The volume catalogued as GA 63, Spiritual Science as a Treasure for Life, gathers twelve public lectures that Rudolf Steiner delivered in Berlin across the winter of 1913 and the early months of 1914, from late October through the following spring. Unlike the members-only cycles Steiner reserved for committed students, these were open evening talks addressed to a general Berlin audience, and the tone reflects that setting: he is building a case, answering objections, and showing an educated public why an inner science of the spirit belongs beside the natural sciences rather than in opposition to them. The core subject is the practical value of spiritual research for ordinary living, how disciplined inner work bears on death, morality, art, history, and the questions that press on any thoughtful person.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 63 sits in the productive stretch just before the outbreak of the First World War, a period when Steiner gave large numbers of public lectures in Berlin, Munich, and other cities to introduce his method to listeners who knew nothing of it. By 1913 he had already published the foundational books this cycle keeps pointing back to: the guide to inner training usually rendered as How to Know Higher Worlds, the account of cosmic and human evolution in Outline of Esoteric Science, and the shorter meditative studies A Way of Self-Knowledge and The Threshold of the Spiritual World. Readers who come to GA 63 will notice that the lectures function as a spoken companion to those printed works, translating dense written instruction into accessible argument for a room of skeptics and the merely curious.
What distinguishes this cycle from Steiner's more specialized courses is its steady comparison with natural science. Again and again he insists that spiritual research does not quarrel with chemistry, physics, or biology but extends their spirit into a region the senses cannot reach. He likens the spiritual researcher to a chemist separating water into its elements: as the chemist parts hydrogen from oxygen, the trained investigator learns to experience the soul apart from the body it usually seems fused with. This is Steiner positioning his work as a continuation of the modern scientific temper, not a retreat from it, and that framing runs through every lecture in the volume.
The historical moment matters for how one reads these talks. Steiner is speaking to a Berlin public shaped by the triumphs of nineteenth-century science, an audience that has watched knowledge of nature reshape technology, transport, and social life, and he meets that audience on its own ground. He grants the achievements of materialist science their full due before asking whether the same rigour might be turned inward, toward the soul that does the knowing. Because these are public lectures rather than esoteric instruction, they preserve a valuable record of how Steiner argued in the open, patiently anticipating the objection before stating his own view.
Themes and Structure
The cycle opens with three lectures that lay the method before applying it. The first describes how ordinary faculties every person already possesses, above all sustained attention and devotion, can be strengthened through years of patient practice into what Steiner calls concentration and meditation, the twin instruments of spiritual perception. He is careful to say these are not abnormal or occult powers but heightened forms of common experience; a reliable memory, he notes, already grows from the ability to attend to things with genuine interest. Yet the path is not easy for being built on ordinary faculties. Quoting Goethe, Steiner warns the beginner that
It is easy, but the easy is difficult.Years of persistent inner training, he insists, stand between the everyday attention we all know and the concentrated force the researcher must command. The next two talks distinguish this research from both religious creed and from the academic sense of the German word for the humanities, arguing that spiritual science is a knowledge of a real spiritual world, as real in its own domain as nature is in its.
From there the lectures turn to specific human questions. Two paired talks, one on death and one on the meaning of the soul's immortality, address the fear that keeps even enlightened minds from inquiring into what lies beyond the grave; Steiner cites the reluctance of scholars like Max Müller to grant that anything at all can be known here, and offers the experience of inner training as a way past that impasse. A striking lecture on Michelangelo reads the history of art as evidence for the soul's development across repeated earthly lives, contrasting Greek sculpture with the Renaissance master to show how the human constitution itself has changed across the ages.
The winter's second half broadens still further. Steiner takes up the ancient riddle of evil, tracing it back to the Stoics and their ideal of the wise soul that masters pain, then reframing wickedness in the light of spiritual knowledge. He devotes a lecture to the moral foundation of human life, and another to Voltaire, whom he reads through the lens of Lessing's The Education of the Human Race and the idea of history as a schooling of souls across successive epochs. Here he unfolds his account of the three members of the soul, the sentient, the intellectual or mind, and the consciousness soul, and shows how each unfolds in a definite phase of cultural history. A further lecture examines what the soul experiences between death and rebirth, and a rich talk on the Homunculus figure from Goethe's Faust turns a literary image into a meditation on the limits of a purely material account of the human being. The cycle closes by returning to its title question, gathering the winter's threads into a statement of what spiritual science can genuinely become for life.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Two entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 63, each rooted in one of the winter's most searching lectures. Follow the links to study the terms in depth:
The first grows out of the January 1914 lecture on evil, where Steiner sets the problem of wickedness against the Stoic effort to hold the clarity of the self free from the surging waves of pain and emotion. The second reflects the February talk in which Voltaire becomes a case study in reading a historical figure through the doctrine of repeated earthly lives and the education of the soul across epochs.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these twelve lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts English translations of the individual talks in the GA 63 collection. For print editions and related secondary literature, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because the English renderings here come from several translators, comparing the archive text with any published edition is worthwhile when a passage turns on a precise term.
Continue Your Study
To place GA 63 within the wider architecture of Steiner's thought, follow these paths through the Thalira library:
- Browse the full Thalira Glossary to trace how the concepts introduced in this cycle, from the threefold soul to repeated earthly lives, connect across the whole body of work.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find study guides for neighbouring volumes and to see how the winter 1913 lectures fit among Steiner's other public cycles.
- Read the paired glossary entries on The Origin of Evil and Voltaire together, since both take their bearings from the same winter of lectures and illuminate how Steiner brings spiritual research to bear on moral and historical questions alike.