55. The Mission of Devotion
GA 68b/1910-03-12/p048
·1910-03-12
·
English
MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
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 will always be a great moment when a person is able to experience in the circle of his family the veneration of this or that personality with whom one is acquainted. The child may not yet have seen this personality, so has not even enjoyed the external impression; it looks up, so to speak, from the stories about what one can see, as if to a complete stranger. Then it experiences the day in such a way that it first gains an impression of the previously revered personality in the external experience. Then it may stand with shy reverence at the door handle that is to give it access to the personality it has learned to revere. When the child has had these feelings, it also approaches the external impression in a completely different way, then something of the wonderful radiance that our soul can radiate is present where it first develops devotion and worship before approaching the object.
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