XXV. On the Significance of the Catholic Mass in the Sense of Mysticism
GA 90b/1905-03-17/p006
·1905-03-17
·
English
HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
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: «Frühe Vortragsreihen und Einzelvorträge für Mitglieder in Berlin 1905–1906 nach ausführlichen und z.T. fragmentarischen Mitschriften.» (Early lecture series and single lectures for members in Berlin 1905-1906, from detailed and in part fragmentary listeners' transcripts.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 90b); the description calls them "Hörermitschriften", and the served text carries the note-taker's gap marker "[Lücke in der Mitschrift]". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
Man has brought low desires, passions and instincts into the world. The lower animal forms are decadent products of man. Everything that is expressed in animals by lower passions has been brought into the world by man. An original state of the world was as we now see it realized in the mineral world. The gem has no desire, no craving, no wish; the gem is chaste and undemanding. If you imagine the other entities with the same chaste and undemanding nature, you have the ideal of the secret disciple. He had to awaken in him the feeling: You must become again as pure, desireless creation, which has emerged so chaste from the hand of the Creator. He sacrificed everything lower - that was the “catharsis”, the purification of instincts, desires, passions - this corresponds to the “sacrifice” or “oblatio” in the Mass, the second part of the Mass.
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