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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 6: Creative Speech and Language.
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  • I would like to refer back to times, my dear friends, when there were individuals who we today, when you imagine the world order at that time there also existed, those we call chemists. Alchemists they were called in the 12th and 13th centuries, and they were active with the material world which we usually can observe in chemists. What do we do today in order to create a real chemist? Today our preparations for the creation of a chemist is his intellectual conceptions of how matter is analysed and synthesized, how he works with a retort, with a heating apparatus, with electricity and so on. This was not enough, if I may express it this way, for a real chemist, up to the 13th and 14th century — perhaps not to take it word for word — but then the chemist had opened the Bible in front of him and was permeated in a way by what he did, in what he did, by what flowed out of the Bible in a corresponding force. Current humanity will obviously regard this as a paradox. For humanity, only a few centuries ago, this seemed obvious. The awareness which the chemist had at that time, in other words the alchemist, in the accomplishment of his actions, was only slightly different to standing at the altar and reading the mass. Only slightly different, because the reading of the mass already was the supreme alchemical act. We will speak about this more precisely in future.
  • I will now summarise this finally in some abstract sentences which do however have life in them. What I have said before and what I say now are interrelated and I don’t say it without purpose, my dear friends. The first one which is experienced in this way is that one leans to recognise how godly wisdom acts in the child, where it is creative, where it not only comes to revelation in a brain, but where it still shapes the brain. Yes, “if you would not become like little children, you shall never enter into the kingdom of the heavens ...” That is the way to penetrate into what you notice in the deep humility of the child, that which lies before becoming a child, that which even Goethe experienced so lovingly, that he used the word “growing young” (Jungwerden) for entering into the world, like one can say “growing old” (Altwerden). Growing young means stepping out of the spiritual state, into earthly existence. One goes in a certain sense really through childhood and back to such a state where one still had a direct relationship with the divine. The old Biblical questions become quite real: Can one return into the mother’s body, to experience a rebirth? — In spirit one can do this. However, in the old way where the Bible lay in front of the alchemists, and the new way which prepares us for handling the world, lies an abyss. The abyss must be bridged over. We will however not find the old ways, because we need to find a new way.
  • Now for the second thing: Anthroposophy as speech formation. Anthroposophy needs to strive to have such a grasp in the world, that I can apply the reality which I’ve presented today as an apparent contradictory image: the laboratory bench of the chemist, the physics-chemistry of clinical work must in human experience take on the form of an altar. Work on humanity, also the purely technical work — must be able to become a service of divine worship. That one will only be able to find when one has the good will to cross over the abyss which separates our world from the other side where the Gospels lay before the alchemists.
• Title: Foundation Course: Summaries of Lectures
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  • Germinating speech forms in Anthroposophy. Differentiated speech and the nature of sound. Earlier and future relationships to sound. Creative power of speech in the Gospels. The Mass as expression of the entire pastoral process. The Sermon. The intellectualistic process or image-rich speech in relation to community building. The meaning of symbols in the sermon. The evangelists in their meaning for alchemists; the Gospels analysed philologically. Various philosophic systems as exercises in thought. Anthroposophical help in arriving at images. Anthroposophy and religion.