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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 1: The Relationship of Anthroposophy to Religious Life
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  • Human evolution is penetrated by more and more things. Something is continuously developing which belongs to the Jews in particular: the awareness of personality, which is urged by ego development. With the Greeks there developed a mighty inner world beside the outer world of observed nature but this inner world could raise doubts, because it was observed merely as a world of mythology. Sensing the religious element rising in Hellenism, which lives in Greek mythology, through mythological fantasy, which people are searching for — because it was not to be found in nature — is what rises up in man. The Greek however didn’t grasp the actual important point within the human inner life, resulting from mythological fantasy, which the Romans evolved into abstract thinking, which certainly already started with Aristotle, but which was developed particularly in Rome. This abstract way of thinking which is so powerful as to being people to the point of their I, bringing them to self-consciousness, to I-consciousness, this is something which we today still carry in us today and we carry it heavily in us, in the form of modern agnosticism.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 3: Theoretical Thinking and Living in the Spirit.
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  • Firstly, I think there is a feeling for many today that some kind of impact is needed in religious life, that religious life needs a kind of renewal in the most diverse areas. Dr Rittelmeyer has formulated the experience which he indicates is present with those familiar with it and I have to admit, something similar has at times confronted me. Already in relation to his first point presented here, one expects unified thoughts, a soul-powerful feeling — and this is summarised in the words “one thing is necessary” — while one finds in Anthroposophy a sum, even perhaps a very large sum of declarations regarding the world content and so for a person, who knows no sure approach, has to say: it appears to me through this experience that in many respects it has already been there for such a long time and has now contributed a lot to the fact that we in our current western civilisation have entered into a dead end.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 4: Anthroposophy and Religion.
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  • Inner intellectualism is nothing other than correlations to the materialistic methods of observation of the external world. What can be recognised about matter is that when one uses the materialistic method, it reflects inwardly as intellectualism. It is like this, that any philosophy which wants to prove its spirit through mere intellect or a spirit comprised from the intellect, will be wafting around in the wind; these would hardly be able to acknowledge that the intellectual is quite rightly spiritual, but that the content of what is intellectual can be nothing other than that of the material world. One must always speak clearly about these things. By expressing a sentence like: “The content of the intellectual can be nothing other than that of the material world,” I’m only saying it can be nothing other than the content of the world, which can be viewed as the sum of material beings and phenomena; whether this is what it is, is not yet agreed upon. The intellectual material world could be through and through spiritual and what comprises intellectualism could be an illusion. Therefore, it is important for spiritual scientific discussions there should already be an unusually powerful conscientiousness existing towards knowledge otherwise there will be no progress in spiritual science. This conscientiousness is also noticed by people of the present; they find it necessary to hackle through their sentences in all directions in order to be concise, and people of the present day who are used to the journalistic handling of a style, call this wrestling for conciseness a bad style.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 7: Formation of Speech.
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  • The verb is quite rightly related to time, to activity, and it is absurd to think of including a noun in the area which has been described as in “the primal beginning.” It has sense to insert a verb, a word related to activity. What lies within the sentence regarding the primal origins is however not an activity brought about by human gestures or actions, because it is the activity which streams out of the verb, the active word. We are not transported back into the ancient mists of the nebular hypothesis by the Kant-Laplace theory, but we will be led back to the sound and loud prehistoric power. This returning into a prehistoric power is something which was experienced powerfully in the first Christian centuries, and it was also strongly felt that it deals with a verb, because it is an absurdity to say: In the prehistoric times there was a noun. — We call it “Word” which can be any part of speech. Of course, it can’t be so in the case of St John’s Gospel.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 10: Composition of the Gospels
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  • In the same way as the shepherds went forth in the fields, we must go, because only then will words become as powerful as they need to be. We need content for our words, and we need power in words. We attain such content for our words when we deepen ourselves in something like the Matthew Gospel; and we attain the power when we deepen ourselves in something like the Luke Gospel. These two Gospels — we will still come back to the others — stand to a great extent as complimentary opposite each other. It is what anyone can give and taken into their being, just as if we break through what is given as religious teaching content coming from of the depth of the human soul.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 11: Insights into the Mystery of Golgotha, Priest Ordination.
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  • Do you see that consecration is really the dividing boundary between two worlds, and there is certainly the awareness in Catholicism — even if it is not present in individual priests — that a consecrated priest is active in another world when he does something, that he is also speaking from another world when he speaks of the Gospels, even though all his ordinary actions are in the earthly world. This differentiation could not be understood since the 15th century. In historic Catholicism, throughout, was this strong differentiation where, in circles of ordained priests, it was consciously stressed. Only now and then some bishop, by mistake, will bring something non—Catholic into Catholicism, namely modern consciousness, and that leads to absurdities. There was for example a pastoral letter written which claimed that the priest in the fulfilment of the sacrament at the altar would be more powerful than Christ Jesus, because he forces Christ Jesus to be present in the sacrament; Christ Jesus has to be present when the priests demands it; the result is that the priest is now more powerful than Christ. — This is the content of a pastoral letter of not long ago. You can come across such things when out of modern consciousness something is understood which should be understood in quite a different mood, namely that which lies beyond the earthly sphere and separated from it by the consecration.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 12: Prophecy, Dogma and Paganism
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  • In brief, my dear friends, the largest part of pastoral and theological work exists in this. Place your hand on your heart and learn through it, feel out of your heart what I have said regarding the necessity for the renewal of Christianity, for the Christian impulse, because the biggest part of what is being preached and discussed exists in the continuous retreat from the recognition of gross intellectualism and the piecemeal eradication of everything out of Christianity, which actually should be understood in a profound way through strong thinking, through such a powerful thinking that the world finds God through Christ, and when God has been discovered through Christ, which can also become practical because in the discovery of the divine, the divine grasped in thought, the godless world can be included to bring about the re-introduction of the divine.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 14: Gnostics and Montanists
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  • What did the Gnosis do? It stood in quite a lively way, I could say, in relation to the most extraordinary and powerful question of that current age: How does one penetrate the supersensible spirit from which the soul originated? — The Gnostic pointed away from that which somehow wanted to flow in from intellectualism and result in the image of Christ up to the point when he hands the cross to Simon of Cyrene. This is the one side of the human battle which at the time had the result of creating the influence of the great question, which I have set before you. What comes forth from this wrestling?
• Title: Foundation Course: Letter from Friedrich Rittelmeyer
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  • The people of whom, and for whom, I want to talk about here, long for a great purpose in life. They imagine this purpose of life, consciously or unconsciously, as a unified, powerful thought, as a singular soul-powerful feeing, which carries the whole of life and lift it up. Now the find Anthroposophy and discover an abundance of assertions in all kinds of fields, a mass of individual insights, big and small, which they initially don’t know how to approach and towards which they feel helpless. It is as if they want to dangerously push everything away by saying ‘One is necessary’, which they still experience as a deep human need.
  • Many of these people strongly feel that help can only come from a higher world. It is precisely here that Anthroposophy seems to be gradually thrown back on itself. It is for them as if people gradually want to and must push themselves higher, with unending effort and boredom while they long to be seized from above and be filled with new, powerful life forces from above.
  • Many of them have worked through a large part of knowledge of our time. Just from current science they have received powerfully chilling and paralysing impressions. And now also the realm of belief and the realm of knowledge needs transformation? Must their most precious and highest experiences of their inner soul realm be sacrificed for research and a descriptive ‘science’? They fear that this will fall back into a dull intellectualism; they rear a falsification, even desecration of the inner life. It looks to them like a basic, dangerous underestimation of the deep distinction is presented between knowledge which appear through the senses and phenomena, and belief, the inner truth freely acknowledged. Not only a few of these people carried a strong knowledge within, that help must somehow be expected from Christ, not from churchlike Christianity, but from the correctly understood Christ himself. Yes, in individuals you find an instinctive awareness of the “living Christ” as the great helper of mankind. Now they are told that in Anthroposophy, Christ is regarded as the “regent of the sun” or that to begin with the two Jesus children in our time reckon with all kinds of extraordinary details; sincere claims which, as far as they had not found this quite repulsive initially, now in any case mean absolutely nothing and above all doesn’t appear to be of help.