Community Building

Lecture I

February 27, 1923

My dear Friends:

The frame of mind in which I speak to you today is not that in which I was privileged to speak to you in earlier days; for, since Sylvester Eve of 1922-23, there stands out in the background of this mood the terrible picture of the Goetheanum in flames. The truth is that, for all those who loved the Goetheanum for the sake of Anthroposophy, the pain and sorrow are necessarily so great and of such a character as to be beyond the possibility of expression in words. The feeling might seem to be justified that a movement which directs its eyes toward the spiritual, such as our Anthroposophical Movement, ought not to have so great a cause for grieving over an external testimonial of its essential nature. But in the case of the Goetheanum that we have lost the matter is somewhat different. It was not just an ordinary structure for our Anthroposophical work. I have had to explain many times during the period of almost ten years in which we have been at work on the building that what might perfectly well have been true in any other similar situation — the building of a home for a spiritual or other movement — could not have applied in the case of our Anthroposophical Movement. For the matter in question here was not simply, as I have often said, that a spiritual movement through its growth brings about in the minds of a group of self-sacrificing and devoted persons the purpose to build for it a home center of its own, which should be constructed in one or another traditional style. In our case the situation was that Anthroposophy stands upon a spiritual foundation which gives it, not the one-sided character of any sort of religious or scientific or artistic movement, but that of a comprehensive movement which desires to manifest itself according to all these various aspects of the great ideals of humanity — the moral and religious, the scientific, and the artistic. Thus, it was quite impossible that the purpose should come about to erect a building for the Anthroposophical Movement in just any sort of form. On the contrary, the same source which gave form to the Anthroposophical ideas, as the expression of the spiritual view belonging to Anthroposophy as a movement in the field of knowledge, had also to determine in an artistic way the construction of this building, and for almost ten years have many friends, giving me their assistance, striven to incorporate in external form, to image forth in the direction of every line, in every external architectural and plastic shape, in every colored surface, that which comes from the fountains of Anthroposophical conceptions, Anthroposophical life, and Anthroposophical will. In the drawing of every line, in each plastic form, in each color there was embodied this view, this life. Intimately united was this building with everything which willed to work otherwise in the Anthroposophical Movement in the aspect of knowledge and in that of art. For example, the friends who have seen Eurythmy presented in the Dornach Goetheanum building must certainly have received the impression that everything which responded to the Eurythmy movements out of the interior architecture and paintings and forms of the auditorium, and the stage was in the most intimate harmony with these movements. One could really feel as if the movements of the persons on the stage were born out of the architectural and sculptural forms. If one stood on the platform and spoke with one's whole heart out of the Anthroposophical spirit, then every line as it had been drawn, every molded form, was something that responded, that spoke together with one. The endeavor had been to achieve this. To be sure, only a first attempt has been made. But the endeavor had been made, and one could sense this, and it is for this reason that anyone who had expended his labor on this Dornach building felt that his own emotions, which he had embodied in this work, shared in the pain from the scorching flames on Sylvester Eve. Precisely the intimate association of Anthroposophical feeling and will with these forms — which were molded so completely from direct vision and according to this vision, and which can never be replaced by any sort of thought-forms, any sort of interpretations — makes the pain from the loss so very profound. But this must pass over, my dear friends, into the memory which can be possessed by those who came to love the Goetheanum, who experienced this profound harmony. And we must set it up, in a certain sense, as a memory in our hearts. Since, in a sense, through the very intimacy of feeling I have mentioned, we have lost the home that sheltered us, we must all the more intensely seek for a spiritual home in our hearts to take the place of that which we have lost. With all possible means must we strive to set up for eternity in our hearts this building which has been removed from the reach of our external artistic sensibilities. Yet in the background of all the work that we can do in future in the realm of Anthroposophy there remains this terrible flame, into which all the parts of the flame united at midnight between December 31 and January 1. And it consumed, not a part of living spiritual Anthroposophy, of course, yet nevertheless a great amount of work which we had striven to achieve for Anthroposophy in our present age.

My dear friends, I believe that what was then experienced, especially if it takes root in the hearts of our Anthroposophical friends, can bestow out of its pain, out of its sorrow, a power for everything to which we shall be summoned on behalf of Anthroposophy in the immediate future. The nature of life is such that, when a number of persons must say to themselves, “We have suffered a common disaster,” this unites them in a certain way, so that strength and power may come in turn from another side for common and effective action. And the forces which are to ensoul us for Anthroposophical work are to come from experiences, not from drab theories, not from abstract ideas.

My dear friends, I wish to connect these things with the theme which I had to choose for these two days, with the description of the prerequisites for the formation of an Anthroposophical community. I wish to connect these things with this theme for the reason that — apart from their being so deeply graven on our hearts — they direct our attention to one of the facts upon which we should earnestly fix the eyes of our souls in these days. Much sacrificial spirit, much devoted labor has been poured into the Goetheanum; and the impulses to this sacrificial spirit, this devoted labor, have come about in the two decades during which we have been practicing Anthroposophy, in all places where Anthroposophy has been alive. These impulses came from the hearts that were filled with enthusiasm for Anthroposophy. And the Goetheanum was a deed of the community of human beings imbued with the Anthroposophical attitude of mind. If we are reflecting very much at present, out of various underlying conditions — and must reflect very much — about how the Anthroposophical Society needs to be regenerated, it must not be forgotten, on the other hand, that the Anthroposophical Society has had a lifetime of two decades, that very much in the nature of a common experience of destiny in common action and common aspiration has been shared by a great number of human beings, that the Anthroposophical Society is not something that we can, let us say, found anew today; for history, real history, experienced history, history achieved, does not submit to being extinguished. It is not possible to begin today something which began two decades ago. If we are to participate in the deliberations here, we must guard against such a misunderstanding as this. One who has found bis way to the Anthroposophical Society in the course of time as an additional member certainly sees much to be criticized in it, and with full justification. In this regard, true and weighty statements have been made here. But it is necessary to bear in mind, nevertheless, that the Anthroposophical Society is something which has produced results. And there are, after all, a goodly number of persons in this Anthroposophical Society who can affirm as a weighty assertion, laden with content because laden with life, with sorrow, and with suffering: “For us in common has our beloved Goetheanum been destroyed by fire.”

After all, the question whether one joined the Society in 1917 or later or whether one can utter these sorrow-filled words oneself today out of deepest inner experience of longer duration, — this makes a difference. Our deliberations ought really to be carried out under the influence of this fact. In that case, something would disappear, something very important, indeed, from the feelings which have been expressed in these days — again, out of fully justifiable underlying causes — by many of our friends. There reached my ear this statement — and I certainly felt its justification — “After all that I have heard here, I can no longer speak in the same way of Anthroposophy after I return home as I could while I was still full of illusions.” I say that something disappears from these words when one reflects about what those who have been Anthroposophists for two decades have experienced together, and recently suffered together, because this suffering was the final link of a long-continued life within the Anthroposophical Society. And it is necessary to realize also, my dear friends, that this common experience cannot be brushed away by the worries we feel during these present days. This, after all, is something abiding. This would remain even if the occurrences here were taking a far worse course than has actually been manifested. Must we lightly forget the depths because of concern with the mere surface of things? This we must not do, especially in a spiritual movement which takes its rise out of the depths of the human heart and soul.

Not without the sun — though the sun also suffers eclipse — not without the sun, in the appropriate meaning of the expression, is that which has come into the world as the Anthroposophical Movement. This does not mean that things should not be recognized within this circle as they present themselves, for the very purpose of regaining the right vehicle for Anthroposophy in a true Anthroposophical Society. But we need the right mood, out of which alone this can be accomplished.

Naturally, my dear friends, I cannot touch upon everything today that must be taken into account. In these two lectures I shall take pains to deal with as much as possible of that which needs to be said; but not everything can lie said. 1 should like, however, to call your special attention to two things: to the urgent need for the building of a community within the Anthroposophical Society, and to the symptom which has appeared within the Anthroposophical Movement through the extraordinarily gratifying youth movement. On the basis of Anthroposophy, however, many things must be viewed otherwise than they are viewed elsewhere. We should simply not be standing on this foundation, so ardently craved by many persons, if we could not view things otherwise than they are viewed elsewhere in the life of the present day.

Community-building! It is most remarkable that the idea of community building should become especially manifest in our day. The present ideal of community-building results from an elemental and profound feeling in many human souls; the ideal of a quite definite relation of man to man with an impulse toward united work. When there came to me some time ago a number of young theologians who were preparing for the vocation of the pastorale, there was within them most of all the impulse toward a religious renewal, toward such a religious renewal as should be permeated by the true power of the Christ, a religious renewal that can lay hold upon many human souls in our time as they desire to be laid hold of but cannot be within the present traditional religious denominations. And I had to give expression to some thing to which I attach great importance in connection with the development of this stream of religious renewal. I had to say: “There must be an endeavor, in the right sense of the expression, toward community-building, to ward an element in the work of religion, and of the pastorate, which binds one human being to another.” And I said to the friends who had come to me: “With abstract words, with preaching in the ordinary sense, with the small residue of the liturgical rites that still continues in one religious de nomination or another, it is not possible to work in the direction of community-building on a religious basis. That which tends more and more toward the intellectual within the religious sphere has brought it about that no small number of present-day sermons are completely permeated by a rationalistic, intellectualistic element. That which is brought to bear upon human beings in this way does not unite them, but, on the contrary, isolates them: it atomizes their social community.” And this must be quite understandable to anyone who knows that he can achieve that which is rational and intelledn.il as a single human individuality. If only I have reached a certain stage of education in my individual human development, I can achieve that which is intellectual without depending upon other persons, and I can bring this to ever greater perfection within me. One can think quite alone; one can carry out logical processes alone; and one may even accomplish this all the better in proportion as one is alone. Actually, one needs to withdraw from the world, even from the world of human beings, when one is intensely engaged in purely logical thinking. But the human being is not capacitated exclusively for such isolation. And, if I shall endeavor today to render clear in a pictorial and not an intellectual way that element in the depths of the human soul which seeks for community-building, 1 must do so for the reason that we are living within the transition to the development of the consciousness soul in the nature of man, for the reason that our life must become more and more conscious. I hit becoming more conscious does not mean becoming more intellectualistic. Becoming more conscious means that we can no longer remain at the stage of mere instinctive experience. But particularly on the basis of Anthroposophy we must endeavor to present that which is lifted up into conscious clarity nevertheless in fullness of elemental life, in a life, I mean to say, whose nature seems to our feeling similar to that of naive perception and sensibility. That must be accomplished.

Now, there is a sort of community in the life of humanity, which is obvious to all, which indicates in all parts of the earth that humanity tends innately toward the community life. This is a sort of community which is referred to even in contemporary civilization, indeed everywhere in the political and economic life, and generally in a very harmful way, but from which we may learn a lesson even though in a primitive form.

A child is taken in his earliest years into a community that is really and concretely human and without which the child could not live. This is the community of human speech. In language, I mean to say, we have a form of community which nature herself sets before the eye of the mind. By means of language, and especially the mother tongue, which impregnates the whole nature of the human being at a time when the child's ether body has not yet been born, the first community-building element is brought to bear upon man. And our rationalistic age is alone responsible for the fact that, although there is a feeling for the languages of the peoples today through the influence of political agitation and also for their folk-nature through the languages, yet the deep and intimate configuration of soul, the tremendous values in destiny and karma, which are connected with the language and its genius are by no means taken into account as the natural innate basis of the human craving for the community. What should we be if we had to pass one another without discovering the same soul life sounding forth in a word of the same sound from the other person, a word in which we also can embody our own soul life? And each of us needs only to exercise a little self-knowledge in order to acquire what I cannot develop here for lack of time — a view of all that we owe to language in the formation of the first primitive human community.

But, my dear friends, there is something even profounder than human language, though it is certainly less often to be met with in life. Human language is something, after all, which unites human beings and forms a community on a certain external level but does not penetrate very deeply into the most intimate life of the soul. For the earthly life we note at certain moments something besides language of a community-building nature, something that goes beyond language. And this is sensed by one who meets again in later life — when destiny so arranges things — with persons whom he has known as children. Just imagine the ideal instance: that anyone should find himself in later life, by disposition of karma, in his fortieth or fiftieth year in association with three, four, or five of the comrades of his youth or childhood, with whom he had not been associated for decades, but with whom lie had lived in the period between the tenth and the twentieth years of his life. Let us suppose there had been good human relationship between these persons, fruitful and filled with love, and let us imagine what it signifies when these persons now permit their souls to lie touched in common by the memories of that time when they lived together as children. Memory lies deeper than everything that belongs to the level of language. Souls resound with a more inti mate harmony when the purely soul language of memory binds one person to another even though only for a brief period of association. And it is certainly not merely because of individual facts that are called up out of the soul and which sound from one soul to the other — as anyone knows who has had any experience in this realm — if that profound intimacy and depth of the soul becomes manifest which may become manifest in such an ideal instance as I have constructed. It is something quite different. It is not the concrete thought contents of memory, but a wholly indefinite, and yet again very definite, common experience in the souls of these persons, it is the resurrection of that in which they were once associated in hundreds of details which blend, however, into a totality, and it is everything that comes from the other soul as a sharing of memory, — this is what serves to awaken a total experience

Such is the case for the earthly life. And, from having traced this fact of the soul into the spiritual realm, 1 had to say at that time to those young theological friends who had come to me for the purpose indicated that, if real community-building was to come about in connection with the Movement for Religious Renewal, there was needed a ritual in harmony with the present time and applicable to it. Sharing together in the experience of the ritual bestows something upon the human soul which evokes, simply through its own nature, the community feeling. And the Movement for Religious Renewal understood this; it adopted this ritual. And I think that the statement made by Dr. Rittelmeyer here from this platform during these days was of great importance — that from this direction of community-building there will grow out of the Movement for Religious Renewal one of the greatest perils for the Anthroposophical Movement. For there lies in this religious ritual an enormously important element in community-building. It binds man to man.

What is there, indeed, in this ritual which binds one human being to another, which, out of the atomized individuals brought about by the intellectualistic, logical element can once more create a community, and will most certainly create communities? This is clearly what Dr. Rittelmeyer had in mind. Here is the means available for creating communities. But, since the Anthroposophical Society also tends toward the creating of a community, it will have to find means suited to itself, if it is not to be threatened by a certain peril from the side of the Movement for Religious Renewal.

Now, what is the secret of the community-begetting element in the ritual, especially as this has been created with this purpose in view for the Movement for Religious Renewal? That which speaks to us in the form of the ritual, whether in ceremony or in words, is a copy of actual experiences, though not, of course, experiences actually passed through here on earth, but of experiences in that world which the human being passes through in his pre-earthly existence, when he is on the second part of the way between death and a new birth: out of that world traversed by the human being from the point that marks the midnight hour of human existence between death and a new birth until the time of the descent to the earthly life. In that sphere through which Man then passes lies the world, lie the occurrences, exist those real entities which are actually pictured in copy in genuine and true ritualistic forms. What, then, does a person feel who shares this experience of the ritual with another with whom he has been brought together by some sort of karma? — and karma is so involved that we may safely presuppose karma wherever we are brought together with other persons. He experiences together with him common memories of the pre-earthly existence. This experience emerges in the subconscious depths of the soul: “Before we descended to the earth, we experienced together a world which now appears before our souls on earth in the ritual.” This is a powerful bond of union; it is really a drawing, not merely of pictures of the supersensible world, but of its actual forces into the world of the senses, ft is a drawing out of the supersensible into the sensible world of those forces which concern a human being intimately, which are connected with the most intimate backgrounds of the human soul. The reason why the ritual unites is because in it there is brought down out of the spiritual worlds that which constitutes the forces of those spiritual worlds, because the human being then has before him in his earthly life that which is super-earthly — not in the rationalistic words which cause forgetfulness of the spiritual world even in the subconscious depth of the soul, but in a living picture permeated with power which is not merely a symbol, not a dead image, but is imbued with power; because he has before him that which belonged to his spiritual environment when he was not in the earthly body. A comprehensive common memory leading over into the spiritual, — this is what constitutes the community-building power of the religious ritual.

Such a power is needed by the Anthroposophical Society also in order that there may emerge within the Society the community nature. But the basis for community-building can be of a different sort in the Anthroposophical Movement from that in the Movement for Religious Renewal, although neither will be exclusive of the other, but one can be in the most complete harmony with the other if the relationship is rightly understood in our feelings. It is simply a matter of necessity, however, to understand first how a community-building element of a different character can enter into human life. A memory turned back toward the spiritual streams out to us in the ritualistic forms. These forms speak to something deeper than the human intellect; they speak to the human heart, for the human heart, in essence, understands the language of the spiritual, although this language of the spirit does not enter directly into consciousness during the earthly life. And now to understand that other element which must play a corresponding role in the Anthroposophical Society it is most important of all that you shall give attention, not only to the mystery of language and of memory in relation to the nature of community-building, but to still another thing in human life.

Take the condition of the dreaming person and compare this with the condition of the person who is fully awake in the life of day. The world of dreams may be beautiful, may be splendid, rich in pictures, full of significance and manifold in meaning, but it is a world which isolates man in his earthly life. In man's world of dreams, he is alone. Here lies one person, asleep and dreaming; others are around him either awake or asleep, but the worlds within their souls have nothing whatever to do with what he is experiencing in his dream consciousness, nothing to do with his dream consciousness itself. Man isolates himself in his dream world and even more in his sleep world. When we awake, we enter into a sort of community life. The space in which we are and in which the other person is, — the feelings and conceptions of this space which he has we also have. We awake in contact with our environment to the same inner life, to a certain extent, to which he awakes. As we awake out of the isolation of the dream, we awake to a certain degree into a human community by reason simply of the nature of our relation as a human being to the external world. We cease to be so definitely within ourselves, so woven around and encased as we were within the dream world, although we were dreaming so beautifully and splendidly and with such manifold meanings.

But how do we wake? We wake through contact with the external world, with the light, with tone, with the phenomena of warmth, with all the other content of the sense world, but we really wake also through contact — at least, as to the ordinary every-day life — with the external aspect of the other human being, his natural aspect. As to the daily life, we wake through contact with the natural world. This wakes us; this transports us from isolation into a certain community life. We do not yet — and this is the mystery of the every-day life — awake as a human being through contact with human beings, with the innermost depth of the human being. We wake through contact with the light, with the tone; we wake, perhaps, through contact with the language which the other person speaks to us as belonging to the natural element in the human being. We wake through contact with the words that he utters outward from within. We do not awake through contact with what goes on in the depths of the soul of the other human being. We awake through contact with the natural element in the other person, but we do not awake in the ordinary life through contact with the element of soul and spirit in the other person.

My dear friends, this is a third awaking or, at least, a third state of the soul. From the first we awake into the second through the summons of nature. From the second we awake into the third state through the summons of the soul and spirit in the other human being. But we must first become aware of this summons. Precisely as we awake rightly for the every-day life through the external nature, there is an awaking at a higher level when we awake in the right way through contact with the soul and spirit element in our fellow human being, when we learn to feel the spirit and soul element of our fellow man as we feel light and tone in our soul life in ordinary awaking.

No matter how beautiful the pictures we may see in the isolation of the dream, no matter how splendid the experiences we may have in the dream consciousness, we are not likely to be able to read, for example, while dreaming unless especially abnormal conditions occur. We do not have this relation to the external world. Now, my dear friends, no matter how beautiful the ideas we receive from Anthroposophy, this knowledge of a spiritual world, although we may theoretically enter completely into all that is said about ourselves, our etheric and astral bodies and the like, we do not thereby as yet understand the spiritual world. We begin to develop the first understanding of the spiritual world when we awake to the spirit and soul of the other person. Only then does real understanding of Anthroposophy first begin. Indeed, we are compelled to take our start from that state for the real understanding of Anthroposophy, which may be called the awaking of the human being to the spirit and soul in the other human being.

My dear friends, the power needed for this awaking can be created through the implanting of spiritual idealism within a human community. There is much talk today, to be sure, al>out idealism. But the truth is that within our contemporary culture and civilization idealism is something rather threadbare. For real idealism exists only when the human being can be conscious of the fact that, just as he brings a spiritual world down into the earthly when he establishes a ritualistic form, so likewise, when he lifts up into the ideal something he has seen within the earthly world and learned to know and understand there, he is lifting this into the supersensible-spiritual. When we celebrate the ritualistic form, we bring the super-earthly into the power-permeated picture. When we experience so spiritually and ideally what we experience in the physical world that we learn to feel that it is experienced in the supersensible, we then lift ourselves with our soul life into the supersensible — that is, when we learn to feel in such a way that we say to ourselves: “What you have perceived here in the world of the senses, if you lift it up to the ideal, it then suddenly becomes alive.” It becomes alive when you permeate it in the right way with impulses of heart and will. When you truly irradiate your whole inner being with will, apply your enthusiasm to it, then, as you idealize your sense experience, you move with it in the direction opposite to that which you follow when you bring the mysteries of the supersensible within the ritualistic form. For, whether we have a small or a large Anthroposophical community, we can attain in a certain sense what is given in this description. We can reach it when, by means of the living power which we embody in the forming of our ideas of the spiritual, we are actually able to experience something possessed of the power to awaken, something which does not simply so idealize the sensible that the ideal becomes an abstract thought but idealizes it in such a way that the ideal attains to a higher life as we enter livingly into it, that it becomes the counterpart of the ritual — that is, the sensible lifted up into the supersensible. This, my dear friends, we can arrive at in our feelings if we take to heart that, wherever we engage in Anthroposophical activities, we shall permeate these activities with spiritualized sentiment, when we have learned to feel that even the door to this room — for, no matter how secular the place may otherwise be, it will be rendered sacred by the reading together of Anthroposophy — is a threshold we cross over with a feeling of reverence. And we must learn to evoke the feeling that this is true of everyone who unites with us in the common receiving of Anthroposophical life. We must learn to bring this not only to the state of innermost abstract conviction but to an inner experience, so that in a room where we are occupied with Anthroposophy we do not merely sit there as a certain number of persons who take in what they hear or what is read to them and transform it into their thoughts, but that, through the whole process of taking in Anthroposophical ideas, in the room where we are occupied with Anthroposophy there will be present a real spiritual Being. Just as the divine forces are present in a sensible way in the ritualistic forms which are being carried out in the world of the senses, so must we learn to permit a real spiritual Being to be supersensibly present by means of our inner soul mood, in the room in which there resound Anthroposophical words. Our speaking, our sentiments, our thinking, our impulses of will, we must learn to guide in a spiritual sense, not in an abstract sense but in such a sense that we shall feel as if a Being hovering above us were looking down upon us and listening to us — a Being really present in the spirit. We must have a feeling for a spiritual Presence, a supersensible Presence, which is there because we are engaged with Anthroposophy. Then does the single Anthroposophical activity really begin to become the realizing of the supersensible itself.

Indeed, my dear friends, visit the primitive communities: there something exists other than merely the language. The language is something that belongs to the upper man. If you give attention to the whole human being, you will find in the common blood that which unites one person to another in the primitive human community. There the bond of blood unites the human beings into a community. But there lives in the blood the Group Soul, or Group Spirit, that which is not to be found in the same way in connection with a free humanity. In a group of human beings that have been united by the bond of blood there has entered a common spiritual element, coming in a way from below upward. Where a common blood flows through the veins of a number of persons, there is present a Group Spirit. So, likewise, through what we experience in common as we receive Anthroposophy together, there may be nurtured in us, not, of course, such a Group Spirit entering through the blood, but a Community Spirit. If we have the capacity to experience this Spirit, we then unite as human beings into a true community. We must simply make Anthroposophy true: we must make it true through! learning to evoke in our Anthroposophical communities the consciousness that only as the human beings gather for Anthroposophical work does the one awake to the soul-spirit nature of the other. The individual persons awake to one another, and they awake to each other in a changed condition each time that they gather together, as each of them in the meantime has gone through a different experience and advanced somewhat further. This awaking is an awaking in unfolding and sending forth new growth. And, dear friends, if you have once discovered the possibility that human souls may awake to human souls and spirits to spirits, so that you enter the Anthroposophical community with the living consciousness: “There for the first time do we become human beings so awake that we then understand Anthroposophy for the first time together with one another,” and if then, on the basis of this understanding, you receive Anthroposophical ideas into an awakened soul — not an every-day soul asleep with respect to the higher existence — then does the real Community Spirituality descend above your place of work. For is it, then, truth when we speak of the supersensible world and are not able to raise ourselves to the level of grasping such real Spirituality, such a reversed ritual? Only when we not only have the idea of this spiritual in an abstract way and are able, perhaps, to repeat it in the form of a theory — theoretically even for ourselves — when we are able to believe, but to believe on the basis of a belief I bat constitutes its own proof, that Spirits hold a spiritual communion with us in our act of spiritually conceiving, only then are we actually engaged in laying hold of the spiritual. You cannot evoke the Anthroposophical community by means of external arrangements, you must evoke it out of the deepest fountain heads of human consciousness itself.

I have shown you today one part of the way to this; tomorrow I shall proceed further with my descriptions. Through such descriptions I should like to give you some indication of the fact that, really, the most important thing for the Anthroposophical Society, if it wills to develop further, is that it shall be laid hold upon by a true understanding of Anthroposophy. If this true understanding of Anthroposophy is present, this constitutes the road, not only to ideas of the spirit, but to fellowship with the spirit. Then, however, this consciousness of a communion with the spiritual world is also community-building. And those communities which are preordained by karma will then actually be formed. They will be a fruit of the right Anthroposophical consciousness. No external means can be given. If such means are described by anyone, he is describing something belonging to charlatanry.

Now, my dear friends, up to a certain extent such things have come to be understood during the two decades of Anthroposophical development — understood by many persons in a spiritual sense. And I shall probably have occasion to speak still further about these things tomorrow, for I shall continue this reflection tomorrow and shall direct your thoughts to another goal. But I wish now in a few words to add something to what may have been aroused among you through this description of the spiritual that underlies the Anthroposophical community life. On the one hand, there exists in the Anthroposophical Movement, after all, that out of which such descriptions as I have given you must come. The Anthroposophical Society may in some periods of time present one appearance or another. Anthroposophy is independent of any Anthroposophical Society and may be found independently of such a society. But it can also, of course, be found in a special way through the fact that one human being learns to wake to the other and that, out of their awaking, communities result. For a person awakes again and again to the person with whom he is associated, and this is the reason why he remains together with him. Inner spiritual reasons are there existent. This must come to be understood more and more within the Anthroposophical Society; and everything, really, that is brought forward to foster the Anthroposophical Society ought in the last analysis to be permeated with forces that lead in all cases directly into Anthroposophy as such.

Recently, after participating for weeks in meetings, both small and large, in which preparations were being made for what has now been brought before this meeting of delegates, after debates had been carried on as people debate in parliaments, in unions and such things on the basis of the ordinary rationalistic everyday considerations, I was profoundly gratified when I attended a meeting of young people, a meeting of academic young people. Here also was discussion of what ought to occur. Discussion continued for a certain length of time about external things; but, after a certain time, we found ourselves unexpectedly in the midst of genuine Anthroposophical considerations. Matters of the daily life flowed of themselves into such a channel that only by speaking Anthroposophically could one any longer discuss the subject. This would be best of all — if people did not, as also frequently happened, drag in Anthroposophical theories by the hair, in an artificial, sentimentally artificial, nebulous manner but if, as a matter of inevitability out of the ordinary requirements of life and the discussion of these, they should come to the point of realizing that it is impossible to see how study can be pursued any further — in chemistry, in physics — unless one begins to speak of Anthroposophy in order to inform oneself as to the necessities of this study. This is the spirit that should rule among us.

But, my dear friends, we shall arrive at no results by tomorrow evening if things continue in the same direction that they have thus far taken. We shall arrive only at a tremendous chaos, at a tragic chaos. For the most important thing of all is that we shall not sentimentally drag in all sorts of matters by the hair but shall cause Anthroposophical impulses to stream into our hearts: Anthroposophical impulses in full clarity. Then will our discussions take a fruitful course.

As matters stand at present, however, I see in this hall two parties, two groups of persons, who fail mutually to understand each other, and who have not thus far been able to take the very first step toward mutual understanding. Why? It is inevitable that those on one side must speak out of an experience covering two decades, out of what I took the liberty to discuss briefly in the beginning of my lecture today, and on the other side there is no interest in this experience. I do not mean this in the least in a critical sense, but only in the sense of a solicitous admonition. We have really had the experience that there are persons, well-meaning persons, enthusiastic in their way in behalf of Anthroposophy, who have simply brushed aside what has been brought forth here by saying: “What interest will all these reports have for us if they continue to be served up to us at a time when the real problem, after all, is that those who do not already know the serious perils to which the Anthroposophical Society is exposed wish to learn about them?” On the one side there is an elemental natural interest, as it were, in the life within the Anthroposophical Society, a life that has a certain element of the family in it, but also the good aspects of family life; on the other side there is something quite uninterested in this, something which has only a general conception of an Anthroposophical Society. As matters now stand, both are justified — so justified, my dear friends, that, if we do not very soon bring our discussions into an entirely different form, the best thing we could do — I express only my own opinion, for what is to take place must come from the bosom of the Society — would be to leave the old Anthroposophical Society just as it is, on the one hand, and establish on the other, for all those who desire something quite different, an association of free Anthroposophical communities. Both could foster, each on its own basis, what they have on their hearts. The result would be that we should have the old Anthroposophical Society, and we should have on the other hand an association of free communities, loosely united and yet intimately bound to each other. The two societies could find a modus vivendi between themselves. But it would be better, nevertheless, if this should result as the hopeless consequence tomorrow evening if the discussion continues on the same course it has thus far taken, I beg you, therefore, to include in the further discussion this thought also — whether you would not wish to avoid an untruth which would consist in tong glued together no matter whether the old is left as it has been or is transformed. If the situation continues to be such that one side does not understand the other, may the two associations I have sketched be formed within the Anthroposophical Movement.

My dear friends, I say this to you out of a very anxious heart; for no one will ever deny that I know the meaning of bearing anxiety on behalf of Anthroposophy. Just as little will anyone deny that I myself know what it means to love Anthroposophy. But it is better to have two sister societies that love one another, each going her own way, united only in a common ideal, than to have something which would end very soon, none the less, in chaos.

My dear friends, you should not, however, overlook the fact that the matters which create our difficulties are the various foundations that have been created. This ought to have been worked out in sharp outline. I will not at all assert that the last Central Executive Committee achieved in a fundamental sense substantially more than the preceding Committee — in any case, not any more than I achieved in the central field when I was the General Secretary. But that is not the main point. What ought to have occurred in an Anthroposophical sense after the various establishments came about here in Stuttgart? This question must be answered. For we cannot today put these foundations out of existence. We must inform ourselves as to the prerequisites for their existence now that they are here. But, if we do not learn to form things in an Anthroposophical sense, as we have not understood in recent years, if we set things up as foreign bodies within the Anthroposophical Movement as has been done, the foundations that have been set up since 1919 will then ruin the whole Anthroposophical Movement. They will ruin every Central Executive Committee, no matter what it may be called. Therefore, the important problem is to conduct factual and not personal discussions and to learn clearly how the Anthroposophical Society is to be formed now that it has once taken these foundations into itself — one of which is so fine a thing as the Waldorf School. Not a word has been uttered about this, for those who are acquainted with what is going on in Stuttgart have until now kept more or less silent. I should wish that the two gentlemen of the Executive Committee — I always omit the third gentleman, Herr Leinhas, who alone has helped me intensively in an important matter and still helps me; in his case I cannot even wish that he should devote himself to the Central Executive Committee, although he ought to be on it in preeminent sense — I should wish that the two other gentlemen of the Central Executive Committee would express themselves in regard to the matter. It is not a question of defending themselves, or anything of the sort, but only the question as to what they have to say in regard to such a future formation of the Anthroposophical Society as would include the possibility of taking into itself the foundations which have existed since 1919. Otherwise, those foundations have come into existence without any one's being responsible for them. This must not be the case, since they do exist. The questions are of the utmost seriousness. And all must give attention to them; we must conduct our discussion objectively and not personally. The words that I am uttering here I mean to be wholly objective, not directed especially at one person or at persons on the Central Executive Committee. Personalities are not being disparaged, but I mean that what I have here again clearly set forth must be discussed. If the two associations are founded, that which constitutes the continuation of the old Anthroposophical Society can take charge, as this must be done, of what has simply come out of the midst of the Anthroposophical Society; and the other, since it has no interest in this, can follow the Anthroposophical path in a more exclusive sense.

I have wished briefly to outline this before you. I shall more thoroughly speak about the facts tomorrow at twelve o'clock.