Lecture III

We are thus able to say that Lucifer has a hand in all traditional theology, all art that is stiff and mannered, anything by way of renaissance; Ahriman has a hand in all materialistic science divorced from the realm of the spirit and unable to find the spirit in the world of nature, and in all aspects of human activity that are mechanical and without inwardness. The luciferic angelic spirits who have survived till today on the basis of tradition are only interested in keeping people from actually doing anything at all. They want to keep them confined to the inner life. Human beings have become individuals, but these angelic spirits do not want human actions to flow out into life and activity, into a manifestation of human will impulses. They want to keep people in an introspective frame of mind, to look rather than take action, to be mystics and follow the wrong kind of theosophy. They like people to sit musing all day, pursuing a thread through all kinds of riddles of the world and unwilling to apply the things they have in mind to the real world outside. They want detached observation to lead to a science of the outside world. They are good at creating a science like the one of Father Secchi,[^9] who was an excellent astrophysicist, being able to make observations using the microscope and telescope and record them, and who also had something that did not relate to this at all, a sublime wisdom greater than the wisdom of this earth and of the human mind that had been given to him by luciferic spirits. The luciferic spirits nurture this wisdom and in doing so tear the human soul and spirit away from earth existence. And however great our materialistic science may be, it comes to nothing, for it has no inner reality of the spirit. This is of no interest to the luciferic spirits.