The Essence of Anthroposophy

I would like to use a trivial comparison: just as the individual forms of a nutshell are built according to exactly the same laws as the nut kernel – as you can see, the same forces act in the shell in their position and in their mutual relationship as they do inside the nut kernel – so, if anthroposophy is is to be understood not as a theory, not as a collection of dull ideas, but as real life appearing in ideas, then what appears as its framework, so to speak its structural shell, must be made of exactly the same spirit as the ideas in which the supersensible life is presented. Therefore, everything that has been realized in Dornach, whether architecturally, pictorially, sculpturally or in any other artistic way, must come from the same spirit as that which is spoken as the Word on the podium. This appearance of ideas and thought-forms cannot be other than the kernel of the nut to the shell, to that which speaks out of forms that are not straw-like allegories or symbols; there everything has flowed into the truly artistic. And yet, even if the whole is only a beginning, one may still refer with a certain certainty to Goethe and in particular to Goethe's view of art. One need only think of how Goethe put it: “When nature reveals her manifest secret to someone, that person feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” In another saying, Goethe expresses the same sentiment: “Art is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would never be revealed without it.