Rudolf Steiner

In 1891, at the age of thirty, Rudolf Steiner wrote Credo: The Individual and the All. Behind him were his essays on Goethe's writings on natural science, and his book The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception: Fundamental Outline with Special Reference to Schiller. His doctoral thesis, Truth and Science, would be completed and accepted in the following year, and his masterpiece of philosophy, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity would appear in 1894.

CREDO The Individual and the ALL

The world of Ideas is the primal source and principle of all existence. In it is infinite harmony and blissful rest. The existence that it did not illumine with its light, would be dead, devoid of being, and would have no part in the whole life of the universe. Only that which derives its being from the Idea signifies something on the Universal Tree of Creation.

The Idea is the spirit, clear in itself, sufficient in and for itself. The individual, the particular, must have the spirit within, otherwise it falls away like a dry leaf from that Tree and was there to no purpose.

But man feels and knows himself as an individual when he awakens to his full conciousness. But in so doing there is implanted within him the longing for the Idea. This longing urges him on to overcome his separation, to let the spirit come to life within him, to be in accord with the spirit. All hat is of the self, everything that is selfish, that makes him into this particular separate being, this he must put an end to in himself, must strip off from himself, for it is this that darkens he light of the spirit. What proceeds from the sensenature, from instinct, desire, passion, that is only desired by this egotistice individuality. Therefore man must root out this selfwilling in himself; instead of what he as an individual wills he must desire what the Spirit, the Idea in him wills. "Let isolated separateness pass away, and follow the voice of the Idea in thee, for that alone is divine!" What man wills as a separate individual is a worthless point in the circumference of the cosmic whole, vanishing in the stream of time. What man wills "in the spirit," that is in the center, for it brings the central light of the universe to life within us; such a deed is not subject to time. If we act as single beings, then we shut ourselves off from the closed chain of cosmic action, we separate ourselves off. If we act "in the spirit," then we find our way livingly into the universal working of worlds. Slaying of all selfdom, that is the foundation for the higher life. For he who kills the selfdom lives an eternal existence. We are immortal to the degree in which we have allowed self to die within us. The mortal in us is selfdom. This is the true meaning of the saying: "Who dies not before he dies, perishes when he dies." That means, he who does not let the selfdom in him cease during the time of his life, has no share in the universal life that is immortal; he has never existed, has had no veritable being.

There are four spheres of human activity in which man devotes himself fully to the spirit, with a killing out of all selfcentered life of his own: in the search for Knowledge, in Art, in Religion and in the loving devotion in the spirit to another personality. He who does not live in at least one of these spheres, does not really live at all. Knowledge is devotion to the universe in thoughts, Art in beholding, Religion in heart and soul, Love with the sum of all our spiritforces, to something which seems to us a being of the world worthy of being treasured by us. Knowledge is the most spiritual, Love the most beautiful form of selfless devotion. For love is a true light of heaven in the life of every day. Devout, truly spiritual love ennobles our being to its inmost fibre, it exalts everything that lives within us. This pure devout love transforms the whole life of the soul into another that has relationship to the Spirit of the World. In this highest sense, to love means to carry the breath of divine life into regions where for the most part only egoism most deserving of abhorrence, and despicable passion are to be found. One must first know something of the holiness of love before one can speak of piety, devoutness.

If man, through one of these four spheres, has made his way out of isolated separateness and entered into the divine life of the Idea, then he has attained that for which the seed of striving was laid in his breast: his union with the spirit; and that is his true destiny. He moreover who lives in the spirit, lives in freedom for he has wrested himself free from all subordinate things. Nothing compels him save from. where he gladly suffers the compulsion, for he has recognized it as the highest. Let truth be changed into life; lose thyself in order to find thyself again in the spirit of the world.