an opponent for the stated reason. Some doubt whether one can so easily make the hypothesis: What is afterwards is also causally conditioned by what went before; but it remains conspicuous, nevertheless, that the antagonism of Mr. Max Seiling followed immediately upon the rejection of his writing by our publishing house. Of course it is easy to deny such a thing, to object to it in all sorts of ways, but it is not a matter of what one or the other objects to, but of what the facts are.