IX
Dornach, March 3,
1923
Yesterday I undertook
to give you a sort of report on the events that took place in
Stuttgart. I went on to say that I would like to convey something of
the substance of the lectures I delivered there. So I will do that
today, and tomorrow try to add further comment supplementing
yesterday's report.
The first lecture on
Tuesday was conceived as a response to a quite definite need that had
developed and made itself clearly felt during the discussions of
Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; they have been described to you at least
from the standpoint of the mood that prevailed there. The need I
refer to was for a survey of the essentials of community building.
Community building by human beings working in anthroposophy has
recently played an important role in the Society. Young people in
particular — but other, older ones as well — entered the
Society with a keen longing to meet others in it with whom they could
have a type of experience that life does not afford the single
individual in today's social order. To say this is to call attention
to a thoroughly understandable longing felt by many people of our
time.
As a result of the
dawning of the age of consciousness, old social ties have lost their
purely human content and their purely human strength. People always
used to grow into some particular community. They did not become
hermits; they grew into some quite specific community or other. They
grew into the community of a family, a profession, a certain rank.
Recently they have been growing into the communities we call social
classes, and so on.
These various
communities have always carried certain responsibilities for the
individual that he could not have carried for himself.
One of the strongest
bonds felt by men of modern times has been that of class. The old
social groupings: those of rank, of nationality, even of race —
have given way to a sense of belonging to a certain class. This has
recently developed to a point where the members of a given class
— the so-called higher classes or aristocracy, the bourgeoisie,
the proletariat — make common cause. Thus communities based on
class have transcended national and even racial and other such
loyalties, and a good many of the elements witnessed in modern
international social life can be ascribed to these class
communities.
But the age of the
consciousness soul, which began early in the fifteenth century and
has come increasingly to the fore, has recently been making itself
felt in human souls with growing urgency and vehemence. This has made
human beings feel that they can no longer find in class communities
any elements that could carry them into something beyond merely
individual existence. On the one hand, modern man has a strong sense
of individuality and cannot tolerate any interference with his life
of individual thought and feeling. He wants to be recognized as a
personality. That goes back to certain primal causes. If I may again
resort to the terminology I used yesterday, I would say that since
the end of Kali Yuga — or, in other words, since this century
began — something has been stirring in contemporary souls, no
matter how unconsciously, that could be expressed in the words,
“I want to be a distinct individual.” Of course, not
everybody could formulate it thus. It shows itself in many kinds of
discontent and psychic instability. But underlying them is the desire
to be a distinct personality.
The truth is,
however, that no one can get along on earth without other human
beings. Historic ties and bonds like those that unite the proletariat
in a sense of class belonging, for example, do not supply anything
that on the one hand can satisfy the urge to be a distinct individual
and on the other unite individuals with their fellowmen. Modern man
wants the purely human element in himself to relate him to the purely
human element in others. He does indeed want social ties, but he
wants them to have an individual character like that experienced in
personal friendships.
An endless amount of
what goes on between human beings in contemporary life can be traced
to a craving for such human communities. It was quite evident a while
ago when a group of younger people came to me wanting to bring about
a renewal of Christianity. It was their belief that such a renewal
could be achieved only by making the Christ impulse very much alive
in the sense that anthroposophy has demonstrated. This longing felt
by younger theologians, some of whom were just completing their
training and were therefore about to assume pastoral duties, others
of whom were still studying, was the element that gave birth to the
latest offshoot of our Society, the Movement for Religious
Renewal.
Now quite a variety
of things had to be done for this Movement for Religious Renewal. It
was of first concern to bring the Christ impulse to life in a way
suited to the present. To do this meant taking very seriously indeed
the fact I have so often stressed: that the Christ not only spoke to
human souls at the beginning of the Christian era but has carried out
the promise that he made when he said, “I will be with you
always, unto the very end of the earth.” This means that he can
always be heard whenever a soul desires it, that a continuing Christ
revelation is taking place. There had to be an ongoing evolution from
the written Gospels to immediately living revelation of the Christ
impulse. This was one aspect of the task of religious renewal.
The other was one
that I had to characterize at once by saying that religious renewal
must bring communities into being, that it must build religious
communities. Once a community has equipped an individual with
knowledge, he can do something with it by himself. But that direct
experience of the spiritual world, which is not based on thought but
rather on feeling and is religious by nature, this experience of the
spiritual world as divine can only be found by forming communities.
So a healthy building of community must, I said, go hand in hand with
the healthy development of religious life.
The personalities who
undertook the launching of this Movement for Religious Renewal were,
at the outset, all Protestant theologians. Their attention could be
called to the fact that it was just the Protestant denominations that
had recently been tending to lay increasing emphasis on sermons, to
the neglect of ritual. But preaching has an atomizing effect on
communities. The sermon, which is intended to convey knowledge of the
spiritual world, challenges the individual soul to form its own
opinions. This fact is reflected in the particularly pronounced
modern antagonism to the credo, the confession of beliefs, in an age
when everyone wants to confess only to his own. This has led to an
atomization, a blowing apart of the congregation, with a resultant
focusing of the religious element on the individual.
This would gradually
bring about the dissolution of the soul elements of the social order
if there were not to be a renewed possibility of building true
community. But true community building can only be the product of a
cultus derived from fresh revelations of the spiritual world. So the
cultus now in use in the Movement for Religious Renewal was
introduced. It takes mankind's historical evolution fully into
account, and thus represents in many of its single details as well as
in its overall aspects a carrying forward of the historical element.
But its every aspect also bears the imprint of fresh revelations,
which the spiritual world can only now begin to make to man's higher
consciousness.
The cultus unites
those who come together at its celebration. It creates community, and
Dr. Rittelmeyer said quite rightly, in the course of the Stuttgart
deliberations, that in the community building power of the cultus the
Movement for Religious Renewal presents a great danger —
perhaps a very grave one — to the Anthroposophical Society.
What was he pointing to when he said this? He was calling attention
to the fact that many a person approaches the Society with the
longing to find a link with others in a free community experience.
Such communal life with the religious coloration that the cultus
gives it can be attained, and people with such a longing for
community life can satisfy it in the Movement for Religious Renewal.
If the Society is not to be endangered, it must therefore also make a
point of nurturing a community building element.
Now this called
attention to a fact of the greatest importance in this most recent
phase of the Society's development. It pointed out that
anthroposophists must acquire an understanding of community building.
An answer must be found to the question whether the community
building that is being achieved in the Movement for Religious Renewal
is the only kind there is at present, or whether there are other
possibilities of attaining the same goal in the Anthroposophical
Society.
This question can
obviously only be answered by studying the nature of community
building.
But that impulse to
build community, which modern man feels and the cultus can satisfy,
is not the only one that moves him, strong though it is; there is
still another. Every human being of the present feels both kinds of
longings, and it is most desirable that each and every one should
have his need met by providing community building elements not only
in the Movement for Religious Renewal but in the Anthroposophical
Society as well.
When one is
discussing something, one naturally has to clothe it in idea form.
But what I am about to present in that form really lives at the
feeling level in people of our time. Ideas are a device for making
things clear. But what I want to talk about now is something that
modern man experiences purely as feeling.
The first kind of
community building that we encounter the moment we set out on earthly
life is one that we take quite for granted and seldom think about or
weigh in feeling. That is the community built by language. We learn
to speak our mother-tongue as little children, and this mother-tongue
provides us with an especially strong community building element
because it comes into the child's experience and is absorbed by him
at a time when his etheric body is still wholly integrated with the
rest of his organism and as yet quite undifferentiated. This means
that the mother-tongue grows completely at one with his entire being.
But it is also an element that groups of human beings share in
common. People feel united by a common language, and if you remember
something I have often mentioned, the fact that a spiritual being is
embodied in a language, that the genius of language is not the
abstraction learned men consider it but a real spiritual being, you
will sense how a community based on a shared language rests on the
fact that its members feel the presence of a real genius of speech.
They feel sheltered beneath the wings of a real spiritual being. That
is the case wherever community is built.
All community
building eventuates in a higher being descending from the world of
the spirit to reign over and unite people who have come together in a
common cause.
But there is another,
individual element eminently capable of creating community that can
make its appearance when a group foregathers. A common tongue unites
people because what one is saying can live in those who are listening
to him; they thus share a common content. But now let us imagine that
a number of individuals who spent their childhood and early
schooldays together find an occasion of the sort that could and
indeed often does present itself to meet again some thirty years
later. This little group of forty- or fifty-year-olds, every one of
whom spent his childhood in the same school and the same region,
begins to talk of common experiences as children and young people.
Something special comes alive in them that makes for quite a
different kind of community than that created by a common tongue.
When members of a group speaking the same language come, in the
course of meeting and talking, to feel that they understand one
another, their sense of belonging together is relatively superficial
compared with what one feels when one's soul-depths are stirred by
entertaining common memories. Every word has a special coloring, a
special flavor, because it takes one back to a shared youth and
childhood. What unites people in such moments of communal experience
reaches deeper levels of their soul life. One feels related in deeper
layers of one's being to those with whom one comes together on this
basis.
What is this basis of
relationship? It consists of memories — memories of communal
experiences of earlier days. One feels oneself transported to a
vanished world where one once lived in company with these others with
whom one is thus re-united.
This is to describe
an earthly situation that aptly illustrates the nature of the cultus.
For what is intended with the cultus? Whether its medium be words or
actions, it projects into the physical world, in an entirely
different sense than our natural surroundings do, an image of the
super-sensible, the spiritual world. Every plant, every process in
external nature is, of course, also an image of something spiritual,
but not in the direct sense that a rightly presented verbal or
ceremonial facet of the cultus is. The words and actions of the
cultus convey the super-sensible world in all its immediacy. The
cultus is based on speaking words in the physical world in a way that
makes the super-sensible world immediately present in them, on
performing actions in a way that conveys forces of the super-sensible
world. A cultus ritual is one in which something happens that is not
limited to what the eyes see when they look physically at ritualistic
acts; the fact is rather that forces of a spiritual, super-sensible
nature permeate ordinary physical forces. A super-sensible event takes
place in the physical act that pictures it.
Man is thus directly
united with the spiritual world by means of the physically
perceptible words and actions of the cultus. Rightly presented, its
words and actions bring to our experience on the physical plane a
world that corresponds to the pre-earthly one from which we human
beings have descended. In just the same sense in which forty- or
fifty-year-olds who have met again feel themselves transported back
into the world they shared in childhood does a person who joins
others at the celebration of a genuine cultus feel himself
transported back into a world he shared with them before they
descended to the earth. He is not aware of this; it remains a
subconscious experience, but it penetrates his feeling life all the
more deeply for that very reason. The cultus is designed with this
intent. It is designed with a view to giving man a real experience of
something that is a memory, an image of his pre-earthly life, of his
existence before he descended to the earth. The members of
congregations based on a cultus feel especially keenly what, for
purposes of illustration, I have just described as taking place when
a group comes together in later life and exchanges memories of
childhood: They feel transported into a world where they lived
together in the super-sensible. This accounts for the binding ties
created by a cultus-based community, and it has always been the
reason why it did so. Where it is a matter of a religious life that
does not have an atomizing effect because of its stress on preaching
but instead emphasizes the cultus, the cultus will lead to the
forming of a true community or congregation. No religious life can be
maintained without the community building element. Thus a community
based in this sense on common memories of the super-sensible is a
community of sacraments as well.
But no form of
sacrament- or cultus-based community that remains standing where it
is today can meet the needs of modern human beings. To be sure, it
may be acceptable to many people. But cultus-based congregations
would not achieve their full potential or — more important
still — reach their real goal if they were to remain nothing
more than communities united by common memories of super-sensible
experience. This has created an increasing need for introducing
sermons into the cultus. The trouble is that the atomizing tendency
of sermons as these are presently conceived by the Protestant
denominations has become very marked, because the real needs arising
from the consciousness soul development of this Fifth Post-Atlantean
epoch have not been taken into account. The concept of preaching in
the older confessions is still based on the needs of the Fourth
Post-Atlantean period. In these older churches, sermons conform to
the world view that prevailed during the period of intellectual soul
development. They are no longer suited to the modern consciousness.
That is why the Protestant churches have gone over to a form of
presentation that makes its appeal more to human opinion, to
conscious human understanding.
There is every good
reason for doing this, of course. On the other hand, no really right
way of doing it has yet been found. A sermon contained within the
cultus is a misfit; it leads away from the cultus in a cognitive
direction. But this problem has not been well recognized in the form
preaching has taken in the course of man's ongoing evolution. You
will see this immediately when I remind you of a certain fact. You
will see how little there is left when we omit sermons of more recent
times that do not take a Biblical text. In most cases, Sunday sermons
as well as those delivered on special occasions take some quotation
from the Bible for their text because fresh, living revelation such
as is also available in the present is rejected. Historical tradition
remains the only source resorted to. In other words, a more
individual form of sermon is being sought, but the key to it has not
been found. Thus sermons eventuate in mere opinion, personal opinion,
with atomizing effect.
Now if the recently
established Movement for Religious Renewal, built as it is in all
essentials on an anthroposophical foundation, reckons with fresh,
ongoing revelation, with a living spiritual experience of the
super-sensible world, then it will be just the sermon factor that will
bring it to recognize its need for something further. This something
is the same thing that makes fresh, ongoing, living knowledge of the
spiritual world possible, namely, anthroposophical spiritual science.
I might express it by saying that sermons will always be the windows
through which the Movement for Religious Renewal will have to receive
what an ongoing, living Anthroposophical Society must give it. But as
I said when I spoke of the Movement for Religious Renewal at the last
lecture I gave over there in the still intact Goetheanum, if the
Movement for Religious Renewal is to grow, the Anthroposophical
Society will have to stand by it in the liveliest possible way, with
all the living life of anthroposophy flowing to it from a number of
human beings as the channel. The Movement for Religious Renewal would
soon go dry if it were not to have at least some people standing by
it in whom anthroposophical cognition is a really living element.
But as I said, many
individuals are presently entering the Society, seeking anthroposophy
not just in the abstract but in the community belonging that
satisfies a yearning of the age of consciousness. It might be
suggested that the Society too should adopt a cultus. It could do
this, of course, but that would take it outside its proper sphere. I
will therefore now go on to discuss the specifically anthroposophical
way of building community.
Modern life
definitely has other community building elements to offer besides
that based on common memories of pre-natal experience of the
super-sensible world. The element I have in mind is one that is needed
by the present in a form especially adapted to the age of
consciousness.
In this connection I
must point out something that goes entirely unnoticed by most human
beings of our time.
There has, to be
sure, always been talk of idealism. But when idealism is mentioned
nowadays, such talk amounts to little more than hollow phrases, even
in the mouths of the well-meaning. For ours is a time when
intellectual elements and forces have come especially strongly to the
fore throughout the entire civilized world, with the result that
there is no understanding for what a whole human being is. The
longing for that understanding is indeed there, particularly in the
case of modern youth. But the very indefiniteness of the form in
which youth conceives it shows that something lives in human souls
today that has not declared itself at all distinctly; it is still
undifferentiated, and it will not become the less naive for being
differentiated.
Now please note the
following. Imagine yourselves back in times when religious streams
were rising and inundating humankind. You will find that in those
bygone periods of human evolution this and that proclamation from the
spiritual world was being greeted by many people with enormous
enthusiasm. Indeed, it would have been completely impossible for the
confessions extant today to find the strength to carry people if, at
the time of these proclamations, souls had not felt a much greater
affinity for revelations from the spiritual world than is felt today.
Observing people nowadays, one simply cannot imagine them being
carried away by anything in the nature of a proclamation of religious
truths such as used to take place in earlier ages. Of course, sects
do form, but there is a philistine quality about them in great
contrast to the fiery response of human souls to earlier
proclamations. One no longer finds the same inner warmth of soul
toward things of the spirit. It suffered a rapid diminution in the
last third of the nineteenth century. Granted, discontent still
drives people to listen to this or that, and to join one or another
church. But the positive warmth that used to live in human souls and
was solely responsible for enabling individuals to put their whole
selves at the service of the spirit has been replaced by a certain
cool or even cold attitude. This coolness is manifest in human souls
today when they speak of ideals and idealism. For nowadays the matter
of chief concern is something that still has a long way to go to its
fulfillment, that still has a long waiting period before it, but that
as expectation is already very much alive in many human souls today.
I can characterize it for you in the following way.
Let us take two
states of consciousness familiar to everybody, and imagine a dreaming
person and someone in a state of ordinary waking consciousness.
What is the situation
of the dreamer? It is the same as that of a sleeping person. For
though we may speak of dreamless sleep, the fact is that sleepers are
always dreaming, though their dreams may be so faint as to go
unnoticed.
What, I repeat, is
the dreamer's situation? He is living in his own dream-picture world.
As he lives in it he frequently finds it a good deal more vivid and
gripping — this much can certainly be said — than his
everyday waking experience. But he is experiencing it in complete
isolation. It is his purely personal experience. Two people may be
sleeping in one and the same room, yet be experiencing two wholly
different worlds in their dream consciousness. They cannot share each
other's experience. Each has his own, and the most they can do is
tell one another about it afterwards.
When a person wakes
and exchanges his dream consciousness for that of everyday, he has
the same sense perception of his surroundings that those about him
have. They begin to share a communal scene. A person wakes to a
shared world when he leaves dreams behind and enters a day-waking
state of consciousness. What wakes him out of the one consciousness
into the other? It is light and sound and the natural environment
that rouse him to the ordinary day-waking state, and other people are
in the same category for him. One wakes up from dreams by the natural
aspects of one's fellowmen, by what they are saying, by the way they
clothe their thoughts and feelings in the language they use. One is
awakened by the way other people naturally behave. Everything in
one's natural environment wakes one to normal day consciousness. In
all previous ages people woke up from the dream state to day-waking
consciousness. And these same surroundings provided a person with the
gate through which, if he was so minded, he entered spiritual
realms.
Then a new element
made its appearance in human life with the awakening and development
of the consciousness soul. This calls for a second kind of awakening,
one for which the human race will feel a growing need: an awakening
at hand of the souls and spirits of other human beings. In ordinary
waking life one awakens only in meeting another's natural aspects.
But a person who has become an independent, distinct individual in
the age of consciousness wants to wake up in the encounter with the
soul and spirit of his fellowman. He wants to awaken to his soul and
spirit, to approach him in a way that startles his own soul awake in
the same sense that light and sound and other such environmental
elements startle one out of dreaming.
This has been felt as
an absolutely basic need since the beginning of the twentieth
century, and it will grow increasingly urgent. It is a need that will
be apparent throughout the twentieth century, despite the time's
chaotic, tumultuous nature, which will affect every phase of life and
civilization. Human beings will feel this need — the need to be
brought to wake up more fully in the encounter with the other person
than one can wake up in regard to the merely natural surroundings.
Dream life wakes up into wakeful day consciousness in the encounter
with the natural environment. Wakeful day consciousness wakes up to a
higher consciousness in the encounter with the soul and spirit of our
fellowman. Man must become more to his fellowman than he used to be:
he must become his awakener. People must come closer to one another
than they used to do, each becoming an awakener of everyone he meets.
Modern human beings entering life today have stored up far too much
karma not to feel a destined connection with every individual they
encounter. In earlier ages, souls were younger and had not formed so
many karmic ties. Now it has become necessary to be awakened not just
by nature but by the human beings with whom we are karmically
connected and whom we want to seek.
So, in addition to
the need to recall one's super-sensible home, which the cultus meets,
we have the further need to be awakened to the soul-spiritual element
by other human beings, and the feeling impulse that can bring this
about is that of the newer idealism. When the ideal ceases to be a
mere abstraction and becomes livingly reunited with man's soul and
spirit, it can be expressed in the words, “I want to wake up in
the encounter with my fellowman.”
This is the feeling
that, vague though it is, is developing in youth today, “I want
to be awakened by my fellowman,” and this is the particular
form in which community can be nurtured in the Anthroposophical
Society. It is the most natural development imaginable for when
people come together for a communal experience of what anthroposophy
can reveal of the super-sensible, the experience is quite a different
one from any that the individual could have alone. The fact that one
wakes up in the encounter with the soul of the other during the time
spent in his company creates an atmosphere that, while it may not
lead one into the super-sensible world in exactly the way described in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,
furthers one's understanding of the ideas that anthroposophical
spiritual science brings us from super-sensible realms.
There is a different
understanding of things among people who share a common idealistic
life based on mutual communication of an anthroposophical content,
whether by reading aloud or in some other way. Through experiencing
the super-sensible together, one human soul is awakened most
intensively in the encounter with another human soul. It wakes the
soul to higher insight, and this frame of mind creates a situation
that causes a real communal being to descend in a group of people
gathered for the purpose of mutually communicating and experiencing
anthroposophical ideas. Just as the genius of a language lives in
that language and spreads its wings over those who speak it, so do
those who experience anthroposophical ideas together in the right,
idealistic frame of mind live in the shelter of the wings of a higher
being.
Now what takes place
as a result?
If this line (Dr.
Steiner draws on the blackboard) represents the demarcation between
the super-sensible and the sense world, we have, here above it, the
processes and beings of the higher world experienced in the cultus;
they are projected by the words and ritualistic acts of the cultus
into the physical world here below the line. In the case of an
anthroposophical group, experience on the physical plane is lifted by
the strength of its genuine, spiritualized idealism into the
spiritual world. The cultus brings the super-sensible down into the
physical world with its words and actions. The anthroposophical group
raises the thoughts and feelings of the assembled individuals into
the super-sensible, and when an anthroposophical content is
experienced in the right frame of mind by a group of human beings
whose souls wake up in the encounter with each other, the soul is
lifted in reality into a spirit community. It is only a question of
this awareness really being present. Where it exists and groups of
this kind make their appearance in the Anthroposophical Society,
there we have in this reversed cultus, as I shall call it, in this
polar opposite of the cultus, a most potent community building
element. If I were to speak pictorially, I would put it thus: the
community of the cultus seeks to draw the angels of heaven down to
the place where the cultus is being celebrated, so that they may be
present in the congregation, whereas the anthroposophical community
seeks to lift human souls into super-sensible realms so that they may
enter the company of angels. In both cases that is what creates
community.
But if anthroposophy
is to serve man as a real means of entering the spiritual world, it
may not be mere theory and abstraction. We must do more than just
talk about spiritual beings; we must look for the opportunities
nearest at hand to enter their company. The work of an
anthroposophical group does not consist in a number of people merely
discussing anthroposophical ideas. Its members should feel so linked
with one another that human soul wakes up in the encounter with human
soul and all are lifted into the spiritual world, into the company of
spiritual beings, though it need not be a question of beholding them.
We do not have to see them to have this experience. This is the
strength-giving element that can emerge from groups that have come
into being within the Society through the right practice of community
building. Some of the fine things that really do exist in the Society
must become more common; that is what new members have been missing.
They have looked for them, but have not found them. What they have
encountered has instead been some such statement as, “If you
want to be a real anthroposophist you must believe in reincarnation
and the etheric body,” and so on.
I have often pointed
out that there are two ways of reading a book like my
Theosophy.
One is to read, “Man
consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, etc., and lives
repeated earth lives and has a karma, etc.” A reader of this
kind is taking in concepts. They are, of course, rather different
concepts than one finds elsewhere, but the mental process that is
going on is in many respects identical with what takes place when one
studies a cookbook. My point was exactly that the process is the
important thing, not the absorption of ideas. It makes no difference
whether you are reading, “Put butter into a frying pan, add
flour, stir; add the beaten eggs, etc.,” or, “There is
physical matter, etheric forces, astral forces, and they
interpenetrate each other.” It is all one from the standpoint
of the soul process involved whether butter, eggs and flour are being
mixed at a stove or the human entelechy is conceived as a mixture of
physical, etheric and astral bodies. But one can also read
Theosophy
in such a manner as to realize that it contains concepts that stand in the
same relation to the world of ordinary physical concepts as the latter
does to the dream world. They belong to a world to which one has to
awaken out of the ordinary physical realm in just the way one wakes
out of one's dream world into the physical. It is the attitude one
has in reading that gives things the right coloring. That attitude
can, of course, be brought to life in present-day human beings in a
variety of ways. They are all described and there to choose from in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.
But modern man also needs to go through the
transitional phase — one not to be confused with actually
beholding higher worlds — of waking up in the encounter with
the soul-spiritual aspect of his fellowman to the point of living
into the spiritual world just as he awakes from dreams into the
physical world through the stimulus of light and sound, etc.
We must rise to an
understanding of this matter. We have to come to understand what
anthroposophy ought to be within the Anthroposophical Society. It
should be a path to the spirit. When it becomes that, community
building will be the outcome.
But anthroposophy
must really be applied to life. That is the essential thing, my dear
friends. How essential it is can be illustrated by an example close
at hand. After we had had many smaller meetings with a varying number
of people there in Stuttgart and had debated what should be done to
consolidate the Society, I came together with the young people. I am
not referring to the meeting I reported on yesterday, which was held
later; this was a prior meeting, but also one held at night. These
particular young people were all students. Well, first there was some
talk about the best way to arrange things so that the Society would
function properly, and so on. But after awhile the conversation
shifted to anthroposophy itself. We got right into its very essence
because these young men and women felt the need to enquire into the
form studies ought to take in future, how the problem of doctoral
dissertations should be handled, and other such questions. It was not
possible to answer them superficially; we had to plunge right into
anthroposophy. In other words, we began with philistine
considerations and immediately got into questions of anthroposophy
and its application, such as, “How does one go about writing a
doctoral dissertation as an anthroposophist? How does one pursue a
subject like chemistry?” Anthroposophy proved itself
life-oriented, for deliberations such as these led over into it quite
of themselves.
The point is that
anthroposophy should never remain abstract learning. Matters can, of
course, be so arranged that people are summoned to a meeting called
for the purpose of deciding how the Society should be set up, with a
conversation about anthroposophy as a further item on the agenda.
This would be a superficial approach. I am not suggesting it, but
rather a much more inward one that would lead over quite of itself
from a consideration of everyday problems to the insight that
anthroposophy should be called upon to help solve them. One sees the
quickening effect it has on life in just such a case as the one
cited, where people were discussing the re-shaping of the Society
only to end up, quite as a matter of organic necessity, in a
discussion of how the anthroposophist and the scientific philistine
must conceive the development of the embryo from their respective
standpoints. We must make a practice of this rather than of a system
of double-entry bookkeeping that sets down such philistine entries on
one page as “Anthroposophical Society,” “Union for
a Free Spiritual Life,” and so on. Real life should be going on
without a lot of theory and abstractions and a dragging in of
supposedly anthroposophical sayings such as “In anthroposophy
man must find his way to man,” and so on. Abstractions of this
kind must not be allowed to play a role. Instead, a concrete
anthroposophical approach should lead straight to the core of every
matter of concern. When that happens, one seldom hears the phrase,
“That is anthroposophical, or un-anthroposophical.”
Indeed, in such cases the word “anthroposophy” is seldom
spoken. We need to guard against fanatical talk.
My dear friends, this
is not a superficial matter, as you will see. At the last Congress in
Vienna I had to give twelve lectures on a wide range of subjects, and
I set myself the task of never once mentioning the word
“anthroposophy.” And I succeeded! You will not discover
the word “anthroposophy” or
“anthroposophical” in a single one of the twelve lectures
given last June in Vienna. The experiment was a success. Surely one
can make a person's acquaintance without having any special interest
in whether his name is Mueller and what his title is. One just takes
him as he is. If we take anthroposophy livingly, just as it is,
without paying much attention to what its name is, this will be a
good course for us to adopt.
We will speak further
about these things tomorrow, and I will then give you something more
in the way of a report.
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