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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 1: The Relationship of Anthroposophy to Religious Life
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  • You see, the Greeks had a great advantage compared to the oriental world, they could to draw together their innermost nature so to speak. From within themselves they could draw a content, but this content could first only attach as filled with fantasy, imagination. However, there was something the Greeks didn’t know. They had brought the development of humanity to internalisation but didn’t attach it to the inner life. The internalisation and the hardening continued in the Roman times and beyond, and man had to learn — today still we need to learn to understand — how one can attach what is within, what permeates this inner being. The Greeks could think about their gods in grandiose fantasy images but what the Greek could not do, was to pray. The prayer only cam about later and for prayer the possibility had to be found of connecting the one praying, to reality. To this we must connect those times in which prayer was not merely spoken, not merely thought or not merely felt, but in which prayer became one with the sacramental ritual. Then again Catholicism knows quite well why they don’t separate themselves from ritual, from the sacrificial act, from the central sacrifice of the mass.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 2: Essence and Elements of Sacramentalism
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  • This is however a process in inorganic nature. When you study what a person accomplishes in the outer world you realize what is of importance is that it happens in such a way, that it comes from spiritual interrelationships, and that the body of a person only presents the possibility for the action. In our actions we namely — in that we gain knowledge of the world as soul-spiritual observers — only have our body as one ingredient. In our bodies processes take place — processes of movement, of nourishment, of dissolving and so on. What takes place in our bodies is an ingredient, something that is added to what happens objectively. Our body doesn’t take part in our actions; we only understand our actions when we consider them when separated from the body. Just as we in the cognitive process, seen materialistically, have something which turns us into observers, so we have in the process of actions for the world, in the process of action, which takes place in the world, something in which the body doesn’t participate. Processes which take place in the body remain without cosmic meaning, just like materialistic knowledge has no cosmic meaning. A person remains in materialism in his actions when they only pertain to the earthly, like a hermit standing in the world has no relationship to anything outside of himself. If he searches for this relationship, then he must mix something spiritual into his actions, accomplish actions in such a way that they aren’t separated from him, like all earthly actions, then he must allow his thoughts and feelings to enter in a vital way into his actions, so that the actions become signs for what lives in them. Then the actions are a sacrificial act, then they are the sacrifice.
  • When we look at knowledge in this way, we see knowledge objectified by the validation of the message in words; if we look at the actions, we have the objectification of action, the drawing out of man alone in what is given in the sacrificial act. Here we first have the relationship of a person to the outer world in the sense that it originates out of the human spirit-soul. Out of the spiritual soul now also rises the imagination — in relation to words, which are no longer experienced as a human, but as a divine revelation — and in relation to the sacrificial act, which is no longer being experienced as the manipulation of the human world, in which man is not involved, but as such is involved with his thoughts, his feelings; this he experiences again in his inner life.
  • If we look at the human beings in as far as they are involved with the outside world, then we have, what I would call, the realization of the process of knowledge (in spirit) in Words, and in the sacrificial act, which appear outwardly in signs, we have indicated everything which a person can unite with in his soul-spirit and actions. If we look at human beings absorbing the outside world, where we have the proclamation of the message in word and the sacrificial act, if we look at human beings who continuously give birth out of the spiritual, then we have realized this in the sacramental acts of transubstantiation and communion.
  • This is what the people wanted to present to those who said: The human physical-soul-spiritual relationship to the universe can be brought back through the sacraments; recognised through the proclamation, through the sacrificial act, performed through the transubstantiation and communion. You could live together with the entire world by taking what is usually spread over two halves in a person, the soul-spiritual, which just watches, and the physical, which is just an addition to external actions. These can be united by taking what the mere observer wants to remain in relation to the outside world, sacramentalize it in the proclamation of the Word, in the Gospel — which comes out of the “Angelum,” out of the realm permeated by the spiritual world — and in the sacrificial act, experienced in his inner life and through which the human being only becomes complete, sacramentalised in the transubstantiation, the transformation, and then by incorporating the human being into this whole in communion, in union. Here you have a real process which is no mere process of knowledge but a process which is connected to your feeling and will, while the process of knowledge takes place in a cold, frozen region of mere abstraction.
  • What takes place in the coldness of knowledge is warmed somewhat by the proclamation of the Word and in the sacrificial act. That which, however, through overheating can no longer exist consciously, because heat numbs consciousness and thus can’t be perceptive, which can happen when the phenomenon is elevated to a noumenon/psyche, means that in place of external processes which are perceived by the senses, the external process of sacramental action is imitated by the human being itself, in which sacramental action is regarded as what lies behind nature, which can’t be produced by anything else, with an objective meaning in the world, because it places the events of human life itself in the cosmos.
  • With this we have given something which our current abstract process for acquiring knowledge actually presents in life. However, a question remains, which is an important question. We can understand that something happens in people through the Word, because the Word works into the corporeality and man forms himself through words. We can also understand that through the sacrificial act something happens in the inner part of man because the sacrificial act is executed in such a way that he is not just holding back what is in his body, but that his feeling and willing takes part in the sacrificial act. As a result, an earthly event in the body is connected to a super-earthly event. This can be comprehended. In fact, quite different feelings are experienced during the sacrificial act than any during any other processes in ordinary outer activities. A dampening of the consciousness which is carried within, is numbed. If we can now say something happens within human beings, then the great question arises which we want to address in future: does this event, which is primarily an independent event, does it not take its course in outer events? Is it not also a world event? If so, then we should ask ourselves, what a person experiences as in an outer action, which is symbolic and thus somehow withdraws from the course of events in natural phenomena — do such actions in their turn somehow weave into the course of events in natural phenomena? Are they something real, outside of the human being? This is the other component of the question. As we said, we will occupy ourselves with this question in the next days.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 4: Anthroposophy and Religion.
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  • If we now go from what we learnt yesterday, we now approach the Sacrificial Act. These things, like many others, we later will clarify more, but this will be able to give you an indication. In olden times the actual characteristic could be found in the Sacrificial Act, of people experiencing the Sacrificial Act as a total reality. Actually for the more ancient presentation, the Sacrificial Act obviously connected to the smoke-like, to the airy; it was because, while the Sacrificial Act flows from within the human beings people knew — as one can also today really experience this in a Sacrificial Act — that just in this way, how the word sounds inwardly and lives itself out in warmth, the Sacrificial Act realises itself in air. Inwardly it lives itself out in the air. Towards the outside the true Sacrificial Act can’t manifest without it somehow or other appearing through light. However, we will speak about these things again later.
  • The Offering manifests itself inwardly, as we’ve seen, as air. When you come to examine the following things, you could later say: I’m taking notice of these things so that I can say that what referred to water in the Sacrificial Mass of the old Mysteries, has now been retained as a residue in the Baptism. How the spoken word referred outwardly to the air and inwardly to warmth, so the Transformation could accordingly refer to the earth, to what is firm, and only inwardly to water; and what had corresponded to unification, one had nothing. In the human being, one could say to oneself, the connection with the elements shifts. However, already in the Transformation to the extra-terrestrial, the earth is available, which man experiences by turning to be united with it. How can he then experience being united with the earthly? —This was the great question of the Old Mysteries. How can one somehow feel anything at all about the truly earthly?
  • I’ve even spoke about it from another point of view. One looks around and it becomes obvious that people take their inner processes for granted, but they don’t find anything which they want to take up into their consciousness. Symbolic action took on unification, but on the outside the place remained empty, something was necessary, so people said to themselves, for this place to be filled, if one wanted to turn to something within the earthly element itself it could correspond to the uniting taking place in communion. People felt they could look down on the earth. What presented itself within the earth, this could be fulfilled in the communion, but something outwardly was not possible. This is how people basically felt in the Old Mysteries, when they spoke of communion. They spoke about it this way, but they felt it could not be a concluded event. We basically feel this way when are instructed according to the outer statements of the Old Mysteries, how in images the event of Golgotha was foreseen, how it was symbolically carried out, which current research always refer to when they want to show that the Mystery of Golgotha was only something which can be compared to later developments when various sacrificial acts took place in temples, by presenting a sensory image of the representative of man having died, buried and resurrected three days later.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 7: Formation of Speech.
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  • This is where we are being directed and must consult. I want you to take note that in this case the Catholic rules were actually very strict. Please don’t take things up in such a way as if I am saying this towards pro-Catholicism; I only want to point out the situation. It isn’t important for us to be for, or opposed, to Catholicism, because it’s about something quite different. Particular customs were very strictly adhered to in the Catholic Church — not at all what is today in Rome’s mood and procedure. If a priest became so unworthy as to be excommunicated, then his skin would be ripped off, scraped off from his fingers where he had held the sacred host in his hands. His skin would be scraped off. Sometimes such things are referred to but legally it is so, and I know such processes quite well, that after the priest’s excommunication the skin of the fingers which touched the host, were scraped off. You can certainly set the objective instead of the succession that goes from the apostles through the priesthood to the priest celebrating today. You can set that which goes through consecration and through the sacraments themselves. You can exclude priesthood, but you can only exclude that by taking things objectively, right to a certain degree, objectively, that the priest no longer may have skin on his fingers when he is no longer authorised to celebrate the sacrificial mass.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 9: Religious Feeling and Intellectualism
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  • I said yesterday that the Protestant quite rightly sees something magical in the way the Catholic performs Mass, and that is certainly correct. Because of our adaptation of the modern-day educational material, we are incapable of admitting to this magic. If you come with a modern consciousness you would not be able to find any difference between a sacrificial Mass as presented in the continuity of Christian evolution and a sacrificial Mass which is simply presented in words, symbols and gestures, perceptible by outer senses, as taking place in the Mass. Beyond the understanding of the content lies the understanding of that which is the sacrifice of Mass for the Catholic; this is connected with the unifying understanding of the world which has got lost for modern humanity, the unified understanding of the world which is understood on the one side by the spirit and on the other side from nature. I could say the route of knowledge has turned more to the side of nature while insight into the spiritual world has disappeared, and as a result of this, the possibilities to perceive certain mysteries. With this I don’t want to say that in the consciousness of every Catholic priest there is also a substantial content about the sacrifice of the Mass. Still, in the Catholic community there is an awareness of this substantial content of the sacrifice of Mass to such a degree that one can still speak about the reality of it in the present.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 11: Insights into the Mystery of Golgotha, Priest Ordination.
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  • Through this, a great crack came about in the Catholic Church. What appeared from the ceremonial of course could not correspond to a soul content. Humanity didn’t come in the same way to the undermining of the ceremonial content, as it came to the drying up of the soul content. So it happened in the Catholic Church that the soul content dried out dogmatically, while the ceremonial content actually sustained itself. This ceremonial content of the Catholic Church didn’t come out of Christianity, but it came out of far older ceremonial processes. Out of such times it stirred, from a time in which people still had a living reading of the cosmos in which, as a sacrificial offering, it could be accomplished from the reading in the cosmos. What was drawn from the ancient ceremonies of the mysteries, was then Christianized. The Mass offering is also certainly taken from the ancient mystery ceremonies and Christianized. However, what remained as symbolic in the act of sacrifice, is what actually continued within the Catholic Church.