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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 3: Theoretical Thinking and Living in the Spirit.
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  • It is necessary that we come to live within the spirit once again, that the spirit becomes a reality in whose processes we participate. This is no contradiction against tranquillity. Precisely though cultivating tranquillity you acquire the right way to participate more strongly and concretely towards what happens objectively; finally, it is no contradiction against tranquillity when one observes all the horror of a volcanic eruption or some similar events this way.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 5: Conceptual Knowledge and Observational Knowledge.
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  • Rudolf Steiner: I would prefer at best to answer you more concretely than in abstractions. First, I would like to approach a difficult question by saying the following.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 6: Creative Speech and Language.
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  • You see, Anthroposophy is quite at the start of its work, and anyone who uses Anthroposophy to develop some or other area, certainly has the experience that all he can still experience for himself in anthroposophical knowledge, the biggest difficulty arrives when he wants to share this with the world. This is just a fact, this is the biggest difficulty. Why? Because today we simply don’t have the instrument of speech which is fully suited to concisely express what is seen through Anthroposophy. The Anthroposophist has the expectation that through Anthroposophy not merely such knowledge should come which live within the inner life, which they see as an inner observation, because it is unattainable for the human race in its entirety. For us this must be of foremost importance: What is possible in the human community? — and not: What can the individual demand? — Let us be clear, my dear friends, whoever is an Anthroposophist speaks out of reality, and in me speaking to him I don’t feel as if I’m merely speaking in general, but when I speak to such a person it seems that either he is a priest or he should become someone who cares for the soul. Theoretically one can thus in the same manner shape one’s endeavours in the most varied human areas. As soon as one enters into such a specialised field, one has to always state the most concrete of opinions which one can only take in. Please observe this. I’m making you aware that Anthroposophy certainly knows it stands at the start of its willing, a will which has to develop quite differently than the way in which it has already stepped in front of the world today. On the other hand, one can see that the world longs very, very strongly for what lies as a seed in Anthroposophy
  • Things were far more concretely taken in the ancient knowledge of mankind than one usually thinks. You must also become knowledgeable with the fact that the power which then still lived in the Gospels, have in the last centuries also got lost, like the original revelation of man has really been lost as has the original language been lost. Now I want to pose the question: do we grasp the Gospels today? We only grasp them when we can really live within them and presently, out of our intellectualized time epoch, we can’t experience them thus. I know very well about the opposition expressed against my interpretations presented in my various Gospel lectures, from some or other side, and I’m quite familiar that these are my initial attempts, that they need to become more complete; but attempts to enliven the Gospels, these they are indeed.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 8: Prayer and Symbolism
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  • y dear friends! It is important that the question which we had yesterday and actually have been considering during the past days from the side of Anthroposophy, we now approach from a religious side, but again I don’t want to do it through definitions and explanations but in a more concrete way. It is important in fact, as you have probably already sensed, to find a way which must come out of religious experience. What belong to religious experiences are the reality of prayer and the reality of the examination of the word, first becoming visible for us in the examining of Gospel words. We will have to draw on the more inner elements of religious life, but we will adhere to these two, prayer and the examination of Gospel words, through examples that are far better than concepts.
  • They failed to understand these words; as the words were not understood in their time; they also don’t lead the way to Christ Jesus. The way to Christ Jesus has to be looked for. At this point it is indicated in the Matthew Gospel which people would find the way and who would not be able to find it, but also, how it can be found. We really need to understand that for those who are unable to ensoul the feelings of blood relationships given through grace to mankind, would not be able to find the way; those who only want to be part of their fatherland and not part of God’s land, will not be able to find their way to Christ Jesus. So we are placed between two concrete experiences in Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 13, and out of this situation we must expect that in this 13th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel the relationship between the folk and Christ Jesus is stated, and how Christ Jesus as such can be discovered again by the folk.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 10: Composition of the Gospels
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  • It is exactly the opposite way to what can be found with the choice of the spiritual route. Here the different Gospels’ content doesn’t fall apart in contradictions, but they are enclosed into the totality of the deed, together; the coming-into-admiration is an experience which has to be had, an experience which is resisted in the most imminent sense by our present spirit of the time. For the spiritual scientist, however, it turns out that what I cannot even ask you to accept is still there, it turns out that there is no other way, than that the content of truth must appear other than just by the harmony between the four Gospels. It would, even if one would create an external synopsis as in Tatian’s sense, which are not contradictory within certain limits, it would not result in what is found in the four Gospels as a concrete harmony.
  • In conjuring up the images around us through our eyes, we speak etherically. However, the other two members which otherwise clearly diverge, which diverge while listening and speaking, are hardly present with seeing, but atrophied; here mere formation of the image overwhelms us. Because this connection is not perceived, today’s tricky physiological foundation lies in epistemology. All epistemological theories, or at least many of them, start from the physiological foundation of observation, which are equally described for all the senses; they actually have no meaning other than an act of seeing. What you can find in the physiological foundation only really fits the act of seeing and is therefore unclear, because people can’t see that some things are atrophied. One could say that these physiological views, which dominate there in relation the sensory physiology, are the most dreadful, able to depress the human mind: one is forever being bothered with things said about the senses in general while each sense must be treated concretely, individually. In many cases it is so that a sensory unit theory is taken as a basis.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 15: Ordination and Transubstantiation
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  • So, I can put it like this: through priest ordination human consciousness is brought into such a condition that a person can with total inner conviction say: the world around us is actually only a fragment of the world; it is there to hide many things from us, namely hiding spiritual processes, from us. We see spiritually in the processes when we are prepared in the appropriate way to do so. Priest ordination involves such preparation which would allow for spiritual perception, to see, everywhere, the sense perceptible as well as the spiritual processes. Let’s take a concrete example.
  • Then again, the disciples of the Apostles in turn depended on the imagery which they had experienced; you can even read this in individual letters. When some or other apostolic disciple, Polycarp of Smyrna for instance, could describe what some or other person who had taught him, looked like, the description was unbelievably more important than the communication of mere words. What is most essential here, was recalling the feeling of being-together-with everything in connection with the Christ, so that one can say the Apostles sensed the succession, but they could no longer inwardly experience every transformation which had been experienced in the old initiation mysteries. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t suggest that the apostles or apostle disciples have made such deliberations, but their soul constitution was so that they could make such deliberations and it was characteristic of their soul constitution to formulate such deliberations. When they were asked to formulate their soul constitution, they would have said: Yes, we couldn’t go through with it in the same way as was still possible in the earlier Mysteries, for instance experiencing the transformation of light to darkness; we can no longer experience how one is anointed with oil and so on, and we can no longer experience the inner pain through recalling; but here a God has incarnated in the form of Jesus who was here, and with whom we have relations and when we really in our consciousness take it up, not merely with intellectual grasping but when in all concreteness we live in it, then something lifts us up into the supersensible world.
  • We will want to develop the particular format of the priest ordination, into a ritual form. I would like, still today, to point out that you could eventually find something which remains incomprehensible in the priest ordination. Now, by me saying something like this you will understand, also in connection with the regular previous lectures up to this morning, that in fact a complete break had to take place regarding the understanding of such things, when the changed consciousness appeared from the middle of the 15th century. In me expressing these things, I’m using words, which actually for the general consciousness could only have been fully understood before the middle of the 15th century. Then people actually stopped having a real sense for the meaning of these words. It is basically only through the trust you have been able to put in me, that you can hear something here in the manner and way it happened in former times when the soul constitution experienced things in quite a different way. Then came the time when less importance was attached to a concrete connection, when people who still knew how to attach importance to this concrete connection, became rare. Now, the most importance was attributed to the comprehensible content of the Gospels, to the comprehensible content of religion as such. Thus, gradually it took on particular importance to discuss the content of the Gospels, to discuss the content of the sacraments and to a certain extent particularly look into the teaching material, at the teaching content. The teaching content gradually became the most important. Not actually the concrete, but the abstract, became the most important, that is the essential thing. While for the catholic consciousness — I don’t mean merely the roman catholic, but the catholic Christian consciousness — the priest ordination placed the chosen one in a spiritual ancestry up to Christ, which actually for the modern person made everything quite comprehensible, from def
  • I think, in any case, my dear friends, that many questions could be conjured out of the soul by me speaking about these things, and I would love it if the questions, while you are all here, not in general, could also be formulated concretely so that no doubt remains. I completely understand that with earnestness your small circle has turned to me with the clear intention to really work toward a renewal of the religious life. It is not possible to do so by merely changing the teaching content; it is only possible when you enter with a changed soul constitution. We are now entering more deeply into things and, triggered through your questions we will become ever more acquainted with these things so that you’re actually going to understand what I mean to convey.