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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 2: Essence and Elements of Sacramentalism
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  • The agnosticism, the Ignorabimus, is something which has sprung up out of the scientific way of thinking of modern time. What kind of knowledge is it which professes ignorance or agnosticism? It is based on something which it agrees with completely; it is based on the fact that people have gradually been trying to totally shut out their life of soul from knowledge. It is namely so that the ideal human knowledge according to the modern scientist, also the historian, is to shut out subjectivity and only retain what is objectively valid. As a result, the process of obtaining knowledge — for scientific research as well — is completely bound to the physical body of man. Please understand this, my dear friends, in all earnest. Materialism namely has the right when it takes this knowledge which is available to it, not only in regard to what is totally due to material conditions, but which appear as material processes. What really happens between people, in their search for scientific knowledge and the outer world, moves between the outer material things and the relationship to the sense organs; this means their relationship with the material, physical body. The real process of seeking knowledge in connection to the earthly world is a material process right into the final phases of cognition. What the human being experiences in this cognition, is lived through as an observer; he experiences it with his soul-spiritual “side-stepping,” so that the human being actually is quite right in the cognitive process as being understood physically and to recognise this as the only decisive conception. The human being as observer, which has no activity within himself — this has already often been mentioned by scientists who have thought about this, recognised it and spoken about it.
  • 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.
  • With this we have thus the possibility to connect the human being in his relationship to all his actions in the outside world in a real sense. Actions distance themselves from him, his own body walks beside him. In transubstantiation that which does not take place in the world is presented as an event, because the outside world is only a fragment of possible events. In communion a person unites himself with the outside world to which he can’t connect through his thinking. Objective processes precede transubstantiation and communion. As a result of this we place a person through a physical-soul-spiritual way in a relationship with the world. We have stopped regarding the human being as in a hermit’s existence removed from the world; we’ve started seeing him as a member of the whole world. We have learnt to regard the world as material, but there, where we see it as a fragment, to look at it as if the spiritual foundation on which matter is based is only a part, spiritualising and perfecting; and we have taken the divine cycle, which is in the outer and inner part of man, and placed it before us ... (Some gaps in stenographer’s text made the publisher shorten the text here.)
  • 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.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 4: Anthroposophy and Religion.
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  • Of course, there was a time where what lived and weaved in the astral body as the result of star activity was to some extent interlinked with an experience that takes place inwardly, in relation to the earth, which we can penetrate recognizably when we move forward to the ether body today. Human beings felt themselves more in the soul-spiritual when, through their astrality, they experienced celestial processes. Then one sees the human being indeed in the earthly, but he wasn’t penetrating it as we do today; he penetrated the etheric, into what ruled in fire, water, air and earth. Here he maintains a relationship of which he is deprived according to today’s viewpoint and particularly the view of science. Right in the experiences the human being has in these relationships, refer back to the ritual acts which of course for our confessions are actually only inherited traditions.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 10: Composition of the Gospels
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  • This is not the essential thing; the essential is the sense of feeling oneself a person among people, by experiencing truth with other people. This is after all Christian. For this reason, it is necessary to believe in Christian community building, not only Christian proclamation. It is very necessary to believe that everything must necessarily flow towards real community building: this means not merely thinking about what others are saying, but to communally feel and act together. In community building the foundation must be for the community feeling communally, and act communally. It must be a real soul-spiritual organism built by the community. We will talk about this further.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 13: The Sacraments, Evolution and Involution
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  • If we look at the meaning of the event of a birth, regarding the relationship formed out of embryonic life, to what is brought about between conception and actual birth, we have previous steps which were initially soul-spiritual in the human being, moving into the material aspect. There is an integration of the spiritual-soul orientation into the material orientation. This is certainly a complicated process which psychology hasn’t yet studied properly, regarding its deeper meaning. I can admit that the development of the germ has not been studied completely. It is usually only studied by starting with the germ cell, briefly, the evolution is followed from the first germinal cell which has been fertilized through its formative elements up to the embryo’s maturity when it is then pushed out. What is not fully studied is what actually happens in the mother’s body in the Chorion and the amniotic glands as organs which are around the embryo and in their way are most perfect in the beginning of embryonic development but then become more complicated and are pushed out at the birth of the embryo.
  • What we have here in the germinal cell is certainly the rising evolution, while the involution is through the soul-spiritual of the organs by which they are first established in the mother’s body, from the Chorion, from the Amnion, and then gradually moving to the actual egg nucleus, to the actual embryo, so that we have here an involution of the soul-spiritual into matter. This matter becomes pushed out and then we have the continuation of embryonic evolution. The embryo is born and now puts forward its forces, as I’ve already explained to you, which it had been developing during the embryonic phase. This continues into the development of speech and still remains available in our bodies until later. We carry within our entire earthly lifetime the forces that remain inside us as remnants of embryonic development: the forces of birth. These birth forces develop within us, evolve in us like a gift of nature. This happens, if I may use this expression which sounds somewhat trivial, out of itself. However, immediately, from taking our first breath, from being in contact with the outer world, other processes come into play, processes related to those of dying. From the beginning we also have forces of dying in us. In these forces of dying our soul-spiritual becomes involved in our exchanges with the outer world.
  • The right harmony only appears around the age of 14, 15 or 16. The young person is taken hold of, by an inner strength, through which the physical body is permeated with the soul-spiritual, which means the astral with the ego-being. This is outwardly expressed in adolescence, and it is only an outer revelation while a complete transformation takes place in the whole person. This event which appears as an evolutionary process can be called maturity. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • Confirmation also has the task — and we will see with this in mind what a fitting ritual it can be — the task in the Christian sense to what can be given to the ego and astral body through which everything has evolved in a modified way between the ego and astral body, between the soul-spiritual and the physical bodily nature, having developed with the coming of maturity.
  • We enter with this into an age in life where we have something else in relation to development. Our soul-spiritual becomes immersed in the physical bodily nature. The physical body captures our soul-spiritual; the soul spiritual is as a result connected in a certain way with the physical body. This is the condition of our development, because we, when we want to examine it as an evolutionary process, describe it as the soul-spiritual incorporation into the human being. We could say: the third evolutionary process is the incorporation. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • Added to this, if we now look for the corresponding process of involution, then we must above all see, my dear friends, that the human being, through the immersion of his soul-spiritual into the physical body, has evolved an admirable power in his being, continually being in the state of oscillation in which there is a return to the soul-spiritual, in the repetition of the re-immersion into the physical bodily nature so that it contains a rhythm, which threatens him to be either lost in the ecstatic soul-spiritual aspect or to fall back into the animalistic, in complete incorporation. Human beings need something which stand opposite this evolutionary process as a process of involution, and this process is reception to Holly Communion. The process of involution for the incorporation is Holy Communion. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • In our discussion about evolution and what the case has been up to now, we could say the following. It is so, that the human being in his soul-spiritual nature, confronts the physical bodily nature at every moment; at every moment the human being must take care to move in the correct rhythm so that his or her soul-spiritual nature is not allowed to sink into animalism, or that the physical is left alone and to a certain extent the unworldly rises into the soul-spiritual which would weaken the soul-spiritual. Bringing the altar sacraments into the right rhythm is what the human being must look for in the reception of sacraments.
  • With this, not the entire human evolution is given, because the complete human evolution includes that we not only in a single moment stand in this swing between the soul-spiritual and the physical bodily nature, but the complete development includes that we also, in time, could swing back again. We need reminders of previous earthly incarnations and earthly experiences. You only need to look at psychopathology and you will see what it means for people when their normal true recollection is ruined, undermined, somehow erased. These recollections certainly develop early and only those things connected to these recollections, intimately felt completely within, getting to complete grasps with it, only really happens after puberty. This is the difference, which today’s modern psychology doesn’t consider, between for instance what is present in a child’s life of recollections up to 15 and 16 years of age, that it is different to what comes later when memories are again gathered so that through the recollections gathered, the I is actually firmly consolidated. In brief, we see that this becomes more and more consolidated, this which we call life’s recollections. It’s one of our necessities; it evolves out of our being — as humans. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • Earlier evolutionary processes we’ve always contrasted with sacramental action and processes of involution; however, the evolutionary processes have gradually become similar to processes of involution. The process of involution during repentance is in a certain way the outer unfolding of quite an inner decisive recollection process; it is the process of involution which is slowly approached by the process of evolution. We need, when we now want the sacramental action for this natural involutionary process of death, to introduce it in a somewhat cultic, ritualistic form, in which something of a spiritual side of nature’s knowledge can be perceived, which serve to confront the dying person and manage to do something to the dying person which is simultaneously stimulated in his soul-spiritual life, stirred by the natural processes of his physical bodily being. It shall, expressed in a rhythm, let the physical-bodily aspect disappear upon death, and the soul-spiritual in turn take shape. For certain reasons, which we will still discuss, one can always see in oils, in everything oil-like, that something leads back to the soul-spiritual. In nature as well, oiling processes are regarded as processes of salvation. Therefore, the holy last anointment is performed here. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • Thus, we have exhausted the individual life of a human being, and there are still two human relationships left that are no longer of an individual nature. The one relationship is where the human being, standing here on earth in his physical bodily being, actually treasures a soul-spiritual relationship in heaven, so that the umbilical cord to his soul spiritual, which had been severed, so to speak, now again is reconnected to the soul-spiritual. This doesn’t involve individual people; it involves the relationship of exchange with the heavenly-spiritual. This is something which is present in all people, albeit unconsciously. If we were to be completely severed from the soul-spiritual, we would never find our way back, it is a deep process of involution which is eternally present in us, quite a hidden process, even more hidden than what happens in the inner soul life when the organism passes through death; for this reason it is a process which in the course of individual lives of people do not become conscious at all. For this, an outer evolutionary process must be looked for and this evolutionary process is given in the ritual of priest ordination. As the sixth one, we have a process which is given out of itself, as I said — you could call it a connection — and corresponding as its counter impulse or the outer evolutionary process, in the priest ordination. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • Now as the seventh one we have an image of the earthly relationship given as a relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily: this relationship is in nature’s way given as the relationship between a man and a woman. For each true observation of the relationship between a man and a woman it is so, that the balance in the feminine swings more to the soul-spiritual side, and in the male, more to the physical-bodily nature. Yes, it is so. On earth, to a certain extent, the relationship is expressed between the human being and the spiritual world, and it is, I could say, that the woman has made one less step down into the physical life, than the man. One must say it actually differently, one must say: The descent into earthly life can be depicted by a definite boundary; the woman doesn’t quite arrive at the boundary while the man crosses over it. This is actually the contrasting difference between a man and woman, expressed in a physical way. There is a certain boundary to reach, the woman doesn’t quite manage it and the man crosses over it. Both bear a kind of imperfection within, between them a state of tension exists as a result. When this state of tension which exists naturally in a relationship between a man and woman, searches for a sacramental evolutionary value — this is a deeply hidden process of involution which we are pointing out here, when we indicate the manly and womanly — then we are given the sacrament of marriage. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • This is what has always been in Christian esotericism in relation to sacramentalism, in so far as it is to be applied to man, that man enters this world endowed with values partly through evolution, partly through values of involution, and to this must always be added, through the sacraments, the values of evolution to involution, and values of involution to evolution. Man equally speaks out of the foundation of his experience: the human being steps with his incomplete being fully into earthly existence; he or she must first be made into a complete being. He or she expresses their incompleteness at birth, in puberty, in incarnation, in memory and in death. To these things the human being, in order to live as complete physical-bodily-soul-spiritual beings, has to add, through sacramental ways, the baptism, confirmation, sacrament at the altar, repentance and last anointment.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 14: Gnostics and Montanists
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  • While the Gnosis directed its gaze to the macrocosm, so Mantanismus dived into the microcosm, in the human being himself. Intellectualistic concepts were at that time only in its infancy and could not yet be fully expressed; theology in today’s sense did not arise in this way. What existed in all the exercises, in particular those prescribed by Mantanus for his students, were inner stories, something which was enlivened within the students as visions. These atavistic visions for the Montanists were particularly indigenous. All those who were to separate themselves from belonging to the mere pastoral care of the Montanists were allowed to practice, and all of them were allowed to practice to the extent that they could answer the question: how does the soul-spiritual in man, in the microcosm, relate to the physical-bodily aspect?
  • The origin of the St John Gospel has really come about through an immense spiritual time context. I can’t do otherwise, my dear friends, than to make a personal remark here, that I need to experience it as the greatest tragedy of our time, that theologians do not experience the majesty of the John Gospel at all, that out of a deep struggle preceding it, out of a struggle, the big question arose: How can mankind manage to, on the one hand, find a way to his soul-spiritual in the spiritual-supersensible where his own soul-spiritual nature originated from? On the other hand, how can mankind reach an understanding for how his soul is within the physical-bodily nature?
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 15: Ordination and Transubstantiation
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  • I would like to sketch it in the following way. Let’s accept that this daily consciousness is connected to human physicality. This higher consciousness is now lifted from it and one sees a completely new world. However, now one has to retain this higher consciousness; it must be purely soul-spiritual. It can’t happen however, if one has not previously developed the strength through exercises — it can’t happen if not accomplished in a lively way; what I’m implying is more of a hypothesis — so, when one has not acquired the strength through exercises, it can all collapse into physicality. This means one is not living in a free soul-spiritual consciousness but the processes in human organs will reveal what this consciousness observes; then one has to do with dreams, one does not really have actual objective imaginations full of content. The objective, content-filled imagination exists as a result of, what one experiences, not being impregnated with bodily processes, but processes of the supersensible world. This must be achieved through exercises and by having achieved this, being able to step over the boundary between the sensual and supersensible which is designated as the threshold. This is the case today. Today our ordinary consciousness contains content known to everyone, but we have another content — which of course can be described as I have done now again from a certain point of view — which is certainly described as the content of a higher world as opposed to that of the ordinary world.
  • The priest ordination in itself is to a certain extent an outer process for that which earlier was evoked inwardly in those going through initiation, through the inversion of outer processes; it is what in fact places the human being in another world. A person is then made aware — I can depict this even more precisely — of certain interrelationships in the cosmos, which can’t be studied in the outer world. A person is made aware that physical processes are taking place which do not coincide with the usual outer sensually perceptible processes and he becomes attentive to what is actually sacramental. He learns to see for instance, in dissolving salt in water, that something is happening which isn’t created in a physical-chemical process of dissolution, but what happens in salt dissolving in water is actually something inward, I could call it, something radiant. He learns to recognise how processes happen which are only conceivable through the spirit in man. This becoming transported into the world of such revelations which can’t be seen with the outer senses or understood with ordinary minds, essentially belongs to the priest consecration. Therefore, through the priest ordination the person will as much be penetrated by this world of the Divine, as the person in olden times was initiated through not merely sensing the penetration of his physicality with light, but that he feels permeated also with the soul-spiritual of the light.
  • We need to look for something else. We need to fully understand that a reality is not something which is spoken about, something abstract. We must also learn to understand the sacramental. We must learn to understand, throughout, that the content of the teaching does not contain the essential but that something must be added from real processes and in such a way that these actual processes are carried on the waves of reality as the weaving of the Divine. There have only been single individuals, like Novalis, who understood this — do read his Aphorisms, then you’ll see. He spoke about magical idealism; he knew this wasn’t alive in outer sensory worlds, but within people, there lived the soul-spiritual. Then there was Schelling — in his old age, that’s why he was hardly understood — for whom it was quite absurd to believe that the essence of Christianity consisted in the acceptance of what Christ taught; rather, Schelling recognised the essential much more according to the account of Jesus going through the process of the entire Golgotha drama, in the description of actions which took place around Golgotha. However, there are individuals who tend towards the reality, who in turn want to enter into actual experiences connected to the spiritual. In totality one could say that the way Catholicism experiences it, is something quite antiquated which can’t be introduced into modern consciousness any longer. For this reason we mustn’t only search for a renewal of old rituals but we must search for a ritual which we can create out of ourselves, but created in such a way that it creates the Divine in us in the sense we have spoken about, so that the words of Paul become the truth — in Gospel interpretation, and in all religious activities: Not I, but Christ in me.
• Title: Foundation Course: Summaries of Lectures
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  • The discerning and acting person. The sinfulness of modern science. Essence and elements of sacramentalism. The experience of words, speech and hearing. The in-streaming of the divine into the word: Gospels. Objectification of action in the Offering. Conversion of natural processes into spiritual processes. Transubstantiation. Uniting with the transformed substances: communion. The physical-soul-spiritual relationship of people to the universe and their representation through sacraments: recognition through the word and offering, dealt through transubstantiation and communion. Question: Do the Gospel and Offering have an impact in the course of outer events? Is the inner experience of transubstantiation and communion something real outside a congregant? Open letter of Dr Friedrich Rittelmeyer to Rudolf Steiner.
  • What does it mean, to experience shaping the divine within? Fundamental ideas on the being of the sacramental. Seven sacraments and their relation to life. Rhythmic exchange from evolution to involution processes in nature and life’s history. Healing these processes through sacraments. Regarding birth, maturity, incarnation, memory, death and sanctification through baptism, confirmation, act of consecration, penance and last anointment. Human relations to the soul-spiritual, which are no longer of an individual nature and their image of the sacrament: marriage, priest ordination.