The Human Being: Body, Soul, and Spirit

 

Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart

June 16, 1921

I felt the need to speak to you about an anthroposophical topic this evening, despite the fact that my stay in Stuttgart should be devoted to other things. Today I would like to share with you something about the relationship between the human being and the world around that person, insofar as this world environment plays a role in the nature of the human being. I would like to shape this theme in such a way that its content can be particularly relevant to many things that need to be considered in the face of the decline of civilization in our time.

If we take together what we have learned over the years from anthroposophical spiritual science about the human being, then much can be summarized for us in that threefold nature of the human being, which has indeed already often appeared before our souls, in the threefold nature of spirit, soul and body. If we look at our present education from the spiritual-scientific point of view, at that which is penetrating more and more into our education today, then we must say that the development of humanity has gradually come to subject only the physical part of the human being to observation. In relation to this consideration of the bodily, we certainly have comprehensive knowledge today and even more endeavor to get to know the bodily in its relationship to the other phenomena of the world. But we live at a time when more and more attention must be paid to the soul and the spirit. Precisely when one looks at the physical so carefully, as is the case with today's usual knowledge, one must actually be led by this consideration of the physical to the consideration of the soul and the spiritual.

I would like to start from phenomena that cannot really be understood today because only the physical is considered, and which nevertheless, I would like to say, are there as great questions before man. When we consider the human body, it fits into the whole order of nature, and knowledge has gradually endeavored to piece this order of nature together from necessarily interrelated causes and effects. The human body is also thought of as being integrated into this chain of causes and effects and is explained from it. This is the materialistic character of our present-day knowledge in the broader and actual sense, that one only looks at natural causes and effects and the way in which the human body is derived from these causes and effects with a kind of mechanical necessity.

But then certain phenomena immediately present themselves to man, which are indeed abnormal phenomena in a certain sense, but which stand there like great riddles, like question marks, if one merely stops at the purely natural explanation according to cause and effect. We see how human corporeality unfolds. The natural scientist comes and seeks the same laws in the human body that he seeks in the rest of nature. He may say that they are only more complicated in the human body, but they are the same laws that are also found in nature. And lo and behold, we see individual laws from which certain phenomena arise, albeit in an abnormal way, which cannot possibly be incorporated into the course of natural events. The materialistic thinker endeavors – he has not yet achieved it, but he regards it as an ideal – to explain ordinary human volition, ordinary human feeling, human thinking or imagining as effects of bodily processes, in the same way that we explain a flame through the combustion of fuel. And it can certainly be said, even if, of course, such explanations have not yet been achieved today, that in a certain way the natural scientist may say that the time will come when thinking, feeling and willing will also be explained from the human body, just as the flame is explained from the burning of fuel. But how should we relate to human imagination, for example, if this view were completely correct? We distinguish between ideas in life that we accept because we can describe them as correct and ideas that we reject because we describe them as incorrect, because we say they are an error. But in the natural order, everything can only follow from the causes and be the proper effect of the causes. Thus, in accordance with the natural order, we can say that error and deception arise from necessary causes in the same way as the correct and justified conception. But here we are confronted with a riddle: why do the phenomena of nature, which are supposed to be all necessary, give rise in man to the true in one instance and the false in another?

But we are even more mystified when we see what we call deceptive visions and false hallucinations arising in individual human beings, which we know to be something that vividly suggests reality without being rooted in it. How can we possibly claim that something is an unjustified hallucination when everything that takes place in a human being necessarily arises from the natural order that is also in him? We would have to ascribe just as much justification to hallucinations as to what we call true impressions and true perceptions. And yet, we are – and we can feel and sense this – justifiably convinced that hallucinations must be rejected as such. Why must they be rejected? Why may they not be recognized as legitimate content of human consciousness? And how can we recognize them as hallucinations at all?

We will only be able to shed light on these mysteries if we look at something else that may initially remind us of hallucinations, but which, according to our perception, cannot be recognized by us in the same sense as hallucinations, and that is the products of human imagination. These products of human imagination arise first from the unfathomable depths of the human soul; they express themselves in images that magically present themselves to the human soul, and they are the source of many things that beautify and uplift life. All art would be inconceivable without the products of the imagination. Nevertheless, we are aware that these products of the imagination are not rooted in a solid reality, that we have to look at them as something that deceives us if we ascribe reality to them in the usual sense of the word. But then we come to something else.

We know the first stage of supersensible knowledge from our spiritual science. There we speak of imagination, there we speak of imaginative knowledge, there we describe how the soul, through certain exercises, comes to have a pictorial content in its contemplation, but which, although it appears as a pictorial content, is not seen by the spiritual researcher as a dream, but is seen as something that refers to a reality, that depicts a reality.

We have, so to speak, three stages of the soul's life before us: the hallucination, which we recognize as a complete deception; the fantasy, which we know that we have somehow brought out of reality, but which nevertheless does not, as it arises in us as a figment of the imagination, have anything directly to do with reality. Thirdly, we have the imagination, which also arises in our soul life as an image or as a collection of images and which we relate to a reality. The spiritual researcher knows how to relate this imagination to a reality through life, just as he relates the secure perception of color or sound to a reality. And to those who say that imagination, real imagination, cannot be proved in its reality, that it could also be an illusion, one must reply: He who has immersed himself in the things of the soul says: You also cannot know whether a hot piece of steel is a real hot piece of steel or merely a thought, a mere mental image. You cannot prove it through thoughts, but you can through life. Everyone knows how to distinguish in life, through the way he comes into contact with external physical reality, the merely imagined hot iron that does not burn you from the real hot iron. And so, in life, the spiritual researcher knows how to distinguish between what is merely imagined in this spiritual world and what points to a reality of this spiritual world through imagination, precisely because of the contact he comes into with the spiritual world through imagination.

Now, one does not understand the relationship of this threefold system, hallucination, fantasy, imagination, if one is not able to penetrate the essence of man in relation to his entire world environment in a spiritual scientific way. The human being is, after all, a being that is divided into spirit, soul and body. If we first consider the human being as he presents himself to us between birth, or let's say conception, and death, then, in terms of our immediate experiences, we have him before us in his corporeality. This corporeality of the human being is only understood to a very small extent, even by today's science. This corporeality is a very, very complicated one. The more one is able to follow it down to its details, the more it becomes a wonderful structure. But the answer to the question: How do we understand this corporeality? - it must come from another side and it only comes to us from the side that spiritual science offers us when it points to the spirit.

But if you take many of the things that have been said in the various lectures of the past years together, you will actually be able to say to yourself: Just as we have the human being's corporeality before us between birth and death, so we have his spirituality, his spirit, before us in the life that the human being accomplishes between death and a new birth. And if we consider the life of a human being between death and a new birth, as I did in the lecture series I gave in Vienna in the spring of 1914, we observe the growth and development of the human spirit in the same way as we observe the growth and development of the human body when we follow the human being from birth to death. It is really so: when we look at the newly born child and then follow the development of the human being, how he develops out of childhood, how he becomes more and more mature, how then decay comes, how then death occurs: we follow the human body in its becoming with our outer senses and combine our outer sense impressions with the intellect. In the same way, we can follow the human spirit in its development if we observe the growth and maturing of the spirit, if we arrive at what I have called in Occult Science the midnight hour of existence between death and a new birth, when we then see its approach to physical life; we then contemplate the spirit, and we must then look at the relationship of this spirit, which actually appears to us in its original form between death and a new birth, to what appears to us here in the physical world as its body in its becoming.

Now, through spiritual research, we are confronted with the significant and important fact that what we experience here as the body, what reveals itself to us as the body, is in a certain respect an image, an external image, a true image of what we observe as spirit between death and a new birth, and what we see as spirit in the way just now indicated is the model for what we see here in the physical life as a body. This is how we must imagine the relationship between the spiritual and the physical. Someone who knows nothing of the life between death and a new birth knows basically nothing of the human spirit.

But when we stand before a human being, as he presents himself to us in the corporeality that reveals itself to us between birth and death, and we then equip ourselves with the awareness that this is an image of the prenatal spiritual, then we ask ourselves: What mediates between the model and the image? What makes the model, which of course precedes the image in time, what makes this model develop in the image? We could perhaps do without such mediation if the human being were to appear completely perfect, if he were to be born in such a way that his spiritual model would immediately transform into the perfect human being and he would no longer have to grow and develop, but would stand before us in perfection. Then we could say: In a spiritual world beyond lies the spirit of man, here in the physical world is the physical image. We relate the physical image to the spiritual model. But it is not like that, as we know, but through birth, the human being first enters into sensual existence as an imperfect being and only gradually, slowly does the human being become similar to his model. Since the spirit only has an effect up to the moment of conception or even a little further into the embryonic life, that is, up to birth, and since the spirit then, so to speak, releases the human being, there must be a mediator, something must be there that, for example, in the twentieth year, takes what had not yet fully corresponded to its spiritual model and shapes it so that it corresponds more and more to its spiritual model. And that which reproduces the spiritual model in the physical is the soul.

And so we find man placed in his entire world environment. We then follow his spiritual existence between death and a new birth, his physical existence between birth and death, and we look at his soul existence as that which the model gradually develops in the physical body, in the bodily image. Then, so to speak, the midpoint of a person's development on earth comes around the age of thirty-five. Then decline sets in. Then, so to speak, the person becomes more and more hardened in terms of his physicality. But that which develops in him is already preparing itself to be absorbed again in its spiritual, purely spiritual, form at death, so that the human being can then live out again in the spiritual form between death and the next birth. What is it, again, that prepares the physical more and more so that it can become spiritual again in death? It is again the soul. This soul-life thus prepares us to be an image of our spirit in the first half of our life. It prepares us to become spirit again in the second half of our life. And so we get the human trinity of spirit, soul and body. This gives us a concrete idea of the relationship between spirit, soul and body. But we also get an idea of the physical, which is clear in itself, which is without contradiction in the sense that it must be. Because if the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual, then all spiritual activities must also be reflected in the physical; then what is spiritual must be traceable in the body in material form. And we need not be surprised that materialism has emerged in the newer knowledge and said that the bodily is the origin of the spiritual. If one takes only that which develops in man between birth and death, namely as imagination, then one finds everything that lives in the life of imagination in the images of the human body. One can follow the human being in the body up to his thinking, and one can come to the delusion of the materialistic view, because one must indeed find those fine ramifications of the bodily organization that come to light in thinking, in imagining.

So one can become a materialist in this way. One can become a materialist because the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual. And when one knows nothing of the spiritual, then one can be satisfied with the bodily, limit oneself to the bodily, then one can believe that the whole human being is contained in the bodily. But this bodily comes into being with the life of the embryo, dissolves after death. This bodily is transient, and all that we also develop as the life of imagination, bound to this bodily, is transient. And yet, it is a true reflection of the spiritual. This corporeality is a particularly true reflection of the spiritual when we look at the activity of this corporeality. We carry out an activity in the fine organizations of our nervous and sensory systems, and this fine activity is absolutely a reflection of a spiritual activity that has taken place between death and a new birth.

And when we now look at this physical activity, when we realize how it is - as I have indicated - mediated by the soul, we have to say: This physicality is an image, a reflection, and we only find the spiritual in the associated spiritual world. Here in this physical world, man, insofar as he is in this physical world, is quite a material being, and in the organization of his materiality, the true image of the spiritual is expressed at the same time. The soul certainly lives in him, which imparts the spiritual, but what belongs to the whole human being is that which lives right up to the embryonic life, which then transforms into that into which the human being in turn transforms after death: the spiritual. The spiritual, the soul and the physical are thus connected.

But if we look at this correctly – just try to see clearly what I have put before you – you will say to yourself: what the human being develops as the power of thinking must, even if only in reverberation, mediate through the soul what has gone before, from the embryo life. In other words, when I have ideas now, a certain power lives in my imaginative life, but this power is not only developed from the body; in the body there is only its afterimage. This power resonates, so to speak, it is a resonance of the life that I spent between death and a new birth before my embryonic life. This life must play a part in my present life. When the ordinary man of today imagines, it is indeed the case that in his imagining lives the echo, the reverberation of his prenatal life.

And how does a person come to ascribe a being to himself? He comes to ascribe a being to himself through the fact that he unconsciously has a realization of it: By imagining, my prenatal being lives on in me, resonates in me, and my body is an afterimage of this prenatal being. If he now begins to develop such an activity himself, which should actually only be developed through the resonance of prenatal existence, what then? Then, in this physical existence, the body, because it is an afterimage, develops something out of itself that is similar to the imaginative activity, but is not justified to do so. And that can indeed occur. When we live and think and imagine in our normal lives, our prenatal life resonates within us. And because the human being is tripartite, the nerve-sense life can be eliminated and each of the other parts can begin to imitate the activity from the purely physical realm that should actually resonate from our prenatal existence. When the rhythmic person or the metabolic-limb person develops such an activity out of themselves without justification, which is similar to the justified imagination that resonates from prenatal life, then hallucination arises. And you can, with absolute precision, if you look at the matter spiritually, distinguish the justified perception, which at the same time, by recognizing it as a justified perception, is living proof of the pre-existent life. You can distinguish it from the hallucination, which, by virtue of the fact that it can be there, that it is the imitation is a living proof that the original it apes also exists, but that it is cooked up entirely by the body and therefore stands there as something unauthorized. For in physical life the body has no right to ape out of itself the way of thinking that should be born out of the spiritual life of prenatal man.

Such considerations must indeed be made if one wants to get beyond those foolish ideas that are now considered definitions of hallucinations and the like. One must look into the structure of the whole human being if one wants to distinguish the hallucinatory life from the real life of imagination. And when the real life of imagination is further developed, when it is consciously taken up and when this consciousness is added to it, so that one not only experiences the echo in the imagination of prenatal life, but when one now quite consciously makes this echo into an image and thereby looks back from the echo to reality, then one comes to imagination. Thus the true spiritual scientist differentiates between hallucination, which is a boiled-out of the physical body, and imagination, which points to the spiritual, which projects itself back into the spiritual, so that one can say: In the hallucinating person the body combines, in the imagining person, who transports himself back from the echo into the prenatal world, the spirit combines; he extends his life beyond the physical existence and lets the spirit combine. In him the spirit combines. Those people who out of prejudice or, as is already happening today, out of ill will, repeat over and over again that the imagination of spiritual science could also be hallucination, they deliberately overlook the fact that the spiritual researcher knows how to strictly differentiate between hallucination and imagination, that it is he who, in the strictest sense of the word, can firmly distinguish one from the other, whereas what is said today in conventional science about hallucinations is everywhere without foundation and ground, everywhere arbitrary definitions. And it is actually only proof that present-day science does not know what hallucinations are, that it cannot distinguish what it encounters as imagination from the hallucinatory life.

Given the character of the insinuations made in this field, one must today already speak of conscious slander. It is only due to the fact that our scientists are lazy about what spiritual-scientific research is that they even bring such things into the world. If they would not be too lazy to go into spiritual science, they would see how strict distinctions are made between hallucinatory and imaginative life in spiritual science.

But one must take this into one's consciousness if one honestly wants to profess our movement, that in our contemporaneity there is the malevolence that comes from laziness, and one must pursue the laziness, which then leads to mendacity, in our contemporary culture to its hiding places; there is no other way for spiritual science today. So that we can say: In the hallucinatory life the body combines, in the imaginative life the spirit combines, and the human being feels completely removed from the world between birth and death when they feel fully immersed in the imaginative life.

The soul stands between the two. The soul is the mediator, so to speak, the spiritual fluid that mediates from the spirit, the model, to the body, the afterimage. This must not be sharply contoured on either side, it must have fluid contours, blurred contours; in contrast to this, one cannot say in a definite way that it is rooted in reality or that it is not rooted in reality. In the case of hallucinations, because they are only cooked up by the body, which however cannot cook up anything real unless it is living in the echoes of prenatal life, in the case of the body and its hallucinations one can say that they are not rooted in reality. In the case of the imaginations and their abstract images, the thoughts, one can say that they are rooted in reality.

With the images that arise from the combination of the soul, with the fantasy images, we now have something blurry; they are real-unreal. They are taken from reality, the sharp contours of reality are toned down, made to fade, made to blur. We feel ourselves to be lifted out of reality, but at the same time we feel that it is something that means something for our inner life, for our whole life in the world. We feel the intermediate state between hallucination, between deceptive hallucination and real imagination in the mediating fantasy, and we may say: in hallucination the body combines, in fantasies in the case of imagination, of which abstract thoughts are the ordinary-life reflection, the soul combines, in the case of inspiration, the mind combines. Here we have the threefold nature of man in his activity and in his relation to his environment. We may say: When we are in the spirit, whether in the shadowy image of thoughts or in imagination, through which we then rise to the higher levels of knowledge, we combine reality;

When we are within the soul and its figments of the imagination, we combine something that floats back and forth between reality and unreality; when the body combines, the hallucinations suggest to us something that may actually correspond to an unreality.

If you take what I have developed now, then you will say to yourself: Yes, an unbiased consideration of the human being provides us with this trinity of spirit, soul and body. And even with regard to what is activated by the human being, we can distinguish in three ways: hallucination, fantasy and imagination, and we are referred to body, soul and spirit. You see, with Anthroposophy you have to penetrate deeper and deeper into its essence to see how it covers the details from its wholeness.

We see how one must first present the division of the human being into body, soul and spirit in a more abstract way, and then how it is filled more and more with concrete content. If you look for the relationships between something that you have presented in this way and the other, you get more and more evidence. But that is necessary in anthroposophical life, that you keep pushing forward and forward. But that is what today's man, who feels so terribly clever, does not love. Modern man does not like to say to himself: I have now read an anthroposophical essay, I have heard an anthroposophical lecture, yes, it is not yet clear to me, but I will wait, I will see what else comes. If he would wait, he would see that progress is constantly being made on other things, and that in the end everything is certain to be true, that one thing will become proof of the other. And to the one who says: If one thing proves the other, then the whole universe is without reason and ground, then one thing always holds the other – to the one who makes this objection, you just say that he cannot accept the description that astronomy gives him of the earth. He is also told that one part of the earth supports the whole and that the whole stands without ground or base. The one who wants other proofs than this support of the one by the other does not take into account that in the case where one comes to totalities, this is precisely the characteristic, that one part supports the other.

What is necessary in order to present anything like what we have developed today before our soul is that people not only talk about the spirit – of course, one can easily talk about the spirit and actually mean blue smoke), but that one speaks spiritually of the spirit, that one is actually grasped by the spirit and that one arranges the one in the world in such a way that the work of the spirit comes to the fore. Someone who only thinks materially cannot distinguish hallucination from imagination and from figments of the imagination when he juxtaposes them. But the one who sees the living spirit in the mediation of the three pulls the threads from one to the other, is filled with living soul content in his way of looking at things, and speaks in such a way that the spirit lives in his words. One should not only speak of the spirit in science, one should let the spirit speak in spiritual science. Please reflect on this sentence, which is indeed very important if the essence of spiritual science is to be understood: One should not only speak about the spirit or of the spirit, one should let the spirit speak in a spiritual way. In this way one becomes free, for the spirit receives one freely and one expresses the nature of the spirit through one's own spirit. One must speak about the spirit in a spiritual way, that is, with fluid thinking, not with hardened thoughts, which correspond to a materialistically thinking science.

But if we take this, then it is, I would say, the very point that leads to the innermost task of our time, and which alone can save us from the decay that is such a strong impulse in our entire present-day civilization. We can say: If we feel completely at ease today with genuine, real devotion to knowing in the world within, then we are led, as if by a world grace pouring over us, to think in such a way that we think spiritually about the world. This is the one that, as a property of world evolution, only came about at the end of the 19th century. Anyone who follows the development of humanity with an open mind will see that the evolution of the world was different before the last third of the 19th century, but that, one might say, the gates of the spiritual have opened and that today, after the materialistic view of nature has celebrated great triumphs, we are faced with the task of looking at the world spiritually again. For rhythmic movement is also the human becoming, through which the individual human being passes in the rhythm of repeated earthly lives. This life is rhythmic. In rhythmic recurrence, man goes through that which once lived out in such spiritual striving of mankind, as it had its peak, for example, in the middle of the 19th century, when man only directed his mind to the material and wanted to explain everything materially , and our present time, when we must return to spiritual contemplation, because if we allow the world to fill our souls without reservation, that soul will be filled with the urge for spiritual contemplation of the world.

That is the secret of our time, I would say. Those who live with the spirit today must realize that the gates between the supersensible and the sensory world are open for earthly existence. Just as the things of the material external world speak to us through colors and sounds, so today a spiritual world speaks clearly to people. But people are still accustomed to letting the old, merely representative material world speak to them, and so they have opened the battle in all forms against the influx of the spiritual way of looking at things. This conflict manifests itself in the materialistic scientific point of view; it manifests itself in the terrible materialistic struggles that convulsed the beginning of the twentieth century. But just as in an earlier period of human development people once aspired too strongly to the spiritual and therefore fell into illusions and enthusiasms that wanted to express the spiritual in their bodies , so he who fights against the spiritual, as basically the majority of civilized people still do, falls into the clutches of the power that today resists the descent of the spiritual into the physical world. And so we have seen looming that which must come to those souls who resist the influx of the spiritual: we come to that which is the appearance of falsehood, which we have seen streaming in so terribly during the time of the world war. It was, however, already prepared beforehand, and we live today in a time when not only does the world resist knowledge, but the world is developing an inclination to tell untruths in a truly dreadful way. And basically, most of what is being said today by opponents of anthroposophy and everything associated with it is untrue. What profound dishonesty is evident in those who today virtually present themselves as the bearers of truth, who call themselves the proclaimers of truth!

Let me give you an example – I always have to use examples that are close at hand, I'm sorry to say: A paper called Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt (Stuttgart Protestant Sunday Paper) is published in Stuttgart. In issue 19, page 149, the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt published a few sentences that included the following, among other things. Someone, a retired pastor named Jehle, had presented something about the anti-church currents of the present day. Much valuable information had been said about monism and freethinking, and then the retired pastor Jehle explained the deeper reasons for the bitterly fought battle against the historicity of Jesus, as waged by A. Drews. He then shed light on Christian Science, which, in the sharpest contrast to the materialistic world view, declares everything material to be unreal, and further: “Steiner's Theosophy, which, in gratitude for his allegiance to the returned Bernhard of Clairvaux, declares Pastor Rittelmeyer to be so.”

Now, my dear friends, a friend of ours has tried to get this matter rectified. The matter was also brought to Pastor Rittelmeyer, and Pastor Rittelmeyer then wrote the following letter to those who had made such a claim:

“In No. 19 of the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt of May 8, I just read a report about the annual meeting of the Protestant Church Association, at which Pastor Jehle, in a lecture on the anti-church movements of the present day, claimed that Dr. Steiner had “declared Pastor Rittelmeyer a follower of the re-emergence of Bernhard of Clairvaux in thanks for his loyalty.” This sentence completely contradicts the truth. Dr. Steiner never declared me, either directly or indirectly, to be the reincarnation of Bernhard of Clairvaux or anything similar – neither to me nor, as I can say with certainty, to anyone else – nor did I myself say or think anything of the kind. I ask you, on the basis of press conventions, to give this correction its full content. Please allow me to express my deep sorrow at the low level of ecclesiastical polemics that is once again evident here. Any foolish talk is welcome if it only disparages the supposed opponent, and not even the generally accepted practice among decent people of seeking prior assurance is adhered to. I do hope that you will have a sense of the low opinion that is attributed to Dr. Steiner and me, and of the base instincts that are stirred in the reader by such a report, which is based on gossip that can easily be shown to be untrue.

Well, you see, the Stuttgarter Evangelische Sonntagsblatt did not print the last words at all, about the low mentality and so on, but only the first words, and added:

“Regarding this explanation” - which is thus printed incompletely! - ”we can only note here: Personal communications from the speaker (which were also sent to the person concerned) as well as his well-known and proven personality, known to so many of our readers, exclude even the slightest doubt for anyone who knows him that he has reproduced the statement to the best of his knowledge and belief.” So you have to hear that the person who is being apostrophized first of all says that the whole thing is a lie, and secondly says that the matter is of a low mind. Then one extricates oneself from the affair in this way and adds: “Regarding the way it was formulated and reported in our paper, which occurred without the knowledge and will of the speaker and without the final review of the editor, who has since gone on vacation” – so the speaker did say that, but one apologizes for the way it was reported by saying that one , and one excuses the person who has served the person who then criticized the rendition in a bad way, excuses this person again by saying that he is in the bath - “the reporter regrets, and with him the speaker and the editor, that, against our intention, various readers” - so they do not regret that they have spread a lie, but the following, they regret - “that, contrary to our intention, it could be misunderstood by various readers, as Pastor Dr. Rittelmeyer informs us, as if we credited him with the vanity to take pleasure in such an appointment, and as if Dr. Steiner had counted on this vanity.”

So it is not admitted that one has spread a lie, but regrets that readers have understood it as if one had counted on the vanity. And now it continues: “As much as we regret, for factual reasons, the promotion of Rudolf Steiner's cause by a representative of the church, the thought of personal disparagement was far from our minds. We also have no doubt that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised by the thought of such an appointment by Rudolf Steiner.

So they create the impression that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised when he heard that I had appointed him, whereas he explicitly states that he was unpleasantly surprised that such a lie was spread by the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt.

“Besides, I think our regular readers know us too well to suspect us of intending to personally disparage or even defame them. They also know that we have plenty to do with better and more beautiful work.” – I leave it to the readers of the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt to judge this.

You see, this is how those who call themselves representatives, the official representatives of the truth, and those whom numerous people consider obliged to represent the truth, work today. One only has to point this out to draw attention to where the tendency towards untruthfulness is today. But there is not yet enough widespread revulsion, not enough widespread disgust for such immorality, for such an anti-religion, which calls itself Christian Sunday worship.

One need only point to a single such symptom, of which hundreds could be demonstrated today, to show where today - and this will get much worse, because we are living in our time - the starting points are that then accumulate into those rabble-rousing performances like the ones that took place at our last eurythmy performances in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden. The same eurythmy performance that was seen here with full sympathy last Sunday was jeered at and whistled at in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden with all kinds of keys and similar instruments, not, of course, out of objective judgment, but out of the coincidence of two things. Firstly, the battle that is being waged on a large scale for reasons that you have probably heard me speak of on many occasions. This battle is being waged against the assertion of the influx of spiritual life into our physical world and is being waged out of the tendency towards untruthfulness. People do not have much time for it, but it must be pursued to its very last hiding place. And the other is the inability that is in league with laziness, with discomfort. When a well-known local newspaper, as I have already mentioned here, wants to pass judgment for its readers, it turns to one of the current authorities, for example Professor Traub in Tübingen; and in one of these articles, as I have already mentioned here, one found very strange words. This university professor, who still has the right today to prepare as many young souls, as they say, for their profession, writes: In Rudolf Steiner's world view, spiritual things and spiritual beings move in the spiritual world like tables and chairs in the physical world! Well, has anyone ever seen tables and chairs moving in the physical world with a sober mind? Professor Traub in Tübingen has the style of writing now that I talk about in my writings that in the spiritual world the entities move like tables and chairs in the physical world. Since he probably does not admit to being a spiritualist, Professor Traub, I at least will not be so rude as to impute to him the other state while he wrote this article, in which one usually sees the tables and chairs moved.

But these are the authorities to whom one turns when one demands a judgment about what presents itself as spiritual science today. These things are just not always stated with sufficient sharpness, and above all they are not thought about and felt with sufficient sharpness by many of our friends either. And again and again we experience it happening that when someone says something against us and we describe him in his whole character, one does not take it badly that he is a liar, but one takes it badly that we say he is a liar. We have experienced this in the last few weeks, one might say, from day to day, here and elsewhere.

One may well speak of an inability when such nonsense is written, as Professor Traub wrote in Tübingen, who also wrote in the same essay: Secret science cannot be a science, simply because the terms “secret” and “science” are mutually exclusive; what is secret is not a science. Now I ask you, if someone writes a scientific book and someone else has the quirk of keeping it secret for a hundred years, is it any less scientific because it was kept secret? It is certainly not scientific because it is kept secret or public, but because of its scientific character! One must really be abandoned by all the spirits of healthy thinking if one can just write such a sentence.

And another thing: here, among ourselves, it is permissible to say that there are some things I must say because, unfortunately, they are not being said enough from other quarters. For many years now, we have been striving to develop an art of recitation and declamation in eurythmy, which in turn goes back to the old good principles of art, again reminding us of what poetry actually is, the art of rhythm, beat, sound, imagery, while in our unartistic time poetry is actually only recited in a prosaic way. They recite the prosaic, the literal, they do not go back to the rhythmic, the metrical basis; and because in our eurythmy we seek what Goethe meant when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors with a baton like a conductor, pointing to the truly artistic in poetry, because we go back from an return from the unartistic to the artistic, that is why the protectors or the people themselves, who today, while pretending to recite poetry, croak and bleat all sorts of prosaic things, they rise croaking and bleating out of their inability and insult those who devote themselves to reciting, who in turn want to bring out the real art of reciting.

I regret that I have to say this myself, but what use is it; if things are not formulated by others, then they must be formulated by me. And I can't help but see in this struggle another form of the struggle of inability, as can be seen, for example, in Traub's thoughtlessness, a struggle of inability of the bleaters against what attempts to be a real recitation. It is understandable that what works out of inability bleats itself or makes its protectors bleat, but we have the obligation to protect spiritual knowledge, and we must, even if it is resented, point out in strong words what is the fundamental damage of our time. Today I have spoken to you about a topic that corresponds to spiritual science, and I had to – well, it was already past our hour, so it was an encore – let my reflections end with something that, in terms of contemporary history, is very much connected to the purely spiritual-scientific main topic. I regret that I have to let my reflections run into such arguments, but we do not live in a cloud-cuckoo-land, we live in the world within, and if we have the necessary enthusiasm, if we feel the sacred obligation to stand up today for the cause of anthroposophical knowledge and its effects, then we must see clearly where the opposition lies, and then, by communicating with each other about these things, we must develop within ourselves the strong will to shine a light into this opposition. For only in this way will we join that which, in the face of decline, leads to a new dawn, which are the impulses that, in the face of the struggle against spirit and soul, want to bring about the assertion of spirit and soul in earthly life. In order to be able to feel together in the right sense in the strong assertion of the power that wants to bring spirit and soul into play, can bring them into play, we must come to an understanding about everything that is against spirit and soul.

I did not want to complain or grumble about the opponents, but I wanted to speak to you to make clear what is necessary for our souls to resonate in the work for mind and soul. I will say more about this when we meet again.

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive June 16, 1921