Healthy Thinking

Lecture 8

The Necessity of a Spiritual life.

Who can speak about the decline of the Western world?

A second lecture for the current time

Stuttgart on 29 July 1920

My dear honourable friends present here today! In my last lecture held here, I pointed to a significant literary, contemporary, publication, a literary publication which is referred to even by those who do not love it at all, which is generally called “literature,” and which one meets far too often as the person has to do, who speaks to you now. He wants to involve the foundations of practical life, with the forces that shape this practical life; he wants to involve everything that shapes this practical life out of the spiritual, with everything that is direct, elementary in man, everything that approaches a human being’s heart and soul and strengthens a person for life. He wants to have as little involvement as possible with what is today called “literature.” Regarding the book — you can sense it from the title’s formulation by today’s relevant lecture — the book of Oswald Spengler, “The Fall of the Western World,” may also speak to those who do not particularly love this literature as such. One can say that particularly those people who are not actually sleeping in their souls today can feel forces of decline, powerful forces of decay, working in terrible declining powers in our cultural life and civilisation and that this decline, these declining phenomena, are revealed in the language of Oswald Spengler’s book which, firstly, is so characteristic of the whole spirit of our time, but secondly, rings out especially from the Central European, the German spirit.

In this book of Oswald Spengler there is nothing less attempted than to prove the necessity of the fall of Western culture, to prove by all means, one can nearly call it, with all refinement of today’s scientific ways — yes, a science that has been proven by a brilliant man as a new science distilled out of the present one — so that Oswald Spengler’s book, I couldn’t call it a theoretical one, not literary one, but a book speaking about facts coming directly out of spiritual life of the present, also speaks in such a the way that the very thoughts of this book influences the deeds of the people who receive it. That many have absorbed these thoughts of Oswald Spengler’s book comes from the simple fact that this book, despite containing 615 pages, has already sold widely; more than 20,000 copies have been sold. What the sale of a book reaching 20,000 copies means for the number of readers contemplated, even those know, who have dealt with such questions.

One can already say that among those ideas, in spiritual areas, with which one has to deal with today, if one wants to deal a bit with the undercurrents of the present cultural and civilized life there are two books which are the most important. The first is Oswald Spengler’s book “The Fall of the Western World” and secondly, one which has perhaps not caught as much attention in literature, namely the book “The economic problems of the proletarian dictatorship.” This book appeared for the first time in the Viennese cooperative publishing house “Neue Erde” (New Earth), written by the man who, as the supreme economic commissioner, i.e. as minister for the affairs of economic life at the time of the establishment of the Hungarian Council dictatorship, after his escape and his internment in Austria, summarised his principles and experiences in this book. One could say that both these books shed a terrible light on what is happening in the undercurrents of spiritual and even working life at present.

Oswald Spengler is a man who tried with his “Fall of the Western World” — that its kernel, so he says, lies in the year of 1911, thus before the start of the war catastrophe — to show how our western culture contains forces of decline, how just in its characteristic phenomena it proves that it is in a declining culture. For Oswald Spengler this culture shows itself as the culture of decline, so he must prophesy that at the beginning of the third millennium it must end just like the ancient Persian epoch once did, the ancient Egyptian, the ancient Babylonian, the ancient Greek, the old Roman culture came to their end. That, my dear friends present here today, doesn’t prove he is a man coming with a superstitious prophecy, it doesn’t say he is a man who submits to any kind of arbitrary fantasy, this says it’s a man who masters the scientific spirit of the present in an excellent way. Precisely because of the genius of the author's personality, because of the universal mastery, one can say of twelve to fifteen contemporary sciences, because of the courageous penetration of all consequences of these sciences for practical and historical life, this book must be seen as a wealth of deeds, not just a single act. Everything I’ve expressed here can be said about this book on the one hand.

On the other hand it is a terrible book. Isn’t it a terrible book which, with all the weight of the scientific tools that can be applied today, ingeniously proves that the signs of decline have led to the downfall of this western culture which already led at the beginning of the third millennium — these phenomena of decay within which we live, which expressed itself in the flaming, warlike world catastrophe and which now continues even if it goes unnoticed by sleeping souls?

In an introductory way we must really work for a bit with the whole manner and way in which Oswald Spengler arrives at his conviction about the necessity of the West’s decline, if we want to answer the question which is actually the theme of today’s contemplation: Who may now speak against the downfall of the western world? — One must not speak recklessly against the Spengler book. To speak recklessly against it would mean to also recklessly disregard the serious scientific tools of the author, would mean that one does not want to consider at all that which he has conscientiously taught us out of the phenomena of contemporary life. I believe many have already spoken out against Oswald Spengler’s book who don’t actually should not be allowed to do so.

Oswald Spengler first appears as a history writer in his book. He says it himself; he had noticed the signs of decline, as I said, before the world war catastrophe. He wanted clarity about the actual causes, about the nature of these declining phenomena. He was one of those personalities on whose souls the declining phenomena became a burden because the larger masses of the population, particularly the so-called intelligent people, still spoke about how wonderfully far we have come and how we want to spread what we have achieved everywhere, into all corners of the world — it was shown to us the power we actually had to have, in order to be able to do what we have believed in to carry it out into the world, to really spread it. Oswald Spengler describes to us how he came up with the idea of declining phenomena of the present, phenomena which in truth one can’t speak about appropriately if one doesn’t speak about the entire history of the West, namely about which thoughts live in the western culture and how we are able today, from a historic viewpoint, to enliven these thoughts in us, enliven it by taking action.

So Oswald Spengler continues his observations towards a comprehensive history book which wants to research the entire foundation of western thought, feeling and experience. Oswald Spengler realised that this scientific approach which has become common in the last centuries, will gradually and after also being applied to history, that this scientific approach — from the viewpoint of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science we have often heard highlighted here — that this scientific approach comes into consideration in all that includes thinking, feeling and willing in those parts of humanity that are responsible for progress in general. It became clear to Oswald Spengler that history, without a scientific approach, doesn’t clarify the actual causes of historic events; how flawed the whole historical approach has become in the last centuries right up to the present.

That, my dear friends, is really also not without meaning in present practical relations because we will see after this, how in the widest circles, reality is made out of historical prejudices. We will, with a characteristic example of the Hungarian council commissioner for economic affairs, Eugen Varga, show that what Oswald Spengler pursues as historical thinking actually wants to become practical reality. If that which Oswald Spengler very clearly points out only exclude forces of decline then the way of looking and thinking which only come from thoughts and ideas emerging from this consideration of decline, even in the social organism, create only symptoms of decline.

In a person like professor Eugen Varga is incarnated, incorporated into the flesh, that way of thinking which Oswald Spengler is peeling off, it is only based on what must lead to the decline of the whole West at the beginning of the third millennium. If only declining phenomena are observed and added in an accelerated tempo with a socialist program and come before the world with the energy of a person like Professor Eugen Varga, then in a short time you will accumulate something that will lead to a decline. You accumulate this, that is, you create the germ of a declining social structure. Eugen Varga created such a social structure in the Hungary Council; such decaying structures were created by the comrades of Professor Eugen Varga, the Lenins and Trotskys in Eastern Europe. This expands more and more over Asia. That means nothing other than that one sees the cultural progress of the decline of the West, inoculating the social organism and then one doesn’t need to be surprised when these phenomena — proven by a scientist as leading to the fall of the whole western world — when these phenomena are concentrated as socialist ideas in a short time lead to the decline of what one pretend to be building up. That’s why these things are connected: Oswald Spengler’s observations and Eugen Varga’s experiences.

The time has come that whoever is seriously concerned with the affairs of the present should deal with them from a practical standpoint; it is time for this person, I would say, to go through the gates that lie in those public omissions and revelations, approach what makes a true realisation possible for actual deeds towards an advancement, to a resurgence of our declining western culture and civilization. Certainly it is so that at first the soul is sleeping in relation to phenomena of decline. Yet on the other hand it must not be concealed that it is a public frivolity if you do not want to look today at such phenomena as those mentioned here, but rather seek salvation with programs that are decades old and believe that you can achieve something other than decline with these programs and ideas. It is a cultural frivolity, a political frivolity carried on in the broadest sense, if you don’t direct your glance to such phenomena.

Now Oswald Spengler became acquainted with what I’ve often called Goetheanism here; he came to know about Goethe’s method of looking at nature as opposed to natural science which is maintained everywhere as official at universities from where it radiates to lower educational institutions and which, through the application of historic writing, has turned history into a caricature. Why did he find it necessary to become acquainted with the Goethean way of observing nature? He found it necessary to apply this Goethean method on history by applying it in such away, he believed, as it should be applied to historical phenomena. Goethe’s method is very different from today’s official natural scientific method of observation. Goethe looked at nature not from such a philosophic, mechanical, pedantic way as merely a connection between cause and effect; he looked at the rise of living beings in a living realm, how living beings emerge from birth, into youth, maturation, into aging and death.

One only need to read Goethe’s treatise of 1790, his attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants, in order to see how he views the development of the plant from the root, from leaf to leaf, in the ascent to blossom and fruit, to see how he looks at nature in its living, becoming, how every leaf is the symbol of the other, as the original form is only metamorphosed in the petal, in the stamens, even in the shoot. Inspired by this Goethean morphology, through this theory of the design of living beings, Oswald Spengler sets out to investigate the historical coming into being of humanity itself according to the pattern of Goethe's ideas about organic nature. So he realised he could look at cultures in the same way as one does the coming into being and growing of an organic life form, a plant, an animal or also a physical human being which is born, grows, ripens, ages and dies as it happens in cultures being born, grow, ripen, age and die, like the dying of the old Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek cultures, the Roman culture; he saw in the individual manifestations of these cultures what Goethe envisaged in individual forms of living beings. He takes into account what the western culture has brought about so far — just as one who studies living beings and compares one living being with another — he compares the western culture up to now with what the Greek, the Roman and those further cultures of ancient times which, up to a certain point, have their development. He could calculate where present culture stood, while finding a corresponding point of view to the view of the Persians, Egyptians and Greek cultures and so on; one could, so he calculated, predict when the culture of the West would perish because one knows how long the old cultures needed before they perished.

All of this becomes useful because Oswald Spengler breaks with the philistine method of viewing history, and he has the courage to break with it, he has the courage to say what history has become in its connection to mere scientific ideas; he has the courage to say, for example: The previous form of the historical approach has kept the formal consideration of history at a level that would have been ashamed of, in other sciences. — Why does he think this? For the reason that he thinks it is necessary not to apply the dead method that is appropriate for the mineral kingdom and other lifeless things to history, but to apply a living method to history, where one cultural form is compared with another. One then has to be a man of such universal knowledge like Oswald Spengler; one must be able to use achievements in the most diverse fields of science, art and technology of different times and cultures and compare them with each other. One must, for example, be able to compare the style in the architecture of any cultural period with the methods in optics, chemistry, and so on — that is, one must have a comprehensive view of what really happened, and Oswald Spengler has it, and he has it as one who has a complete command of the current scientific spirit. In this way he can compare — like eyes can compare one plant with another, one animal with another — so he can compare for example the work of a mathematician in a cultural period with someone making music; he can compare what the physicist has done at the experimental table with what the socialist agitator at the same time calls a cultural form; he can compare what the chemist says, with what the painter conjures on the canvas. That means he can really take and apply a morphological approach: he can compare, he can use a comparison, an analogy, he believes, to a scientific method and from this application of comparison, of analogy — which others only apply as a thread of fantasy — he finds strict methods of how to get out of superficial historical events which are usually considered isolated from one another, to deduce deeper causes.

This he does in his own way and it is interesting to see which results Oswald Spengler arrives at with his geniality, knowledge and boldness. He truly comes to transcend what history has actually become today in the hands of those who deal with history mostly from the point of view of one or other party without even being aware of it. How do today’s viewers of history themselves scoff in front of their middle school students about the fact that in the time of Herder and Goethe, people described a Brutus, a Caesar, a Marc Antony, an Alexander, a Pericles, using them as an ideal, taking any ideal personality and applying them either in their excellent, angelic or even heinous nature. Today’s history observers believe, in view of history, they are beyond all that which was there at the end of the 18^th century and beginning of the 19^th century, brought in from personal, human aspects into the historical perspective. Oswald Spengler rightly throws in their faces: “They sneer at historians of Goethe’s era when they try to defend their political ideals by writing a history of antiquity, with names like Lykurg, Brutus, Cato, Cicero, Augustus, through whose rescue or convictions their own program is hidden through personal effusiveness; but even they can’t write a chapter without betraying which party slant their morning paper belongs to.” Often one has to take into account what is living in the consciousness of the people currently, especially in the intellectuals and even in those apparently at the pinnacle of science; one has to characterize it as Oswald Spengler has characterized it here.

Spengler points out something else. Spengler remarks for example, how little has been drawn out of the depths of events, what in recent time, I would like to say as absolute truth, has been felt about any phenomenon. Oswald Spengler for instance remarks on the whole hype that started over Ibsen’s “Nora” at that time. Those good middle class people who believed they belonged in this very milieu and knew this milieu from which Ibsen’s “Nora” emerged, they believed they could draw the entire problem of femininity into their sphere. Oswald Spengler said: How funny would it be with Ibsen’s feminine problems if, instead of the famous Nora, one would replace her with Caesar’s wife, for example. Don’t they know that they are basically considering something sparse: those who did not cross over the middle class barrier between 1850 and 1950 — because then they will have disappeared — these ladies stepping out. It is quite a lot when a person of today must be taken seriously like Oswald Spengler who throws these things at people so eagerly — I would like to say out of sheer pleasure regarding their own education — how they often — unspoken or outspoken — occupy themselves in a strange way with self-praise and self-pleasure, how they know so delightfully much about the deepest secrets of the world and despite this, don’t sense that these secrets are nothing other than the European superficiality between 1850 and 1950.

It would be terrible if in the present time, nothing can effectively work against the serious tools of Oswald Spengler. Now, my dear friends, it must be pointed out what in the course of several years — actually I can already say since a decade ago — has also appeared here in Stuttgart from the Anthroposophic viewpoint of spiritual science. You see, a significant fact has often been pointed out here, the significant fact that one actually looks at quite incorrectly, how natural science has acted on the western cultural process in the last three to four centuries. It is believed that this natural science coming from Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo and so on — all of this prevailing belief in the widest circles — especially the scholarly circles — that one can learn through this how to penetrate reality. It is believed that one must school one’s thinking according to science, then in this way one would see what is actually being thought, what exactly is being thought, and as a result one must look at everything else coming about in life according to this pattern of observation.

Spiritual scientific observation leads to another kind of knowledge. This spiritual scientific observation does what, I would like to say, Oswald Spengler lapses from even in his superficial observations of Goetheanism, by doing it in a deeper way. Long before the name of Oswald Spengler was even mentioned, the most essential foundation of the entire western cultural development pointed to something else. It has been pointed out, certainly, that what happened in the development of western culture during the last three to four centuries, can only be understood from a spiritual scientific background, providing a real overview of the course of the whole history of mankind. In public lectures here, it has repeatedly been pointed out how totally different — one has to go back 7 to 8 Centuries if one wants to find it — the old Indian culture was, as I called it in my “Occult Science.” I pointed out how different they were, different as an ancient Persian, ancient Egyptian-Babylonian, an ancient Greek-Babylonian, the ancient Greek-Latin culture they had and how. According to these cultures, they were born, became young, then matured and died, how our contemporary culture, the fifth cultural epoch after the great Atlantic catastrophe, emerged — our contemporary culture about which people talk about in the most diverse ways. Repeatedly it was shown how within this contemporary culture of ours, since the middle of the 15^th Century, the intellectualist element, the element of mind, has risen and how in the development of mankind the emergence of this intellect — because before that the intellect did not mean the most cognitive power of the human being — how the emergence of this intellect for the whole education of mankind, means something special, especially in the West.

My dear friends, when one looks at the entire configuration — exactly what Oswald Spengler attempted, but did not manage — of the morphology of earlier cultural epochs in a spiritual scientific way, allowing it to go though one’s vision, then one knows: Big, powerful, awe-inspiring things have been produced by these ancient cultures, by being born, being young, becoming mature, aging and dying. However, what our culture is called to do, what it has to carry from the deepest depths of human soul life to the surface of outer cultural life, is the maturation of the true force of freedom in mankind. For this reason I tried to find out what has emerged from the foundations of human soul life in the beginning of the nineties of the last century in my book “Philosophy of Freedom.” After experiencing freedom, after the experience of freedom in the pure intellect, because in nothing else can freedom be experienced — although other things are also valuable in the human being — only in pure thinking can freedom be experienced and then radiate out to the rest of the human being. All that humanity found instinctively earlier in mysticism, in occultism and in theosophy as superficial knowledge, must be cast away. Today it is impossible for humanity to find what they absorbed from astrology, mysticism, theosophy, gnosis and what was useful for old knowledge, awaken it again somewhat, again wanting to warm it up.

What is incumbent upon us today is to bring out of the present viewpoint of development precisely that which leads to the consciousness of freedom: to grasp the being of the human being in touching it in pure thinking. If this human being is grasped in pure thinking, then a quite new spiritual world must be born out of this thinking. Out of the old cultures there was never anything born out of pure thinking that we have inherited as spiritual treasure, spiritual insights. Only in our time, out of pure thinking, can a true knowledge of the spiritual be born, because this knowledge of the spirit must be born out of pure thinking, because only in this way can a person simultaneously mature in the course of development of humanity towards freedom — to the real consciousness of freedom — which is then due to him in earth development. Everything that we experience in the terrible present, about phenomena of decline, come from this: Because mankind, from the lowest depths of its soul life, should grasp the crystal clarity of thought to conquer freedom and because mankind should mature to the strength that is necessary for this, old realities are omitted; they fall away first, drop into decline and the way must be sought as to how, from the crumbling debris of the old cultural life, the human will can rise, which penetrates thinking with full light, with which pure thinking can grow up in freedom.

In order to capture freedom, to find ourselves completely within, we must get out of the chaos, out of the ruins of outer life and give birth to human greatness from within. That’s why mankind’s view of what really could master outer life in its essence disappeared at first and it was precisely at the time when the consciousness of freedom awakened, but only a dead science was achieved. What came about as science was not something from which one could make actual progress in thinking but it overcame humanity as a weakness. What was to be achieved as freedom appeared as a weakness according to scientific observation. Science becomes weak because forces have to be diverted to the other side. Out of educational forces within the human being, science took on its own shape. How science has come into being is connected with the forces of mankind’s development. It is not the case that these forces had to learn from what science has become.

Now Oswald Spengler found the following: a person can’t penetrate the historical process of becoming with what science produces as ideas. It really depends on finding a necessary comparison in order to move from the outer appearances of historical events to deeper, inner events. However — and this we must keep clearly in view: Yes, Oswald Spengler noticed that today’s historical observation, which is similar to the approach in which all of mankind is missing, he noticed this sharply and clearly, and he even noticed that what has come to the fore as evident in Goetheanism, could help the scientific approach out of all its limitations. However, Oswald Spengler is a spirit who himself — although he universally dominated contemporary sciences — was deeply ingrained, not in the way of thinking generated by natural science, but in the way of thinking that has been generated by science since the middle of the 15th century; he is unable to develop to that which from the depth of the human soul could now overcome his scientific viewpoint.

So Oswald Spengler ingeniously arrived at a negative insight: Yes, if we allow science to become our life of action then we only manage to bring about a decline. He comes to claim: What does today's science give us? It gives us proof that what the western world at the beginning of the third millennium with its current culture was, must be over. — However, what has led from science is something he can’t conquer. One must give him justice: With those ideas contained in scientific knowledge one can only arrive at unproductive social ideas for the present. One must rise up to comparison, to image, to allegory, in order to recognise the deeper historical forces. However when comparison and allegory become not merely an image of fantasy and the image not just a product of imagination, if image and comparison, allegory and symbol in the sense of Spengler, not just created from fantasy, then a real force must be created from the soul, which did not rise in Oswald Spengler. The real forces — methods of acquiring knowledge from Higher Worlds, should be sketched here — these forces should be developed if one uses image, allegory, symbol and symptom, as Oswald Spengler uses them, quite seriously, for the observation of world events.

This means, in other words, that Oswald Spengler is a person who strives from this way of looking at things because he feels the current approach to human development inadequate. He knows different ideas must be applied, above all things, to history. He doesn’t want to apply these forms of ideas because they demand calling up forces within himself which can only apply to these forms of the ideas. It has to be said: When someone applies images, allegories, imaginations and symbols to the historic viewpoint then he continues, if he stays with the same point of view with which we are born — if he does not develop the spiritual forces of knowledge of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks — he continues to be a player of mere allegories, remains a fantasist in an historical territory. This means, what Oswald Spengler claimed as his method may not be applied from his spiritual viewpoint, but it may only be applied when a person has risen to what has already here been depicted as imaginative, inspirational and intuitive insight.

Oswald Spengler wants to apply methods to the historical viewpoint which are still permeated by the old scientific thinking, even if not by the scientific spirit. Oswald Spengler is one of those who goes red in the head when you mention what anthroposophical science speaks about is the only way out of the decline of the West. For Oswald Spengler it comes across, for example, in terms of social orientation from the anthroposophically oriented foundation, as salon communism and the like. Oswald Spengler shows genius in relation to his personal spiritual forces, shows universal thinking and recognition in the field of the most diverse sciences, but at the same time he also shows the utmost narrow-mindedness when it is about developing such mental powers in order for his methods to become fruitful.

My dear friends, only when one sees through this, only then can one speak against Oswald Spengler regarding the downfall of the western world. Only then can one say: Yes, you are right, the cultures that have come up in the course of historical development must be viewed in such a way that we look at their birth, their growing young, their maturing, their aging, their dying. — Yes, when we look at it this way then our culture reveals what we must ascribe to the downfall Oswald Spengler indicates. However, then we only see one culture beside another, like one plant next to another, and we derive nothing, which we can, when we observe through spiritual science.

When we study cultures through spiritual science and then glance back at the first culture, the old Atlantic culture — I have presented this in my lecture on the historical development of humanity — we find that what the human being possessed at that time as their own awareness, was primitive, quite elementary, simple. Yet, we find that at the same time, man could bring forth from his own powers of consciousness, an awe-inspiring primordial wisdom. We go back and find the most elementary stages of development in the first cultural epochs; but when we understand that the primordial wisdom lives in these cultures, then we literally kneel reverently down to what permeated these primordial cultures. If we go further, we find these first cultures replaced by other cultures. We find primordial wisdom less in what man consciously brings forward as higher, and so increasingly, until we reach our culture, namely since the middle of the 15^th Century, we find a complete drying up of the primordial wisdom. This is even expressed outwardly. It is nonsense that it is believed people could have understood scientific thinking during the 10^th or 11^th century. No, they couldn’t understand that because at that time quite a different language was spoken than today. You have to get to know the mindset of that time that has thoroughly changed. Therefore, what ruled in these earlier cultures had, albeit instinctively, dried out, so that one culture could bring about another culture. The primal Indian culture could supply the primordial germ of wisdom into the ancient Persian culture which in turn was able to send the primordial germ of wisdom into the ancient Egyptian culture, which in turn transmitted it to the Greco-Latin culture and so on. We have moved up — because of our consciousness of freedom — to an elaboration of the pure mind, of pure thinking, but we have lost the old instinctive primal wisdom.

Viewing nature only from the outside like Oswald Spengler does, we must speak like Oswald Spengler about the downfall of the Western world. We can only speak against the downfall of the Western world if we have the courage to say: The old, instinctive, spiritual knowledge has dried up, but in our hearts a new spark is already glowing. We are giving birth to a new spiritual life out of what we have acquired as intellect, which can penetrate our inner being to new cultural deeds. We don’t only believe, but we know: within us is the germ of futures, not merely of a future, and so we learn to understand how differently we must look at what history has brought about, than how Oswald Spengler views it.

We see, for example, how the old Greek-Latin culture, which has come up from the south, is coming to an end; it brought Christianity over from the Orient, preserved the Mystery of Golgotha at first, then — what happened to this Mystery of Golgotha? Humanity still understood it at the time because the primordial wisdom was around; one understood what the origin of Christianity was. Then the Germanic peoples came from the North and took up what the ancient peoples had developed, which had come to maturity and died; they took it into their new blood and transformed it. These Germanic peoples were the last ones who could take up the primordial wisdom. In its bosom mankind developed, in which this primordial wisdom dried up and which would bring forth a new spiritual life from the power that must be generated from within itself. If this spiritual life is not brought forwards, then the western world’s culture will pass over into barbarism.

Today it is not important to look at the outer world and say: I believe there will be enough forces to rekindle declining life. It’s not a matter of standing there with a sleeping soul and waiting for this or that to happen in the outside world; that leads to decline. With proof Oswald Spengler is right, even if the historians he laughs at prove him wrong in so many ways, in the face of those who are allowed to speak out of a new spiritual life against the decline of the Occident, he ceases to be right. He ceases to be right to those who say: Yes, in the outer world everything may decline and will decline.

However, we can find something that had not been there: we can, out of our will, when we illuminate it with pure thinking, create a new world, a world which one can’t see, but which one wills to see. One has the strength for such a will only if one wants to penetrate this will, wants to enforce it with that which can be won through spiritual knowledge as power, as giving impulses to this will — in ways which have often been described. Therefore one does not appeal today to the vague belief that, nevertheless, again and again there were forces which brought forth new cultures.

Today we have to agree with Oswald Spengler: Indeed, the facts prove a decline and Oswald Spengler only summarizes the facts to prove it. One has to agree with him if one doesn’t have the certainty of this: the will is fuelled by the spirit, by Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, it will not refute theories, or views, and not refute concepts and ideas that are false, but it will fight the facts of decline through its own sense of the facts. Today we don’t need to refute theories or false views; today we need to conquer the facts to find the truth. Only this justifies speaking against the downfall of the western world. This shows us at the same time how people understood such an idea of Oswald Spengler’s — the idea that the Western, the Central European peoples, with all that they have brought forward, are already at an end and that the Russian people — I have for a long time been repeating this before Oswald Spengler — that this Russian people hold the nucleus, the true future kernel to the future of Europe; that’s right — Bolshevism, of course, offers the counterbalance, but it will destroy the Russian population. How does Oswald Spengler think of the process of the future?

He thinks to himself that this western world’s culture will disappear and that which is rising in Russia will replace what is in Central Europe. — No, if one understands the kernel of Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science one would say something different, one would say: Just like Germanic peoples have received the kernel of Christianity in their way, as they could not develop anything out of their young blood if the Mystery of Golgotha had not appeared from the south, so from this Central Europe there must shine the culture coming from the East, what we ourselves are developing from a new spiritual life. It doesn’t matter that Oswald Spengler’s sense of the foreign Russianness is flooding the West and Central Europe by something young compared to what has died. No, it is a question of this Russianness having to find something that we ourselves generate as a new spiritual life, something that this Russianness has to receive in the same way as the Germanic peoples received the Mystery of Golgotha with their young blood. No, it is a question of this Russianness having to find something that we ourselves generate as a new spiritual life, something that this Russianness has to receive in the same way as the Germanic peoples, with their young blood, received the Mystery of Golgotha. The future of even the most future-minded depends on us not dying due to the decline of the Occident, but to bring the immortal part in us to unfold through a new spiritual life; only those who speak of such a new spiritual life may speak against the decline of the Occident.

It is obvious that where old thinking continues living and is conserved today is namely where socialistic theories come about, which shows that the decline is not only seen, not only allowed, but that decline is bred. In relation to this, it is extremely interesting to see how the Minister for Economic Affairs in the Hungarian Council, Professor Eugen Varga, has had experiences, which he describes in his book “The Economic-Political Problems of Proletarianism,” just published by the Viennese cooperative publishing house “Neue Erde” — “The Economic-Political Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship.” There he describes how, according to his principles, he is more or less a Marxist in his principles, as Lenin and Trotsky are in an even more radical form, and with these forces, which are forming themselves to the point of bullishness, he now wants to establish an order, an economic order in Hungary.

In a few short lines I want to show how he is, on the one hand, a Marxist. He believes: If you make the world Marxist then it becomes real, so I first want to make Hungary Marxist and real. — He knows that it was the urban industrial proletariat that carried the Marxist ideas, and he knows that what he wants to establish can only be born from the ideas that the urban industrial proletariat swears by. Immediately he had to state one thing and says: Yes, the whole belief of this urban proletariat is that the future depends on the practical realization of Marxist ideas. If one meets such institutions, the first to become unemployed will be the urban population and next the urban industrial proletariat will run out of bread and become unhappy. The only ones who get off on the right foot are the farmers outside; they can, if you set things up the way we want them to be, they can fare a little better; the proletarians in the cities can expect only impoverishment at first and enormous inflation; the only thing that beckons them is ruin.

So what does this real Marxist, Professor Eugen Varga have to say? He says: The greatness of an ideal is shown by the fact that one can hunger for it. — But if the ideal promised to the people, that when the ideal is fulfilled, they will not have to go hungry, then it is questionable whether they really like to go hungry when it is it is not fulfilled. Varga would have had to wait and see whether it would not turn out, on internal reasons, that his Hungarian councillor would have perished. However, he has the excuse that it did not come to that, because he can point to the Romanian incidents and other external reasons and so he finds all sorts of other things that he cites as his experiences.

It is in fact interesting to point out these events because one is dealing with someone who was allowed to become a practitioner, who could show how the stubborn theories, which one just thinks are practical, turn out to be reprehensible, pernicious, if one wants to actualise them. So the professor Eugen Varga also tells us many beautiful things about his Marxism. He also describes how he uses his councils, how everyone is elected from within the workforce, how the positions in the factories are filled, the supervisor positions and so on. He says: One must avoid the old bureaucracy. — What he is describing is bureaucracy. But he says: That which in the present is as thick as a stick will all become terribly beautiful in the future. — He relates: Yes, at present terrible things are experienced, because those who have been elected to supervise the factories are loitering around, just arguing, and the others, who are still supposed to work, think that they should all be elected to the supervisory positions themselves, because this loitering and arguing seems to them to be a very special ideal. — This depicts Professor Eugen Varga, the instigator of the soviet dictatorship in Hungary. He fails to notice that in a single sentence, on 47 pages of his book, he expresses a meaningful truth. I confess to you frankly and freely that his book is, to me, an extraordinarily interesting contemporary phenomenon, because in Professor Eugen Varga, what Oswald Spengler regarded as the phenomena of decline, is now transformed into socialist ideas. Already in his ideas there are forces of decline, so that through people like Professor Eugen Varga, people are inoculated with forces of decline.

If one leaves culture to itself; if one starts to doctor such ideas in these areas, as does Lenin and Trotsky and others in the East and in Asia, then destruction is forced in a concentrated way, so that history then rapidly goes into complete destruction. This is what the book of Eugen Varga is for me, a man who wants to be a practitioner of the theory of decline being put into practice — it is interesting to me in terms of cultural history, because this book is not just literature, it is something that expresses life in action.

What is actually interesting about it? I must say, as interesting as the book is — what actually is the most interesting is only one sentence which appears on page 47 of this book of Eugen Varga. This sentence even gave me a surprise. He describes how he structured his working councils, how at the top is the production commissioner and below, the individual commissioners, just as real Marxism imagines them to be. These production commissioners act as intermediaries between the works councils and the supreme economic office. Regarding these commissioners I found on page 47 of this book, a remarkable confession. You see, here he says: This system — he means his council system — meets all four of the above requirements, if the person who is the production commissioner is appropriate. — Now, my dear friends, if you put the appropriate personalities in all positions, then you do not need to implement socialist ideas in reality, because then all demands will be fulfilled by these personalities.

Out of the corner of this abstract theorist’s reflections, eager to be a practitioner, jumped that which he consciously did not want to confess. Its four demands are: 1. that the councils be elected from among the workers, 2. that economic commissioners be set up, 3. that the whole should not be bureaucratic, and 4. that all people, including teachers, must be politically reliable. These requirements would be fulfilled — when? When the production commissioner is appropriate. — The economic system of the professor Eugen Varga will of course only be appropriate if the commissioner is as much a Marxist and Leninist as Varga himself. Here you see how these people reckon with reality. They do not merely depict — as historians portray the ancient heroes, an Alexander, a Pericles — according to the political terms contained in their morning paper. No, they want to shape people according to what their morning paper contains. You also have what Oswald Spengler considers as the main cause of the downfall, brought into the most direct practice, and the most important thing about practice is simply not seen.

What, my dear friends, leads to an answer of the question: Who dare speak against the decline of the western world? We live in a time when only those who feel in their souls that there is a spiritually oriented science which can ignite the will, can kindle the will so that forces arise which were not there before. Those who consider only the forces that existed before like Oswald Spengler, or that work on the outside like professor Eugen Varga, can either only see the downfall, or must cause it themselves. Who dare speak against the decline of the western world? Someone who may speak against the downfall of the western world is someone who demands that human deeds come out of the new-born spiritual life. — This is how the question must be answered clearly and this is what anthroposophically orientated spiritual science has been trying to do for years.

I observed towards the end of the Waldorf school year the results of lessons to the students in individual classes — and I have already mentioned some of this — how for example Dr Stein approached the 7^th and 8^th grade pupils with history from the perspective of the rising spiritual life as a will that is juxtaposed with the dwindling forces. I have mentioned other things that shine in the Waldorf School as good fruits of our spiritual science.

Today I would like to mention that people outside sneer particularly when it is spoken about — as it must be spoken about in spiritual science — of the soul and spirit, besides the body. One only has to see once, for example in Class 5 under the leadership of Fräulein von Heydebrand, how it is presented to the children — in the form appropriate to the children — what Anthroposophy makes of Anthropology, that it awakens in the children an idea of the real concrete form of the soul and spirit of man. There’s a pulsating of life, there’s nothing of the boredom of today’s anthropological concepts that are otherwise introduced to children, because the knowledge is drawn from real life, real life is stimulated in the youth. It is only a question of the teacher's being able to transform, precisely for the corresponding age, that which emerges from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

It can also be said, then: the Mystery of Golgotha came as a strike into the earth’s evolution at a time when it was understood with what remained of old instinctive spiritual science — I have often mentioned this in my lectures. Today people have to understand it with the rising, new spiritual science. Then Christianity will experience a new birth, then Christianity will again be understood because under the hand of the theologian, Christianity has degenerated into materialism. Instead of seriously considering how Christianity itself has to be found anew out of a renewed spiritual life today, theologians appear — forgive me for bringing this up as well — theologians who are against anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. If one wants to read all the literature against anthroposophically orientated spiritual science you will find nothing different, yet it is sometimes interesting to glance at the titles of publications. There is for instance — I don’t know if any among you know about this beautiful sheet — “Die neue Kirche” (The New Church), published on behalf of the Hamburg People's Church Council by Pastor Franz Tügel and Dr Peter Petersen. In it is an article, in number 15 of the year 1920 “Theological Direction, Dr Steiner and the Devil.” On page 232 we find the following sentence: “At most it is still conceivable that a Catholic could become a student of Steiner ...” — Such a thing is born out of today's culture; for once people should consider what the catholic clergy is throwing against anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, but here speaks a Protestant, and so the author thinks that this spiritual science, could, well, still pass for Catholicism and says — “there are relations which one can understand; but how a Protestant can join him, at least a conscious one, grasped by the spirit of the Reformation, is completely incomprehensible. In Steiner’s school all faith is held as truth. Schaeder rightly points out, that all the exercises recommended by Steiner amount to legalism and morality. For me there is no doubt: Luther would have given the Steiner teaching in his language to the devil, he would also have strongly emphasized what is thoroughly un-German about it. He would have warned his Protestant church against the false prophet.”

I would like to pose a question. Are the exercises I recommend meant to amount to lawlessness and immorality? What is emphasized here is something particularly bad, that the exercises recommended by me amount to legalism and morality. Well, many things are written in such a tone today.

However, there is also another tone in which one cannot say it is written. The already mentioned anatomy professor, Fuchs in Göttingen, managed with an ingenious distortion to say in newspaper articles that anthroposophy should not be scientific. He has proved nothing else with it than that he can currently regard as a scientist, only what just enters into his head as science, and what is not so, that he does not regard as science. That means, he does it in the same way as those who, when Copernicus appeared, considered Copernicus unscientific because he did not teach what they taught to the faithful in the church. In medieval times, grand inquisitors had come from the ranks of the church; today, they can come from the ranks of university professors and be called foxes; and their followers are prepared in such a way that they pull from their pockets all kinds of combat equipment, such as children's trumpets and ratchets, house keys with which to whistle, when a Dr Stein and a Dr Kolisko talk about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It cannot be said that these people first listened to the talks that were given; otherwise they would have had to conjure up the children's trumpets and rattles and whatever else they had, after they had heard the “bad” rationale of Dr Kolisko and Dr Stein. The rationale of Dr Stein and Dr Kolisko was not in the will of these people to be listened to; it was in their will to shout it down in the same way one would have done in medieval times by other means, according to what these people venerate as progress today. One must have the courage to look unreservedly at such sentiments. You don't need to do anything other than look at the numerous sleeping souls of people who do not want to look at the phenomena of spiritual life, who want to sleep in the face of these phenomena. Then you have to say — also about the supersensible — what a Viennese writes about his Vienna, what he writes about is what he loves there — even if it is not particularly well written, it is nevertheless something like self-knowledge. After this young Viennese draws attention to his own youth and brings it together with what is developing as a healthier spirituality — he says — writing in the Viennese ‘Sonn- und Montagszeitung’ (newspaper) No. 29 of July 19, 1920:

“The spiritual situation of the German Danube countries seems to me to be even less pleasing than the economic and political one. We possess pretty much the cheapest and shallowest variety of socialism, the oldest and long since vanquished variety of philosophy in free-spirited dissipation and banal historical terms; besides that, the most unedifying method of playing knowledge and faith off against each other; besides that, religiously dressed-up blanket intolerance; next to it, the most uncritical desire to fall for all the noisily dressed-up artifice, an admirable garrulity and a sentimental predilection for the self-evident; alongside this, genial traits, damped down by a tacitly agreed upon, warm-hearted lack of talent which regards the half for the whole and the whole for the half, and above it, finally, a respectable sort of vanity, which speaks to the other, blowing itself off: ‘This tells me nothing! I’m dreadful and educated myself!’.”

That, embedded in such a kind of spirituality, even the softest and most un-profiled brand of occultism is just the most popular here, seems hardly to be surprising. A wide, murky stream of smut flows through this city, and all varieties of truism flourish lushly on its banks. My dear friends, one may already say that there is a kind of spirituality, which lets the most stupid brand of occultism, the stupidest spiritualistic muck, just flow around — that, my dear friends, is at once self-evident!

Now I don’t want — because it’s already late — to point out that, other than Vienna, there might be this cuddly stream of frivolous shallowness with its audience, where one sleeps in the face of what is of the utmost necessity: the reawakening of those forces which need to awaken in the human breast if we want in the place of downfall, the place of the rising. However, if we can see the fallacy of how, on the one hand, geniuses like Oswald Spengler can prove the downfall of what is present, how on the other hand people like Professor Eugen Varga show downfall currents through their deeds, then we will — if we have the ability to wake up in the soul — then we will still be able to perceive spiritual streams which as anthroposophically orientated spiritual science want to place in the will of people that which can be born out of the light of supersensible cognition. Then we will gain a new version of the Words of Christ: Heaven and earth may pass away but my Words will not pass away. — Then we will say: Yes, everything that is accessible to the eyes of Oswald Spengler and all that in which social reforms like Professors Eugen Varga would like to move, will perish.

What is born out of a truly new spirit, is what will dominate the future, because it does not only believe in some forces lying somewhere indeterminately, which will already help to bring about a new culture, as has helped before, but it wants to kindle one's own will, the deepest inner will of man himself, which one has in one's hand in freedom, to new forces. Then we speak against the decline of the Occident, because we do not only trust in the future, but because we want to bring about a future which we already see now.

Just as one sees the future plant in the germ of the old one, we want a future that we already see as a germ in us. The future will be, if we only want it, against all the forces of doom. It is to the Will that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science addresses itself; to the will, not to the inactive way of looking at things, and from there it wants to take the right to speak against the decline of the western world.