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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 1: The Relationship of Anthroposophy to Religious Life
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  • These incisive, important things exist already. Certainly, they are not made properly clear but they are felt, and I presume that currently, where nearly everything is shaken up in people’s minds, a young theology in particular needs to show itself, in how these things can’t really be completed, as is seen to some extent today with theologians, without being permeated by the actual being of Christ. Out of this experience such a book as Von Overbeck’s was created regarding the current Christianity of theology, where basically the answer is given to why modern theology is no longer Christian because it deals with a general philosophising about a world permeated by God, and not in the real sense of the Christ experience creating the foundation for the entire treatment of religious problems. Religious problems are dealt with based only as Father-problems and not actually the Christ experience.
  • It is unbelievably meaningful, my dear friends, to observe how, on the one hand the old Indian striving came from what he saw, while he, when he strived towards human beings, I might call it, fell into unconsciousness, into Nirvana, while the Old Persian remained in what he was looking at. The divine which is the basis of the mineral, the plant and animal worlds, was understood by the Old Persian and from this came his religious striving; but now he was overcome by fear that he might be urged to seek man, and this turned into abstract thoughts which turned into imagery. This is actually the basic feeling of the near-Asian peoples all the way to Africa. They saw the foundation of nature as being a spiritual world; they didn’t see people, but they were afraid to search in people because then they would enter an abstract region, a region into which later, the Romans entered with their religion. Before the Roman time, in the second, third Century there was the aspiration everywhere to avoid entering into abstractions, hence the aspiration to capture what is presented in images. There was even the endeavour to express in images, what one understood, in image form. There was an effort to, in relation to the divine, which one perceives, not to search for it through abstract concepts but in actions made visible; this is the origin of ritual, sacramental action. In this religious area which I’m referring to, is the origin of ritual in worship.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 4: Anthroposophy and Religion.
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  • You know how the real crux of the Christ conception resulted from people noticing some similarities between the symbolic religious practices and the event of Golgotha, that they believed, even theologians believed they must speak about Christ as a myth or as something which had developed and reached fulfilment in the temples. The whole thing has now reached a point where this same way of thinking is appearing in other areas: the Our Father prayer has been examined in the same way and now nearly every sentence can be shown to have existed in pre-Christian times. This is regarded as a special catch for religious research. For someone who admits, truly admits to this way of closed thinking, it would be the same as to draw conclusions about people from their clothes. When a father allows his child to inherit his clothes, one can’t say the son has become the father, because the son is someone quite different from the father even when he wears the same clothing. Just so the wording of the Our Father has passed over on to Christianity, but the content has essentially become something new. In order to examine these things, one must first look even deeper into all the connections: one needs to know the foundations from which the Old Mystery priests retained something like an expectation, which resembled something which could not yet have been accomplished on earth.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 7: Formation of Speech.
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  • So we start becoming aware of different things when we approach the sense of speech. You see, such an acquisition of the sense of language sometimes leads to something extraordinarily important. Goethe once uttered a sentence, when already in his late life, to the Chancellor von Müller, a statement which has often been quoted and is often used, to understand the entire way in which “Faust,” written by Goethe, originated. Goethe said that for him the conception of “Faust” had for 60 years been clear “from the beginning” (von vornherein); the other parts less extensively. Now commentary upon commentary have been written and this sentence was nearly always recalled, because it is psychologically extraordinarily important, and the commentators have it always understood like this: Goethe had a plan from the beginning for his “Faust” and in the 60 years of his life — since he was twenty or about eighteen — he used this plan, he had “from the start,” to work from.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 10: Composition of the Gospels
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  • There are however difficulties along this path which come to the fore when some strides are made into the Gospel — I stress the words “into” — that make you stumble over the inherited content. For actual spiritual researchers this creates less of a disturbance, because such a person would place the primordial Gospel into, what one could nearly call, a wordless text, and that makes it easier not to stumble over the inherited content. Admiration as a basis for reading the Gospels, seems to me an indispensable element for individuals, as a foundation for their religious learning processes. I once more need to stress that it is not important to characterise religious life in general, but to supply a foundation for the teaching process, in any case for religious processes as such.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 11: Insights into the Mystery of Golgotha, Priest Ordination.
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  • Now my dear friends, I come to the question of how we should proceed. It is like this: you see, with all this there was also an evangelical consciousness introduced in the evolution of humanity, in the individual human development, because the earlier evangelical consciousness to a certain degree entangled man in the supernatural, superhuman processes and acts of superhuman beings. With Augustus it was expressed somewhat differently, that the progress of humanity was permeated with the superhuman element ... (gap in notes). People saw the superhuman battle raging as something like Christ fighting against the enemy who wants to lead him into the temptation of appearing super human; that the one who drew near to the Christ was one to whom original guilt was traced back to, and it is shown how Christ turns against the original sin. This understanding has now come to an end. Earlier, this understanding had been adhered to, for what was supersensible-divine permeated earthly matter, and there already has been an intention present for specialization to make a dividing border between the supernatural, and that part of man entangled in sensuality.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 12: Prophecy, Dogma and Paganism
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  • The second essential characteristic is that the Second Coming of the Christ is clearly mentioned everywhere in the writings, that is to say, exactly what is referred to in the 13th chapter of Mark’s Gospel in the most delicate sense of the word. It was certainly, one must admit, the belief in the entire spirit of the church fathers’ writings from the 4th century that the Second Coming of Christ can be predicted in the near future. They called people’s attention to how the old world would fall apart and how the Christ would reappear, and added to this, the imagination was created that Christ would appear in a similar way, in the most wonderful way, strolling over the earth, as it had been the case before.
• Title: Foundation Course: Letter from Friedrich Rittelmeyer
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  • After the devastating impressions of the last years which have gone through the German world, a longing has developed for religious renewal. It is true that on the whole, quite small circles have these longings which are really serious and alive. However, these are circles in which one can hope to find the power for how this can be developed. Some really strong will glows here in the youthful hearts waiting for the aim and leadership. There where one didn’t dare to think about it not long ago, lectures are being held regarding the rebirth of the German nation, and one allows certain religious sounds to become agreeable even if one doesn’t want to know anything about church life. In newspapers and magazines, and much more so in innumerable dialogues, there is a turn towards higher questions. The feeling that something new and great could come into the inner realm lives in a clear or less clear way in many of the best of us. As hopeful as we at times evoke this mood, at closer inspection we still discover a hopelessness, which is truly a call for mercy. Nearly superstitiously one waits in these circles for religious leaders, but one has no idea in which direction one is steered and vacillates between hope and a deep mistrust in one’s own hope. Inspired, one celebrates soon the one and then the other which on the region of the inner life appears strong and safe to talk about, yet to which one has to admit shortly after, that one was disappointed and that the word of fulfilment is not mentioned again. One hopes for intuitions, does not know the at least where it should come from and which are the most believable, and confuses ever more dangerous tendencies of instinctive life with divine revelations. One regards the great personalities of the past, Fichte, Goethe, also Luther, and tries drawing inspiration from their work without really liberating contemporary solutions.