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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 5: Conceptual Knowledge and Observational Knowledge.
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  • Let’s consider the religious connection with God. Would a religion — this question was asked in three ways and called thinking feeling and willing — would a religion still be approachable through Anthroposophy, which is dependent on knowledge, to people who do not have knowledge, or will they get a raw deal? — Anthroposophy certainly doesn’t make religiousness dependent on knowledge. I must confess in the deepest religious sense I actually can’t understand why a dependent religious life should exists beside Anthroposophy because the course of an anthroposophic life becomes such that firstly, of course, single personalities become researchers, who to some extend break through to the observation; then others will apply their healthy human minds to it — yes, this is what it is about. Just recently in Berlin this word was taken as evil from a philosophic view, and opposed on the grounds of the human mind being unable to understand anything super-sensory, and that the human mind which is able to understand something super-sensory, would surely not be healthy. —
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 8: Prayer and Symbolism
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  • Now we can add the following, which is again an earthly thing, something which we want to link to the first thing we have related to: “Lead us not into temptation,” which means: Let our connection to You be so alive that we may not experience the challenge to merge with mere nature, to surrender ourselves to mere nature, that we hold you firmly in all our daily nourishment. “But deliver us, from the evil.” The evil consists of mankind letting go of the Divine; we ask that we are freed and let loose from this evil.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 10: Composition of the Gospels
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  • of the merchant who sells everything in order to acquire the Heavenly realm. Because Christ Jesus knows he may speak to his disciples in this way, he can speak to them about the last, the most dangerous parable. It is the parable which must have a terrible effect on unprepared people, the parable of everything which is in offensive, evil or sinful, will finally be burnt in the furnace of fire, and only the good be gathered for Heaven. This can only be tolerated by minds which have learnt to be un-egoistic; otherwise it would anger their minds regarding such a parable.
  • In the total style of the 13th Matthew Gospel one’s first attention is directed to the full human being; to the focus of the whole human being in his heart, perceiving through his senses, if he is to approach the interpretation of the parables. In the following way Christ Jesus makes it understandable to his disciples: after he has gone through from quite an objective observation given in the parable of the sower, he can no present further active parables and allow these to lead towards the functions of the heavenly realms. First, we have the parable of the plants and the weeds which point out that the good seeds could not flourish, without evil next to it. Then again one could say this is being expressed in a wonderful, quite scientific knowledge, because we know in a certain sense that plants can be damaged if the weeds are taken out in the wrong way. Likewise, we would harm mankind if we were to eradicate sin, for example, by not leading sinful men spiritually to the righteous, but by eradicating them before “the harvest,” that is, before the end of the earth. This is approachable to people; what works in plants or in weeds, can be placed before their souls. It can be taken further, placed there objectively, how the world is spread out in the wide-open spaces, and how to carry what comes from the world, to the heavenly kingdom. The kingdom of heaven is the mustard seed, which is small compared with other seeds, then again it becomes a bigger tree compared with other plants.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 11: Insights into the Mystery of Golgotha, Priest Ordination.
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  • The other pole is Faust. He took on the intellect with all his senses, resulting in his deteriorating into the dangers of the intellect, as he entered into all the individual dangers of the intellect. It is not for nothing that these personalities are a kind of landmark for modern mankind: on the one side Luther and what he connected to, and on the other side Faust, and what he associates with. It was truly no small deed of Goethe when he wanted to reshape Faust in such a way that he would not perish. Lessing already thought about it. If freedom is to be achieved for humanity, the intellect needs to be engaged with, but humanity should not be pushed away from the divine. The Faust fragment of Lessing ends with the words (of the angels to the devil): “You shall not prevail!” which Goethe remodelled. He said to himself there should be a possibility not to be separated from the divine when mankind engages with the intellect — but he needs it for the development of freedom. In this terrible battle Luther stood. He saw how the intellect contained within itself the danger that man also strangulates his soul from the divine, how man succumbs to the death of the soul. That which is devoured by the intellect — in anthroposophy we call it “becoming Ahrimanic” — which totally enters into the intellect, becomes devoured, it is cut off from the divine. This is what Luther felt for modern man.
  • Historically it was so that on the one hand there was the Catholic Church where people were absolutely not within the intellect, it even wants to save people by preventing them from entering into the intellect, it wanted to preserve them from progress made in the 15th century onwards by conserving such dogmas like the one which claims infallibility, such as the dogma regarding the immaculate conception, as I’ve mentioned earlier. They couldn’t manage consequently in the Roman Catholic sense without the infallibility dogma because they even deny its intellectual meaning, declaring it unfit for development and incapable of understanding the spiritual world. A reinforcement was needed for what people had to believe, indicating the sovereignty of the Papal Command for the Truth. There is nothing more untimely, but basically nothing greater than this determination of the dogma of infallibility, to completely contradict all consciousness of the time and all human desires for freedom. It is the last consequence of the secularization of Catholicism in an iron clad consequence of tremendous genius. One must say if you take, on the one hand, the ironclad consequence of the Roman clerics in their determination of the infallibility dogma, and on the other hand the kind of polemics of a Dollinger, the latter is of course philistine in the face of tremendous ingenuity — you could even call it devilish — something is carried out, because it was once the consequence to that which Rome has come to since the secularization of Christianity by Constantine.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 12: Prophecy, Dogma and Paganism
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  • You may know that such a canonization in the Catholic Church requires a very detailed ceremony, preceded by the exact determination of how the relevant person lived and what he thought, a process which should not last years, but centuries. Further, this examination must end with a ceremony which exist of all those who come forward, who have something well founded to present regarding the living exchange the personality has in relation to the divine, and to some extent always enter into what is said in such a way, that the so-called Advocatus diaboli, the representative of the demonic world, who has to refute everything that the other side has to say for the relevant canonisation, is brought to attention. So there will be an extensive trial, at which the being who should be regarded as the Diabolus, the devil, will have on the other side, the Christ representative, for the Christ-like will always be drawn into the discussion with the devilish representative, when a saint is to be recognised.
  • Now of course I could have interrupted this conversation with him, regarding the church always admitting to the possibility of lively exchanges with the divine, so that supersensible experiences were possible. It is however the dogma of the Catholic Church that such supersensible experiences which could take place, are devilish and that they must be avoided, one must be forced to flee from them. Of course, it is certainly the Catholic Church’s dogmatism which says that all of Anthroposophy is objectionable from the basis that it claims to touch on insights in the supersensible worlds. For this reason, Anthroposophy is rejected because such an insight can only be arrived at with the help of the Devil; it is therefore evil. That is something which is judged by the Catholic Church as quite necessary, quite consistent. Things are already such that they must not be blurred. Whoever thinks reconciliation between Anthroposophy and the Catholic Church can without further ado be brought about, is mistaken. The Initiate knows, for the Catholic Church to be consequent from their side, it will regard Anthroposophy as devilish, and more than ever, the Catholic church today has allowed such consequences to become its custom.
  • As an answer from the priest I received his claim that any exchange with the supersensible worlds may in no way be wished for; if it happens in this world it must be made clear that the divine principle has been besieged by the devil. — So, I said to him: If you now have such an exchange with the supersensible worlds, would you consider that as devilish? — He answered: Yes, he has on his side the talent to merely work with literature of the saints in order to know that something like that exists; but he doesn’t desire to become a saint himself. — This is now the last sentence which would be expressed by these people, this person also did not express it because if he did, then the last sentence would be that he says: To regard me as a saint, the church has the right to wait for two to three centuries.
  • We can draw all kinds of conclusions from this. You could for example connect all kinds of evil thinking habits to it which is relevant particularly at present, when someone says that everything which can be said about the causes of the war, one would only really know about after decades when all the archives have been combed through. If you have any sense for reality you would know that in a couple of decades everything would be so blurred that no truth would be discovered in the archives in order to determine something as some tradition, and you would know that one, I could call it, very insidious step could renounce what has been said out of the consciousness of the present. This is also something which must be considered more deeply, but it only belongs in parenthesis here: I only want to draw your attention to it, that with the proclamation of a saint, waiting for such a long time, things in question could have become thoroughly blurred, and you can have insight into the Catholic Church’s extraordinarily difficult burden towards its real progress.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 14: Gnostics and Montanists
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  • From all this wrestling another great question arises which became the crux for the Christian Gnostics. My dear friends, because the Gnostics regarded 365 as the Divine god of the Jews, they experienced the Fatherly and the Divine at the end of this row. When the Jews worshiped their god, they experienced it as Fatherly, while what later appeared as the Holy Ghost, they experienced the opposite pole, in the Nous. As a result, the Gnostics gave an answer to the primordial question in the first Christian centuries, an answer which is no longer valid today. Their answer was: The Christ is a far higher creation than the Father; the Christ is essentially equal to the Father. The Father, who finds his most outward, extreme expression in the Jewish god, is the creator of the world, but as the world creator he has, out of its foundations allowed things to be created simultaneously, the good and evil, the good and bad, simultaneously health and illness, the divine and the devilish. This world, which was not made out of love, because it contains evil, the Gnostics contrasted with the more elevated divine nature of the Christ who came from above, downward, carrying the Nous within, who can redeem this world that the creator had to leave un-liberated.
  • So we see in the historic mood how outer actions were searching for what lay within. I could say we can understand this historic mood in a spiritual way when we see how the Order of the Temple has grown out of the crusades, orders which are already further in their turning within. As a result of the crusades it brought an inwardness with it. It only takes things in such a way that it knows that one does not actually internalize them if one does not penetrate the exterior at the same time, when one doesn’t, in order to save the moral, see it as an enemy in an exterior way. As paradoxical as this might appear, my dear friends, what Godfrey of Bouillon saw outwardly in the realm of the Turks, this is like Luther’s battle at Wartburg Castle with its devils as an inner power. The struggle is directed inward.