7. How Do We Understand Illness and Death?

GA 68b/1907-01-21/p011 ·1907-01-21 · English High

Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

It is understandable that a person with today's concepts and ideas, who has little knowledge of spiritual science, cannot become familiar with such a word. He has learned to see death and illness as natural processes, and it is completely foreign to him to see something [purely] natural that takes place within the world of purely natural processes as an effect of something moral, of something that depends on the arbitrariness and free will of man, of sin. That something moral can be the cause of something organic is far removed from the thinking of our time. If the apostle's word were correctly understood according to the wording, it would be quite futile to talk about it to our contemporaries. But it is not even understood correctly according to the wording. The Bible is a strange book of secrets, and those who think they understand it best usually penetrate its spirit the least.

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Cite: GA 68b/1907-01-21/p011 · edition English