Paths and Goals of Anthroposophy. What the world needs now is Anthroposophy!

 

Rudolf Steiner, Basel, Switzerland

January 5, 1920

Anyone who looks at the building in the neighborhood that is dedicated to the so-called Goetheanum, a free university for spiritual science that aims to serve the spiritual and cultural interests of the future, may initially be struck by the peculiar forms and style that confront them. One might have various objections to what one sees there. Those who are involved in the construction will be able to understand such objections, that it is a preliminary attempt, if they arise from goodwill. But a certain question must be raised about this building, which is characteristic of everything that the spiritual movement wants and strives for, of which this building is supposed to be a representative. If it had been necessary, in the usual way, to erect an independent building somewhere for a certain spiritual movement, for a certain kind of spiritual activity, then one would probably have turned to this or that architect, to this or that artist, and one might have conferred with them about what was to be done in such a building, and then a building would have been erected in some antique, Renaissance or other style, in which this spiritual-scientific activity was to find its home. There would only have been an external relationship between the forms within and around the building dedicated to this spiritual activity, and the activity itself. This was not possible with this spiritual movement. The aim here was to create an outer shell for a particular spiritual current that, in its entirety and in every detail, even the most insignificant, seemed to have been born out of the entire thinking, feeling and willing of this spiritual movement itself. The point was to create something in the external forms, down to the most minute detail, which is an external expression of the inwardly willed in the same way as a word or anything else that is intended to express the content of this spiritual movement itself. In this matter one could not turn to some existing style, to some formal language that has been handed down historically. What is visible to the eye in the structures had to be created from the same spiritual foundation from which the content of the world view is drawn. This is not only the innermost motivation of the spiritual-scientific movement, which also calls itself anthroposophical, but also of the whole way in which this movement conceives of its task, its paths and its goals in relation to the great demands of the present civilized world.

This spiritual movement does not want some abstract theory, a science that only occupies the intellect; it does not want to be something that can only serve the one-sided satisfaction of the inner soul's interests; it wants to be something that can indeed give the most intimate satisfaction to those longings of the human soul that go to a world view. But it wants to anchor this Weltanschhauung so firmly in reality that it can intervene in all practical life. And so it is that what we were able to achieve alone at first was the direct creation of building and art forms for our cause, which are characteristic of this whole movement. In this particular sphere it has intervened in the most practical matters; but this spiritual movement will seek ways and indicate goals which will have an effect on all social and moral aspects of human coexistence, in the widest sense. Those who build on this spiritual science should not be unworldly idealists, but should become idealists who can allow what arises from their soul to flow directly into their practical life. And all that often goes so strangely in the thoughts of man should be harmonized with what is in man's innermost soul striving. The outer practice of life should become one with that through which man seeks his moral impulses, develops his social instincts, and engages in his religious worship. With such a view, however, this spiritual-scientific movement still stands today quite far removed from that which is striven for, willed, and even considered right by the broadest circles of today's educated people.

That this must be so, but also that it is necessary for such a spiritual movement to take its place in our modern civilization, can be seen when we turn our gaze to the way in which our whole life, in which we live today, has actually come together out of the most diverse currents. Today I would like to speak first of two main currents in our civilized life. We have today what we call our spiritual education, in which our religious convictions are rooted, in which our moral ideals arise, but in which our entire higher spiritual life is also rooted. We have that through which man is to educate his abilities and strengths for a spiritual education beyond the ordinary manual work. And we have, in addition to this, the practical activity of life, which has received such intensive impulses in recent centuries. We have around us a technology that has been inspired by our science but that also reaches deeply into social life. This technology has transformed modern civilized life in a way that would certainly have been completely incomprehensible to a person eight or nine centuries ago.

If we now ask ourselves where our intellectual and cultural life comes from, a life that not only dominates our higher schools but also unfolds its impulses down to our elementary schools, and where, on the other hand, our practical life, permeated by such an extensive technology, comes from, we get an answer that the man of the present still gives little account of. But one need only – and we will discuss this in more detail in the third lecture – consider what, so to speak, forms the basis of our Western civilization, especially its higher spiritual part, one need only look at Christianity in the broadest sense, so one will be able to say, even from a superficial world-historical point of view, If we look for the origin of our Christian views and convictions, which have shaped so much of our general intellectual outlook and convictions, and if we look for the origin of these beliefs and convictions, much more than we are willing to admit today, we will eventually come across the path that Christianity took from the Orient to the Occident. And one can continue to look around for the thread that one has gained in such a way, and one will find that those paths that arise when one traces back our spiritual education - those paths that lead into Latin-Roman, into Greek, from which our spiritual education still clearly shows its inner — that these paths ultimately lead to the special state of mind, to the special constitution of the soul, through which, millennia ago, before prehistoric times, our educational life, which is more directed towards the inner, the soul-spiritual, originated from the Orient. Only because this educational life, this inner spiritual view, has changed so much over the centuries and millennia, we no longer notice today how it derives its origin from what, as I said, took its origin before pre-Christian millennia from a state of mind that has become quite alien to today's civilized man. To understand this long journey, we must not only go back to what external historiography, which can be proven by documents, offers, we must go beyond what this historiography can say, and go back to prehistoric times. This is quite difficult for the modern man. For he thinks in his innermost being that he has “made such wonderful progress” in spiritual things in the course of the last few centuries, perhaps only in the very last century, that everything that lies in the times just mentioned must be referred to the realm of the childlike, the primitive.

But anyone who is able to see the ancient culture of the Orient clearly, without being clouded by such prejudices, will see that, although civilization and intellectual development were substantially different in pre-Christian times in the Orient, they offered human souls very intense spiritual content. But these were achieved in a completely different, I would say radically different, way than what is achieved today to influence people who are to acquire a higher education at secondary schools.

In the ancient Orient, anyone who was to acquire a higher intellectual culture had to undergo a complete transformation of their entire human being after being chosen by the leaders and directors of the educational institutions concerned. I am speaking of the educational institutions of this ancient Orient. They are cognitively accessible to the spiritual science that is being discussed here; but if one is unprejudiced enough, if one has a certain courage of thought and cognition, then one can also deduce from what has been handed down historically what was there prehistorically. One must speak of these educational institutions in such a way that what appears separately in us has an inner unity there. These educational institutions, to which everything that we actually still carry within us today refers, but in a significantly transformed form, were at the same time what we call a church today, but also what we call a school today, and were at the same time what we call an art institution today. Art, science, and religion formed a unity in the older human civilizations. And anyone who was to be developed in these educational institutions had to bring their whole being to development. They had to transform their whole being. They had to adopt a different form of thinking from the one that is effective in everyday life. He had to devote himself to contemplative thinking. He had to get used to dealing with thinking in the same way as one otherwise deals with the external world. But he also had to get used to transforming his entire emotional and volitional life. It is difficult to imagine today what was striven for in this direction. For how do we actually think about our lives? We admit: the child, that must be developed. The abilities and powers with which it is endowed when it comes into the world must be developed through education. Now, the child cannot educate itself; the others, the adults, initially have the view that the child's abilities and powers must be developed. And we also make the child different in terms of his thinking, feeling and will than when he is born into the world. But if we now expect the human being to continue this development even when he has already come into his own will, when others no longer take care of his development out of their own views, then the present human being finds this a strange expectation; for one should only be developed as long as one cannot take charge of this development oneself, cannot take it into one's own hands. Once one comes to a certain freedom with regard to one's own development, then one abandons evolution. This is the intellectual arrogance in which we live today. We think in the moment when we would be in a position to take our development into our own hands, we are already finished, and we place ourselves in the world as finished people.

Such a view did not exist within that civilization, but rather, the human being was developed further and further. And just as the child is able to recognize, feel, and do more and more after going through a certain training, as if there were a kind of awakening in the soul, so there is also such an awakening for the further development that the human being can now take into his own hands. The oriental mystery school student was educated for this awakening in soul activities, which were higher than the ordinary ones in the same sense that the higher abilities of adults are higher than those of a child. And it was believed that only the one who has gone through this later awakening in the best sense of the word in life is capable of judging the highest matters of life. And one was not prepared there merely to be a person who, when he reflects, when he develops a certain inner feeling and perception, feels satisfied through the knowledge of his connection with a spiritual world. No, it was not only the ability to develop a worldview that was developed there, but also those abilities through which social and outwardly technical life was guided, through which human coexistence was directed. The whole of life was influenced by spiritual education and development.

It is so difficult for us to place ourselves back in the prevailing situation in the Orient thousands of years ago, at the starting point of our more recent human development, because our whole soul constitution has changed with the further development of humanity, because we have come to different feelings and views about life. For those people who were steeped in the spiritual development I have just hinted at, it was instinctive to move towards such a transformation of the human being. These people's instincts were different. They tended towards such a vision of spiritual life after a certain transformation. Those who did not themselves undergo such training looked up, by virtue of the instincts that were also present in them, to what those who had been trained could give them. They followed them in the training of their inner soul life. But they also followed them in the ordering of their social life, in their attitude to the life of the whole.

The instincts that led to such a life have been transformed just as much as the special soul instincts of the child have been transformed in the adult in the context of today's overall culture of humanity. But through these instincts, in connection with what had been absorbed from the teachings of those educational institutions that can truly be called mysteries, there arose a human soul-disposition that could not but lead to seeking what is at the core of the human being, not here in the sphere of life that includes the human body, but to direct this whole view of life, also to rise, as it were instinctively, in the popular consciousness, to the higher man in man, to that in man which is essentially spiritual-soul-like, to that in man which, although it appears in the sensual body for the time between birth and death, is eternal in itself and belongs to a spiritual world, into which one instinctively looked. Something superhuman, if I may use this expression, which has become somewhat questionable through the followers of Nietzsche, something superhuman was seen as the essence of man. What man looked at as his own nature was something that went beyond this ordinary human being. In this respect, education was great: seeking out the human being in his essence in a spiritual-soul realm, which finds expression only in the physical, reaching out from the spiritual-soul world into the whole human being, directing this human being in his most material expressions from the spiritual-soul realm.

In many metamorphoses, through many transformations, what came about as the content of spiritual education was then worked out in the Orient and came to Greece in many transformations. There it appears, I might say, filtered. While in the oldest Greek period, which Friedrich Nietzsche called the tragic age of the Greeks, we can still see something of such a directing of the whole human being to the higher human being, in the later Greek period what can be called, in a more comprehensive sense, the dialectical, the purely intellectual essence of the human being emerges. The whole rich and intensely all-human content of an original culture was, as it were, filtered and further and further filtered, and in the most diluted state it came over into our age. And so it forms the one current of our life, which went right up to the spiritual and soul-filled human being and gave the human being an awareness through which he felt, in every moment of life, in the presence of the giver and in the most menial of tasks, as an external expression of the spiritual and soul-filled human being.

We shall see in the third lecture that the Mystery of Golgotha, from which Christianity emerged in its development on this earth, stands as a fact in itself, which can be grasped in different ways in different ages. But that from which the next understanding of this Mystery of Golgotha was shaped was what had been brought over from the Orient in the form of education. And in fact, in all that we still summon up today to comprehend Christianity, there lives that which is the last, albeit intellectually diluted, experience of the Orient. There is a certain idiosyncrasy to this entire soul configuration, which lives in us only in its final metamorphosis. And this idiosyncrasy must be sought in what follows.

As great and powerful as this world view is in terms of rising to the superhuman in man and descending to what Western civilization has risen to and become great in, this oriental civilization could never have done so. It could produce the superhuman, the spiritual-soul, it could not produce anything else. It is something I have already hinted at in other contexts here. Just at the time when the last metamorphosis of Oriental spiritual life began to take root in the West, a new spiritual life began to take shape, a spiritual life that has indeed produced enormous blossoms in our time, but blossoms of a completely different kind than the Oriental spiritual life just described. Let us look at these other blossoms.

I would like to point out the following fact again. As I said, I have already mentioned it here from other points of view. If we look through the current handbooks to see how many people live on the earth, we are told that about 1500 million people inhabit the earth. If we look at what is being worked on within human civilization, if we look at the human resources that are active in our human being and human life, then, strangely enough, we have to say something different. We would actually have to say that the Earth works as if it were inhabited not just by 1500 million people, but by 2200 million people. For three to four centuries, our world of machines has been working in such a way that work is being done that could also be done by people. We are replacing human labor with machine power. And if you convert what our machines achieve into human labor, you find, based on an eight-hour working day, that our work on earth involves seven to eight times a hundred million people, that is, not real people, but human labor, which is raised by machines.

This is something that is being introduced into human civilization by those spiritual forces that have arisen from the Western world, those spiritual forces that could never have developed in a straight line from that inner culture of spirit and soul that had so magnificently risen to the superhuman, to the higher human in the human, to the spiritual-soul human being. This culture remained at the level of certain heights of the soul. It did not penetrate what we call practical life today. It could never have brought dead metal or other material into such a context that a man would work among people, not a superman, but an underman, a man who is actually a homunculus compared to people of flesh and blood, a mechanism that introduces into human culture what otherwise people could introduce. This is the essence of our Western intellectual life. It is all the more characteristic of this Western intellectual life the farther west we go, where the mechanical man, the sub-human, has emerged from this intellectual life, just as the spiritual man, the super-human, has emerged from the Oriental intellectual life.

The fact that such a thing could be created in the West is not an isolated phenomenon of civilization. It is connected with the whole development of perception, feeling and thinking. The people who brought this homunculus into being are, in their whole state of mind, of course, greater in the other direction than the Oriental man. Today, one cannot understand life if one cannot see through this contrast in all its intensity. For on the one hand, this modern man still carries within him the last metamorphosis of that which came to him from the Orient, and on the other hand, he has been absorbing for centuries what is most essential to Western spiritual life. A balance has not yet been achieved. They stand there like two separate currents flowing apart: the current of the superman, though much changed, and the current of the subhuman, though only in its beginning. And the modern man, the man of the present, when he awakens to the consciousness that in his soul these two currents live abruptly, he suffers mentally, spiritually and probably also physically from the discord that arises from it. These are matters that become so deeply entwined in the unconscious and subconscious that something quite different from the actual cause enters not only into the consciousness of the person, but even into the constitution of his body. The modern human being finds himself nervous, finds himself dissatisfied with circumstances. There are hundreds of ways in which modern man feels a discord between himself and his surroundings, and how this discord is also expressed in his physical health. What has been mentioned is behind this. Behind this lies the great question: How can we, for the civilization of the future, harmonize what produced the subhuman with what lives in us in its last phase as the legacy of a civilization that has led to the spiritual-soul human being?

The spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy seeks to take on board what is contained in the forces of our civilization, as I have just mentioned. It sees as a necessary goal, borne by the most significant demands of the time, a balancing between the soul forces that have led in one direction and the soul forces that have led in the other direction. And it is aware of how tremendously necessary and significant it is for humanity to find the paths to this goal. Instinctively, I have named the oriental spiritual life.

This spiritual life was born out of the instincts of ancient man. We have received it as an heirloom. But we have received it in an already intellectualized state; it has lived its way into our civilization in concepts and ideas of a rather abstract nature. For we no longer have the instincts that the former bearer of this spiritual life had. No matter how much one may fantasize about it, the fact remains that the present-day human being should return to naivety, that he should become instinctive again. In one respect, one is right to make such a demand. But naivety will express itself in a different way than before. The instinctive life will go in different directions. And to demand that we should become like people of previous millennia is the same as demanding that adults should play like children. No, we cannot go back to satisfy our deepest soul needs, into the civilization of past millennia, nor can we, if we do not want to fall into decadence, call out as Westerners “ex oriente lux”; no, we must not call out, the light comes to us from the Orient. For the light that is there today has also undergone many metamorphoses, and we cannot indulge in the illusion that what can still be found somewhere in the Orient today represents a spirituality that could somehow fruitfully reach into our civilization. It was a decadence of the worst kind when a theosophical movement asserted itself out of the religious and cultural needs of the Occident, out of the machine age, which had also formed a mechanistic world view that cannot satisfy man. It was decadence of the worst kind that one went into the area that today's decadent oriental succession of an intellectual life of earlier times has. When Indian culture was sought out today in order to incorporate it into Western theosophy, it showed just how barren one had become, how the creative powers no longer stir from one's own spiritual life, how one could only be great in the mechanistic, but how one could not find one's own way into those areas that the soul needs for its view of the true spiritual essence of man.

This tendency, by the way, underlies today's life all too much. Do we not see how those who are dissatisfied with present-day Christianity often inquire: What was Christianity like in the past? What was early Christianity like? Let us do it again as the early Christians did. As if we had not progressed since then, as if we did not need a new understanding of Christianity! Oh, the characteristic of infertility is everywhere, the impossibility of one's own creation. No, that is not what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants: borrowing from some ancient culture or from the present-day succession of an ancient culture.

Particularly when one grasps the concrete reality of the roots of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, it is easy to see what has been said. You can hear how the present-day Oriental, I would even say, how old methods are reproduced, seeks the path to the spiritual in a certain breathing process, in a regulation of breathing, seeks to develop the human constitution through which one finds inner powers of knowledge and feeling and will, in order to ascend into the spiritual world, where the spiritual-soul human being is found, where true self-knowledge is. The Oriental of today does what the Oriental has always done in earlier centuries and millennia for such a path: he descends from the mere intellectual life of the head into the life of the whole human being. He knows the inner organic connection between the way we breathe in and the way we breathe out — I will speak of this again in the next few days — and the process of our imagining and thinking. But he also knows that thinking and imagining grow out of the breathing process. And so he wants to go back to the roots of thinking, to the breathing process. He seeks the path up to the spiritual world in a regulation of the breathing process. We cannot imitate this path. If we were to imitate it, we would sin against our human constitution, which has become quite different. The inner structure of our brain and nervous system is different from that from which the instinctive spiritual culture of the Orient emerged. If we were to consider it right today to devote ourselves only to a regulated breathing process, we would be denying the intellectual life. We would be denying what we are constituted for today.

In order to ascend the paths into the spiritual world, we must undergo other metamorphoses. We no longer have to go back from thinking to bodily processes such as breathing; we have to develop thinking itself. That is why today's spiritual science, living at the height of its time, must speak of an education of the intellectual life, but not of the intellectual life that is almost the only one known today. It is precisely this intellectual life that has made us dry and arid, as if parched, for the full scope of life. No matter how much the one-sided intellectualism is railed against from all sides in the present day, nothing is being done to really fight it. One has the feeling that mere concepts, even those taken from serious and conscientious science, leave the soul cold and do not lead it along the paths of true life. On the other hand, however, one does not find the possibility of directing this intellectual life in a direction that can be satisfying, because one wants to avoid precisely that which the spiritual science meant here must regard as the right thing for the modern human being. The modern human being cannot, when he realizes the dryness, the sobriety, the one-sidedness of mere intellectualism, draw on some, as one often says, pre-thought, primitive, elementary life to improve himself as an intellectual person. He cannot, I would say, seek in a life of blind rage, which one does not understand, that which he wants to externally affix to intellectual civilization.

Therefore, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks, through the practice-based development of the soul, that which modern man actually longs for in order to truly satisfy his soul. I have described in detail in the second part of my “Occult Science”, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in other of my writings, how this path is to be followed in a way that is appropriate for Western man. In principle, I will only hint at the fact that it is a matter of taking hold of the soul life in such a way that one avoids developing concepts, notions and ideas in the highest degree, that one does not develop only the life of thought in a one-sided way, but that one exercises the soul in such a way that the most living feelings are connected with the thoughts themselves, which arise, combine and separate. While today the one-sided intellectualist is sober in his thought life, but also lets this thought life wander in the alien fields of science or other fields and otherwise thoughtlessly lives in life, that which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science calls its practice seeks to deepen into thinking, but at this deepening of thinking of thinking, so that one can rejoice, become angry, hate and love what one only thinks, how one hates and loves people, how one becomes angry at outer events, so that a whole inner life arises, arises in such liveliness as the outer life is. The books mentioned are intended to bear witness to the fact that this can be done systematically.

But then, when a person seeks out such paths, when he really develops the forces of knowledge, feeling and will that otherwise lie dormant within him, when he therefore takes his development in hand not from the body, as in the ancient oriental culture, in a regulated breathing process, but from the soul and from the spirit, then he finds the way into the spiritual world. And what forces does he apply? He applies the forces through which his civilization has become great. He applies the forces that he also applied in building his machines, in developing his mechanistic Copernican, Galilean, Keplerian, Newtonian astronomical conceptions. The powers of imagination and ingenuity that are developed by our minds and souls in our machines, what lives in our astronomy, in our chemistry, what lies in our social life, all this is being cultivated. The Oriental had none of this. He could not have continued his spiritual life to the point of developing these powers of the soul. He had to go to the breathing of the body in order to follow the path of knowledge. We must start from the point where we start in our outer practical life. We must proceed from the same soul and spiritual powers that live in our mechanistic culture, which has produced seven to eight hundred million specimens of the subhuman. We must develop a new orientation, that is, a vision of the higher, the eternal, the immortal human being from the most sensual, the most mechanical, from that which proves to be the path to the subhuman in our Western civilization.

However, not everything that wants to be part of modern civilization is appealing to modern people. For this modern man, he demands that the child should develop, because the child cannot yet make its own decision about its development. At the moment when he is supposed to make the decision himself, he no longer allows himself to be involved in the development; at that point he is done; at that point he allows himself to be elected to the city council, to parliament, because he knows everything. One knows everything. There is no need to descend to the development of abilities through which one knows something. One is a critic for everything, if only one has come to the awareness of one's arbitrariness, if only the others are no longer allowed to mess around in relation to development. This modern man must seek the way to ascend again to those heights where one finds the spiritual-soul man.

Now the fact of the matter is that for the time being the inner urge to seek this spiritual-soul-man, to tread the path to these realizations, is still a renunciation-filled one, for this path demands a life that certainly takes place in pain and suffering, a life that not everyone has to live today, not everyone can live, nor does everyone need to live. But just as not everyone can become a chemist, but the results of chemistry can be useful for all people, just as not everyone can become an astronomer, but the results of astronomy can appeal to all souls, so there can be few spiritual researchers, but the results of this spiritual research can be grasped by ordinary common sense, as I have often said here. The few spiritual researchers can communicate their spiritual insights, and common sense will understand them. But that is precisely what people today deny. They come and say: What you spiritual researchers communicate to us may be beautiful fantasies; but we dissect it logically, we do not accept it, because it does not show itself before our human understanding. We have not yet trained ourselves to see higher things.

One does experience very strange things in this area. Just recently another pamphlet has appeared about what I, as an anthroposophically oriented worldview, have to represent before humanity today. A man who is, well, a “university professor” says, where he gives me the brush-off as a philosopher and, as he says, as a theosophist: Yes, there Steiner claims that one must also become a chemist in order to understand chemical things, a physicist in order to understand physical things; one can admit that to him. But now it is very strange how this gentleman behaves strangely. He says: Everyone can agree with what chemists claim about this or that, because if he becomes a chemist himself, he will see that it is correct; everyone can agree with what physicists claim, because if he becomes a physicist himself, he will see that what physicists say is correct. But to understand what spiritual science says, one would have to develop special abilities.

But I am not saying anything else. Just as a person must become a chemist in order to judge chemistry, and as a person must become a physicist in order to judge physics, so a person must become a scholar of spiritual science in order to decide on spiritual science. But now, continuing his text, that strange - perhaps not so strange - university professor says: It is not a matter of what Steiner claims only being justified before people trained in spiritual science, but of it having to be justified before me! That is, it must be justified before someone who not only has no idea about it, but also does not want to get one.

This is, of course, a “common sense” written in quotation marks, which is not good at understanding what spiritual science has to offer. The unbiased common sense will grasp it. Yes, in the future people will perhaps think quite differently about these things than they are accustomed to thinking in many circles today. The world is there. The philosophers have always argued about the world. Well, philosophers will still have common sense. And one can even say, if one is unbiased: philosophy is better than its reputation. But philosophers argue. And if you are unprejudiced, you can even grant a certain acumen in the philosophical field to someone who says the opposite of what another is saying, again out of a certain acumen. Yes, if you are unprejudiced here in this field, you come to a very strange judgment about common sense. It is there. People generally speak in this common sense. But it is not at all suitable for understanding the world, otherwise philosophers would not need to argue. This ordinary common sense does not seem to be at all suitable for grasping the world that is presented to the senses externally, just as it is. Try to see if it can grasp what spiritual science has to say, and you will see: the way will open up for you to grasp precisely that. It is wishy-washy, not even mere prejudice, to say: humanitarians also claim different things; one this or the other that. This is said without knowledge of the facts. If one gets to know the facts, one will no longer claim this.

Of course, many a prejudice and many a preconception will have to be overcome if the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here is to be integrated into modern life. But it will have to be integrated. For the way will have to be found to combine the two spiritual currents you have been shown today. We cannot become reactionaries in order to return to earlier intellectual formations. We must place ourselves in that which the scientific, mechanistic age has produced. But we must spiritualize the forces that have brought forth a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Giordano Bruno, a Röntgen, a Becquerel and so on down to our own day, we must spiritualize these forces so that through the same forces of the human soul, through which we build machines, we also ascend to the knowledge of the spiritual-soul human being. Then we will no longer merely speak of the spirit, but we will be able to give content to the striving for the spirit.

This is what is so disturbing to the deeper observer of contemporary civilization: people today talk a lot about the spirit, but they give no content to this talk about the spirit. This gives rise to world views on the one hand, and to the practice of life in an unorganized way connected with these world views on the other, just as our spiritually scientific world view would be out of place in a house built in an old architectural style. Our spiritually scientific world view wants to live in structures that are born of itself. It should create and can create in such a way that it is able to permeate the external material life down to the technical details and the social interconnections. Then this spiritual science will be able to become the bearer of a civilization that finds the right ways to the goals that have been hinted at today. Then this spiritual science will no longer allow that life to flourish, of which one can say: Well, some strive towards the spirit again; they demand that the person who works hard in the factory no longer works only in the factory, but that he has enough time left over to devote to the spirit as well. Oh, no, spiritual science does not demand that one has to work in the factory and, when one locks the door behind oneself, then steps out of the factory to find spiritual life there. No, spiritual science demands the opposite: that when you enter the factory to go to work, you carry the spirit with you, so that every machine is imbued with the spirit of that which also carries the world view to the highest heights of knowledge, of the immortal. Spiritual science does not want to leave time for the spirit, but to imbue all time with what man can find as the content of his spirit.

Now, people often cry out for the spirit today. A book about socialism has just been published - there are all sorts of heartfelt and sometimes sensible views - by Robert Wilbrandt, a professor at the University of Tübingen. It sounds: Yes, but we will not get anywhere with socialism if we do not find the new spirit, the new soul. So on the last pages of the book, the cry for the spirit, for the soul! But if you take such a man, such a personality, to the point where the spirit is given content, where you not only interpret in the abstract in terms of spirit and soul, where you speak of spiritual and soul content as science otherwise speaks of natural content, then the personality in question withdraws, because they do not have the courage to profess the real spirit that is full of content. And so we see it in many. They cry out for the spirit. But when the spirit seeks a real content, they do not come forward. They remain in merely pointing to an abstract union of human souls with the spiritual. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks as a path: the path to real spiritual content, to a real spiritual world, out of our own organic powers of knowledge as a goal: to develop the merely inorganic two currents that have been joined together in us, Orientalism and Occidentalism, to form a striving that finds its way out of our own striving, both down into the mechanism and up into the highest spirituality.

I will conclude today by saying only the following, in anticipation of the further elaboration of this theme that I will give tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, when it will be possible to characterize many things more broadly than I could in today's introduction. The call for a new spirituality is echoing today in many hearts and minds, and in a certain way people already sense that our misfortune, which has manifested itself so terribly in the last five years, is connected in the outer world with the fact that our spirit has reached an impasse. That a wall must be broken through in order to make spiritual progress. There is a sense that we cannot make progress in the social, the political, or the outwardly technical spheres without a new spirit. A man who may not always have played a very favorable role, but perhaps a wiser one than some of his colleagues among the “statesmen” - I say that in quotation marks when I speak of statesmen today - in recent years, has now also - statesmen and generals write war memoirs today, after all - has now also written his war memoirs. They end with the following words:

“War will continue, albeit in a modified form. I believe that future generations will call the great drama that has dominated the world for five years not world war, but world revolution...”

These are the words of Czernin, the Austrian statesman. So at least one person can see how things are connected, even if only to a very limited extent. And he continues:

”... and we shall know that this world revolution has only begun with the world war. Neither Versailles nor Saint Germain will create a lasting work. In this peace lies the disintegrating seed of death. The convulsions that shake Europe are not yet diminishing. Like a mighty earthquake, the subterranean rumblings continue. Soon, the earth will open again and again, here or there, hurling fire against the sky; again and again, events of an elemental nature and force will sweep devastatingly across the lands. Until all that is reminiscent of the madness of this war and the French peace has been swept away.

Slowly, with unspeakable agony, a new world will be born. Future generations will look back on our time as if it were a long, evil dream, but day always follows the darkest night. Generations have sunk into the grave, murdered, starved, succumbed to disease. Millions have died in the quest to destroy and annihilate, with hatred and murder in their hearts.

But other generations are rising, and with them a new spirit. They will build up what war and revolution have destroyed. Every winter is followed by spring. That, too, is an eternal law in the cycle of life, that resurrection follows death.

Blessed are those who will be called upon to help build the new world as soldiers of labor.

Here, too, the call for the new spirit arises from the limited statesmanship of the old days. Now, this call for the new spirit must only be understood and take root truly and earnestly enough in people's souls. For even the most external events in life are connected with the most internal ones, the most external material events with the most internal spiritual experiences. And when we look at what the spirit, which reached its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, has lived out in the events of recent years, we will understand that the call for a new spiritual life must come true. With this new spiritual life, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to have its ways and goals connected to the building of the world, just as those spiritual endeavors that fight it are visibly connected to the terrible events of recent years.

Just recently I read a remarkable lecture that was given in the Baltic region – note the date – on May 1, 1918. A physicist's lecture on May 1, 1918, ends with the words: “The world war has shown that the spiritual aspirations of the present day, the scientific work of the present day, are still too isolated.” The world war – roughly speaking, this physicist says – has taught us that in the future, what is being worked on in the scientific laboratories must be in an inner organic connection, in a continuous inner exchange of ideas, with what is being worked on in the general staffs. The most intimate alliance must be sought – so this physicist says – between science and the general staff. He sees the salvation of the future in this!

As one can see, the science of the past can even view alliances that are formed between it and the most destructive forces of humanity as an ideal. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to form an alliance between its spiritual striving and all truly constructive forces of human civilization.

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive