292. The History of Art I: Mid-European and Southern Art
15 Nov 1916, Dornach Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
The gradual entry of Christianity into the life of the people is also recognisable, or, rather, would be recognisable, if the dramatic representations which did, indeed, grow more and more significant toward the 13th century, had been preserved. All that we now bring to light again—the Christmas and Easter Plays, and Plays of the Three Wise Men—are of a later date, and are but a faint reflection of those earlier ones which tended to a more universal presentation of the Christian world-conception. |
292. The History of Art I: Mid-European and Southern Art
15 Nov 1916, Dornach Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Continuing our studies on the great works of Art, we will show some further slides today, supplementing those that were shown last week. Today I propose in the main to supplement what I endeavoured to explain last week, of the connections and contrasts between the Mid-European, or Northern, and the Southern Art. I tried to show how the specifically artistic quality is always influenced by the character of the South or of the North, while, on the other hand, there were continual interpenetrations of the Southern and Mid-European impulses, layer upon layer, as it were, so that it is by no means easy now to see how these things really worked together. Spiritual scientific investigations will in course of time have to bring more and more light into these matters. Today I wish to draw attention to the contrasts from certain other points of view. You will remember what I emphasised last time. From underlying impulses of the Mid-European spiritual life, there arose what we may call the art of expression—expression of Will and Intelligence—the power to express the ever-mobile life of the soul. The soul in movement—that is the goal of the Mid-European impulse; while the Southern (which was, however, influenced at a very early stage by the Mid-European) looks more to all that enters our perceptions from the Divine-spiritual in the Cosmos, which finds expression in the power of composition, and in features which transcend the human. It is a characteristic abuse of our time to consider Art—even the plastic Arts—far too much from the mere point of view of the narrative and subject matter, while appreciating far too little the specifically artistic qualities. At the same time there is another equally pernicious error. Art is very frequently severed nowadays from the general life of culture and civilisation, and treated as though it were something that lives a life apart. This, too, is wrong. For we need only have a feeling for the specifically artistic qualities, for all that works in form and colouring, in composition and the like—we need only wean ourselves of the tendency to explain everything symbolically, or in other artificial ways; we need but feel—before such pictures as Dürer's ‘St. Jerome,’ or ‘Melancholia,’ for example,—how infinitely deeper is the mysterious ebb and flow of the masses of light themselves, than any artificial symbolism we may choose to read into these pictures. Then we shall recognise that the specifically artistic qualities that come to expression in the great works of Art, are also living in the whole general life of civilisation. Out of the common feeling of his time the artist works into the spheres of form and color and expression. The time itself works through the soul of the artist. The whole culture of the age finds expression in the characteristic works of Art. We saw last time how the Mid-European, or Northern element, works its way upwards more or less independently, while at the same time it grows together with all that is brought to it through the Church—through Christianity from the side of Rome. Until the 12th and 13th centuries we witness the development of a unique artistic life in Middle Europe, uniting the more Roman or Latin elements with a strongly individual characterisation of all that is life and movement in the human soul. We cannot understand what took place until the 12th and 13th centuries if we merely consider what we know of the spread of Christianity in the succeeding time. For the whole spread of Christianity was a very different thing in those earlier centuries from what it afterwards became. It was only in later times that the rigidly dogmatic qualities which so repel us, came into prominence, though, needless to say, there were all manner of excesses even before the twelfth century. And while in Middle Europe the systemmatising, formal tendency of Rome was always felt like a foreign body, still the Christian impulses found their way most wonderfully into the soul-life of the people—especially into the more subconscious, feeling elements of the soul. This entry of Christianity into the soul found expression especially in the sphere of Art, where there was a wrestling for plastic power of expression. Here we may point to a truth which can be characterised in two very simple statements which are, none the less, very far-reaching. We may ask this question: To what does Art appeal among the Southern peoples? To what did it appeal already in antiquity? And elsewhere in the South, in the period of its decline and in its resurrection from the early to the late Renaissance? To what does Art appeal in the more southern regions? It appeals to the fancy and imagination. This statement is of infinite importance. The appeal is to the life of the fancy and the imagination, which is present in the souls of the southern people with a slight, suggestion of a sanguine temperament in these respects. Thus in the southern regions we see the Christian ideas entering, above all, into the imaginative life, and borne by fancy into the realm of Art. Needless to say, such a statement must not be pressed too far. I would say, the statement itself should be artistically understood. Only so, my dear friends, could it come about that in the time of the Renaissance artistic fancy rose to such great heights of creation, while the moral life, as we showed in a recent lecture, fell to the state revealed in the attacks of Francis of Assisi, and later of Savonarola. The situation stands before us when we contrast the fiery attacks of Savonarola which were all in vain, with the infinitely rich life of Christian vision and imagination in the plastic works of Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and many others. Art in the North speaks differently and appeals to a different element of soul, namely, to mind and feeling. Once more, these things must not be pressed; nevertheless, in such a statement guiding lines are given for the understanding of whole epochs of History. However we may believe that Christianity contains a peculiar, morally religious impulse of the soul, this impulse did not find its way into the element of fancy and imagination in the Southern culture which reached such giddy heights in the Renaissance. But in the North, the centuries until the 12th—nay, the beginning of the 13th—reveal in Art the progressive appeal of Christianity, and especially the tragic elements of Christianity, to human heart and feeling. The Art of the Italian Renaissance strives to make the countenance of Christianity itself as fair as possible—that, after all, is the essential element in the Renaissance Art: But the centuries to which I now refer, in Middle Europe, are all devoted to the striving to realise the Story of the Passion—with all its tragedy and drama, until the tragic story becomes their very own in heart and soul. Down to the Carolingian period in Middle Europe, Mid-European paganism continually breaks through into the life of feeling. But in the centuries from that time onward until the 12th and 13th there arises out of the very soul of Middle Europe an inherently Christian Feeling for all human life. And the strange thing is that from the 13th century onward a certain decline can be observed. Yet, as I explained last time, even now when another element once more overwhelms it, there is still the constant striving for the Mid-European soul to assimilate into its deepest inner life all things that come to it, so that, after all, there is a continuity of work and progress in the best souls, from the 11th century on into the 15th and 16th. The gradual entry of Christianity into the life of the people is also recognisable, or, rather, would be recognisable, if the dramatic representations which did, indeed, grow more and more significant toward the 13th century, had been preserved. All that we now bring to light again—the Christmas and Easter Plays, and Plays of the Three Wise Men—are of a later date, and are but a faint reflection of those earlier ones which tended to a more universal presentation of the Christian world-conception. The Play concerning Anti-Christ, of the 12th century, which has been found at Tegernsee in Bavaria, and a later Play on the Ten Virgins, these, too, are but echoes of Plays that were presented everywhere, dramatising the Biblical stories and the sacred legends. Out of this life with the Christian world-conception as a whole, there arose the works of Art which we shall see again today and which we say last time. There followed what I might call a slow and silent working towards the deepening of the soul's life and its artistic power of expression. It finds expression wonderfully in Dürer's representations of the Passion, and notably in the head of Christ Himself as conceived by Dürer and others. It will be a satisfaction to me if we can show these pictures, too, on some future occasion; we do not possess them at present. If we study the progress of artistic penetration in pictures of the countenance of Christ till Dürer's time, and in other things as well, we find there was really attained in Mid-Europe at that time an astonishing degree of maturity. It lies inherent in the subtle difference between the Mid-European and Northern, and the Southern life, which developed, as it were, the last phases of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch—(albeit the Fifth epoch already shone into the Renaissance);—the South in its deepest tendencies of feeling was still expressing the last phases of the Fourth; while in Mid-Europe and the North the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch was preparing. What afterwards became the expression of the individual, and of all that is mobile in the human soul—the soul in movement and emotion—all this was working its way up from unconscious depths. Here we see the whole life of the two regions in their essential difference. We need only bear in mind how much in the Southern Art is due to the fact that there still existed a living atavistic perception of what plays from spiritual regions into the realms of sense. For this was, indeed, preserved in what are known to us of the Byzantine forms of Art—in all the suggestive forms and figures that have come down to us. Take, for instance, what works upon us with such suggestive power in the Art of the Mosaics, and in all that is connected with the name of Cimabue. Here it is more the Christ Figure that works upon us. In Middle Europe it is, rather, the life of Jesus that is presented to us, for the artistic forms are created directly out of the inner life of the soul. Superhuman as is the Byzantine type of Christ, inwardly human is the Christ type which was afterwards worked out by Dürer. The Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, including the latest flower (in the Italian Renaissance) has essentially the quality of looking upward to the superhuman and typical; the superhuman and generic nature of the soul, setting aside the individually human. The Southern peoples brought to their Art, in a far higher degree, the ancient, the generic nature of the soul in its superhuman and divine quality. In the Northern Art, on the other hand, we see the strong decided striving of the individual, as it works its way upwards out of every single human soul. The more these things are understood, the more this will be confirmed. The southern life still contains mankind as a whole. Think how intensely an Athenian was an Athenian, or a Spartan a Spartan, so that Aristotle rightly called man a “Zoon politicos”—a political animal. The “political animal” was developed to its greatest height in Rome, where, we might say, man lived more in the streets than in his own house; and with his soul-life, also, he lived more in the life that surrounded him than in the house of his own soul. Such, truly, was the Southern imagination as it worked in the world of space. From the very outset men live together, live together as a whole, and the life of Art itself arises out of this principle. This is a feature common to all the Southern Art. They decorate the churches and the public squares; everywhere we see how they reckon with the fact that the people run gladly together, crowd gladly into the churches, or in the public squares, drawn thither by their very temperament and expecting what will there be set before them. To possess themselves fully, they need this life in the outer world, this living with the group-soul nature—with all that is most eminently political—in the right sense of the word. All this is different in Middle Europe. In Middle Europe man lives within himself; seeks his experiences in his own house and home, even the house of his soul. And if he is to dedicate himself to the group-nature, his heart must first be conquered for it, he must in some way be summoned to it. Many of the underlying impulses of Gothic architecture will be found to lie in this direction. The buildings erected by Gothic architecture stand there not because the people are already running together of their own accord, but, on the contrary, because they must first call the people, bring them together, as it were, through mysterious and suggestive influences. This is expressed in the very forms of the Gothic. The individuals must first be called to the group-life. And the same thing lies inherent in the whole treatment of light and darkness which I described to you the other day. In the elemental surging and interweaving of the light into the darkness, man finds an element into which he can enter to free himself from his own separate existence; albeit he can carry his individual existence, his individuality with him into this very element, because it is so akin to the nature of the soul. In all these things we find the distinguishing feature of the Northern as against the Southern Art. Hence the striving—the successful striving—of the Northern Art to express inwardness of life and soul. We need only call to mind the portraits, the Madonnas, for instance, of Van Eyck. These Madonnas—their facial expression altogether determined by a turning inward of the life of the human soul—this speaking from an inwardness of soul in the countenance and gesture—all this, Raphael would never have painted. Raphael raises what he paints beyond the human; Van Eyck lifts it into the still more deeply human, so as to seize the human emotions with his paintings, the human hearts of those who see them. Once more it is a question of grasping the human soul. The priesthood until the 12th and 13th centuries were well aware of these possibilities of the human soul in Europe. They reckoned with these things. They worked with the heart and mind of the people. And without a doubt, much that arose out of this wrestling for artistic powers of expression, came about through the co-operation of the religious orders with that inner life and character of the people which we have here described. We must by all means understand how these more Northerly qualities of artistic creation are connected with the protesting folk-soul of the North, rising up in opposition against the Roman element. Luther went to Rome. But he saw nothing of the sublime heights of artistic creation; he saw only the moral degradation there. And this implies very much. No doubt he met one or another of the great painters of Rome on the Square of St. Peter's, but what concern had they for him, these men who created out of al altogether different mood of soul, something to which he had no inner relationship. And yet, Luther's very radical one-sidedness was in another way the product of the same Mid-European characteristics which, if I may say so, wrestled most sublimely in the realm of plastic, pictorial expression, and attained an artistic height that stands, in a certain way, so magnificently and independently side by side with the Art of the Italian Renaissance. (We need make no comparisons, for they are always trivial.) We will therefore now show a few more pictures, supplementing those we showed last week. First we will show some wood-sculptures from the very beginning of the 13th century. They are at Halberstadt. Look at this Crucifixion Group. I will only say one thing to characterise what is most important. In this group you can see how deeply the story of the Passion had found its way into their lives by that time. There is Mary, there is St. John, and in the center the Christ, looking down towards her. If you could see the face you would see an infinite deepening of soul in the expression, an overwhelming depth. In Mary, if you have a feeling for these things, you will recognise at once the flowing together of the more Roman, priestly conception with the Mid-European depth and tenderness of feeling. Here it is recognisable in a most wonderful way. We shall presently show the face of Mary in detail. This group reveals how they contrived, out of the specifically Mid-European creative impulse of the soul, to mould the Christianity which had conquered the Mid-European country. We will now show the detail. Wonderfully characteristic is the expression of the face. The expression in the Southern Art is such that the eyes look far out into the world; in the Northern Art the soul, as it were, presses forward into the look of the eyes from within. Here the two are altogether interwoven—united with one another. A tenderness of soul in the expressions hovers gently, wonderfully, over a more Latin, Roman rounding and perfection of the features. These things must not be pressed. But I beg of you to observe in all the following pictures how very differently the clothing and drapery is treated in the Mid-European Art and in the Southern. Undoubtedly, such things must not be pressed too far; yet it is true to say that in all the Southern Art the drapery rather surrounds and veils the human form, follows the lines of the form closely, continuing, as it were, the bodily forms. In the Mid-European Art the treatment of the drapery is different. It proceeds from the emotion and movement of the soul. According to the gesture of the hand and the whole attitude of the figure, the quick, mobile life of soul is continued into the raiment. The latter adheres less closely to the body. It does not seek, as in the Southern Art, to veil or to express the forms of the body. It is, rather, like a continuation of the living experience of the soul. You will see this more and more distinctly as we go on into the following centuries. We have now come to the famous: This, too, is in the wood, and dates from the first third of the 13th century. None the less, you will see in it a wonderful progression from the former group whose subject is so similar. Observe the communion of soul between the Mary and the Christ-Figure. See how the faith in the Christian world-conception, deeply united with the human soul, appears in the St. John and in the Mary-Figure, as the power that overcomes all things. The Christian world-conception had entered into the souls of these people so as to become an universal historic conception of all earthly evolution. See how Adam, down here, receives the Blood of the Redeemer dropping downward from the Cross. Study the face of Adam, how he is touched by the influence of Grace which he can now receive inasmuch as he may catch the Blood of the Redeemer flowing from the Cross. You will realise with what infinite depths Christianity had found its may into the lives of these people. It had risen to a universal and truly Cosmic conception. Angels carry the Cross. God the Father descends with the Dove, setting His seal upon the fact that what He had given to the Earth in His Son gives, at this moment, the whole Earth its meaning. In this group with all its artistic perfection we see how deeply Christianity had found its way into Middle Europe,because they tried again and again to permeate it with the human heart and feeling,—to permeate it from within the human soul. On the other hand, in the South, it was permeated by fancy and imagination, thus producing that peculiar permeation, so free from the moral element—(or shall we say, in order not to give offence, so free from moral cant)—which comes to expression in the Renaissance in the South. If you were to make a study of the progress in the representation of the Christ-Figure, this Head of Christ would be an important station. Also the Head of Christ in the Cathedral of Amiens, and afterwards, the Head of Christ by Albrecht Dürer. We now pass to some sculptures which are found at Freiburg in Saxony, also dating from the first third of the 13th century. They show an altogether different aspect, though here, too, it is the sacred history, and a deep striving for inwardness. It is not too much to say that one loves to dwell on every single face. The next picture: shows us two figures. The one, the figure of a woman, is hard to interpret. Perhaps she is an “Ecclesia.” The other is said to be Aaron. These things are not essential. The figures are undoubtedly connected, allegorically or in some other way, with the Christian world-conception. Once more, observe the deepening of the soul's life. The contrast of expression between the face on the left, and that on the right is particularly fascinating from this point of view. Supplementing what we showed last time of the Cathedrals at Naumburg and Strasburg, we will now show some sculptures from the Cathedral at Bamberg. Here, to begin with, we have two. See how directly the dramatic element, the living movement of soul, is expressed in the attitudes, representing the interchange between one soul and another. C. single moment is presented to us, while at the same time the two contrasting characters are well expressed. The composition is by no means great, but the expressiveness of soul is marvellous. He must remember that this dates from about 1240. Spiritual scientific research will in course of time be confirmed, in that it does not suggest—as many people still do today—that the Mid-European element, in its presentation of the Christian world-conception, was in any high degree influenced by the Southern. That, indeed, is not the case. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. The different streams are not as yet clearly seen by external history. It is not seen, for instance, what I pointed out the other day—how the Northern impulses worked down even into the creations of Raphael and Michelangelo. Artistically, this conception is altogether a product of the Northern spirit. This example shows how the worldly and the religious elements played into one another. This was, indeed, the case, especially at the time with which we are now dealing. The worldly and the religious were brought together in the effort which I characterised just now. The souls of men had to be won over; the individual souls must first be called—must by some means be gathered together, if they are to look up in community, in congregation, to the spiritual world. Likewise, they must first be called if they are to express reverence in one way or another, for something in the outer worldly sphere. Hence the worldly is brought together with the ecclesiastical element. Here, then, we see the Emperor Heinrich, the Empress Kunigunde, and, on the left, St. Stephen. Needless to say, these things presuppose, as a rule, the naivete of the common people, their blind devotion and dependence. Today, in the fond belief of our contemporaries, these things are overcome. Inwardly, they are present all the more. On the part of the great lords themselves there is very frequently the underlying idea (not unconnected with very human qualities, which shall be nameless), that they themselves stand just a little nearer to the various Saints and supersensible powers than ordinary mortals do. The Old and the New Testament were always conceived in unison, as the promise and the fulfilment. Follow the detail of these figures. And now another figure from the same Cathedral. A figure of Mary, showing—from whatever point of view you may consider it—how richly the qualities which I described before, come to expression in this stream of Art. You must remember that this was done about the year 1245. What would you look for in the South at that time? The next Picture, from the Cathedral at Bamberg again, represents the figure of: A favorite representation at that time. Last time we saw the corresponding figure from the Cathedral at Strasburg. The figure of the Church is conceived with a certain inner freedom. Her soul is free, she gazes freely far into the world, with wisdom. This figure is in contrast, as we saw last time, with the Synagogue, who is represented once more with bound and downcast eyes. The whole posture is intended to represent this contrast in every detail, even to the sweep of the drapery. Look at the lower portion of the dress, how well it is adapted to the movement of the soul. We will insert the 'Church' once more, in order that you may compare the draperies: And now a worldly, or secular figure from the same Cathedral. Study the expression well. The head, which we will now show in detail, is most wonderful: We now pass on to the 14th century, and see what had occurred by that time. We have a few figures from the Cathedral at Cologne, first half of the 14th century. It is easy to see that a certain decline had taken place. The next picture is also from Cologne: Going further in the 14th century we now come to a figure of St. Paul by a master known as the “Master of the Clay Figures.” These figures were executed in burnt earthenware. Having now shown the rise, and to some extent the decline of a stream of evolution complete in itself, we will give a series of pictures from the Chartreuse de Champmol at Dijon, which are really great of their kind. Most, if not all of them are the independent work of the Dutch sculptor, Sluter, or else done under his direction. He brought to the Chartreuse at Dijon, from the Netherlands, an almost unique power of individual characterisation. From many points of view we see this individualising tendency in his work. Here especially you see the Art of individual characterisation. Compare this Madonna and Child of Sluter's with the next picture (Moses) and realise the power of one and the same man to characterise these two. Remember that this Chartreuse at Dijon was built in 1306 to 1334; it was therefore the beginning of the 14th century. Compare this with Michelangelo's Moses—for why should these things not be placed together—they are, indeed, comparable. And now by the same artist as before—Sluter. To live with the prophetic figures so as to achieve this degree of individualisation, was, indeed, most wonderful. We will now show one of the figures in detail: These are by the same artist. The age was especially great in the creation of tomb monuments. We will show the detail of the upper part: The figures round the base of the tomb which were formerly so small, are wonderfully executed when you come to see them in detail. Such is the individual characterisation of all the single figures round the base of the tomb. Here is another group. We now go on to an artist of the 15th century. (We must go according to the pictures we possess at the moment.) The last pictures, you remember, were by an artist of the early 14th century. With the Cologne Master, and the Master of the Clay Figures who made the group we saw before, we came to the 14th century. We now pass on into the 15th. Here, then, we have two figures by Hans Multscher: This is about the middle of the 15th century. The next is a Madonna, by the same artist (Multscher). And now we go further and further in what I described just now as the elaboration of the Christian subjects with deep inwardness of soul. The following are figures carved in wood, at Blutenburg (end of the 15th century). The art of characterisation has, indeed, attained its ideal to a marvellous extent. The figure of Mary, carved in wood—end of the 13th century: This, then, is the time when Michelangelo and Raphael were born. The next picture, too, is from Blutenburg. The time when these highly individual figures were created was also especially great in wood-carving, with which they decorated the Choristers' seats in their churches. We will give two examples from the Frauenkirche in Munich, end of the 15th century. We now come to the sculptor who worked at the end of the 15th century. And this was the time when the High Renaissance in Italy had not as yet begun. These works were created about 1490–1495. This St. Elizabeth—created in the early 16th century—is now in the (Germanisches Museum, at Nuremberg.) This, too, dates from the beginning of the 16th century. There are wonderful types among these twelve Apostles; one would like to study every single head alone: Finally, we give two examples of the sculptor—Veit Stoss—early 16th century, who worked in Cracow and also in Southern Germany, creating his plastic works in many different materials. The next picture is in Nuremberg,. “The Angel's Greeting,” it is called. I will also show three paintings by Hans Baldung, also known as Hans Grun, who worked in Dürer's workshop at the beginning of the 16th century—about 1507–1509. His pictures reveal once more, in the sphere of painting, how everything is turned towards the life of the soul. Hans Baldung was also a portrait painter of no mean order. Here you have an example. Here you see how the same master cultivated the art of portraiture. He was a pupil of Dürer's, who subsequently lived at Strasburg, and at Freiburg in Breisgau. He did some wonderful paintings of the Life of Christ, and of the Mother of Christ. You will find a picture by him at Basel—“Christ on the Cross.” This picture, then, is of the early 16th century—the time of Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome. My dear Friends, the more we multiply these pictures, the more should we see, from this juxtaposition of the Northern and Southern Art, what an immense revolution took place at the turn of the fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean Epochs. And the more should we realise how infinitely rich in content is the simple statement that at that historic moment Civilisation passed from the development of the Intellectual, or Feeling Soul into that of the Spiritual Soul. Infinitely much is contained in such a simple statement. But we only learn to understand these things of Spiritual Science rightly when we follow them into the several and detailed domains of human life. In conclusion, my dear Friends, I still wish to speak a word of solemn remembrance to you on this day. The day after tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of our dear friend, Fraulein Stinde, and in our hearts we will not forget to think on that day of all that came into our Movement through the work of this dear and valued member. And we will also turn our thoughts to her soul as she works on in the Spiritual Worlds—deeply and lovingly connected as she is with our Movement. On this day especially we will deepen the thoughts and feelings of our hearts which are directed to her. I only wished to add this word of remembrance to remind you of the day after tomorrow. In memory of all that unites us with our dear friend—with the soul of our dear Sophie Stinde—let us now rise from our seats. |
166. Necessity and Freedom: Lecture I
25 Jan 1916, Berlin Translated by Pauline Wehrle Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Today I would just like to add a few words about the following. When I was here at Christmas, I drew your attention to the fact that in our time especially, such contradictory things are emerging, that they are quite confusing for human thinking. |
166. Necessity and Freedom: Lecture I
25 Jan 1916, Berlin Translated by Pauline Wehrle Rudolf Steiner |
||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Now that we can be together again, it will be my task in the coming days to speak about important but rather difficult aspects of human and world existence, and we shall certainly not be able to reach any conclusion about these in this lecture; we can only make a beginning. As we proceed we will see how tremendously important these very questions are if we are to connect ourselves inwardly with the soul-stirring events of our times. If I had to summarize in a few words what I am going to speak about, I would say “necessity in world events and in human actions” and “human freedom in these two domains.” There is hardly anyone who is not more or less intensely concerned with these problems, and perhaps there are hardly any events on the physical plane that urge us as strongly to deal with these questions as the ones that are at present overshadowing the peoples of Europe and reverberating in their souls. If we look at world events and our own actions, feeling, willing, and thinking within these events, considering them for the moment in conjunction with what we call divine cosmic guidance, wisdom-filled cosmic guidance, we see that this divine guidance is at work everywhere. And if we look at something that has happened and that perhaps we ourselves have been involved in, we can ask afterwards “Was the reason for this event we were involved in so much a part of wise cosmic guidance that we can say it was inevitable for it to happen as it did, and we ourselves could not have acted differently in it?” Or, looking more toward the future, we could also say “At some time in the future one or another thing will happen in which we believe we may be playing a part. Ought we not assume of the wise world guidance we presupposed that what happens in the future will also come about inevitably or, as we often say, is predetermined?” Can our freedom exist under such conditions? Can we resolve to use the ideas and skills we have acquired to intervene in some way? Can we do anything to alter things through the way we intervene if we do not want them to happen in the way they would be bound to happen without our intervention? If we look back on the past, we tend to have the impression that everything was inevitable and could not have happened differently. If we look more toward the future, we have the impression that it must be possible for us to intervene in the course of events with our own will as much as we can. In short, we will always be in a conflict between supposing an absolute and all-pervading necessity on the one hand and necessarily assuming that we are free on the other. For without this latter assumption we cannot maintain our world view and would have to accept the fact that we are like cogs in the huge machine of existence, governed by the forces ruling the machine to the point where even the duties of the cogs are predetermined. As you know, the conflict between choosing one thing or the other runs to some extent through all our intellectual endeavors. There have always been philosophers called determinists who supposed that all the events we are involved in through our actions and our willing are strictly predetermined, and there have also always been indeterminists who supposed that, on the contrary, human beings can intervene in the course of evolution through their will and their ideas. You know too that the most extreme form of determinism is fatalism, which clings so firmly to the belief that the world is pervaded by spiritual necessity as to presuppose that not one single thing could possibly happen differently from the way it was predetermined, that human beings cannot do other than submit passively to a fate that fills the whole world just because everything is predetermined. Perhaps some of you also know that Kant set up an antinomian chart on one side of which he wrote a particular statement and always set its opposite on the other side.1 For example, on one side stood the assertion “In terms of space the world is infinite,” and on the other side “In terms of space the world is finite.” He then went on to show that with the concepts at our disposal we can prove one of these just as well as the other. We can prove with the same logical exactitude that “the world is infinite with regard to both space and time” or that “the world is finite, boarded-up, in terms of space and that it had a beginning in time.” The questions we have introduced also belong among the ones Kant put on his antinomian chart. He drew people's attention to the fact that one can just as well prove positively, in as proper and logical a way as possible, that everything that happens in the world, including human action, is subject to rigid necessity, as one can prove that human beings are free and influence in one way or another the course of events when they bring their will to bear on it. Kant considered these questions to be outside the realm of human knowledge, to be questions that lie beyond the limits of human knowledge, because we can prove the one just as easily and conclusively as the other. Our studies of the last few years will actually have more or less given you the groundwork to get to the bottom of this strange mystery. For it certainly is a mysterious question whether human beings are bound by necessity or are free. It is a puzzling matter. Yet it is even more puzzling that both these alternatives can be conclusively proved. You will find no basis at all for overcoming doubt in this sphere if you look outside of what we call spiritual science. Only the background spiritual science can give will enable you to discover something about what is at the bottom of this mysterious question. This time we will deal with our subject in very slow stages. I would just like to ask in anticipation, “How is such a thing possible that human beings can prove something and also prove its opposite?” When we approach a matter of this kind, we are certainly made aware of certain limits in normal human comprehension, in ordinary human logic. We meet with this limitation of human logic in regard to other things too. It always appears when human beings want to approach infinity with their concepts. I can show you this by means of a very simple example. As soon as human beings want to approach infinity with their intellects, something occurs that can be called confusion in their concepts. I will demonstrate this in a very simple way. You must just be a little patient and follow a train of thought to which you are probably not accustomed. Suppose I write these figures on the blackboard one after the other, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. I could write an infinite number of them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc., couldn't I? I can also write a second column of figures; on the right of each number I can put double the number, like this:
Again I can write an infinite number of them. Now you will agree with me that each number in the right-hand column is in the left-hand column too. I can underline 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on. Look at the left column for a moment; an infinite series of numbers is possible. This infinite series contains all the numbers included in the right column. 2, 4, 6, and so on are all there. I can continue underlining them. If you look at the figures that are underlined, you will see that they are exactly half of all the numbers together because every other one is underlined. But when I write them on the right-hand side, I can write 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on into infinity. I have an infinite number both on the left and on the right, and you cannot say that there are fewer on the right than on the left. There is no doubt that I am bound to have just as many numbers on the right as on the left. And yet, as every other number would have to be crossed out on the left to make the left column the same as the right, the infinite number on the left is only half the infinite number on the right. Obviously I have just as many numbers on the right as on the left, namely an infinite number, for each number on the right has one corresponding to it on the left—yet the amount of numbers on the right cannot but be half that of the numbers on the left. There is no question about it, as soon as we deal with infinity, our thinking becomes confused. The problem arising here also cannot be solved, for it is just as true that on the right there are half as many numbers as on the left as it is true that there are exactly as many numbers on the right as on the left. Here you have the problem in its simplest form. This brings us to the realization that our concepts cannot actually be used where infinity is concerned, where we go beyond the sense world—and infinity does go beyond the sense world. And do not imagine this to apply only to unlimited infinity, for you cannot use your concepts where limited infinity is concerned either, as the same confusion arises there. Suppose you draw a triangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon and so on. When you reach a construction with a hundred sides, you will have come very close to a circle. You will no longer be able to distinguish the small lines very clearly, especially if you look at them from a distance. Therefore you can say that a circle is a polygon with an infinite number of sides. If you have a small circle there are an infinite number of sides in it; if you have a circle twice the size, you still have an infinite number of sides—and yet exactly twice as many! So you do not need to go as far as unlimited infinity, for if you take a small circle with an infinite number of sides and a circle twice the size with an infinite number of sides, then even in the realm of visible, limited infinity you can encounter something that throws your concepts into utter confusion. What I have just said is extremely important. For people completely fail to notice that there is only a certain field where our concepts apply, namely the field of the physical plane, and that there is a particular reason why this has to be so. You know, at a place where people are attacking us rather severely—which is now happening in many places from a great many people—a pastor gave a speech opposing our spiritual science, and thinking it might be especially effective, he concluded with a quotation from Matthias Claudius.2 This quotation says roughly that human beings are really poor sinners who cannot know much and ought to rest content with what they do know and not chase after what they cannot know. The pastor picked this verse out of a poem by Matthias Claudius because he thought he could charge us with wanting to transcend the sense world—after all, had not Matthias Claudius already said that human beings are nothing but sinners who are unable to get beyond this world of the senses? “By chance,” as people say, a friend of ours looked up this poem by Matthias Claudius and also read the verse preceding it. This preceding verse says that a person can go out into the open and, although the moon is always a round orb, if it does not happen to be full moon, he sees only part of the moon even though the other part is there. In the same way there are many things in the world people could become aware of if only they looked at them at the right moment. Thus Matthias Claudius wanted to draw attention to the fact that people should not confine themselves to immediate sense appearance and that anyone who allows himself to be deceived by this is a poor sinner. In fact, what the good pastor quoted from Matthias Claudius reflected on himself. The sense world—if we happen not to be just like that pastor—at times makes us aware that wherever we look we should also look in the opposite direction and adjust our first view accordingly. However, the world of the senses cannot supply this immediate adjustment with regard to what transcends the sense world. We cannot just quote the other verse. That is why human beings philosophize away and, of course, are convinced of the truth of their speculations, for they can be logically proved. But their opposite can also be logically proved. So let us tackle the question today, “Why is it that when we transcend the sense world our thinking gets so confused?” And we will now look at the question in a way which will bring us closer to an answer. How does it happen that two contradictory statements can both be proved right? We will find this has to do with the fact that human life is in a kind of central position, a point of balance between two polar opposite forces, the ahrimanic and the luciferic. You can of course cogitate on freedom and necessity and imagine you have compelling evidence that the world contains only necessity. But the compelling force of this argument comes from Ahriman. When we prove things in one direction, it is Ahriman who leads us astray, and if we prove their opposite, we are misled by Lucifer. For we are always exposed to these two powers, and if we do not take into account that we are placed in between them, we shall never get to the bottom of the conflicts in human nature, such as the one we have been considering. It was actually in the course of the nineteenth century that people lost the feeling that throughout the world order there are, besides a state of equilibrium, pendulum swings to the right and the left, a swing toward Ahriman and a swing toward Lucifer. This feeling has been totally lost. After all, if you speak nowadays of Ahriman and Lucifer, you are considered not quite sane, aren't you? It was not as bad as this until the middle of the nineteenth century, for a very clever philosopher, Thrandorff, wrote a very nice article here in Berlin in the middle of the nineteenth century in an attempt to refute the argument of a certain clergyman.3 This clergyman let it be known—and it should be alright to say this in our circles—that there is no devil and that it is really a dreadful superstition to speak of one. We speak of Ahriman rather than of the devil. The philosopher Thrandorff spoke out against the clergyman in a very interesting article, “The Devil: No Dogmatic Bogy.” As late as the middle of the 1850s he tried as it were to prove the existence of Ahriman on a strictly philosophical basis. In the course of the public lectures I am to give here in the near future I hope I can speak about this extinct part of human spiritual life, about an aspect of theosophy that completely disappeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. Right up to that time people had still spoken about these things, even if they called them by other names. The feeling for these things has now been lost, but basically it was there in a delicate form right into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, until it had to recede into the background for a while in the natural course of things. We know of course, as I have often emphasized, that spiritual science does not in the slightest way deny the great value and significance of progress in the natural sciences. But this progress in science would not have been possible unless the feeling for this opposition between Ahriman and Lucifer, which can be discovered only on a spiritual level, had been lost. It now has to emerge again above the threshold of human consciousness. I would like to give you an example of how things stood in regard to Ahriman and Lucifer in the days when people had only a feeling left that there are two different powers at work. Here is an example to illustrate this. In the old town hall in Prague there is a remarkable clock that was made in the fifteenth century. This clock is really a marvel. At first sight it looks like a sort of sundial, but it is so intricately constructed that it shows the course of the hours in a twofold way: the old Bohemian and the modern way. In the old Bohemian way the hours went from 1 or rather from 0 to 24, and the other way only to 12. At sunset the pointer or gnomon—and there was a shadow there—always pointed to 1. The clock was so arranged that the pointer literally always indicated 1 at sunset. That is to say, despite the varying times of sunset the hand always showed 1. In addition to this, the clock also showed when sun or moon eclipses occurred. It also showed the course of the various planets through the constellations, giving the planetary orbits. It really was a wonderful construction and even showed the movable festivals, that is to say, it indicated on what day Easter fell in a particular year. It was also a calendar, giving the course of the year from January to December, including the fact that Easter is movable. A special pointer showed on what day Easter fell, despite it being movable, and it also showed Whitsun. This clock, then, was constructed in the fifteenth century in an extraordinarily impressive way. And the story of how it was constructed has been investigated. But apart from this story—and the documents are there for you to read, with lots of descriptions—there is a legend that also aims at giving an account of the marvelous quality of this clock: first regarding its wonderful construction, and then regarding the fact that the man who was gifted enough to make such a clock always wound it up as long as he lived. After his death nobody could wind it, and they searched everywhere for people who could put it in order and get it going. As a rule they only found people who damaged it. Then someone would be found who said he could sort it out and did so, yet time and again the clock went wrong. These facts grew into a kind of folk tale, which runs as follows: Once upon a time through a special gift from heaven a simple man acquired the ability to make this clock. He alone knew how to look after it. The legend attaches great significance to the fact that he was only a simple man who acquired this ability through special grace; that is to say, he was inspired by the spiritual world. But it came about that the governor wanted to keep this clock specially for Prague and prevent any other town from having one like it. So he had the inspired clockmaker blinded by having his eyes plucked out. Thus the man withdrew from the scene. But just before his death he begged once more to be permitted a moment in which to set the clock to rights again, and according to the legend he used this moment to make a quick manipulation and put the clock into such disorder that nobody could ever put it right again. At first sight this seems a very unpretentious story. But in the way the story is constructed there is a sure feeling for the existence of Ahriman and Lucifer and the balance between them. Think how sensitively this story has been formed. The same sensitive construction can be found in countless such folk tales; it grows out of this same sure feeling for Lucifer and Ahriman. The story begins with the position of equilibrium, doesn't it? Through an act of grace from the spiritual world the man acquires the ability to construct an extraordinary clock. There is no trace of egotism in it, though anybody can give way to egotism. It was a gift of grace, and he really did not build the clock out of egotism. Nor was there any intellectuality in it, for it is expressly stated that he was a simple man. This whole description of the skill being an act of grace with no trace of egotism, and of his being a simple man who was free of intellectuality, was in fact given in order to indicate that there was no trace of Ahriman and Lucifer in this man's soul, but that he was entirely under the influence of divine powers that were good and progressive. Lucifer lived in the governor. It was out of egotism that he wanted to keep the clock exclusively for his own town, and this was why he blinded the clockmaker. Lucifer is placed on the one side. But as soon as Lucifer is there, he always allies himself with his brother Ahriman. And because the man has been blinded, this other power acquires the capacity to attack from outside through skillful manipulation. That is the work of Ahriman. Thus the power for good is placed between Lucifer and Ahriman. You can find a sensitive construction like this in many of the folk tales, even the simplest of them. But it was possible for this feeling of the intervention of Ahriman and Lucifer in life to get lost at a time when a sense had to gain ground that positive and negative electricity, positive and negative magnetism, and so on, are the basic forces of the material world. This feeling for perceiving the world spiritually had to withdraw in order for scientific investigation to flourish. We shall now look at how Ahriman and Lucifer intervene in what human beings call knowledge, in what people call their relation to the world in general, in a way that leads to the very confusion we were speaking about. This confusion is especially evident in the questions we have introduced. Let us take a simple hypothetical example. I could just as well have taken this from great world events as from everyday occurrences. Let us suppose that three or four people are preparing to go out for a drive. They plan to travel, let us say, through a mountain pass. This pass has overhanging rocks. The people are ready for the drive and intend setting out at an arranged time. But the chauffeur has just ordered another mug of beer which is served a bit too late. He therefore delays the departure by five minutes. Then he sets out with the party. They drive through the ravine. Just as they come to the overhanging rock it breaks loose, falls on top of the vehicle, and crushes the whole party. They all perish, or perhaps it was only the passengers who were killed and the chauffeur was spared. Here we have a case in point. You could ask whether it was the chauffeur's fault, or whether the whole thing was governed by absolute necessity. Was it absolutely inevitable that these people should meet with this disaster at that precise moment? And was the chauffeur's tardiness just part of this necessity? Or could we imagine that if only the chauffeur had been punctual, he would have driven them through the mountain pass a long time before the rock fell, and they would never have been hit by it? Here in the midst of everyday life you have this question of freedom and necessity which is intimately connected with “guilty” or “innocent.” Obviously, if everything is subject to absolute necessity, we cannot say that the chauffeur was guilty at all from a higher point of view, as it was entirely inevitable that these people met their death. We meet this problem in life all the time. It is, as we have said, one of the most difficult of questions, the kind of question in which Ahriman and Lucifer interfere most easily when we try to find a solution. Ahriman is the one who appears first when this question is being tackled, as we shall see. We will have to approach this question from a different angle if we want to get at an answer. You see, if we set about solving a question like this by starting with the thought “I can easily follow the course of events: the boulder fell—that happened,” and then ask “Is this actually based on necessity or freedom? Could things have happened differently?” we are only looking at the external events. We are looking at the events as they happen on the physical plane. Now people follow this approach out of the same impulse that leads them, if they have a materialistic outlook, to stop short at the physical body when contemplating the human being. Anyone who knows nothing about spiritual science will stop short at the physical body nowadays, won't he? He will say “The human being you see and feel is what exists.” He does not go beyond the physical body to the etheric body. And if he is a thoroughly pig-headed materialist, he will jeer and scoff when he hears people saying there is a finer, etheric body underlying the dense physical body. Yet you know how well-founded the view is that among the members of the human being the etheric body is the one most closely associated with the physical body, and in the course of time we have become accustomed to knowing that we must not just speak of the human physical body but also of the human etheric body, and so on. Some of you, however, may not yet have asked yourselves “What kind of world is that other world outside the human being, the world in which the ordinary world events occur?” We have of course spoken of a number of things in this connection. We have said that to begin with when we perceive the external events of the physical plane with our senses, we have no idea that wherever we look there are elemental beings; it is exactly the same when we first look at the human being. Human beings have an etheric body, which we have often also called an elemental body. Outside in nature, in external physical happenings in general, we have a succession of physical events and also the world of elemental existence. This runs absolutely parallel: the human being with a physical and an etheric body, and physical processes with events of the elemental world flowing into them. It would be just as one-sided to say that external processes are merely physical as to say that a human being has a physical body only, when we ought to be saying that he also has an etheric body. What we perceive with our physical senses and physical intellect is one thing. But there is something behind it that is analogous to the human etheric body. Behind every external physical occurrence there is a higher, more subtle one. There are people who have a certain awareness of such things. This awareness can come to them in two different ways. You may have noticed something like the following either in yourself or in other people. A person has had some experience. But afterwards he comes to you and says—or it may be something you experienced and you may say, “Actually I had the feeling that while this experience was taking place externally, something quite different was happening to me as well, in a higher part of my being.” This is to say, deeper natures may feel that events not taking place on the physical plane at all can yet have an important effect on the course of their life. First, such people know something has happened to them. Others go even further and see things of this kind symbolically in a dream. Someone dreams he experiences this or that. He dreams, for instance, that he is killed by a boulder. He wakes up and is able to say, “That was a symbolic dream; something has taken place in my soul life.” It can often be proved true in life that something took place in the soul that was of far greater significance than what happened to the person on the physical plane. He may have progressed a stage higher in knowledge, purified part of his will nature, or made his feelings more sensitive or something of that kind. In lectures given here recently I drew attention to the fact that what a person knows with his I is actually only a part of all that happens to him, and that the astral body knows a very great deal more, though not consciously. You will remember my telling you this. The astral body certainly knows of a great deal that happens to us in the supersensible realm and not in the realm of the senses. Now we have arrived from another direction at the fact that something is continually happening to us in the supersensible realm. Just as in the case of my moving my hand, the physical movement is only part of the whole process and behind it there is an etheric process, a process of my etheric body, so every physical process outside me is permeated by a subtle elementary process that runs parallel with it and takes place in the supersensible realm. Not only beings are permeated by a supersensible element, but so is the whole of existence. Remember something I have repeatedly referred to and which even seems somewhat paradoxical. I have pointed out that in the spiritual realm we often have the opposite of what exists on the physical plane, not always, but often. Thus if something is true here for the physical plane, the truth with regard to the spiritual aspect can look quite different. Not always, as I say. But I have counted many cases over the years where one would have to say that on the spiritual level there is exactly the opposite result from what one would expect to happen on the physical plane. With regard to supersensible occurrences running parallel with those of the sense world, this is occasionally, in fact very often, the case. So let us examine it. If we see a party of people setting off by coach and taking a drive, and a piece of rock falls and crushes them, that is the physical occurrence. Parallel with this physical event, that is to say, within it in the same way as our etheric body is within us, there is a supersensible occurrence. And we have to recognize that this may be the exact opposite of what is happening here on the physical plane. In fact it is very frequently the exact opposite. This can also create great confusion if we do not watch out. For instance, the following may happen. If someone has acquired atavistic clairvoyance and has a kind of second sight, he or she may have the following experience: Supposing a party of people is setting out on a journey, but at the last moment one of the party decides to stay behind, the person who has second sight, let us say. Instead of going with the others, that person stays behind and after a while has a vision. In this vision any event can appear to that person. He or she could of course just as well see the party being hit by boulders as see, for instance—and this can be a matter of disposition—that some especially good fortune happens to them. He or she could very well see the party having a very joyful experience, and might subsequently hear that the party had perished in the way I described. This could happen if the clairvoyant were not to see what was happening on the physical plane—which he might very well have seen—but had seen what was happening as a parallel event on the astral plane: for the moment these people left the physical plane they may well have been called to something special in the spiritual world, something that filled them with an abundance of new life in the spiritual world. In short, the clairvoyant person may have seen an event of the supersensible worlds going on in exactly the opposite direction, and this absolutely contradictory event could be true. It might really be the case that here on the physical plane a misfortune exists that corresponds in the supersensible world to some great good fortune for those same souls. Now someone who thinks he is smarter than the wise guidance of the world (and there are such people) might say, “If I ruled the world, I would not do it in such a way that I call souls to happiness in the spiritual world and at the same time shower them with misfortune here on the physical plane. I would do it better than that!” Well, all one can say to people like that is, “Surely one can understand that here on the physical plane people can easily be misled by Ahriman. But cosmic wisdom always knows better.” It could be a matter of the following: The task awaiting the souls in the spiritual world requires their having this experience here on the physical plane, so that they can look back, so to speak, to this physical event of their earthly lives and gain a certain strength they need. That is to say, for the souls who experience them these two occurrences, the physical and the spiritual one, may necessarily belong together. We could quote hypothetical examples of all kinds, showing that when something takes place here on the physical plane there exists, as it were, an etheric body of this event, an elemental, supersensible event belonging to it. We must not merely generalize like pantheists do and stop short at the general statement that there is a spiritual world underlying the physical, but we must give concrete examples. We must be aware that behind every physical occurrence there is a spiritual occurrence, a real spiritual occurrence, and both together form a whole. If we follow the course of events on the physical plane, we can say that we get to the point where we link together the events of the physical plane by means of thoughts. And as we watch things happen on the physical plane we actually reach the point of finding a “cause” for each “effect.” That is how things are. People everywhere look for the cause belonging to each effect. Whenever anything has happened, people always have to find the cause of it. But this means finding the inevitability. If you look with sufficient pedantry at the simple example I chose, you could say, “Well now, this party had gathered and had fixed their departure for a definite time. But if I follow up why the chauffeur was tardy, I will go in several directions. First of all, I may look at the chauffeur himself and consider how he was brought up and how he became tardy. Then I will look at the various circumstances leading to his getting his mug of beer too late. All I will be able to find in this way is merely a chain of causes. I will be able to show how one event fits in with the others in such a way that the affair could not possibly have happened otherwise. I will gradually come to the point where I completely eliminate the chauffeur's free will, for if we have a cause for every effect, this includes everything the chauffeur does as well.” The chauffeur only wanted another mug of beer, didn't he, because he had probably not been thrashed sufficiently when he was young. If he had been thrashed more often—and it is not his fault that he was not—things would not have turned out as they did. Looking at it this way we can base the whole thing on a chain of cause and effect. This has to do with the fact that it is only on the physical plane that we can use concepts. For just consider: if you want to understand something, one thought must be able to follow from another, that is to say, you depend on being able to develop one thought out of another. It lies in the nature of concepts that one follows from the other. That must be so. Yet, what can be clearly and necessarily linked together through concepts on the physical plane immediately changes as soon as we enter the neighboring supersensible world. There we have to do not with cause and effect but with beings. This is where beings are active. At every moment one or another being is working on or withdrawing from a task. There it is not at all a matter of what can be grasped by concepts in the usual sense. If you tried using concepts for what is happening in the spiritual world, the following could happen. You might think, “Well, here I am. Certainly I am far enough advanced to perceive that something spiritual is happening. At one moment a gnome approaches, then a sylph, and soon afterwards another being. Now all the beings are together. I will do my best to fathom what the effects will have to be.” On the physical plane this is sometimes easy to do, of course. If we hit a billiard ball in a certain direction, we know which way the other one will go, because we can calculate it. Yet on the spiritual plane it may happen that when you have seen a being and now know “Ah, that is a gnome, he is setting out to do something and will do such and such; he is joining forces with another being, thus the following is bound to happen,” you think you have figured it all out. But the next moment another being appears and changes the whole thing, or a being you were counting on drops out and disappears and no longer participates. There, everything is based on beings. You cannot link everything together with your concepts in the same way as you can on the physical plane. That is quite impossible. There, you cannot explain one thing following from the other on the basis of concepts. Things work together in an entirely different manner in the spiritual world, in the series or stream of spiritual happenings running parallel with physical happenings. We must become familiar with the fact that underlying our world there is a world we must not only assume to be spiritual in comparison to ours, but we must also assume its events to be connected with each other in a totally different way than those in our world. For we can do nothing at all in the spiritual world, in the actual reality of this spiritual world, with the way we are used to explaining things in the world of our concepts. Thus we see that two worlds interpenetrate; one of them can be grasped with concepts and the other cannot, but can only be perceived. I am pointing to something that goes very deep, but people are not aware how deep it goes. Just consider for a moment that if someone were to believe he could prove everything, and that only what has been proved is true, the following could happen. That person could say, “As a matter of fact, everything has to be proved, and what has not been proved is unacceptable. Therefore everything that happens in the course of the history of the world must be capable of being proved. So I only need to think hard and I am bound to be able to prove, for instance, whether the Mystery of Golgotha took place or not.” Indeed, people are so very inclined nowadays to say that if the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be proved, the whole thing is nonsense and there never was such an event. And what do people think of proofs? They think that one starts with one definite concept and proceeds from this to the next one, and if it is possible to do this right through, the matter is proved. But no world other than the physical functions according to this kind of proof. This reasoning does not apply to any other world. For if we were able to prove that the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place of necessity, and this could be concluded from our concepts, it would not have been a free deed at all! Christ would then have been compelled to come down to the earth from the cosmos simply because human concepts prove and therefore dictate it. However, the Mystery of Golgotha has to be a free deed, that is to say, it has to be just the kind of deed that cannot be proved. It is important that people come to realize this. It is the same thing, after all, when people want to prove either that God created the world or that he did not. There, too, they proceed from one thought to another. But “creating the world,” at any rate will have been a free deed of a divine being! From this it follows that we cannot prove the Creation as following of necessity from our series of concepts; rather, we have to perceive it to arrive at it. So we are saying something of tremendous importance when we state that the very next world to ours—which, as a supersensible world, permeates ours—is not organized in a way we can penetrate by means of our concepts and their conclusiveness, but that there a kind of vision comes into its own in which events are arranged in a totally different way. Today I would just like to add a few words about the following. When I was here at Christmas, I drew your attention to the fact that in our time especially, such contradictory things are emerging, that they are quite confusing for human thinking. Just imagine, a book has just been published by the great scientist Ernst Haeckel called Thoughts about Eternity,4 I have already mentioned it earlier. These Thoughts about Eternity contain exactly the opposite of what many other people have concluded as a result of living through recent world events. Just think, there are many people today (we shall come to speak of this fact in its particular connection with our present studies, but today I just wanted to give an introduction) who have experienced a deepening of their religious feelings just because world events are having such a terribly overwhelming effect on their souls; for they say, “Unless there is a supersensible world underlying our physical world, how can we explain what is happening in our time?” Many people have rediscovered their feeling for religion. I do not need to describe their train of thought; it is obvious and can be discerned in so many people. Haeckel arrives at a different train of thought. He explains in his recently published book that people believe in immortality of the soul. However, he says, current events prove clearly enough that any such belief is ridiculous, for we witness thousands of people perishing every day for no reason at all. With these events in mind, how can any sensible person imagine that there can be any talk about the immortality of the soul? How is it possible for a higher world order to stand behind things of this sort? These shocking events seem to Haeckel to prove his dogma that one cannot speak of immortality of the soul. Here we have antinomy again: A large proportion of humanity is experiencing a deepening of religious feeling, while the very same events are making Haeckel tremendously superficial where religion is concerned. All this is connected with the fact that nowadays people are unable to understand the relationship between the world accessible to their senses and their brain-bound intellect and the supersensible world underlying it. No sooner do they approach these things than their thinking gets confused. Yet despite all the disillusionment it brings, our time will certainly in one way also bring about a deepening of people's souls, a turning away from materialism. It will be necessary that knowledge of the way supersensible events complement happenings in the world of the senses arise from a pure activity of the soul devoting itself to an impartial exploration of the world. It is necessary that there should be at least a small number of people who are able to realize that all the pain and suffering being experienced at present on the physical plane are, from the point of view of the whole of human evolution, only one side and that there is also another side, a supersensible side. We have drawn your attention to this supersensible aspect from various points of view, and we will speak of still further ones. But when peace returns to Europe's blood-stained soil, we will again and again experience the need for a group of people capable of hearing and sensing spiritually what the spiritual worlds will then be saying to humanity in times of peace. And we must never tire of impressing the following lines upon our hearts and souls, for it will be proved over and over again how deeply true they are:
|
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: The Goesch-Sprengel Situation - Address I
21 Aug 1915, Dornach Translated by Catherine E. Creeger Rudolf Steiner |
---|
4 I will not discuss the matter of the “keeper of the seal” any further today; I just want to point out that her letters started coming around Christmas, mysteriously enough. It may well be that I shall have to say something about this at some point, but I really do not want to do it today. |
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: The Goesch-Sprengel Situation - Address I
21 Aug 1915, Dornach Translated by Catherine E. Creeger Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Letter from Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch to Rudolf Steiner19 August 1915, Dornach Dear Dr. Steiner: Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors that serve evil purposes. On the good side, I am grateful for the esoteric knowledge and teachings you have imparted to us, for the mystery dramas you have given us, for the introduction of eurythmy, and for the art of the Johannesbau. In these contexts, I continue to recognize you as an envoy of the great white lodge and am filled with profound gratitude to you and to anything you do that is devoted to the good. However, I perceive the way you cultivate relationships between yourself and other members of our spiritual movement as serving evil purposes, and I see this behavior as gravely endangering our movement. The relationships you create between yourself and other members turn the others into merely parts of yourself rather than independent spiritual entities alongside you. You only appear to act as a human being among equals. In actuality, you scorn any truly human connection and presume to intervene in the lives of others in a way that belongs only to the gods and not to any modern human being. In this way, you create an anti-Christian relationship between yourself and the other members of our spiritual movement. These people have readied themselves to meet great spiritual teachings in our time, but you are making them poorer than the poorest materialists out there, who in spite of their distorted Christianity that has turned into its exact opposite are still able to develop a strong I. If it goes on like this, however, your followers will eventually fall prey to black magic as a result of the constant weakening of their I through how you behave toward them. There have already been instances of highly respected members substituting a reliance on your word for reliance on the truth; they cut off any criticism of any part of your work, objecting that your critics would be placing themselves above you. They feel that putting oneself above you is such an act of wanton temerity as to be out of the question, and that with their objection the issue is resolved once and for all. The members are not to blame for erroneous ideas like this—you are. In your concern to promulgate ever more of your teachings, you have neglected to cultivate the attitude among your pupils that as Christians, individuals must put themselves not only below any other person, but also above any other; not only are the least of our fellow human beings of irreplaceable value to us in their most profound depths of being, but also the least of us carry responsibility for the most advanced and must oppose their errors. Your own teachings have strengthened me in this conviction. In real life, however, you apply a number of means that work counter to this Christian ideal of human community. I will now discuss two of these means in detail so that the thrust of my contentions becomes clearer. It is a fact that you have developed the habit of making promises and not keeping them. No one will maintain that you do not have a sufficiently clear view of the future, or that you are too weak to carry out your original intentions, either of which would constitute a certain justification for failing to keep promises. No, this is a case of deliberately causing disappointment. Since the promises were unsolicited and made at your own initiative, it is also a case of deliberate intervention into someone else's life in order do something that is by rights reserved for destiny. A disappointment that comes to us through karma has a direct and beneficial effect on our development. In contrast, a disappointment deliberately arranged for us by another person is at the very least a heavy blow, and if our confidence in the person delivering the blow is not shaken, it also constitutes a weakening of our I. The difference is the same as the difference between meeting an accidental death in a burning building and death by burning at the stake, premeditated by others. Because of their trust in you, recipients of such a promise who are waiting for it to be kept get into a state of tension and uncertainty; meanwhile you are able to calmly survey their gradually increasing disappointment. Once the people in question have realized that the promise is not going to be kept, they will not take your word seriously in the future and thus will distance themselves from you, at least to some extent. However, since on the whole they continue to put their trust in you, they will lose all standards for the sanctity of giving one's word, and may perhaps begin to act as you do. As a result, they are dependent on you in a humanly unworthy fashion and will try to affect others in the same way you do. Alternatively, people may respond in one of the three following ways: First, because of the confidence they have in you, they may assume that there must be a deep occult meaning behind the way you act. They will conclude that there can be profound occult reasons that permit or even obligate someone to make promises without intending to keep them. Occasionally we even meet people whose emotions are so confused that they admire that kind of behavior and take it as a sign of something superhuman. It is evident, however, that nothing in this world can authorize a modern human being to make promises without intending to keep them. Causing disappointment is something reserved for the gods who direct our karma. This sort of conceptual confusion is all the more dangerous for a student of esotericism because modern spiritual science appeals to our healthy capacity for discernment, which is undermined by things like this. In a most unfortunate fashion, your word displaces the truth; the thought “I must not place myself above him” displaces the realization that you have done something evil. The human dignity of these people crumbles away bit by bit, and they turn into spiritually dependent tools in your hands. The second possibility for those whose trust has been betrayed is that in order to be able to maintain their confidence in you, the people in question never let themselves become fully conscious of the fact that you never had any intention of keeping the promises you made to them. As a way out, they take your not keeping promises as a new revelation of a being they do not experience as really human and cannot hold responsible as they would a human being. This point of view is in fact already represented within the Society and is leading to your becoming ever more shadowlike as a human being. The third and final possibility is that some people will choose the radical way out, forgetting the fact that a promise of some kind was ever made. This, too, robs people of a bit of their I. As a result, your coworkers in our spiritual movement will be shadows whose I is weakened, rather than independent individuals. You yourself, however, are the one to blame for all this. A second example of the evil nature of your behavior is your refusal to accept any criticism of people working in our movement. On occasion, you have implied that any such criticism stems from negative emotions. This is a false assumption. I am not talking about malicious or destructive criticism. Many of our members, out of their sincere sense of responsibility, are capable of constructive criticism, and that is what I am talking about. The only possible reason for avoiding such criticism would be knowing that people in positions of responsibility are unfit for their jobs. In our modern age, people are meant to come together out of their own free will and freely create the kind of hierarchy and order necessary for us to accomplish what we have to do, and a certain amount of constructive mutual criticism is our only guarantee of success. In fact, the only way a true, natural, and appropriate hierarchical order can come about nowadays is if this kind of criticism is allowed to work. If people who have been criticized do not choose to take action on justified accusations—and in fact they are morally obliged to actively seek criticism—they must give up their positions in the hierarchy so that the truth can triumph. Their superiors should not protect people like that by acting as if everything were going fine. This is what our modern age requires. However, if at any level in the hierarchical order mistakes are not criticized but tolerated and allowed to persist, we are only creating a false hierarchy that is based, not on real human capabilities and relationships, but on fiction—a fiction that is maintained only through further wrongdoing. Once again, the result is a lack of humanity and Christianity in our relationships in general, and once again you are to blame. In the organization of our Society as it has gradually developed under your guidance, the strengths of the members are usurped to the advantage of yourself and perhaps of certain other people prominent in this false hierarchy. Meanwhile, the Society's affairs are being mismanaged. Personal oversensitivity on the part of those being criticized is something that needs to be eliminated; you might give a lecture about this sometime. As a general rule, especially if it comes at the right moment, criticism can take a stimulating and gratifying form and be free of any personal bitterness, so that its thorns are removed and the recipient can be glad to receive help in resolving the issue. The nervousness and animosity so prevalent among the critics spring in part from the justified feeling that even the most objective criticism will not be heeded, but will be looked at askance and disregarded. A truly superior person has no reason to fear criticism; true superiority can stand the test of even the most pointed criticism. In the event that people attempt to offer criticism out of a sense of responsibility but are not really able to grasp the facts of the case, those people can usually be made to see their misunderstanding sooner or later without any undue waste of time. At the moment, I am not talking about a case like this one, where the criticism has already developed into a well-founded rejection of an entire self-contained system confronting me. In this case, no amount of postponement would make any difference. If in a specific instance, however, a person I myself recognize as superior—not simply someone who, for some unknown reason, is my superior in a false hierarchy—points out that I do not yet fully understand the case in question, I will gladly defer my criticism until the case can be considered closed. Under your influence, however, the principle at work in our spiritual movement is that any such criticism should be withheld indefinitely—until the facts of the case have been forgotten. And this principle applies not only to certain specific cases, but to all such instances. This is not only wrong and harmful to everyone, it also undermines our discernment, on which so much depends. Once again, I have to point out the inherent contradiction between spiritual science's appeal to people's healthy power of judgment and the fact that in most instances in our movement, this power of judgment must be subordinated to incomprehensible reasons for measures being taken. You must admit, however, that at this point in time, two thousand years after Christ, people possess certain standards that all individuals can apply and must also allow to be applied to themselves, if they are not to be utterly lost. There are certainly a sufficient number of closed cases that really are subject to our judgment. The mere fact that a person feels compelled to think about a particular case usually suggests that he or she is capable of achieving some clarity in the matter, though not necessarily without help. As things stand at the moment, our members are constantly expending a considerable portion of their spiritual energy on the useless task of seeking out hidden wisdom-filled motives for the evil behavior of yourself and your highest colleagues, while you stand by, calmly observing this waste of effort. Or, in order not to lose faith in you, these people have to decide to repress these truth-seeking forces in themselves and thus fall prey to partial stupefaction. What happens with these forces then? What a horrible thought to pursue! In any case, you represent a great focal point of forces of which individuals are merely the instruments, to be used as you choose for incomprehensible ends. There is no question in our movement of real interaction taking place between complete human beings, interaction in which each one is allowed to contribute his or her best. You are not a friend to all the members; your whole attitude rejects lively friendly relationships. In truth, for many people, you are the greatest enemy they have ever encountered. All these things I have described are not only objectively evil, they also directly contradict the teachings you promulgate. It is from you that I learned the reasons that lead me to reject the way you act. As time goes on, you give an ever stronger impression of acting on your connection to the Christ impulse only in your lectures; outside the lectures, you embrace impulses that are quite the opposite. In parts, it already seems to me as if your teaching has been somewhat influenced by what you practice in real life—not the content of your teachings, but their formal structure. In their structure, certain sentences make promises that are then not kept and can only serve the purpose of subjecting the reader to fruitless thought and work. (See “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges.”)2 If people try to explain this by saying that you, like any other human being, may have changed your mind over the course of time, you reject this as irksome criticism (Preface to Riddles of Philosophy, last paragraph).3 Both these passages, by the way, clearly show a change in style verging on the incomprehensible. The kind of interpersonal attitude you create not only contradicts your teachings; your behavior also contradicts what you yourself demand of spiritual teachers in the modern age. Such teachers should appeal only to people's consciousness. Their self-chosen obligation toward their students is to never exercise any magical influence on the students' subconscious that the latter have not consented to or cannot control. You, however, are doing this incessantly through the behavior I described and through other occult means. For you, every handshake, every friendly conversation becomes a means of cultivating these false relationships. The bliss that fills the members after meeting with you is not the bliss of the communion of saints, but a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic one. You, not the members themselves, are to blame for this. You even try to use these handshakes and friendly conversations to pull members back into the fold against their will once they have recognized the falsity of the relationships you try to create. I have perceived with certainty that you exercise undue influence on your followers in this way. In the modern age, when any uncontrollable influence on the subconscious of others must be avoided, it is not enough to simply give lectures or introduce new spirituality. In addition, the life you lead together with the other members of our movement must be governed by Christian impulses; your relationships with your followers must become like those of Benedictus, so beautifully portrayed in your fourth mystery drama. In fact, now that we have received so much in the way of teachings, developing such relationships is the much more urgent obligation. When I ask myself how it can possibly be that you whose task it was to proclaim these teachings can act in ways directly counter to them, I can conceive of two possible answers. On the one hand, I can guess at the reasons why the great white lodge might have had to choose a person who is not yet completely Christianized for this task, and in your capacity as teacher I still accept you as the envoy of the lodge. On the other hand, it seems to me that your most profound motivation is by no means actively evil, although what I have had to say might be erroneously interpreted to imply that. No, it is simply a too one-sided interest in renewing these teachings in a way appropriate to our times, and above all a fear of real life. By avoiding and obstructing real life and by creating substitutes for it, however, you allow an evil force to develop. In this, I see the greatest danger to our spiritual movement and to yourself. Fully Christian occultists can never rest content with simply passing on teachings; they must also enter into a life partnership with their students. True relationships from person to person in the Christian sense require each one of us to be an open book to all others to the extent their individual strength permits. All people should give themselves completely to their fellows to whatever extent the latter can receive them. This should be the basis of any modern hierarchy. Those higher up in the hierarchy must turn to those beneath them with whatever they have to give. What you practice, however, is anti-Christian and just the opposite. Whenever possible you arrange things so that intentions are kept in the dark and events are treated as if they had not happened. It is not enough to confess that like anyone else, you too can have a weak moment. Whenever we meet any other person (a person who in the Christian sense is just as necessary as ourselves), we do so as people who are imperfect in some way and still need to learn. This fact must not only be admitted, it must be constantly confirmed in our actions as human beings. It is truly necessary to seek out this interaction with our fellows, no matter how much an occultist of the old school may dread it. It is not enough to simply protest against blind admiration; we must also seek out objective criticism. In communities of this sort, spiritual teachers must renounce all the help available to them in pre-Christian times for making students receptive to their teachings. Above all, they must renounce the unapproachable authority of the teacher filled with divine wisdom, who taught students in whom the I had not yet been born. They must also do without the complete isolation of teachers and pupils from all human relationships. The problem I am pointing out here did not exist for pre-Christian initiators. The individual I had not yet been born, and the divine being working through the teachers had the authority to intervene in the destiny of the students in ways otherwise reserved for karma. But as Christians, we must see modern initiates first and foremost as human beings, and our confidence in them depends on them not exercising any superhuman influence on our destiny. For someone who is directing all his energies toward the renewal of occult teachings for our times, the temptation is great to reject the difficult tasks of Christian community and to artificially make his teaching easier by any of the means appropriate in earlier times. However, these things have become evil in our times, and it would be better nowadays for the teacher to remain invisible except when promulgating the doctrine than it would be for him to relate to his students as you are doing. Maintaining and strengthening the I of each student is much more important than passing on the teachings—after all, the teachings are directed to the individual I. Any restriction of the ego's rights must also result in the teachings taking root within the individual in the wrong way. Any dulling of individual discernment represents a grave danger to those striving for the spirit. I will admit that in one sense, this kind of right living is infinitely more difficult for you than for others. Christian occultists must take up a challenge that other people will face only in times to come; that is, to both live and be a seer. They are in constant danger of falsely confusing these different planes and the laws that govern them. But they cannot escape this danger by refusing the challenge; for without being able to orient themselves according to the Christ impulse, they would still get these two planes mixed up in unjustified ways. When this happens in a meeting with a pupil, the pupil will be the first to experience the disastrous results, although they will soon revert to the teacher. The community of the Grail is perhaps the only place where this challenge has been met satisfactorily to any extent. You yourself admit that you are not totally satisfied with what you have been able to tell us about the Grail, and you have clearly described your own difficulties in researching the Grail mysteries, although you call the new initiates “initiates of the Grail.” Perhaps the Grail will grant us salvation in this difficult hour. Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time, as you were well aware. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being. I will refrain from explaining this statement in greater detail at this point because that would lead us too far afield. It is still possible for me to greet you from a distance with all due respect as the bearer of great teachings, as I attempted to do on that evening. But I cannot submit to exchanging handshakes and friendly conversations with you as if nothing had happened, and especially not since I have clearly seen that these very handshakes and conversations are one of your chief means of exercising impermissible influences on your pupils and since I cannot share the opinion of a certain respected member that these things exist for the purpose of testing one's own strength in the face of outside influences. To inform you of the need to avoid further personal contact is the purpose of this letter inasmuch as it concerns the two of us personally. With regard to yourself, my purpose in writing to you about this very serious matter is to see accomplished the little I can do as your fellow human being, namely, to confront you with the fact that a person on the physical plane and using physical means has been able to point out to you the evil in your actions. You would be condemned to a shadowy existence if no one would turn to you like this. I hope that the fact that at least a few people nowadays are capable of recognizing your errors as such, remembering them and taking a stand against them, will be of help to you in the now necessary process of restructuring life in our spiritual movement. There are a few other members whom I can expect to understand the matters under discussion here, and I shall inform them of the contents of this letter. It is imperative, however, that you begin to thoroughly transform the relationship between yourself and other members of the movement, as I have indicated. The objective purpose of my writing to you is to express this in the hopes that our movement will continue to work in accordance with the intentions of evolution. What would be the consequence if you were to reject this challenge? At least in certain instances, you have already forfeited an activity that must have been assigned to you by the masters of the white lodge—the personal instruction of individuals. For as I have already said, a profound mistrust in your treatment of individual human destinies is all too justified. I can also not imagine how an esoteric lesson could take place under the prevailing circumstances. If you restricted yourself to disseminating ever more aspects of the teachings but let everything else continue as before, and if not enough members were able to work their way through to the necessary insights, the Society would degenerate into an exoteric association at best. There are already certain signs of this happening, alongside the tendencies to evil and to stupefaction. Either that or, if your followers become aware of their responsibility, they will have to bring about a complete separation between the teacher and what is taught, leaving you to discharge the duties of your holy office as a guilty and tormented Amfortas among hungry and sorrowful disciples. I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell. But I have decided to send the letter anyway because the moment demands it. When I wonder about the emotions with which you will receive this letter, the question of whether you will find your way to people with whom you can go through this experience and begin the necessary transformations weighs on me especially heavily. This is an area where, in this Christian age, the occultist as such is bound to fail and must be simply a human among humans, just as Christ Jesus had to experience things on Earth that he could not experience as a God. May you turn to this Spirit for help! Heinrich Goesch I have read you this letter, my friends, because it concerns each and every one of you just as much as it concerns me, and because it seems obvious to me that you must each decide for yourself to what extent you believe its claims correspond to actual practice within our Society. Otherwise people might think that I am afraid of this charge of contributing to the “stupefaction” of our members, and that I do not see you as sufficiently independent to leave it up to each one of you to judge the situation individually as you see fit. However, you must realize that a letter like this cannot be seen in isolation; it is a symptom of what is going on in our Society. That is why I will take no part in discussing either this letter or anything that will need to be done as a result of it. It is clear that it must be left up to the members to decide what needs to be done and how to go about it, at least to begin with. In particular, I will refrain from saying anything about the passage claiming that promises have not been kept. If assessing this matter is left to individual discretion, each one of you will know how things stand, since each one of you must know what you have been promised and whether the promises were kept. However, I would expect and request the Society as such, or those members living in the neighborhood of the building in Dornach, to take a decided stand on this issue in the very near future. I myself will not get involved in discussions on the matter at all. There are only a few things I want to tell you, and I ask you to take my remarks as what I have to say in connection with what I have just read, especially because it is obvious from other symptoms, not just from this letter, that many things I have said to members in lectures here in the course of the last few weeks and months have had no effect at all. First of all, there is one thing I would like to emphasize. My friends, I cannot allow anyone to dictate how I conduct myself with members of the Society. It is up to me, and me alone, to decide how I find it necessary to relate to them. This is not to be taken as any kind of guideline for you; I am simply speaking for myself. I will not allow anyone to prescribe in any way how I should interact with members, inasmuch as this interaction has to do with the sins of omission I am supposed to have committed against them. There is a very deep and weighty reason why this has to be the way it is. Not only this letter, but also many other things that have come up in the Society intermittently down through the years and with increasing frequency lately, show that many people simply do not make an effort to understand the kind of responsibility carried by someone communicating esoteric truths. It seems that many of our members don't want to try to understand what it sometimes takes to speak even a single sentence of that sort. With all the spiritual preparation it takes to give a lecture, it is simply not possible to sit with different little groups of members until two in the morning every night chatting about all kinds of useless and superfluous stuff. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated, nor are many other things that people seem to require of me and that then get counted as sins of omission. I need my time, and I need it in a totally different way than what people seem to want to understand. If I weren't using it the way I am, you would be hearing the same kind of stupid esoteric views from me that you can hear so much of in the rest of the world. So much for the sins of omission. I also do not understand how the statement that my dealings with individual members and with groups of members are not Christian enough fits together with the complaint that I am exerting an undue influence over you by means of black magic whenever I take the liberty of shaking hands with one of you or involving you in conversation. I am certainly open to changing this practice if the Society will make its views on the subject known, because it is up to you, of course, whether you want to shake hands or get involved in a friendly conversation with me. If this opinion becomes prevalent, it should be expressed, and then handshakes can, of course, be avoided in the future. For reasons I expressed earlier, I will not go into this any further, but there is still one thing I must mention because it is so very typical. There is a passage in this letter that reads as follows: “Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being.” Let me just mention that on the Friday before Sunday the 25th, a member of our Society approached me with an inquiry from Mrs. Goesch with regard to her child, who had fallen down and gotten hurt somehow. I responded by saying that if she wished, I could take a look at what was wrong with the child. Shortly thereafter that person returned, bringing Mrs. Goesch and the child to me. On the following Sunday, here in the Schreinerei, I intervened in the inner being of Mrs. Goesch by shaking her hand and asking her how the child was doing. My encounter with Mr. Goesch on the stairs leading up to the eurythmy room on Thursday, August 5, consisted of my responding to Mr. Goesch, who had asked me whether it was all right for the child (whom I had just seen standing down by the door) to take part in eurythmy exercises again, by saying that of course that was entirely up to the parents, since what the parents wanted was the only thing to consider in whether or not the child should come to eurythmy again. At that point, I also made the mistake of extending my hand to Mr. Goesch. These are the two instances in which I intervened in someone else's inner being by means of black magic. Let me still comment on one more passage from the end of this letter: “I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe my insights—which I achieved through the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell.” I believe you all know who the so-called keeper of the seal is, and all I have to say about this is that the person in question has written a number of letters to both me and my wife in the past few months, including one Mrs. Steiner received only today.4 I will not discuss the matter of the “keeper of the seal” any further today; I just want to point out that her letters started coming around Christmas, mysteriously enough. It may well be that I shall have to say something about this at some point, but I really do not want to do it today. I want you to come to a conclusion without being influenced by me. It is certainly almost impossible to be aware of the mysterious connection between this letter and the “keeper of the seal” and say nothing further about it, but today may not be the right time for that. However, I do still want to mention that some years ago in fall I announced that due to certain embarrassing symptoms that had appeared within our Society, it seemed necessary to found a society of a more restricted sort.5 To begin with, I attempted to invest a number of long-term members close to me with certain offices, on the assumption that these people would become independently active in accordance with their new titles. At that time, I said that if anything came of it, the membership would hear about it by Epiphany. No one heard a thing, which means that the Society for Theosophical Art and Style does not exist. That is a perfectly justified assumption, since no one has heard anything to the contrary, and it is equally safe to assume that an announcement would have been made if my intentions had in fact been realized. The way my plans were received, however, made it impossible for this society to come about. It was simply an experiment. My friends, I have often said that the Anthroposophical Society has to make sense as a society if it is to make sense at all. After all, other arrangements could be made for lecturing on esoteric teachings. I have also often pointed out that if certain signs and symptoms continue to appear in the Society, finding another form for it will become inevitable because the present form and present arrangements are not serving the purpose. I was trying to avoid certain things prevalent in the Theosophical Society when I founded the Anthroposophical Society, of which I do not want to be a member, since that is crucial to what I have to do for this spiritual movement. Our Society also often comes under attack from outside, and of course these attacks are also directed at the Society's teacher and lecturer. This should lead our active members to take up the obligation to defend our cause, if they take the idea of our Society as seriously as they should. However, libelous pamphlets of the most despicable sort, containing the most unbelievable calumnies, have been appearing, and I leave it up to each one of you to judge whether everyone who could do something about them has taken the idea of the Society as seriously as would be necessary if the Society is to withstand these attacks from outside. My friends, it is neither feasible nor possible for those who have an interest in the survival of the Anthroposophical Society to always first come to me to discuss what they ought to do in defense of me and our cause. That has to come to an end. If it does not, it would mean that it is actually true that people here are assigned their positions by me. I have to respect the independence of the members, even if that means, as it unfortunately does in many cases, that I have to deny them something. The fact of the matter is that the way things have been going, I could truly have done much more if I had not had to get involved in a lot of things that actually did not warrant my involvement. At least where the well-being of our Society is concerned, it is an absurdity to want to clear everything with me first. If what I want to do is to be accomplished on behalf of the Society, then please allow me the time to do it. The Society is wrongly conceived of if people are always turning to one individual; it must include taking personal initiative in what needs to be done on behalf of the Society. For this reason, my friends, today's incident must be seen as an important and even crucial one. That is why I read you this letter, which is basically only an isolated symptom of something flaring up here, there, and everywhere. I will wait patiently to see what you, as members of the Society, will do about it. Meanwhile, I will continue to fulfill my obligations; the program will continue tomorrow as planned. But it goes without saying that how everything goes on after that will depend on the position the Society takes on what it has heard today. This is not something to be taken as an isolated case; it touches on many fundamental issues I have been pointing to for months in many discussions.6 When Rudolf Steiner had finished, a discussion took place; no stenographic record was kept. Some people must have spoken up in defense of the point of view expressed in Goesch's letter, because as one participant recollects, Rudolf Steiner left the room together with Marie Steiner, saying “I cannot have anything more to do with a society like this!”7 The great majority of those present must have been ashamed of this state of affairs, and on that same evening they composed this expression of confidence: Dornach Dear Dr. Steiner: As members of the Anthroposophical Society, we wish to express our righteous indignation and our feeling of shame that someone of mendacious and immoral outlook, as evident in Mr. Heinrich Goesch's letter, has dared to address you in a fashion dictated by the most despicable delusions of grandeur. We must painfully reproach ourselves for not having understood how to prevent what has happened and for having proved unable thus far to create a circle of people in which the thoughts and feelings expressed in this letter could not have arisen. We ask your forgiveness as our loved and respected teacher. We also ask that you not retract your confidence in us, or rather, that you trust in us again, because we are firmly resolved to better realize the ideal of the Anthroposophical Society and to be more aware of our responsibility in future. It is a matter of course that, given the point of view they represent, we no longer wish to consider Miss Alice Sprengel, Mr. Heinrich Goesch, and Mrs. Gertrud Goesch as having a place in our midst. We ask you, dear Dr. Steiner, to take our signatures as an assurance of our unconditional and constant trust and our sincerest gratitude. signed by Michael Bauer and over 300 others8 This vote of confidence was a spontaneous and purely human expression of the signers' relationship to Rudolf Steiner. The facts of the case are addressed in Rudolf Steiner's own contributions. The professional comments of one Dr. Amann (Basel, September 14, 1915) shed some light on the difficulties the members faced in judging the situation:
Rudolf Steiner continued in the same vein on the following evening, August 22, 1915, discussing the case further.
|
223. Michaelmas and the Soul-Forces of Man: Lecture III
30 Sep 1923, Vienna Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood Rudolf Steiner |
---|
While in former periods of human evolution festivals like Christmas or Easter exerted a far-reaching influence on the entire social life and its manifestations, they have become but a faint echo of what they once meant, expressing themselves in all sorts of customs that lack all deeper social significance. |
223. Michaelmas and the Soul-Forces of Man: Lecture III
30 Sep 1923, Vienna Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood Rudolf Steiner |
---|
In the first of these lectures I endeavored to set forth how Michael's Conflict with the Dragon persisted into the 18th Century as a determining idea, really a determining impulse in mankind; and in the second lecture I tried to show how a productive revival of this impulse may and really must be brought about. But now, before discussing particulars for a Michael Festival at the beginning of autumn, I should like today to speak about several prerequisites involved in such an intention. The core of the matter is this: all impulses such as the Michael impulse depend upon man's attaining to super-sensible enlightenment concerning his connection not only with earthly but with cosmic conditions: he must learn to feel himself not only as an earth citizen but as a citizen of the universe, as far as this is perceptible either spiritually or, in image, physically. Nowadays, of course, our general education offers only the most meager opportunities for sensing our connection with the cosmos. True, by means of their materialistically colored science men are aware of earth conditions to the point of feeling connected with them, at least as regards their material life in the wider sense. But the knowledge of this connection certainly engenders no enthusiasm, hence all outer signs of such a connection have become very dim. Human feeling for the traditional festivals has grown dim and shadowy. While in former periods of human evolution festivals like Christmas or Easter exerted a far-reaching influence on the entire social life and its manifestations, they have become but a faint echo of what they once meant, expressing themselves in all sorts of customs that lack all deeper social significance. Now, if we intend in some way to realize the Michael Festival with its particularly far-reaching social significance, we must naturally first create a feeling for what it might signify; for by no means must it bear the character of our modern festivities, but should be brought forth from the depths of the human being. These depths we can only reach by once more penetrating and entering into our relationship with the extra-terrestrial cosmos and with what this yields for the cycle of the seasons. To illustrate what I really mean by all that, I need only ask you to consider how abstract, how dreadfully out of touch with the human being, are all the feelings and conceptions of the extraterrestrial universe that today enter human consciousness. Think of what astronomy, astro-physics, and other related sciences accomplish today. They compute the paths of the planets—the positions of the fixed stars, if you like; and from the results of research in spectral analysis they arrive at conclusions concerning the material composition of these heavenly bodies. But what have all the results of such methods to do with the intimate inner soul life of man? This man, equipped with all such sky-wisdom, feels himself a hermit on what he thinks of as the planet earth. And the present habits of thinking connected with these matters are at bottom only a system of very circumscribed concepts. To get a better light on this, let us consider a condition of consciousness certainly present in ordinary life, though an inferior one: the condition of dream-pervaded sleep. In order to obtain points of contact for today's discussion I will tell you in a few words what relates to this condition. Dreaming may be associated with inner conditions of the human organism and transform these into pictures resembling symbols [See: Rudolf Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge (Anthroposophy) as a Demand of the Age; Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life, Anthroposophic Press, New York.]—the movements of the heart, for example, can be symbolized by flames, and so forth: we can determine concretely and in detail the connection between dream symbols and our inner organic states and processes. Or alternatively, outer events of our life may be symbolized, events that have remained in us as memories or the like. In any case it is misleading to take the conceptional content of a dream very seriously. This can be interesting, it has a sensational aspect, it is of great interest to many people; but for those who see deeper into the nature of man the dream content as it pertains to the conception proper is of extraordinarily little significance. The dramatic development of a dream, on the other hand, is of the greatest import. I will illustrate this: Suppose a man dreams he is climbing a mountain. It is an excessively difficult climb and becomes ever more so, the higher he goes. Finally he reaches a point where his strength fails him and conditions have become so unfavorable that he cannot proceed: he must come to a halt. Something like fear, something of disappointment enters his dream. Perhaps at this point he wakes up.—Now, something underlies this dream that should really not be sought in the pictures themselves as they appeal to the imagination, but rather in the emotional experiencing of an intention, in the increasingly formidable obstructions appearing in the path of this intention, and in the circumstance of encountering even more insuperable obstacles. If we think of all that as proceeding in an emotional-dramatic way we discover a certain emotional content underlying the actual dream pictures as dramatic content.—This same emotional content could give rise to quite a different dream. The man might dream he is entering a cave. It gets darker and darker as he gropes along until he finally comes to a swamp. There he wades a bit farther, but finally arrives at a quagmire that stops further progress. This picture embraces the same emotional and sentient dramatic content as the other; and the dramatic content in question could be dreamt in still many other forms. The pictorial content of a dream may vary continually; the essential factor is what underlies the dream in the way of movements, tension and relaxation, hope and disappointment. Nevertheless, the dream presents itself in pictures, and we must ask, How do these arise? They do so, for example, because at the moment of awaking something is experienced by the ego and astral body outside the physical and etheric bodies. The nature of such super-sensible experiences is of course something that cannot possibly be expressed in pictures borrowed from the sense world; but as the ego and the astral body reunite with the physical and etheric bodies they have no choice but to use pictures from the available supply. In this way the peculiar dream drama is clothed in pictures. Now we begin to take an interest in the content of these pictures. Their conformation is entirely different from that of other experiences. Why? Our dreams employ nothing but outer or inner experiences, but they give these a different contiguity. Why is this? It is because dreams are a protest against our mode of life in the physical sense-world during our waking hours. There we live wholly interwoven with the system of natural laws, and dreams break through this. Dreams will not stand for it, so they rip events out of their context and present them in another sequence. They protest against the system of natural laws—in fact, men should learn that every immersion into spirit is just such a protest. In this connection, there are certain quaint people who keep trying to penetrate the spiritual world by means of the ordinary natural-scientific method. Extraordinarily interesting in this connection is Dr. Ludwig Staudenmaier's book on Experimental Magic. A man of that type starts with the assumption that everything which is to be comprehended should be comprehended according to the natural-scientific mode of thought. Now, Staudenmaier does not exactly occupy himself with dreams as such but with so-called mediumistic phenomena, which are really an extension of the dream world. In healthy human beings the dream remains an experience that does not pass over into the outer organization; whereas in the case of a medium everything that is ordinarily experienced by the ego, and the astral body, and that then takes shape in the pictures provided by the physical and etheric bodies, passes over into the experiences of the physical and etheric bodies. This is what gives rise to all the phenomena associated with mediumistic conditions.—Staudenmaier was quite right in refusing to be guided by what other mediums offered him, so he set about making himself into a sort of medium. He dreamt while writing, so to speak: he applied the pencil as he had seen mediums do it, and sure enough, it worked! But he was greatly astonished at what came to light: he was amazed at sequences he had never thought of. He wrote all sorts of things wholly foreign to the realm of his conscious life. What he had written was frequently so remote from his conscious life that he asked, “Who is writing this?” And the answer came, “Spirits.” He had to write “spirits!” Imagine: the materialist, who of course recognizes no spirits, had to write down “spirits.” But he was convinced that whatever was writing through him was lying, so he asked next why the spirits lied to him so; and they said, “Well, we have to lie to you—that is our way.” Then he asked about all sorts of things that concerned himself, and once they went so far as to say “muttonhead.” [Kohlkopf—literally “cabbage-head.”] Now, we cannot assume his frame of mind to have been such as to make him label himself a muttonhead. But in any case, all sorts of things came to light that were summed upon the phrase, “we have to lie to you;” so he reflected that since there are naturally no spirits, his subconscious mind must be speaking. But now the case becomes still more alarming: the subconscious calls the conscious mind a muttonhead, and it lies; hence this personality would have to confess, “In my subconscious mind I am an unqualified liar.” But ultimately all this merely points to the fact that the world into which the medium plunges down registers a protest against the constraint of the laws of nature, exactly as does the world of dreams. Everything we can think, will, or feel in the physical sense-world is distorted the moment we enter this more or less subconscious world. Why? Well, dreams are the bridge leading to the spiritual world, and the spiritual world is wholly permeated by a set of laws that are not the laws of nature, but laws that bear an entirely different inner character. Dreams are the transition to this world. It is grave error to imagine that the spiritual world can be comprehended by means of natural laws; and dreams are the herald, as it were, warning us of the impossibility of merely extending the laws of nature when we penetrate into the spiritual world. The same methods can be carried over if we prepare ourselves to accomplish this; but in penetrating into the spiritual world we enter an entirely different system of laws. The idea that the world can and should be comprehended only by means of the mental capacities developed in the course of the last three or four hundred years has today become an axiom. This has come about gradually. Today there are no longer such men as were still to be found in the first half of the 19th Century, men for example, of the type of Johannes Müller, Haeckel's teacher, who confessed that many a bit of research he was carrying on purely as a physiologist refused to be clarified as long as he thought about it in his ordinary waking condition, but that subsequently a dream had brought back to him the whole work of preparing the tissue when awake, all the steps he had taken, and thus many such riddles were solved in his dreams. And Johannes Müller was also one of those who were still fully convinced that in sleep a man dwells in this peculiar spiritual weaving, untouched by inexorable natural laws; where one can even penetrate into the system of physical nature laws, because underlying these there is again something spiritual, and because what is spiritual is fundamentally not subject to natural necessity but merely manifests this on the visible surface. One really has to speak in paradoxes if thoughts that result quite naturally from spiritual research are to be carried to their logical conclusion. No one who thinks in line with modern natural science believes that a light shining at a given point in space will appear equally bright at a distance. The physicist computes the decrease in the strength of light by the square of the distance, and he calculates gravity in the same way. Regarding these physical entities, he knows that the validity of what is true on the earth's surface diminishes as we pass out into the surrounding cosmos. But he refuses to apply this principle to his thinking. Yet in this respect thinking differs in no way from anything we can learn about earth matters in the laboratories, in the operating rooms—from anything on earth, right down to twice two is four. If gravity diminishes by the square of the distance, why should not the validity of the system of nature laws diminish in a similar ratio and eventually, beyond a certain distance, cease altogether? That is where spiritual science penetrates. It points out that when the Nebula of Orion or the Canes Nebula is to be the subject of research, the same course is followed as though, with tellurian concepts, Venus, for example, were to be illuminated by the flame of a candle. When spiritual science reveals the truth by means of such analogies people think it is paradoxical. Nevertheless, in the state in which during sleep we penetrate into the spiritual world, greater possibilities are offered us for investigating the Nebula of Orion or the Canes Nebula than are provided by working in laboratories or in observatories. Research would yield much more if we dreamt about these matters instead of reflecting on them with our intellect. As soon as we enter the cosmos it is useless to apply the results of our earthly research. The nature of our present-day education is such that we are prone to apply to the whole cosmos what we consider true in our little earth cell; but it is obvious that truth cannot come to light in this way. If we proceed from considerations of this sort, a good deal of what confronted men in former things through a primitive, but penetrating, clairvoyant way of looking at things takes on greater value than it has for present-day mankind in general. We will not even pass by the knowledge that came into being in the pastoral life of primitive times, which is nowadays so superficially ignored; for those old shepherds dreamt many a solution to the mysteries of the stars better than can be computed today by our clever scientists with their observatories and spectroscopes. Strange as that may sound, it is true. By studying in a spiritual-scientific way what has been preserved from olden times we can find our way into this mysterious connection we have with the cosmos. Let me tell you here of what can be discovered if we seek through spiritual science the deeply religious and ethical, but also social import of the old Druidic Mysteries on the one hand, and those of the Mithras Mysteries on the other; for this will give us points of contact with the way in which we should conceive the shaping of a Michael Festival. Regarding the Druid Mysteries, the lecture cycle I gave a few weeks ago in Penmaenmawr, [See: Rudolf Steiner, Evolution of the World and Humanity, Anthroposophic Press, New York (actually, Anthroposophic Publishing Company, London, 1926. Also in Evolution of Consciousness, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966.—e.Ed)] Wales—the spot in England that lies exactly behind the island of Anglesea—is of quite special significance because in that place many reminders of the old sacrificial sanctuaries and Mystery temples of the Druids are to be found lying about in fragments. Today these relics, these cromlechs and mounds, are not really very impressive. One climbs up to the mountain tops and finds stones arranged in such a way as to form a sort of chamber, with a larger stone on top; or one sees the cromlechs arranged in circles—originally there were always twelve. In the immediate vicinity of Penmaenmawr were to be found two such sun-circles adjoining each other; and in this particular neighborhood, where even in the spiritual life of nature there is so much that has a different effect from that of nature elsewhere, what I have set forth in various anthroposophical lectures concerning the Druid Mysteries could be tested with the utmost clarity. There is indeed a quite special spiritual atmosphere in this region where—on the island of Anglesea—the Society of King Arthur had a settlement. I must describe it as follows: In speaking of super-sensible things we cannot form thoughts in the same way as we usually do in life or in science, where abstract thoughts are formed, conclusions drawn, and so forth. But to be reduced, in addition, even to speaking more or less abstractly—our language, which has become abstract, demands this—well, if we want to describe something in a spiritual-scientific way we cannot be as abstract as all that in the inner being of our soul: everything must be presented pictorially. We must have pictures, imaginations, before the mind's eye. And this means something different from having thoughts. Thoughts in the soul are extraordinarily patient, according to the degree of our inner indolence: we can hold them; but imaginations always lead a life of their own: we feel quite clearly that an imagination presents itself to us. It is different from writing or drawing, yet similar. We write or draw with our soul; but imaginations are not abstractly held fast like mere thoughts: we write them. In most parts of Europe where civilization has already taken on so abstract a character these imaginations flit past comparatively very quickly: depicting the super-sensible always involves an inner effort. It is as though we wrote something that would then be immediately wiped away by some demonic power—gone again at once. The same is true of imaginations by means of which we bring the super-sensible to consciousness and experience it in our soul. Now, the spiritual atmosphere in the region of Wales that I mentioned has this peculiarity: while imaginations stamp themselves less readily into the astral element, they persist longer, being more deeply imprinted. That is what appears so conspicuous in that locality; and indeed, everything there points to a more spiritual way of retracing the path to what those old Druid priests really strove for—not during the decadence of the Druid cults, when they contained much that was rather distasteful and even nefarious, but in the time of their flowering. Examining one of these cromlechs we find it to close off, in a primitive way, a certain space for a chamber that was covered for reasons having to do with the priest's purposes. When you observe sunlight you have first the physical sunlight. But this physical sunlight is wholly permeated by the spiritual activities of the sun; and to speak of the physical sunlight merely as does the modern physicist would be exactly the same as talking about a man's muscles, bones, blood, and so on, omitting all reference to the soul and spirit holding sway within him. Light is by no means mere phos: it is phosphoros, light-bearing—is endowed with something active and psychic. But this psychic element of light is lost to man in the mere sense-world.—Now, when the Druid priest entered this burying place—like other old cult sanctuaries, the cromlechs were mostly erected over graves—he set up this arrangement which in a certain way was impervious to the physical sun-rays; but the spiritual activities of the sun penetrated it, and the Druid priests were specially trained to perceive these. So he looked through these stones—they were always specially selected—into the chamber where the spiritual activity of the sun penetrated, but from which the physical effect was excluded. His vision had been finely schooled, for what can be seen in a primitive darkroom of that sort varies according to the date, whether February, July, August, or December. In July it is lightly tinged with yellow; in December it radiates a faintly bluish shade from within. And one capable of observing this beholds—in the qualitative changes undergone in the course of the year by this shadow-phenomenon enclosed in such a darkroom—the whole cycle of the seasons in the psycho-spiritual activity of the sun's radiance. And further: these sun-circles are arranged in the number twelve, like the twelve signs of the zodiac; and on the mountain we had climbed we found a large sun-circle and nearby a smaller one. If one had ascended, perhaps in a balloon, and looked down upon these two Druid circles, ignoring the insignificant distance between them, the same ground plan would have presented itself—there is something profoundly moving about this—as that of the Goetheanum in Dornach which was destroyed by fire. The old Druid priests had schooled themselves to read from what thus met their soul's eye how, at every time of day and at every season of the year as well, the sun's shadow varied. They could trace these shadow formations and by means of them determine accurately, this is the time of March, this is the time of October. Through the perception this brought them they were conscious of cosmic events, but also of cosmic conditions having significance for life on this earth. And now, think how people go about it today when they want to determine the influence of cosmic life on earthly life—even the peasants! They have a calendar telling what should be done on this or that day, and they do it, too, approximately; for the fundamental knowledge once available concerning these matters has vanished. But calendars there were none at the time of the old Druids, nor even writing: what the Druid priest was able to tell from his observations of the sun constituted men's knowledge of the connection between the heavens and the earth. And when the priest said: The position of the sun now calls for the sowing of wheat, or, it is the time to lead the bull through the herd, it was done. The cult of that epoch was anything but an abstract prayer: it regulated life in its obvious, practical demands in accord with the enlightenment obtained by communicating with the spirit of the universe. The great language of the heavens was deciphered, and then applied to earthly things. All this penetrated even the most intimate details of the social life. The priest indicated, according to his readings in the universe, what should be done on such and such a day of the year in order to achieve a favorable contact with the whole universe. That was a cult that actually made of the whole of life a sort of divine worship. By comparison, the most mystical mysticism of our time is a kind of abstraction, for it lets outer nature go its way, so to speak, without bothering about it: it lives and has its being in tradition and seeks inner exaltation, shutting itself off and concentrating within itself as far as possible in order to arrive at an abstract connection with some chimerical world of divine spirit. All this was very different in those olden times. Within the cult—and it was a cult that had a real, true connection with the universe—men united with what the Gods were perpetually creating and bringing about in the world: and as earth-men they carried out the will of the gods as read in the stellar script by means of the methods known to the Druid priests. But they had to know how to read the writing in the stars.—It is profoundly affecting to be able, at the very spot, to transport oneself back to conditions such as I have described as prevailing during the height of the Druid culture. Elsewhere in that region as well—even over as far as Norway—are to be found many such relics of the Druid culture. Similarly, all through Central Europe, in parts of Germany, in the Rhineland, even in western France, relics and reminders of the ancient Mithras Cult are to be found. Here again I will only indicate the most important features. The outer symbol of the Mithras Cult is always a bull ridden by a man thrusting a sword into the bull's neck; below, a scorpion biting the bull, or, a serpent; but whenever the representation is complete you will see this picture of bull and man surrounded by the firmament, and particularly the signs of the zodiac. Again we ask, What does this picture express? The answer will never be found by an external, antiquated science of history, because the latter has no means of establishing the interrelationships that can provide clues to the meaning of this man on the bull. In order to arrive at the solution one must know the nature of the training undergone by those who served the Mithras Cult. The whole ceremony could, of course, be run off in such a way as to be beautiful—or ugly, if you like—without anything intelligent transpiring. Only one who had passed through a certain training could make sense of it. That is why all the descriptions of the Mithras Mysteries are really twaddle, although the pictures give promise of yielding so much. The service of the Mithras Cult demanded in the neophyte a very fine and sensitive development of the capacity for receptive sentience. Everything depended upon the development of this faculty in him. I said yesterday in the public lecture [See: Rudolf Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge (Anthroposophy) as a Demand of the Age; Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life, Anthroposophic Press, New York.] that the human heart is really a subconscious sense organ: subconsciously the head perceives through the heart what goes on in the physical functions of the lower body and the chest. Just as we perceive outer events in the sense-world through the eye, so the human heart is in reality a sense organ in its relation to the functions mentioned. Subconsciously by means of the heart, the head, and particularly the cerebellum, perceives the blood being nourished by the transformed foodstuffs, perceives the functioning of the kidneys, the liver, and other processes of the organism. The heart is the sense organ for perceiving all this in the upper portion of the human being. Now, to raise this heart as a sense organ to a certain degree of consciousness was the object in the schooling of those who were to be engaged in the Mithras Cult. They had to develop a sensitive, conscious feeling for the processes in the liver, kidneys, spleen, etc., in the human organism. The upper man, the headman, had to sense very delicately what went on in the chest-man and the limb-man. In older epochs that sort of schooling was not the mental training to which we are accustomed today, but a schooling of the whole human being, appealing in the main to the capacity for feeling. And just as we say, on the basis of outer optical perception, There are rain clouds or, the sky is blue, so the sufficiently matured disciple could say, Now the metabolism in my organism is of this nature, now it is of that. Actually, the processes within the human organism seem the same the year round only to the abstractionist. When science will once more have advanced to real truths concerning these things, men will be amazed to learn how they can establish, by means very different from the crude methods of our modern precision instruments, how the condition of our blood varies and the digestion functions differently in January from September, and in what way the heart as a sense organ is a marvelous barometer for the course of the seasons within the human limb-metabolic organism. The Mithras disciple was taught to perceive the course of the seasons within himself by means of his heart organization, his heart-science, which transmitted to him the passage of food transformed by digestion and taken into the blood. And what was there perceived really showed in man—in the motion of the inner man—the whole course of outer nature. Oh, what does our abstract science amount to, no matter how accurately we describe plants and plant cells, animals and animal tissues, compared with what once was present instinctively by reason of man's ability to make his entire being into an organ of perception, to develop his capacity for feeling into an organ capable of gleaning knowledge! Man bears within him the animal nature, and truly he does so more intensively than is usually imagined; and what the ancient Mithras followers perceived by means of their heart-science could not be represented otherwise than by the bull. The forces working through the metabolic-limb man, and tamed only by the upper man, are indicated by all that figures as the scorpion and the serpent winding around the bull. And the human being proper, in all his frailty, is mounted above in his primitive might, thrusting the sword of Michael into the neck of the bull. But what it was that must thus be conquered, and how it manifests itself in the course of the seasons, was known only to those who had been schooled in these matters. Here the symbol begins to take on significance. By means of ordinary human knowledge no amount of observation or picturesque presentation will make anything of it. It can only be understood if one knows something about the heart-science of the old Mithras pupils; for what they really studied when they looked at themselves through their heart was the spirit of the sun's annual passage through the zodiac. In this way the human being experienced himself as a higher being, riding on his lower nature; and therefore it was fitting that the cosmos should be arranged in a circle around him; in this manner cosmic spirituality was experienced. The more a renascent spiritual science makes it possible for us to examine what was brought to light by an ancient semi-conscious, dreamlike clairvoyance—but clairvoyance, nevertheless—the greater becomes our respect for it. A spirit of reverence for the ancient cultures pervades us when we see deeper into them and rediscover, for example, that the purpose of the Mithras Cult was to enable the priest, by penetrating the secrets of the seasons' cycle, to tell the members of his community what should be done on each day of the year. The Mithras Cult served to elicit from the heavens the knowledge of what should take place on earth. How infinitely greater is the enthusiasm, the incentive, for what must be done on earth if a man feels himself to be active in such a way that into his activity there flow the impulses deciphered from the great cosmic script he had read in the universe; that he made such knowledge his starting point and employed the resulting impulses in the ordinary affairs of daily life! However little this may accord with our modern concepts—naturally it does not—it was good and right according to the old ones. But in making this reservation we must clearly understand what it means to read in the universe what should be done in the lives of men on earth, thereby knowing ourself to be one with the divine in us—as over against debating the needs of the social life in the vein of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Only one who can visualize this contrast is able to see clearly into the nature of the new impulses demanded by the social life of our time. This foundation alone can induce the right frame of mind for letting our cognition pass from the earth out into cosmic space: instead of abstractly calculating and computing and using a spectroscope, which is the common method when looking up to Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and so on, we thereby employ the means comprised in imagination, inspiration, and intuition. In that way, even when only imagination enters in, the heavenly bodies become something very different from the picture they present to modern astronomy—a picture derived partly from sense observation, partly from deductions. The moon, for example, appears to present-day astronomers as some sort of a superannuated heavenly body of mineral which, like a kind of mirror, reflects the sunlight that then, under certain conditions, falls on the earth. They do not bother very much about any of the effects of this sunlight. For a time these observations were applied to the weather, but the excessively clever people of the 19th Century naturally refused to believe in any relation between the various phases of the moon and the weather. Yet those who, like Gustav Theodor Fechner, harbored something of a mystic tendency in their soul, did believe in it. I have repeatedly told the story in our circles about the great 19th Century botanists Schleiden and Gustav Theodor Fechner, both active at the same university. Schleiden naturally considered it a mere superstition that Fechner should keep careful statistics on the rainfall during the full moon and the new moon periods. What Fechner had to say about the moon's influence on the weather amounted to pure superstition for Schleiden. But then the following episode occurred. The two professors had wives; and in those days it was still customary in Leipzig to collect rainwater for the laundry. Barrels were set up for this purpose; and Frau Professor Fechner and likewise Frau Professor Schleiden caught rainwater in such barrels, like everybody else. Now, the natural thing would have been for Frau Professor Schleiden to say, It is stupid to bother about what sort of an influence the moon phases have on the rainfall. But although Herr Professor Schleiden considered it stupid to take the matter seriously, Frau Professor Schleiden got into a violent dispute with Frau Professor Fechner because both ladies wanted to set up their barrels in the same place at the same time.—the women knew all about rain from practical experience, though the men on their professorial platforms took quite a different standpoint in the matter. The external aspects of the moon are as I have described them; but especially after rising from imagination to inspiration are we confronted with its spiritual content. This content of the moon is not just something to be understood in an abstract sense: it is a real moon population; and looked at in a spiritual-scientific way the moon presents itself as a sort of fortress in the cosmos. From the outside, not only the light-rays of the sun but all the external effects of the universe are reflected by the moon down to the earth; but in the interior of the moon there is a complete world that nowadays can be reached only by ascending, in a certain sense, to the spirit world. In older writings on the relation of the moon to other cosmic beings you can find many a hint of this, and compare it with what can now be said by anthroposophy about the nature of the moon. We have often heard that in olden times men had not only that instinctive wisdom of which I have spoken: they had beings as teachers who never descended into physical bodies—higher beings who occupied etheric bodies only, and whose instruction was imparted to men not by speaking, as we speak today, but by transmitting the wisdom in an inner way, as though inoculating the etheric body with it. People knew of the existence of these higher beings, just as we know that some physical teacher is present; but they also knew that these beings surrounded them in a strictly spiritual state. Everything connected with that “primordial wisdom,” recognized even by the Catholic Church—the primordial wisdom that once was available, and of which even the Vedas and the sublime Vedanta philosophy are but faint reverberations—all this can be traced back to the teaching of these higher spiritual beings. That wisdom, which was never written down, was not thought out by man: it grew in him. We must not think of the influence exerted by those primordial teachers as any sort of demonstrating instruction. Just as today, we learn to speak when we are children by imitating the older people, without any particular instruction—as indeed we develop a great deal as though through inner growth—so the primordial teachers exerted a mysterious influence on people of that ancient time, without any abstract instruction; with the result that at a certain age a man simply knew himself to be knowledgeable. Just as today a child gets his second teeth or reaches puberty at a certain age, so men of old became enlightened in the same way.—Doubtless many a modern college student would be delighted if this sort of thing still happened—if the light of wisdom simply flared up in him without his having to exert himself particularly! What a very different wisdom that was from anything we have today! It was an organic force in man, related to growth, and other forces. It was simply wisdom of an entirely different nature, and what took place in connection with it I can best explain by a comparison. Suppose I pour some sort of liquid into a glass and then add salt. When the salt is dissolved it leaves the liquid cloudy. Then I add an ingredient that will precipitate the salt, leaving the liquid purer, clearer, while the sediment is denser. Very well: if I want to describe what permeated men during the period of primordial wisdom, I must say it is a mixture of what is spiritually wholly pure and of a physical animalistic element. What nowadays we think, we imagine our abstract thoughts simply as functioning and holding sway without having any being in us: or again, breathing and the circulation seem like something by themselves, apart. But for primeval man in earlier earth epochs, that was all one: it was simply a case of his having to breathe and of his blood circulating in him; and it was in his circulation that he willed.—Then came the time when human thinking moved higher up toward the head and became purer, like the liquid in the glass, while the sediment, as we may call it, formed below. This occurred when the primordial teachers withdrew more and more from the earth, when this primal wisdom was no longer imparted in the old way. And whither did these primordial teachers withdraw? We find them again in the moon fortress I spoke of. That is where they are and where they continue to have their being. And what remained on earth was the sediment—meaning the present nature of the forces of propagation. These forces did not exist in their present form at the time when primordial wisdom held sway on earth: they gradually became that way—a sort of sediment. I am not implying that they are anything reprehensible, merely that in this connection they are the sediment. And our present abstract wisdom is what corresponds up above to the solvent liquid. This shows us that the development of humanity has brought about on the one hand the more spiritual features in the abstract sense, and on the other, the coarser animalistic qualities as a sediment.—Reflections of this sort will gradually evoke a conception of the spiritual content of the moon; but it must be remembered that this kind of science, which formerly was rather of a prophetic nature, was inherent in men's instinctive clairvoyance. Just as we can speak about the moon in this way—that is, about what I may call its population, its spiritual aspect—so we can adopt the same course in the case of Saturn. When by spiritual-scientific effort, we learn to know Saturn—a little is disclosed through imagination, but far more through inspiration and intuition—we delve ever deeper into the universe, and we find that we are tracing the process of sense perception. We experience this physical process; we see something, and then feel the red of it. That is something very different from withdrawing from the physical body, according to the methods you will find described in my books, and then being able to observe the effects of an outer object on the human physical organism; to observe how the ether forces, rising from within, seize on the physico-chemical process that takes place, for example, in the eye during optical perception. In reality, the act of exposing ourself in the ordinary way to the world in perception, even in scientific observation, does not affect us very deeply. But when a man steps out of himself in this way and confronts himself in the etheric body and possibly in the astral as well, and then sees ex postfacto how such a sense-process of perception or cognition came about—even though his spiritual nature had left his physical sense-nature—then he indeed feels a mighty, intensive process taking place in his spirituality. What he then experiences is real ecstasy. The world becomes immense; and what he is accustomed to seeing only in his outer circle of vision, namely, the zodiac and its external display of constellations, becomes something that arises from within him. If someone were to object that what thus arises might be mere recollections, this would only prove that he does not know the event in question; for what arises there are truly not recollections but mighty imaginations transfused by intuitions: here we begin to behold from within what we had previously seen only from without. As human beings we become interwoven with all the mysteries of the zodiac; and if we seize the favorable moment there may flash before us, out of the inner universe, the secret of Saturn, for example, in its passage across the zodiac. Reading in the cosmos, you see, consists in finding the methods for reading out of the inwardly seen heavenly bodies as they pass through the zodiac. What the individual planet tells us provides the vowels of the world-script; and all that forms around the vowels when the planets pass the zodiacal constellations gives us the consonants, if I may use this comparison. By obtaining an inner view of what we ordinarily observe only from the outside we really learn to know the essence of what pertains to the planets. That is the way to become acquainted with Saturn, for example, in its true inner being. We see its population, which is the guardian of our planetary system's memory; everything that has ever occurred in our planetary system since the beginning of time is preserved by the spirits of Saturn as in a mighty cosmic memory. So if anyone wants to study the great cosmic-historical course of our planetary system, surely he should not speculate about it, as did Kant and Laplace who concluded that once there was a primordial mist that condensed and got into a spiral motion from which the planets split off and circled around the sun, which remained in the middle. I have spoken of this repeatedly and remarked how nice it is to perform this experiment for children: you have a drop of oil floating on some liquid; above the liquid you have a piece of cardboard through which you stick a pin, and you now rotate the drop of oil by twirling the pin, with the result that smaller drops of oil split off. Now, it may be a good thing in life to forget oneself; but in a case like this we should not forget what we ourselves are doing in the experiment, namely, setting the drop of oil in motion. And by the same token, we should not forget the twirler in the Kant-Laplace theory: we would have to station him out in the universe and think of him as some great and mighty school teacher twirling the pin. Then the picture would have been true and honest; but modern science is simply not honest when dealing with such things. I am describing to you how one really arrives at seeing what lives in the planets and in the heavenly bodies in general. By means of Saturn we must study the constitution of the planetary system in its cosmic-historical evolution. Only a science that is spiritual can offer the human soul anything that can seem like a cosmic experience. Nowadays we really think only of earthly experiences. Cosmic experience leads us out to participation in the cosmos; and only by co-experiencing the cosmos in this way will we once more achieve a spiritualized instinct for the meaning of the seasons with which our organic life as well as our social life is interwoven—an instinct for the very different relation in which the earth stands to the cosmos while on its way from spring to summer, and again from summer through autumn into winter. We will learn to sense how differently life on earth flows along in the burgeoning spring than when the autumn brings the death of nature; we will feel the contrast between the awakening life in nature during spring and its sleeping state in the fall. In this way man will again be able to conform with the course of nature, celebrating festivals that have social significance, in the same way that the forces of nature, through his physical organization, make him one with his breathing and circulation. If we consider what is inside our skin we find that we live there in our breathing and in our circulation. What we are there we are as physical men; in respect of what goes on in us we belong to cosmic life. Outwardly we live as closely interwoven with outer nature as we do inwardly with our breathing and circulation. And what is man really in respect of his consciousness? Well, he is really an earthworm—and worse: an earthworm for whom it never rains! In certain localities where there is a great deal of rain, it is so pleasant to see the worms coming out of the ground—we must careful not to tread on them, as will everyone be who loves animals. And then we reflect: Those poor little chaps are down there underground all the time and only come out when it rains; but if it does not rain, they have to stay below. Now, the materialist of today is just such an earthworm—but one for whom it never rains; for if we continue with the simile, the rain would consist of the radiant shining into him of spiritual enlightenment, otherwise he would always be crawling about down there where there is no light. Today humanity must overcome this earthworm nature; it must emerge, must get into the light, into the spiritual light of day. And the call for a Michael Festival is the call for the spiritual light of day. That is what I wanted to point out to you before I can speak of the things that can inaugurate a Michael Festival as a festival of especial significance—significant socially as well. |
54. Esoteric Development: Inner Development
07 Dec 1905, Berlin Translated by Gertrude Teutsch, Olin D. Wannamaker, Diane Tatum, Alice Wuslin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
I have been able to give only a few indications to you about this matter. After Christmas, however, we will speak again about further and deeper things. I especially wanted to awaken in you this one understanding, that the higher life is not schooled in a tumultuous way, but rather quite intimately, in the deepest soul, and that the great day when the soul awakens and enters into the higher life actually arrives like the thief in the night. |
54. Esoteric Development: Inner Development
07 Dec 1905, Berlin Translated by Gertrude Teutsch, Olin D. Wannamaker, Diane Tatum, Alice Wuslin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Translated by Gertrude Teutsch The concepts concerning the super-sensible world and its relationship with the world of the senses have been discussed here in a long series of lectures. It is only natural that, again and again, the question should arise, “What is the origin of knowledge concerning the super-sensible world?” With this question or, in other words, with the question of the inner development of man, we wish to occupy ourselves today. The phrase “inner development of man” here refers to the ascent of the human being to capacities which must be acquired if he wishes to make super-sensible insights his own. Now do not misunderstand the intent of this lecture. This lecture will by no means postulate rules or laws concerning general human morality, nor will it challenge the general religion of the age. I must stress this because when occultism is discussed the misunderstanding often arises that some sort of general demands or fundamental moral laws, valid without variation, are being established. This is not the case. This point requires particular clarification in our age of standardization, when differences between human beings are not at all acknowledged. Neither should today's lecture be mistaken for a lecture concerning the general fundamentals of the anthroposophic movement. Occultism is not the same as anthroposophy. The Anthroposophical Society is not alone in cultivating occultism, nor is this its only task. It could even be possible for a person to join the Anthroposophical Society and to avoid occultism altogether. Among the inquiries which are pursued within the Anthroposophical Society, in addition to the field of general ethics, is also this field of occultism, which includes those laws of existence which are hidden from the usual sense observation in everyday human experience. By no means, however, are these laws unrelated to everyday experience. “Occult” means “hidden,” or “mysterious.” But it must be stressed over and over that occultism is a matter in which certain preconditions are truly necessary. Just as higher mathematics would be incomprehensible to the simple peasant who had never before encountered it, so is occultism incomprehensible to many people today. Occultism ceases to be “occult,” however, when one has mastered it. In this way, I have strictly defined the boundaries of today's lecture. Therefore, no one can object—this must be stressed in the light of the most manifold endeavors and of the experience of millennia—that the demands of occultism cannot be fulfilled, and that they contradict the general culture. No one is expected to fulfill these demands. But if someone requests that he be given convictions provided by occultism and yet refuses to occupy himself with it, he is like a schoolboy who wishes to create electricity in a glass rod, yet refuses to rub it. Without friction, it will not become charged. This is similar to the objection raised against the practice of occultism. No one is exhorted to become an occultist; one must come to occultism of one's own volition. Whoever says that we do not need occultism will not need to occupy himself with it. At this time, occultism does not appeal to mankind in general. In fact, it is extremely difficult in the present culture to submit to those rules of conduct which will open the spiritual world. Two prerequisites are totally lacking in our culture. One is isolation, what spiritual science calls “higher human solitude.” The other is overcoming the egotism which, though largely unconscious, has become a dominant characteristic of our time. The absence of these two prerequisites renders the path of inner development simply unattainable. Isolation, or spiritual solitude, is very difficult to achieve because life conditions tend to distract and disperse, in brief to demand sense-involvement in the external. There has been no previous culture in which people have lived with such an involvement in the external. I beg you not to take what I am saying as criticism, but simply as an objective characterization. Of course, he who speaks as I do knows that this situation cannot be different, and that it forms the basis for the greatest advantages and greatest achievements of our time. But this is the reason that our time is so devoid of super-sensible insight and that our culture is so devoid of super-sensible influence. In other cultures—and they do exist—the human being is in a position to cultivate the inner life more and to withdraw from the influences of external life. Such cultures offer a soil where inner life in the higher sense can thrive. In the Oriental culture there exists what is called Yoga. Those who live according to the rules of this teaching are called yogis. A yogi is one who strives for higher spiritual knowledge, but only after he has sought for himself a master of the super-sensible. No one is able to proceed without the guidance of a master, or guru. When the yogi has found such a guru, he must spend a considerable part of the day, regularly, not irregularly, living totally within his soul. All the forces that the yogi needs to develop are already within his soul. They exist there as truly as electricity exists in the glass rod before it is brought forth through friction. In order to call forth the forces of the soul, methods of spiritual science must be used which are the results of observations made over millennia. This is very difficult in our time, which demands a certain splintering of each individual struggling for existence. One cannot arrive at a total inward composure; one cannot even arrive at the concept of such composure. People are not sufficiently aware of the deep solitude the yogi must seek. One must repeat the same matter rhythmically with immense regularity, if only for a brief time each day, in total separation from all usual concerns. It is indispensable that all life usually surrounding the yogi cease to exist and that his senses become unreceptive to all impressions of the world around him. He must be able to make himself deaf and dumb to his surroundings during the time which he prescribes for himself. He must be able to concentrate to such a degree—and he must acquire practice in this concentration—that a cannon could be fired next to him without disturbing his attention to his inner life. He must also become free of all memory impressions, particularly those of everyday life. Just think how exceedingly difficult it is to bring about these conditions in our culture, how even the concept of such isolation is lacking. This spiritual solitude must be reached in such a way that the harmony, the total equilibrium with the surrounding world, is never lost. But this harmony can be lost exceedingly easily during such deep immersion in one's inner life. Whoever goes more and more deeply inward must at the same time be able to establish harmony with the external world all the more clearly. No hint of estrangement, of distancing from external practical life, may arise in him lest he stray from the right course. To a degree, then, it might be impossible to distinguish his higher life from insanity. It truly is a kind of insanity when the inner life loses its proper relationship to the outer. Just imagine, for example, that you were knowledgeable concerning our conditions on earth and that you had all the experience and wisdom which may be gathered here. You fall asleep in the evening, and in the morning you do not wake up on Earth but on Mars. The conditions on Mars are totally different from those on Earth; the knowledge that you have gathered on Earth is of no use to you whatsoever. There is no longer harmony between life within you and external life. You probably would find yourself in a Martian insane asylum within an hour. A similar situation might easily arise if the development of the internal life severs one's connection with the external world. One must take strict care that this does not happen. These are great difficulties in our culture. Egotism in relation to inward soul properties is the first obstacle. Present humanity usually takes no account of this. This egotism is closely connected with the spiritual development of man. An important prerequisite for spiritual development is not to seek it out of egotism. Whoever is motivated by egotism cannot get very far. But egotism in our time reaches deep into the innermost soul. Again and again the objection is heard, “What use are all the teachings of occultism, if I cannot experience them myself?” Whoever starts from this presumption and cannot change has little chance of arriving at higher development. One aspect of higher development is a most intimate awareness of human community, so that it is immaterial whether it is I or someone else having the experience. Hence I must meet one who has a higher development than I with unlimited love and trust. First, I must acquire this consciousness, the consciousness of infinite trust toward my fellow man when he says that he has experienced one thing or the other. Such trust is a precondition for working together. Wherever occult capacities are strongly brought into play, there exists unlimited trust; there exists the awareness that a human being is a personality in which a higher individuality lives. The first basis, therefore, is trust and faith, because we do not seek the higher self only in ourselves but also in our fellow men. Everyone living around one exists in undivided unity in the inner kernel of one's being. On the basis of my lower self I am separated from other humans. But as far as my higher self is concerned—and that alone can ascend to the spiritual world—I am no longer separated from my fellow men; I am united with my fellow men; the one speaking to me out of higher truths is actually my own self. I must get away completely from the notion of difference between him and me. I must overcome totally the feeling that he has an advantage over me. Try to live your way into this feeling until it penetrates the most intimate fiber of your soul and causes every vestige of egotism to disappear. Do this so that the one further along the path than you truly stands before you like your own self; then you have attained one of the prerequisites for awakening higher spiritual life. In situations where one receives guidance for the occult life, sometimes quite erroneously and confusedly, one may often hear that the higher self lives in the human being, that he need only allow his inner man to speak and the highest truth will thereby become manifest. Nothing is more correct and, at the same time, less productive than this assertion. Just try to let your inner self speak, and you will see that, as a rule, no matter how much you fancy that your higher self is making an appearance, it is the lower self that speaks. The higher self is not found within us for the time being. We must seek it outside of ourselves. We can learn a good deal from the person who is further along than we are, since there the higher self is visible. One's higher self can gain nothing from one's own egotistic “I.” There where he now stands who is further along than I am, there will I stand sometime in the future. I am truly constituted to carry within myself the seed for what he already is. But the paths to Olympus must first be illuminated before one can follow them. A feeling which may seem unbelievable is the fundamental condition for all occult development. It is mentioned in the various religions, and every practical occultist with experience will confirm it. The Christian religion describes it with the well-known sentence, , which an occultist must understand completely, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” This sentence can be understood only by he who has learned to revere in the highest sense. Suppose that in your earliest youth you had heard about a venerable person, an individual of whom you held the highest opinion, and now you are offered the opportunity to meet this person. A sense of awe prevails in you when the moment approaches that you will see this person for the first time. There, standing at the gateway of this personality, you might feel hesitant to touch the door handle and open it. When you look up in this way to such a venerable personality, then you have begun to grasp the feeling that Christianity intends by the statement that one should become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. Whether or not the subject of this veneration is truly worthy of it is not really important. What matters is the capacity to look up to something with a veneration that comes from the innermost heart. This feeling of veneration is the elevating force, raising us to higher spheres of super-sensible life. Everyone seeking the higher life must write into his soul with golden letters this law of the occult world. Development must start from this basic soul-mood; without this feeling, nothing can be achieved. Next, a person seeking inner development must understand clearly that he is doing something of immense importance to the human being. What he seeks is no more nor less than a new birth, and that needs to be taken in a literal sense. The higher soul of man is to be born. Just as man in his first birth was born out of the deep inner foundations of existence, and as he emerged into the light of the sun, so does he who seeks inner development step forth from the physical light of the sun into a higher spiritual light. Something is being born in him which rests as deeply in most human beings as the unborn child rests in the mother. Without being aware of the full significance of this fact, one cannot understand what occult development means. The higher soul, resting deep within human nature and interwoven with it, is brought forth. As man stands before us in everyday life, his higher and lower natures are intermingled, and that is fortunate for everyday life. Many persons among us would exhibit evil, negative qualities except that there lives along with the lower nature a higher one which exerts a balancing influence. This intermingling can be compared with mixing a yellow with a blue liquid in a glass. The result is a green liquid in which blue and yellow can no longer be distinguished. So also is the lower nature in man mingled with the higher, and the two cannot be distinguished. Just as you might extract the blue liquid from the green by a chemical process, so that only the yellow remains and the unified green is separated into a complete duality, so the lower and higher natures separate in occult development. One draws the lower nature out of the body like a sword from the scabbard, which then remains alone. The lower nature comes forth appearing almost gruesome. When it was still mingled with the higher nature, nothing was noticeable. But once separated, all evil, negative properties come into view. People who previously appeared benevolent often become argumentative and jealous. This characteristic had existed earlier in the lower nature, but was guided by the higher. You can observe this in many who have been guided along an abnormal path. A person may readily become a liar when he is introduced into the spiritual world, because the capacity to distinguish between the true and the false is lost especially easily. Therefore, strictest training of the personal character is a necessary parallel to occult training. What history tells us about the saints and their temptations is not legend but literal truth. He who wants to develop towards the higher world on any path is readily prone to such temptations unless he can subdue everything that meets him with a powerful strength of character and the highest morality. Not only do lust and passions grow—that is not even the case so much—but opportunities also increase. This seems miraculous. As through a miracle, the person ascending into the higher worlds finds previously hidden opportunities for evil lurking around him. In every aspect of life a demon lies in wait for him, ready to lead him astray. He now sees what he has not seen before. As through a spell, the division within his own being charms forth such opportunities from the hidden areas of life. Therefore, a very determined shaping of the character is an indispensable foundation for the so-called white magic, the school of occult development which leads man into the higher worlds in a good, true, and genuine way. Every practical occultist will tell you that no one should dare to step through the narrow portal, as the entrance to occult development is called, without practicing these properties again and again. They build the necessary foundation for occult life. First man must develop the ability to distinguish in every situation throughout his life what is unimportant from what is important, that is, what is perishable from the imperishable. This requirement is easy to indicate but difficult to carry out. As Goethe says, it is easy, but what is easy is hard. Look, for instance, at a plant or an object. You will learn to understand that everything has an important and an unimportant side, and that man usually takes interest in the unimportant, in the relationship of the matter to himself, or in some other subordinate aspect. He who wishes to become an occultist must gradually develop the habit of seeing and seeking in each thing its essence. For instance, when he sees a clock he must have an interest in its laws. He must be able to take it apart into its smallest detail and to develop a feeling for the laws of the clock. A mineralogist will arrive at considerable knowledge about a quartz-crystal simply by looking at it. The occultist, however, must be able to take the stone in his hand and to feel in a living way something akin to the following monologue: “In a certain sense you, the crystal, are beneath humanity, but in a certain sense you are far above humanity. You are beneath humanity because you cannot make for yourself a picture of man by means of concepts, and because you do not feel. You cannot explain or think, you do not live, but you have an advantage over mankind. You are pure within yourself, have no desire, no wishes, no lust. Every human, every living being has wishes, desires, lusts. You do not have them. You are complete and without wishes, satisfied with what has come to you, an example for man, with which he will have to unite his other qualities.” If the occultist can feel this in all its depth, then he has grasped what the stone can tell him. In this way man can draw out of everything something full of meaning. When this has become a habit for him, when he separates the important from the unimportant, he has acquired another feeling essential to the occultist. Then he must connect his own life with that which is important. In this people err particularly easily in our time. They believe that their place in life is not proper for them. How often people are inclined to say, “My lot has put me in the wrong place. I am,” let us say, “a postal clerk. If I were put in a different place, I could give people high ideas, great teaching,” and so on. The mistake which these people make is that they do not enter into the significant aspect of their occupation. If you see in me something of importance because I can talk to the people here, then you do not see the importance of your own life and work. If the mail-carriers did not carry the mail, the whole postal traffic would stop, and much work already achieved by others would be in vain. Hence everyone in his place is of exceeding importance for the whole, and none is higher than the other. Christ has attempted to demonstrate this most beautifully in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, with the words, “The servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him.” These words were spoken after the Master had washed the feet of the Apostles. He wanted to say, “What would I be without my Apostles? They must be there so that I can be there in the world, and I must pay them tribute by lowering myself before them and washing their feet.” This is one of the most significant allusions to the feeling that the occultist must have for what is important. What is important in the inward sense must not be confused with the externally important. This must be strictly observed. In addition, we must develop a series of qualities.1 To begin with, we must become masters over our thoughts, and particularly our train of thought. This is called control of thoughts. Just think how thoughts whirl about in the soul of man, how they flit about like will-o'-the wisps. Here one impression arises, there another, and each one changes one's thoughts. It is not true that we govern our thoughts; rather our thoughts govern us totally. We must advance to the ability of steeping ourselves in one specific thought at a certain time of the day and not allow any other thought to enter and disturb our soul. In this way we ourselves hold the reins of thought life for a time. The second quality is to find a similar relationship to our actions, that is, to exercise control over our actions. Here it is necessary to undertake actions, at least occasionally, which are not initiated by anything external. That which is initiated by our station in life, our profession, or our situation does not lead us more deeply into higher life. Higher life depends on personal matters, such as resolving to do something springing totally from one's own initiative even if it is an absolutely insignificant matter. All other actions contribute nothing to the higher life. The third quality to be striven for is even-temperedness. People fluctuate back and forth between joy and sorrow. One moment they are beside themselves with joy, the next they are unbearably sad. Thus, people allow themselves to be rocked on the waves of life, on joy or sorrow. But they must reach equanimity and steadiness. Neither the greatest sorrow nor the greatest joy must unsettle their composure. They must become steadfast and even-tempered. Fourth is the understanding for every being. Nothing expresses more beautifully what it means to understand every being than the legend which is handed down to us, not by the Gospel, but by a Persian story. Jesus was walking across a field with his disciples, and on the way they found a decaying dog. The animal looked horrible. Jesus stopped and cast an admiring look upon it, saying, “What beautiful teeth the animal has!” Jesus found within the ugly the one beautiful aspect. Strive at all times to approach what is wonderful in every object of outer reality, and you will see that everything contains an aspect that can be affirmed. Do as Christ did when he admired the beautiful teeth on the dead dog. This course will lead you to the great ability to tolerate, and to an understanding of every thing and of every being. The fifth quality is complete openness towards everything new that meets us. Most people judge new things which meet them by the old which they already know. If anyone comes to tell them something new, they immediately respond with an opposing opinion. But we must not confront a new communication immediately with our own opinion. We must rather be on the alert for possibilities of learning something new. And learn we can, even from a small child. Even if one were the wisest person, one must be willing to hold back one's own judgment, and to listen to others. We must develop this ability to listen, for it will enable us to meet matters with the greatest possible openness. In occultism, this is called faith. It is the power not to weaken through opposition the impression made by the new. The sixth quality is that which everyone receives once he has developed the first five. It is inner harmony. The person who has the other qualities also has inner harmony. In addition, it is necessary for a person seeking occult development to develop his feeling for freedom to the highest degree. That feeling for freedom enables him to seek within himself the center of his own being, to stand on his own two feet, so that he will not have to ask everyone what he should do and so that he can stand upright and act freely. This also is a quality which one needs to acquire. If man has developed these qualities within himself, then he stands above all the dangers arising from the division within his nature. Then the properties of his lower nature can no longer affect him; he can no longer stray from the path. Therefore, these qualities must be formed with the greatest precision. Then comes the occult life, whose expression depends on a steady rhythm being carried into life. The phrase “carrying rhythm into life” expresses the unfolding of this faculty. If you observe nature, you will find in it a certain rhythm. You will, of course, expect that the violet blooms every year at the same time in spring, that the crops in the field and the grapes on the vine will ripen at the same time each year. This rhythmical sequence of phenomena exists everywhere in nature. Everywhere there is rhythm, everywhere repetition in regular sequence. As you ascend from the plant to beings with higher development, you see the rhythmic sequence decreasing. Yet even in the higher stages of animal development one sees how all functions are ordered rhythmically. At a certain time of the year, animals acquire certain functions and capabilities. The higher a being evolves, the more life is given over into the hands of the being itself, and the more these rhythms cease. You must know that the human body is only one member of man's being. There is also the etheric body, then the astral body, and, finally, the higher members which form the basis for the others. The physical body is highly subject to the same rhythm that governs outer nature. Just as plant and animal life, in its external form, takes its course rhythmically, so does the life of the physical body. The heart beats rhythmically, the lungs breathe rhythmically, and so forth. All this proceeds so rhythmically because it is set in order by higher powers, by the wisdom of the world, by that which the scriptures call the Holy Spirit. The higher bodies, particularly the astral body, have been, I would like to say, abandoned by these higher spiritual forces, and have lost their rhythm. Can you deny that your activity relating to wishes, desires, and passions is irregular, that it can in no way compare with the regularity ruling the physical body? He who learns to know the rhythm inherent in physical nature increasingly finds in it an example for spirituality. If you consider the heart, this wonderful organ with the regular beat and innate wisdom, and you compare it with the desires and passions of the astral body which unleash all sorts of actions against the heart, you will recognize how its regular course is influenced detrimentally by passion. However, the functions of the astral body must become as rhythmical as those of the physical body. I want to mention something here which will seem grotesque to most people. This is the matter of fasting. Awareness of the significance of fasting has been totally lost. Fasting is enormously significant, however, for creating rhythm in our astral body. What does it mean to fast? It means to restrain the desire to eat and to block the astral body in relation to this desire. He who fasts blocks the astral body and develops no desire to eat. This is like blocking a force in a machine. The astral body becomes inactive then, and the whole rhythm of the physical body with its innate wisdom works upward into the astral body to rhythmicize it. Like the imprint of a seal, the harmony of the physical body impresses itself upon the astral body. It would transfer much more permanently if the astral body were not continuously being made irregular by desires, passions, and wishes, including spiritual desires and wishes. It is more necessary for the man of today to carry rhythm into all spheres of higher life than it was in earlier times. Just as rhythm is implanted in the physical body by God, so man must make his astral body rhythmical. Man must order his day for himself. He must arrange it for his astral body as the spirit of nature arranges it for the lower realms. In the morning, at a definite time, one must undertake one spiritual action; a different one must be undertaken at another time, again to be adhered to regularly, and yet another one in the evening. These spiritual exercises must not be chosen arbitrarily, but must be suitable for the development of the higher life. This is one method for taking life in hand and for keeping it in hand. So set a time for yourself in the morning when you concentrate. You must adhere to this hour. You must establish a kind of calm so that the occult master in you may awaken. You must meditate about a great thought content that has nothing to do with the external world, and let this thought content come to life completely. A short time is enough, perhaps a quarter of an hour. Even five minutes are sufficient if more time is not available. But it is worthless to do these exercises irregularly. Do them regularly so that the activity of the astral body becomes as regular as a clock. Only then do they have value. The astral body will appear completely different if you do these exercises regularly. Sit down in the morning and do these exercises, and the forces I described will develop. But, as I said, it must be done regularly, for the astral body expects that the same process will take place at the same time each day, and it falls into disorder if this does not happen. At least the intent towards order must exist. If you rhythmicize your life in this manner, you will see success in not too long a time; that is, the spiritual life hidden from man for the time being will become manifest to a certain degree. As a rule, human life alternates among four states. The first state is the perception of the external world. You look around with your senses and perceive the external world. The second is what we may call imagination or the life of mental images which is related to, or even part of, dream life. There man does not have his roots in his surroundings, but is separated from them. There he has no realities within himself, but at the most reminiscences. The third state is dreamless sleep, in which man has no consciousness of his ego at all. In the fourth state he lives in memory. This is different from perception. It is already something remote, spiritual. If man had no memory, he could uphold no spiritual development. The inner life begins to develop by means of inner contemplation and meditation. Thus, the human being sooner or later perceives that he no longer dreams in a chaotic manner; he begins to dream in the most significant way, and remarkable things reveal themselves in his dreams, which he gradually begins to recognize as manifestations of spiritual beings. Naturally the trivial objection might easily be raised that this is nothing but a dream and therefore of no consequence. However, should someone discover the dirigible in his dream and then proceed to build it, the dream would simply have shown the truth. Thus an idea can be grasped in an other-than-usual manner. Its truthfulness must then be judged by the fact that it can be realized. We must become convinced of its inner truth from outside. The next step in spiritual life is to comprehend truth by means of our own qualities and of guiding our dreams consciously. When we begin to guide our dreams in a regular manner, then we are at the stage where truth becomes transparent for us. The first stage is called “material cognition.” For this, the object must lie before us. The next stage is “imaginative cognition.” It is developed through meditation, that is through shaping life rhythmically. Achieving this is laborious. But once it is achieved, the time arrives when there is no longer a difference between perception in the usual life and perception in the super-sensible. When we are among the things of our usual life, that is, in the sense world, and we change our spiritual state, then we experience continuously the spiritual, the super-sensible world, but only if we have sufficiently trained ourselves. This happens as soon as we are able to be deaf and dumb to the sense world, to remember nothing of the everyday world, and still to retain a spiritual life within us. Then our dream-life begins to take on a conscious form. If we are able to pour some of this into our everyday life, then the next capacity arises, rendering the soul-qualities of the beings around us perceptible. Then we see not only the external aspect of things, but also the inner, hidden essential kernel of things, of plants, of animals, and of man. I know that most people will say that these are actually different things. True, these are always different things from those a person sees who does not have such senses. The third stage is that in which a consciousness, which is as a rule completely empty, begins to be enlivened by continuity of consciousness. The continuity appears on its own. The person is then no longer unconscious during sleep. During the time in which he used to sleep, he now experiences the spiritual world. Of what does sleep usually consist? The physical body lies in bed, and the astral body lives in the super-sensible world. In this super-sensible world, you are taking a walk. As a rule, a person with the type of disposition which is typical today cannot withdraw very far from his body. If one applies the rules of spiritual science, organs can be developed in the astral body as it wanders during sleep—just as the physical body has organs—which allow one to become conscious during sleep. The physical body would be blind and deaf if it had no eyes or ears, and the astral body walking at night is blind and deaf for the same reason, because it does not yet have eyes and ears. But these organs are developed through meditation which provides the means for training these organs. This meditation must then be guided in a regular way. It is being led so that the human body is the mother and the spirit of man is the father. The physical human body, as we see it before us, is a mystery in every one of its parts and, in fact, each member is related in a definite but mysterious way to a part of the astral body. These are matters which the occultist knows. For instance, the point in the physical body lying between the eyebrows belongs to a certain organ in the astral organism. When the occultist indicates how one must direct thoughts, feelings, and sensations to this point between the eyebrows through connecting something formed in the physical body with the corresponding part of the astral body, the result will be a certain sensation in the astral body. But this must be practiced regularly, and one must know how to do it. Then the astral body begins to form its members. From a lump, it grows to be an organism in which organs are formed. I have described the astral sense organs in the periodical, Lucifer Gnosis. They are also called Lotus flowers. By means of special word sequences, these Lotus flowers are cultivated. Once this has occurred, the human being is able to perceive the spiritual world. This is the same world he enters when passing through the portal of death, a final contradiction to Hamlet's “The undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” So it is possible to go, or rather to slip, from the sense world into the super-sensible world and to live there as well as here. That does not mean life in never-never land, but life in a realm that clarifies and explains life in our realm. Just as the usual person who has not studied electricity would not understand all the wonderful workings in a factory powered by electricity, so the average person does not understand the occurrences in the spiritual world. The visitor at the factory will lack understanding as long as he remains ignorant of the laws of electricity. So also will man lack understanding in the realm of the spirit as long as he does not know the laws of the spiritual. There is nothing in our world that is not dependent on the spiritual world at every moment. Everything surrounding us is the external expression of the spiritual world. There is no materiality. Everything material is condensed spirit. For the person looking into the spiritual world, the whole material, sense-perceptible world, the world in general, becomes spiritualized. As ice melts into water through the effect of the sun, so everything sense-perceptible melts into something spiritual within the soul which looks into the spiritual world. Thus, the fundament of the world gradually manifests before the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear. The life that man learns to know in this manner is actually the spiritual life he carries within himself all along. But he knows nothing of it because he does not know himself before developing organs for the higher world. Imagine possessing the characteristics you have at this time, yet being without sense-organs. You would know nothing of the world around you, would have no understanding of the physical body, and yet you would belong to the physical world. So the soul of man belongs to the spiritual world, but does not know it because it does not hear or see. Just as our body is drawn out of the forces and materials of the physical world, so is our soul drawn out of the forces and materials of the spiritual world. We do not recognize ourselves within ourselves, but only within our surroundings. As we cannot perceive a heart or a brain—even by means of X-ray—without seeing it in other people through our sense organs (it is only the eyes that can see the heart), so we truly cannot see or hear our own soul without perceiving it with spiritual organs in the surrounding world. You can recognize yourself only by means of your surroundings. In truth there exists no inner knowledge, no self-examination; there is only one knowledge, one revelation of the life around us through the organs of the physical as well as the spiritual. We are a part of the worlds around us, of the physical, the soul, and the spiritual worlds. We learn from the physical if we have physical organs, from the spiritual world and from all souls if we have spiritual and soul organs. There is no knowledge but knowledge of the world. It is vain and empty idleness for man to “brood” within himself, believing that it is possible to progress simply by looking into himself. Man will find the God in himself if he awakens the divine organs within himself and finds his higher divine self in his surroundings, just as he finds his lower self solely by means of using his eyes and ears. We perceive ourselves clearly as physical beings by means of intercourse with the sense world, and we perceive ourselves clearly in relation to the spiritual world by developing spiritual senses. Development of the inner man means opening oneself to the divine life around us. Now you will understand that it is essential that he who ascends to the higher world undergoes, to begin with, an immense strengthening of his character. Man can experience on his own the characteristics of the sense world because his senses are already opened. This is possible because a benevolent divine spirit, who has seen and heard in the physical world, stood by man in the most ancient times, before man could see and hear, and opened man's eyes and ears. It is from just such beings that man must learn at this time to see spiritually, from beings already able to do what he still has to learn. We must have a guru who can tell us how we should develop our organs, who will tell us what he has done in order to develop these organs. He who wishes to guide must have acquired one fundamental quality. This is unconditional truthfulness. This same quality is also a main requirement for the student. No one may train to become an occultist unless this fundamental quality of unconditional truthfulness has been previously cultivated. When facing sense experience, one can test what is being said. When I tell you something about the spiritual world, however, you must have trust because you are not far enough to be able to confirm the information. He who wishes to be a guru must have become so truthful that it is impossible for him to take lightly such statements concerning the spiritual world or the spiritual life. The sense world corrects errors immediately by its own nature, but in the spiritual world we must have these guidelines within ourselves. We must be strictly trained, so that we are not forced to use the outer world for controls, but only our inner self. We are only able to gain this control by acquiring already in this world the strictest truthfulness. Therefore, when the Anthroposophical Society began to present some of the basic teachings of occultism to the world, it had to adopt the principle: there is no law higher than truth. Very few people understand this principle. Most are satisfied if they can say they have the conviction that something is true, and then if it is wrong, they will simply say that they were mistaken. The occultist cannot rely on his subjective honesty. There he is on the wrong track. He must always be in consonance with the facts of the external world, and any experience that contradicts these facts must be seen as an error or a mistake. The question of who is at fault for the error ceases to be important to the occultist. He must be in absolute harmony with the facts in life. He must begin to feel responsible in the strictest sense for every one of his assertions. Thus he trains himself in the unconditional certainty that he must have for himself and for others if he wishes to be a spiritual guide. So you see that I needed to indicate to you today a series of qualities and methods. We will have to speak about these again in order to add the higher concepts. It may seem to you that these things are too intimate to discuss with others, that each soul has to come to grips with them on its own terms, and that they are possibly unsuitable for reaching the great destination which should be reached, namely the entrance into the spiritual world. This entrance will definitely be achieved by those who tread the path I have characterized. When? One of the most outstanding participants in the theosophical movement, Subba Row, who died some time ago, has spoken fittingly about this. Replying to the question of how long it would take, he said, “Seven years, perhaps also seven times seven years, perhaps even seven incarnations, perhaps only seven hours.” It all depends on what the human being brings with himself into life. We may meet a person who seems to be very stupid, but who has brought with himself a concealed higher life that needs only to be brought out. Most human beings these days are much further than it seems, and more people would know about this if the materialism of our conditions and of our time would not drive them back into the inner life of the soul. A large percentage of today's human beings was previously much further advanced. Whether that which is within them will come forth depends on many factors. But it is possible to give some help. Suppose you have before you a person who was highly developed in his earlier incarnation, but now has an undeveloped brain. An undeveloped brain may at times conceal great spiritual faculties. But if he can be taught the usual everyday abilities, it may happen that the inner spirituality also comes forth. Another important factor is the environment in which a person lives. The human being is a mirror-image of his surroundings in a most significant way. Suppose that a person is a highly developed personality, but lives in surroundings that awaken and develop certain prejudices with such a strong effect that the higher talents cannot come forth. Unless such a person finds someone who can draw out these abilities, they will remain hidden. I have been able to give only a few indications to you about this matter. After Christmas, however, we will speak again about further and deeper things. I especially wanted to awaken in you this one understanding, that the higher life is not schooled in a tumultuous way, but rather quite intimately, in the deepest soul, and that the great day when the soul awakens and enters into the higher life actually arrives like the thief in the night. The development towards the higher life leads man into a new world, and when he has entered this new world, then he sees the other side of existence, so to speak; then what has previously been hidden for him reveals itself. Maybe not everyone can do this; maybe only a few can do it, one might say to oneself. But that must not keep one from at least starting on the way that is open to everyone, namely to hear about the higher worlds. The human being is called to live in community, and he who secludes himself cannot arrive at a spiritual life. But it is a seclusion in a stronger sense if he says, “I do not believe this, this does not relate to me; this may be valid for the after-life.” For the occultist this has no validity. It is an important principle for the occultist to consider other human beings as true manifestations of his own higher self, because he knows then that he must find the others in himself. There is a delicate distinction between these two sentences: “To find the others in oneself,” and “To find oneself in the others.” In the higher sense it means, “This is you.” And in the highest sense it means to recognize oneself in the world and to understand that saying of the poet which I cited some weeks ago in a different connection: “One was successful. He lifted the veil of the goddess at Sais. But what did he see? Miracle of miracles! He saw himself.” To find oneself—not in egotistical inwardness, but selflessly in the world without—that is true recognition of the self.
|
62. Fairy Tales in the Light of Spiritual Investigation: Fairy Tales in the light of Spiritual Investigation
06 Feb 1913, Berlin Translated by Peter Stebbing Rudolf Steiner |
---|
This is in all probability a reference to Rudolf Steiner's friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer (1825-1900), professor of literature at the Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) in Vienna, discoverer of the Oberufer Christmas Plays, and described by Rudolf Steiner as “a researcher in the style of the Brothers Grimm.” (Document of Barr, Sept. 1907.) |
62. Fairy Tales in the Light of Spiritual Investigation: Fairy Tales in the light of Spiritual Investigation
06 Feb 1913, Berlin Translated by Peter Stebbing Rudolf Steiner |
---|
A number of things make it seem precarious to speak about fairy tales in the light of spiritual investigation. One of them is the difficulty of the subject itself, since the sources of a genuine and true fairy tale mood have in fact to be sought at deep levels of the human soul. The methods of spiritual research often described by me must follow convoluted paths before these sources can be discovered. Genuine fairy tales originate from sources lying at greater depths of the human soul than is generally supposed, speaking to us magically out of every epoch of humanity's development. A second difficulty is that, in regard to what is magical in fairy tales, one has to a considerable extent the feeling that the original, elementary impression, indeed the essential nature of the fairy tale itself is destroyed through intellectual observations and a conceptual penetration of the fairy tale. If one has the justified conviction in regard to explanations and commentaries that they destroy the immediate living impression the fairy tale ought to make in simply letting it work on one, then one would far rather not accept explanations in place of their subtle and enchanting qualities. These well up from seemingly unfathomable sources of the folk-spirit or of the individual human soul-disposition. It is really as though one were to destroy the blossom of a plant, if one intrudes with one's power of judgment in what wells up so pristinely from the human soul as do these fairy tale compositions. Even so, with the methods of spiritual science it proves possible nonetheless to illumine at least to some extent those regions of the soul-life from which fairy tale moods arise. Actual experience would seem to gainsay the second reservation as well. Just because the origin of fairy tales has to be sought at such profound depths of the human soul, one arrives as a matter of course at the conviction that what may be offered as a kind of spiritual scientific explanation remains something that touches the source so slightly after all as not to harm it by such investigation. Far from being impoverished, one has the feeling that everything of profound significance in those regions of the human soul remains so new, unique and original that one would like best of all to bring it to expression oneself in the form of a fairy tale of some kind. One senses how impossible any other approach is in speaking out of these hidden sources. It may be regarded as entirely natural that someone like Goethe who attempted, alongside his artistic activity, to penetrate deeply into the background, into the sources of existence, in having something to communicate of the soul's profoundest experiences, did not resort to theoretical discussion. Instead, having gained insight into the underlying sources, he makes use of the fairy tale once again for the soul's most noteworthy experiences. This is what Goethe did in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, wanting, in his fashion, to bring to expression those profound experiences of the human soul that Schiller set forth in a more philosophical-abstract form in his Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race. It lies in the nature of what is magical in fairy tales that explanations cannot ultimately destroy their productive mood. For, whoever is able to arrive at the aforementioned sources from the standpoint of spiritual investigation, discovers a peculiar fact. (If I were to say all that I should like to say about the nature of fairy tales, I would have to hold many lectures. Hence, it will only be possible today to put forward a few indications and results of investigation.) That is to say, whoever seeks to come to the aforementioned sources from the standpoint of spiritual research finds that these fairy tale sources lie far deeper down in the human soul than do the sources of creativity and artistic appreciation otherwise. This applies even with regard to the most compelling works of art—the most moving tragedies for instance. Tragedy depicts what the human soul can experience in connection with powers the poet tells us derive from the tremendous destiny uplifting it, while overwhelming the individual. The shock-waves of tragedy derive from this destiny, but such that we can say: The entanglements, the threads spun in the course of the tragedy and unraveled again are inherent in definite experiences of the human soul in the external world. These are in many respects hard to foresee, since for the most part we penetrate only with difficulty into the particular make up of the individual. Still, they can be surmised and fathomed in sensing what takes place in the human soul in consequence of its relation to life. In experiencing something tragic, one has the feeling, in one way or another, a particular soul is entangled in a particular destiny, as this is presented to us. The sources of fairy tales and of the moods out of which they arise lie deeper than these entanglements of tragedy. The tragic, as well as other forms of artistic expression, results for us, we may feel, in seeing the human being—for instance at a particular age, a particular period of life—at the mercy of certain blows of destiny. In being affected by a tragedy, we necessarily assume that the human being is led to the corresponding involvements of destiny as a result of particular inner experiences. We sense the need to understand the specific human beings presented to us in the tragedy with their particular sets of experiences. A certain circumscribed range of what is human comes to meet us in the tragedy, as in other works of art. In approaching fairy tales with sympathetic understanding, we have a different feeling than the one just described, since the effect of the fairy tale on the human soul is an original and elemental one, belonging to effects that are hence unconscious. In sensing what comes to meet us in fairy tales we find something altogether different from what a human being in a particular life situation may become involved in. It is not a matter of a narrowly circumscribed range of human experience, but of something lying so deep, and so integral to the soul, as to be “generally human.” We cannot say, a particular human soul at a particular age of life, in a certain situation, encounters something of the kind. Rather, what comes to expression in the fairy tale is so deeply rooted in the soul that we identify with it no matter whether as a child in the first years of life, whether in our middle years, or whether in having grown old. What comes to expression in the fairy tale accompanies us throughout our lives in the deepest recesses of the soul. Only, the fairy tale is often a quite freewheeling and playful, pictorial expression of underlying experiences. The aesthetic, artistic enjoyment of the fairy tale may be as far removed for the soul from the corresponding inner experience—the comparison can be ventured—as say, the experience of taste on the tongue when we partake of food is removed from the complicated, hidden processes this food undergoes in the total organism in contributing to building up the organism. What the food undergoes initially evades human observation and knowledge. All the human being has is the enjoyment in tasting. The two things have seemingly little to do with each other in the first instance, and from how a particular food tastes, no one is capable of determining what purpose this food has in the whole life-process of the human organism. What we experience in the aesthetic enjoyment of the fairy tale is likewise far removed from what takes place deep down in the unconscious, where what the fairy tale radiates and pours forth out of itself joins forces with the human soul. The soul has a deep-rooted need to let the substance of the fairy tale run through its spiritual “veins,” just as the organism has a need to allow the nutrients to circulate through it. Applying the methods of spiritual research that have been described for penetrating the spiritual worlds, at a certain stage one acquires knowledge of spiritual processes that continually take place quite unconsciously in the depths of the human soul. In normal everyday life, such spiritual processes unfolding in the soul's depths surface only occasionally in faint dream experiences caught by day-consciousness. Awakening from sleep under especially favorable circumstances, one may have the feeling: You are emerging out of a spiritual world in which thinking, in which a kind of pondering has taken place, in which something has happened in the deep, unfathomable background of existence. Though apparently similar to daytime experiences, and intimately connected with one's whole being, this remains profoundly concealed for conscious daily life. For the spiritual researcher who has made some progress and is capable of initial experiences in the world of spiritual beings and spiritual facts, things often proceed in much the same way. As far as one advances, one still arrives again and again, so to speak, only at the boundary of a world in which spiritual processes approach one out of the deep unconscious. These processes, it must be said, are connected with one's own being. They can be apprehended almost the same way as a fata morgana appearing to one's spiritual gaze, not revealing themselves in their totality. That is one of the strangest experiences—this peering into the unfathomable spiritual connections within which the human soul stands. In attentively following up these intimate soul occurrences, it turns out that conflicts experienced in the depths of the soul and portrayed in works of art, in tragedies, are relatively easy to survey, as compared to the generally-human soul conflicts of which we have no presentiment in daily life. Every person does nonetheless undergo these conflicts at every age of life. Such a soul conflict discovered by means of spiritual investigation takes place for example, without ordinary consciousness knowing anything of it, every day on awakening, when the soul emerges from the world in which it unconsciously resides during sleep and immerses itself once again in the physical body. As already mentioned, ordinary consciousness has no notion of this, and yet a battle takes place every day in the soul's foundations, glimpsed only in spiritual investigation. This can be designated the battle of the solitary soul seeking its spiritual path, with the stupendous forces of natural existence, such as we face in external life in being helplessly subjected to thunder and lightning—in experiencing how the elements vent themselves upon the defenseless human being. Though arising with stupendous force, even such rare occurrences of Nature experienced by the human being are a trifling matter as compared with the inner battle taking place unconsciously upon awakening. Experiencing itself existentially, the soul has now to unite itself with the forces and substances of the physical body in which it immerses itself, so as to make use of the senses and of the limbs once again, these being ruled by natural forces. The human soul has something like a yearning to submerge itself in the purely natural, a longing that fulfils itself with every awakening. There is at the same time, as though a shrinking back, a sense of helplessness as against what stands in perpetual contrast to the human soul—the purely natural, manifesting in the external corporeality into which it awakens. Strange as it may sound that such a battle takes place daily in the soul's foundations, it is nonetheless an experience that does transpire unconsciously. The soul cannot know precisely what happens, but it experiences this battle every morning, and each and every soul stands under the impression of this battle despite knowing nothing of it—through all that the soul inherently is, the whole way it is attuned to existence. Something else that takes place in the depths of the soul and can be apprehended by means of spiritual investigation presents itself at the moment of falling asleep. Having withdrawn itself from the senses and from the limbs, having in a sense left the external body behind in the physical sense-world, what then approaches the human soul may be called a feeling of its own “inwardness.” Only then does it go through the inner battles that arise unconsciously by virtue of its being bound to external matter in life—and having to act in accordance with this entanglement. It feels the attachment to the sense world with which it is burdened as a hindrance, holding it back morally. Other moral moods can give us no conception of what thus transpires unconsciously after falling asleep, when the human soul is alone with itself. And all sorts of further moods then take their course in the soul when free of the body, in leading a purely spiritual existence between falling asleep and waking up. However, it should not be supposed that these events taking place in the soul's depths are not there in the waking state. Spiritual investigation reveals one very interesting fact in particular, namely that people not only dream when they think they do, but all day long. The soul is in truth always full of dreams, only the human being does not notice this, since day consciousness is stronger as compared to dream consciousness. Just as a weaker light is drowned out by a stronger one, so what continually takes place in the course of waking consciousness as an ongoing dream-experience is drowned out by day consciousness. Though not generally aware of it, we dream all the time. And out of the abundance of dream experiences, of dreams that remain unconscious, presenting themselves as boundless in relation to the experiences of day consciousness, those dreams of which the human being does actually become conscious, separate themselves off. They do so much as a single drop of water might separate itself from a vast lake. But this dreaming activity that remains unconscious is a soul-spiritual experience. Things take place there in the soul's depths. Such spiritual experiences of the soul located in unconscious regions take their course much as chemical processes, of which we are unconscious, take place in the body. Connecting this with a further fact arising from these lectures, additional light may be shed on hidden aspects of the soul-life spoken of here. We have often stressed—this was emphasized again in the previous lecture—that in the course of humanity's development on the earth, the soul-life of human beings has changed. Looking back far enough, we find that primeval human beings had quite different experiences from those of the human soul today. We have already spoken of the fact—and will do so again in coming lectures—that the primeval human being in early periods of evolution had a certain original clairvoyance. In the manner of looking at the world normal today in the waking state, we receive sense impressions from an external stimulus. We connect them by means of our understanding, our reason, feeling and will. This is merely the consciousness belonging to the present, having developed out of older forms of human consciousness. Applying the word in the positive sense, these were clairvoyant states. In an entirely normal way, in certain intermediate states between waking and sleeping, human beings were able to experience something of spiritual worlds. Thus, even if not yet fully self-conscious, human beings were by no means as unfamiliar in their normal consciousness with experiences taking place in the depths of the soul, such as those we have spoken of today. In ancient times human beings perceived more fully their connection with the spiritual world around them. They saw what takes place in the soul, the events occurring deep within the soul, as connected with the spiritual in the universe. They saw spiritual realities passing through the soul and felt themselves much more related to the soul-spiritual beings and facts of the universe. This was characteristic of the original clairvoyant state of humanity. Just as it is possible today to come to a feeling such as the following only under quite exceptional conditions, in ancient times it occurred frequently—not only in artistic, but also in quite primitive human beings. An experience of a quite vague and indefinite nature may lie buried in the depths of the soul, not rising into consciousness—an experience such as we have described. Nothing of this experience enters the conscious life of day. Something is nonetheless there in the soul, just as hunger is present in the bodily organism. And just as one needs something to satisfy hunger, so one needs something to satisfy this indefinite mood deriving from the experience lying deep within the soul. One then feels the urge to reach either for an existing fairy tale, for a saga, or if one is of an artistic disposition, perhaps to elaborate something of the kind oneself. Here it is as though all theoretical words one might make use of amount to stammering; and that is how fairy tales arise. Filling the soul with fairy tale pictures in this way constitutes nourishment for the soul as regards the “hunger” referred to. In past ages of humanity's development every human being still stood closer to a clairvoyant perception of these inner spiritual experiences of the soul, and with their simpler constitution people were able—in sensing the hunger described here far more directly than is the case today—to seek nourishment from the pictures we possess today in the fairy tale traditions of various peoples. The human soul felt a kinship with spiritual existence. Without understanding them, it sensed more or less consciously the inner battles it had to undergo, giving pictorial form to them in pictures bearing only a distant similarity to what had taken place in the soul's substrata. Yet there is a palpable connection between what expresses itself in fairy tales and these unfathomable experiences of the human soul. Ordinary experience shows us that a childlike soul disposition frequently creates something for itself inwardly, such as a simple “companion”—a companion really only there for this childlike mind, accompanying it nonetheless and taking part in the various occurrences of life. Who does not know, for instance, of children who take certain invisible friends along with them through life? You have to imagine that these “friends” are there when something happens that pleases the child, participating as invisible spirit companions, soul companions, when the child experiences this or that. Quite often one can witness how badly it affects the child's soul disposition when a “sensible” person comes, hears the child has such a soul companion, and now wants to talk it out of this soul companion, even perhaps considering it salutary for the child to be talked out of it. The child grieves for its soul companion. And if the child is receptive for soul-spiritual moods, this grieving signifies still more. It can mean the child begins to ail, becoming constitutionally infirm. This is an altogether real experience connected with profound inner occurrences of the human soul. Without dispersing the “aroma” of the fairy tale, we can sense this simple experience in the fairy tale which tells of the child and the toad, related by the Brothers Grimm.1 They tell us of the girl who always has a toad accompany her while eating. The toad, however, only likes the milk. The child talks to the animal as though with a human being. One day she wants the toad to eat some of her bread as well. The mother overhears this; she comes and strikes the animal dead. The child ails, sickens, and dies. In fairy tales we feel soul moods reverberate that do absolutely in fact take place in the depths of the soul, such that the human soul is actually not only cognizant of them in certain periods of life, but simply by virtue of being human, irrespective of being a child or an adult. Thus, every human soul can sense something re-echo of what it experiences without comprehending it—not even raising it into consciousness—connected with what in the fairy tale works on the soul as food works on the taste buds. For the soul, the fairy tale then becomes something similar to the nutritional substance as applied to the organism. It is fascinating to seek out in deep soul experiences what re-echoes in various fairy tales. It would of course be quite a major undertaking actually to examine individual fairy tales in this regard, collected as they are in such numbers. This would require a lot of time. But what can perhaps be illustrated with a few fairy tales can be applied to all of them, in so far as they are genuine. Let us take another fairy tale also collected by the Brothers Grimm, the fairy tale of “Rumpelstiltskin.” A miller asserts to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold and is requested to have her come to the castle, so the king can ascertain her art for himself. The daughter goes to the castle. She is locked in a room and given a bundle of straw with which to demonstrate her art. In the room she is quite helpless. And while she is in this helpless state, a manikin appears before her. He says to her: “What will you give me, if I spin the straw into gold for you?” The miller's daughter gives him her necklace and the little man thereupon spins the straw into gold for her. The king is quite amazed, but he wants still more, and she is to spin straw into gold once again. The miller's daughter is again locked in a room, and as she sits in front of all the straw, the little man appears and says, “What will you give me, if I spin the straw to gold for you?” She gives him a little ring, and the straw is once more spun into gold by the little man. But the king wants still more. And when she now sits for the third time in the room and the little man again appears, she has nothing further to give him. At that the little man says, if she becomes queen one day, she is to grant him the first child she gives birth to. She promises to do so. And when the child is there, and the little man comes and reminds her of her promise, the miller's daughter wants a postponement. The little man then says to her: “If you can tell me what my name is, you can be free of your promise.” The miller's daughter sends everywhere, inquiring after every name. In learning every name, she wants to find out what the little man's name is. Finally, after a number of vain attempts, she actually succeeds in discovering his name—Rumpelstiltskin. With really no work of art other than fairy tales does one have such a sense of joy over the immediate picture presented, while yet knowing of the profound inner soul-experience out of which the fairy tale is born. Though the comparison may be trivial, it is perhaps still apt: Just as a person can be aware of the chemistry of food and still find a bite to eat flavorful, so it is possible to know something of the profound inner experiences of soul that are only experienced, not “known,” and that come to expression in fairy tale pictures in the manner indicated. In fact, unknowingly the solitary human soul—it is after all alone with itself during sleep, as also in the rest of life even when united with the body—feels and experiences, albeit unconsciously, the whole disparate relation in which it finds itself in regard to its own immense tasks, its place within the divine order of the world. The human soul does indeed feel how little it is capable of in comparing its ability with what external Nature can do, in transforming one thing into another. Nature is really a great magician, such as the human soul itself would like to be. In conscious life it may light-heartedly look past this gulf between the human soul and the wise omniscience and omnipotence of the spirit of Nature. But at deeper levels of soul experience, the matter is not done away with so easily. There, the human soul would necessarily go to rack and ruin if it were not after all to feel within it a more profound being inside the initially perceptible one, a being it can rely on, of which it can say to itself: As imperfect as you now still are—this being within you is cleverer. It is at work within you; it can carry you to the point of attaining the greatest skill. It can grant you wings, enabling you to see an endless perspective spread out before you, leading into a limitless future. You will be capable of accomplishing what you cannot as yet accomplish, for within you there is something that is infinitely more than your “knowing” self. It is your loyal helper. You must only gain a relation to it. You have really only to be able to form a conception of this cleverer, wiser, more skillful being than you yourself are, residing within you. In calling to mind this discourse of the human soul with itself, this unconscious discourse with the more adroit part of the soul, we may feel reverberating in this fairy tale of “Rumpelstiltskin” what the soul experiences in the miller's daughter who cannot spin straw into gold, but finds in the little man a skillful, loyal helper. There, deep in the substrata of the soul—in pictures, the distinctive aura of which is not destroyed through knowing their origin—the profound inner life of soul is given. Or, let us take another fairy tale.—Please do not take it amiss, however, if I connect this with matters having an apparently personal tinge, though not at all meant in a personal sense. The essential point will become clear in adding a few observations. In my Esoteric Science you will find a description of world evolution. It is not my intention to talk specifically about this now—that can be left for another occasion. In this world evolution our earth is spoken of as having gone through certain stages as a planet in the cosmos, comparable to human lives that follow one upon the other. Just as the individual human being goes through lives that follow each other sequentially, so our earth has gone through various planetary life-stages, various incarnations. In spiritual science, we speak, for certain reasons, of the earth as having gone through a kind of “Moon” existence before beginning its “Earth” existence, and prior to this a kind of “Sun” existence. Thus, we may speak of a Sun-existence, a planetary predecessor existence of our Earth-existence, as having been present in a primeval past—an ancient Sun, with which the earth was still united. Then, in the course of evolution a splitting off of Sun and earth took place. From what had originally been “Sun,” the moon separated itself off as well, and our sun of today, which is not the original Sun, but only a piece of it, so to speak. Thus, we may speak, as it were, of the original Sun and of its successor, the sun of today. And we may also refer to the moon of today as a product of the old Sun. If spiritual scientific investigation follows the evolution of the earth retrospectively to where the second sun, the sun of today, developed as an independent cosmic body, it has to be said that at that time, of the creatures that might have been externally perceptible to the senses, among the animals, only those existed that had developed to the stage of the fishes. These things can all be looked up more precisely in Esoteric Science. They can be discovered only by means of spiritual scientific investigation. At the time they had been discovered and written down by me in EsotericScience, the fairy tale in question was quite unknown to me. That is the personal factor I should like to add here. I am able to establish with certainty that it was quite unknown to me, since I only later came across it in Wilhelm Wundt's Ethnic Psychology,2 whose sources I only then followed up further. Before briefly outlining the fairy tale, I should like to say one thing in advance: Everything the spiritual researcher is able to investigate in this way in the spiritual world—and the things just referred to do have to be investigated in the spiritual world, since they are otherwise no longer extant—everything investigated in this way presents a world with which the human soul is united even so. We are connected with this world in the deepest recesses of our souls. It is always present, indeed we unconsciously enter this spiritual world in normal life upon falling asleep. Our soul is united with it and has within it not only the soul's experiences during sleep, but also those relating to the whole of evolution referred to here. Were it not paradoxical, one would like to say: in the unconscious state, the soul knows of this and experiences itself in the ongoing stream issuing from the original Sun and subsequently from the daughter sun we now see shining in the sky, as well as from the moon, also a descendant of the original Sun. And in addition, the soul experiences the fact that it has undergone an existence, soul-spiritually, in which it was not yet connected with earthly matter, in which it could look down on earthly processes; for instance, on the time in which the fish species were the highest animal organisms, where the present sun, the present moon, arose and split off from the Earth. In unconscious regions, the soul is linked to these events. We shall now briefly follow the outline of a fairy tale found among primitive peoples, who tell us: There was once a man. As a human being, he was, however, actually of the nature of tree resin and could only perform his work during the night, since, had he carried out his work by day, he would have been melted by the Sun. One day, however, it happened that he did go out by day, in order to catch fish. And behold, the man who actually consisted of tree resin, melted away. His sons decided to avenge him. And they shot arrows. They shot arrows that formed certain figures, towering one over the other, so that a ladder arose reaching up to heaven. They climbed up this ladder, one of them during the day, the other during the night. One of them became the sun, and the other became the moon. It is not my habit to interpret such things in an abstract way and to introduce intellectual concepts. But it is a different matter to have a feeling for the results of investigation—that the human soul in its depths is united with what happens in the world, to be grasped only spiritually, that the human soul is connected with all this and has a hunger to savor its deepest unconscious experiences in pictures. In citing the fairy tale just outlined, one feels a reverberation of what the human soul experienced as the original Sun, and as the arising of sun and moon during the fish epoch of the Earth. It was in some respects a quite momentous experience for me—this is once more the personal note—when I came across this fairy tale, long after the facts I have mentioned stood printed in my Esoteric Science. Though the notion of interpreting the whole matter abstractly still does not occur to me, a certain kindred feeling arises when I consider world evolution in the context of another, parallel portrayal—when I give myself up to the wonderful pictures of this fairy tale. Or, as a further example, let us take a peculiar Melanesian fairy tale. Before speaking of this fairy tale, let us remind ourselves that, as shown by spiritual investigation, the human soul is also closely linked to prevailing occurrences and facts of the universe. Even if stated rather too graphically, it is still nonetheless true in a certain respect, from a spiritual scientific point of view, if we say: When the human soul leaves the physical body in sleep, it leads an existence in direct connection with the entire cosmos, feeling itself related to the entire cosmos. We may remind ourselves of the relationship of the human soul, or for example, of the human “I” with the cosmos—at least with something of significance in the cosmos. We direct our gaze to the plant world and tell ourselves: The plant grows, but it can only do so under the influence of the sun's light and warmth. We have before us the plant rooted in the earth. In spiritual science we say: the plant consists of its physical body and of the life-body which permeates it. But that does not suffice for the plant to grow and unfold itself. For that, the forces are required that work on the plant from the sun. If we now contemplate the human body while the human being sleeps, this sleeping human body is in a sense equivalent to a plant. As a sleeping body it is comparable to the plant in having the same potential to grow as the plant. However, the human being is emancipated from the cosmic order which envelops the plant. The plant has to wait for the sun to exert its influence on it, for the rising and setting of the sun. It is bound to the external cosmic order. The human being is not so bound. Why not? Because what spiritual science points out is in fact true: the human being exerts an influence from the “I”—outside the physical body in sleep—upon the plant-like physical body, equivalent to what the sun exerts on the plant. Just as the sun pours its light out over the plants, so does the human “I” pour its light over the now plant-like physical body when the human being sleeps. As the sun “reigns” over the plants, so the human “I” reigns, spiritually, over the plant-like sleeping physical body. The “I” of the human being is thus related to the sun-existence. Indeed, the “I” of the human being is itself a kind of “sun” for the sleeping human body, and brings about its enlivening during sleep, brings it about that those forces are replenished that have been used up in the waking state. If we have a feeling for this, then we recognize how the human “I” is related to the sun. Spiritual science shows us in addition that, just as the sun traverses the arc of heaven—I am of course speaking of the apparent movement of the sun—and in a certain respect the effect of its rays differs according to whether it stands in this or that constellation of the zodiac, so the human “I” also goes through various phases in its experience. Thus, from one phase it works in one way, from a different phase it works in another way on the physical body. In spiritual science one acquires a feeling for how the sun works differently onto the earth according to whether it does so, for example, from the constellation of Aries, or from the constellation of Taurus, and so on. For that reason, one does not speak of the sun in general, but of its effect in connection with the twelve signs of the zodiac—indicating the correspondence of the changing “I” with the changing activity of the sun. Let us now take everything that could only be sketched here, but which is developed further in Esoteric Science, as something to be gained as soul-spiritual knowledge. Let us regard it as what takes place in the depths of the soul and remains unconscious but takes place in such a way that it signifies an inner participation in the spiritual forces of the cosmos that manifest themselves in the fixed stars and planets. And let us compare all this, proclaimed by spiritual science as the secrets of the universe, with a Melanesian fairy tale, that I shall again outline only briefly: On a country road lies a stone. This stone is the mother of Quatl. And Quatl has eleven brothers. After the eleven brothers and Quatl have been created, Quatl begins to create the present world. In this world he created, a difference between day and night was still unknown. Quatl then learns that there is an island somewhere, on which there is a difference between day and night. He travels to this island and brings a few inhabitants from this island back to his country. And, by virtue of their influence on those in his country, they too come to experience the alternating states of sleeping and waking, and the rising and setting of the sun takes place for them as a soul experience. It is remarkable what reverberates once again in this fairy tale. Considering the fairy tale as a whole there re-echoes, with every sentence, so to speak, something of world secrets, something of what, in the sense of spiritual science, the soul experiences in its depths. One then has to say: The sources of fairy tale moods, of fairy tales generally, lie in hidden depths of the human soul. These fairy tales are presented in the form of pictures, since external happenings have to be made use of in order to provide what is to be spiritual nourishment for the hunger that wells up as an outcome of the soul's experiences. Though we are far removed from the actual experiences in question, we can sense how they reverberate in the fairy tale pictures. With this in mind, we need not wonder that the finest, most characteristic fairy tales are those handed down from former ages when people still had a certain clairvoyant consciousness and found easier access to the sources of these fairy tale moods. Further, it need not surprise us that in regions of the world where human beings stand closer to spirituality than do the souls of the Occident, for example in India, in the Orient in general, fairy tales can have a much more distinctive character. Neither need we be surprised that in the German fairy tales that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected in the form told them by relatives and others, often simple people, we come upon accounts reminiscent of the periods of European life in which the great heroic sagas arose. Fairy tales contain attributes found in the great heroic sagas. It need not surprise us to hear that it belatedly came to light that the most significant fairy tales are even older than the heroic sagas. Heroic sagas after all show human beings only at a particular age of life and in particular situations, while what lives in fairy tales is of a generally-human nature, accompanying human beings at every age, from their first to their last breath. It need not surprise us if the fairy tale also insistently depicts, for example, what we have referred to as a profound experience of the soul, the feeling of the soul's inadequacy on awakening in regard to the forces of Nature it helplessly faces and is only a match for, if it has the consolation of knowing at the same time: Within you, there is something that transcends your personal self, and makes you in a certain respect the victor once again over the forces of Nature. In sensing this mood, one has a feeling for why human beings so often find themselves up against giants in fairy tales. Why do these giants appear? Well, as an image, these giants arise as a matter of course from the whole tone of the soul in wanting to make its way into the body again in the morning, seeing itself confronted by the “giant” forces of Nature occupying the body. What the soul senses there as a battle, what it then feels is altogether real—not in rational terms, but as corresponds to depictions of the manifold battles of the human being with giants. When all this comes to meet it, it clearly senses how it possesses only one thing, its shrewdness, in this whole battle—in its stand in confronting giants. For, this entails the feeling: You could now reenter your body, but what are you, as against the immense forces of the universe! However, you do have something not there in these giants, and that is cunning—reason! This does in fact stand unconsciously before the soul, even if it has also to say to itself, that it can do nothing against the immense forces of the universe. We see how the soul transposes this literally into a picture in giving expression to the mood in question: A man goes along a country road and comes to an inn. In the inn he asks for milk-soup (blancmange). Flies enter the soup. He finishes eating the milk-soup, leaving the flies. Then he strikes the plate, counts the flies he has killed, and brags: “A hundred at one blow!” The innkeeper hangs a sign around his neck: “He has killed a hundred at one blow.” Continuing along the country road, this man comes to a different region. There a king looks out the window of his castle. He sees the man with the sign around his neck and says to himself: I could well use him. He takes him into his service and assigns him a definite task. He says to him: “You see, the problem is, whole packs of bears always come into my kingdom. If you have struck a hundred dead, then you can certainly also strike the bears dead for me.” The man says: “I am willing to do it!” But, until the bears are there, he wants a good wage and proper meals, for, having thought about it, he says to himself: If I can't do it, I shall at least have lived well until then.—When the time came, and the bears were approaching, he collected all kinds of food and various good things bears like to eat. Then he approached them and laid these things out. When the bears got there, they ate until they were full to excess, finally lying there as though paralyzed; and now he struck them dead one after the other. The king arrived and saw what he had accomplished. However, the man told him: “I simply had the bears jump over a stick and chopped off their heads at the same time!” Delighted, the king assigns him another task. He says to him: “Now the giants will soon also be coming into my land, and you must help me against them as well.” The man promised to do so. And when the time approached, he again took a quantity of provisions with him, including a lark and a piece of cheese. On actually encountering the giants, he first entered into a conversation with them about his strength. One of the giants said: “We shall certainly show you that we are stronger,” taking a stone and crushing it in his hand. Then he said to the man: “That is how strong we are! What can you do as compared to us?” Another giant took an arrow, shooting it so high that only after a long time did the arrow come down again and said: “That's how strong we are! What can you do as compared to us?” At this, the man who had killed a hundred at one blow said: “I can do all that and more!” He took a small piece of cheese and a stone, spreading the stone with cheese, and said to the giants: “I can squeeze water out of a stone!” And he squashed the cheese so that water squirted out of it. The giants were astonished at his strength in being able to squeeze water from a stone. Then the man took the lark and let it fly off, saying to the giants: “Your arrow came back down again, the one I have shot, however, goes up so high that it does not come back down at all!” For the lark did not return at all. At that, the giants were so amazed, they agreed among themselves that they would only be able to overcome him with cunning. They no longer thought of being able to overcome him with the strength of giants. Nonetheless, they did not succeed in outwitting him; on the contrary, he outwitted them. While they all slept, he put an inflated pig's bladder over his head, inside which there was some blood. The giants had said to themselves: Awake, we shall not be able to get the better of him, so we shall do it while he sleeps. They struck him while he slept, smashing the pig's bladder. Seeing the blood that spurted out, they thought they had finished him off. And they soon fell asleep. In the peaceful quiet that overcame them, they slept so soundly that he was able to put an end to them. Even though, like some dreams, the fairy tale ends here somewhat indefinitely and on an unsatisfactory note, we nonetheless have before us a portrayal of the battle of the human soul against the forces of Nature—first against the “bears,” then against the “giants.” But something else becomes evident in this fairy tale. We have the man who has “killed a hundred at one blow.” We have an echo of what lives at the deepest unconscious levels of the soul: the consolation in becoming aware of its own shrewdness over against these stronger, overwhelming forces. It is not a good thing when what has been presented artistically in pictures is interpreted abstractly. That is not at all what matters. On the other hand, nothing of the artistic form of the fairy tale is diminished if one has a feeling for the fact that the fairy tale is an after-echo of events taking place deep within the soul. These events are such that we can know a great deal about them, as much as one can come to know by means of spiritual investigation—yet, in immersing ourselves in fairy tales and experiencing them, they still remain original and elementary. In researching them, it is certainly agreeable to know that fairy tales present what the soul needs on account of its deepest experiences, as we have indicated. At the same time, no fairy tale mood is destroyed in arriving at a deeper recognition of the sources of subconscious life. Presented only abstractly, we find these sources are impoverished for our consciousness, whereas the fairy tale form is really the more comprehensive one for expressing the deepest experiences of the soul. It is then comprehensible that Goethe expressed in the significant and evocative pictures of the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily what he was abundantly able to experience, and which Schiller chose to express in abstract-philosophical concepts. Thus, despite having thought a great deal, Goethe wanted to say in pictures what he felt concerning the deepest underlying strata of human soul-life. And because the fairy tale relates in this way to the innermost soul, it is precisely the form most suited to the child. For it may be said of fairy tales that they have brought it about that what is most profound in spiritual life is expressed in the simplest possible form. In fact, one gradually comes to feel that in all conscious artistic life there is no greater art than that which completes the path from the uncomprehended depths of soul-life to the delightful, often playful pictures of the fairy tale. An art capable of expressing in the most self-evident form what is hard to comprehend is the greatest and most natural art, an art intimately related to the human being. And just because, in the case of the child, the essential human being is still united in an unspoilt way with the whole of existence, with the whole of life, the child especially needs the fairy tale as nourishment for its soul. What depicts spiritual powers can come alive more fully in the child. The childlike soul may not be enmeshed in abstract theoretical concepts if it is not to be obliterated. It has to remain connected with what is rooted in the depths of existence. Hence, we can do nothing of greater benefit for the soul of the child than in allowing what unites the human being with the roots of existence to act upon it. As the child still has to work creatively on its own physical formation, summoning the formative forces for its own growth, for the unfolding of its natural abilities, it senses wonderful soul nourishment in fairy tale pictures that connect it with the roots of existence. Since, even in giving themselves over to what is rational and intellectual, human beings can still never be wholly torn away from the roots of existence, they gladly turn again at every age to the fairy tale, provided they are of a sufficiently healthy and straightforward soul disposition. For there is no stage of life and no human situation that can estrange us altogether from what flows from fairy tales—in consequence of which we could cease having anything more to do with what is most profound in human nature or have no sense for what is so incomprehensible for the intellect, expressed in the self-evident, simple, primitive fairy tale and fairy tale mood. Hence, those who have concerned themselves for a long time with restoring to humanity the fairy tales that had been rather glossed over by civilization, individuals such as the Brothers Grimm, understandably had the feeling—even if they did not adopt a spiritual scientific view—that they were renewing something that belongs intimately to human nature. After an intellectual culture had done its part over a period of centuries to estrange the human soul, including the soul of the child, such collections of fairy tales as those of the Brothers Grimm have quite properly found their way again to all human beings receptive for such things. In this way they have become once more the common heritage of children's souls, indeed of all human souls. They will do so increasingly, the more spiritual science is not just taken as theory, but becomes an underlying mood of the soul, uniting it more and more in feeling with the spiritual roots of its existence.3 In this way, by means of the dissemination of spiritual science, what genuine fairy tale collectors, those truly receptive for fairy tales as well as those who present them have declared, will prove well-founded. This is what a certain individual, a true friend of fairy tales, often said in lectures I was able to hear.4 It is a wonderfully poetic utterance which at the same time summarizes what results from such spiritual scientific considerations as we have presented today. It may be formulated in words this man spoke—knowing as he did how to love fairy tales, collecting them, and appreciating them. He always liked to add the saying:
|
54. Inner Development
07 Dec 1905, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
I could only give you a few indications about that; however, we speak again about the other and deeper matters after Christmas. The one idea I wanted to wake is that the higher life develops not tumultuously but quite intimately, in the deepest soul, and that the great day when the soul awakes and enters the higher life really comes like the thief at night. |
54. Inner Development
07 Dec 1905, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
In a series of talks, I have spoken of the ideas about the supersensible world and its connection with the sensuous world. It is only a matter of course that the question appears repeatedly, where from does the knowledge of the supersensible world come? Today we want to deal with this question, or with other words, with the question of the inner development of the human being. Inner development of the human being is meant here in the sense that the human being advances to such abilities that he must acquire to himself if he wants to make that supersensible knowledge his own. Do not misunderstand the intention of this talk. This talk is remote from establishing rules or principles that have something to do with general human morality or with the demands, which belong to the general zeitgeist. I must note this expressly because over and over again in our time of equalisation where one does not accept any difference between human being and human being the misunderstanding appears, as if anybody who speaks of occultism establishes any general human demands, moral principles or the like which apply to everybody without distinction. This is not the case. This talk must not at all be confused with a talk on general principles of the theosophical movement. Occultism is unlike theosophy. The Theosophical Society has not only and indeed not exclusively the task to maintain occultism. It could be even possible that anybody who joins this Theosophical Society considers occultism as something completely unacceptable. Among those matters that are maintained in the Theosophical Society to which also a general ethics belongs is also occultism, which encompasses the knowledge of those principles of our existence that escape from the usual sensory observation in the everyday human area of experience. However, by no means the principles are those, which have nothing to do with this everyday experience. “Occult” means: concealed, mysterious. However, I emphasise again and again that occultism is something that needs certain preconditions. As incomprehensible as higher mathematics is for the usual farmer who has never heard of it, it is occultism for many people of our time. However, occultism stops being occult if one has taken possession of it. With it, I have strictly limited the field of this talk. Thus, nobody can object—and this must expressly be emphasised after the millenniums-old experiences and often performed experiments—that the demands which occultism puts up could not be fulfilled, they would contradict a general human culture. The fulfilment of it is required from nobody. If, however, anybody comes to me and wants to get the convictions which occultism conveys, but refuses to deal with occultism, he is in the very same situation as the schoolchild who wants to make a glass rod electric, but refuses to rub it. It will not become electric without friction. Somebody who behaves like that who has to make any objection to the methods of occultism. Nobody is asked to become occultist; everybody must come voluntarily to occultism. Someone who objects that we do not need occultism does not need to deal with it. Occultism does not appeal to the general humanity today. Moreover, in our present civilisation, it is exceptionally difficult to fulfil the demands of a life, which makes the supersensible world accessible. Two preconditions are completely absent in our civilisation. The first demand is the isolation, that which esoteric science calls the higher human loneliness. The second one is the overcoming of an egoism that has risen high concerning the innermost soul qualities, in large part unaware to humanity. The lack of these preconditions makes the developmental way of the inner life almost impossible today, because life is dispersed more and more, demands external sensuousness. In no other culture, the human beings lived in the exterior in this way as just in ours. Now I ask you again not to take anything that I say as criticism but only as a characteristic. Of course, someone speaking that way as I do today knows exactly that this cannot be different, that just the great advantages and significant achievements of our time are based on these qualities. However, that is why our time is without any supersensible knowledge and without any influence of supersensible knowledge on our culture. In other cultures—and there are some—the human being is able to maintain his inner life more and to withdraw from the effects of the outer life. Then, within such cultures, that prospers which one calls inner life in the higher sense. In the Eastern cultures, there is something that one calls yoga and those who live according to the rules of yoga yogis. Therefore, a yogi is someone who aims at the higher spiritual science, but only, after he has looked for a master of the supersensible for himself. Nobody looks for yoga in another way than under the tutelage of a master, a guru. If he has found him, he must use a big part of the day regularly, not irregularly, to live completely in his soul. All forces that the yogi has to develop are already in his soul, they are there as certain as it is true that the electricity in the glass rod appears by friction. It is true that no one knows on his own how to cause these forces as also no one knows on his own that he can make the glass rod electric by friction. One has to use the observations made in millenniums and the esoteric methods developed thereby to evoke the soul forces. This is very difficult in our time, which demands from every human being because of the struggle for existence that he splits himself. He does not come to the big inner contemplation, not even to a concept of contemplation, which one had in yoga. No consciousness is there of the deep loneliness which the yogi must search for. He has to repeat the same thing rhythmically, even if only for a short time, with tremendous regularity every day, with complete seclusion of anything that lives in him otherwise. It is necessary and essential that all life, which surrounds us, dies down before the yogi that his senses become unreceptive to any impression of the outside world. The yogi has to make himself blind and deaf to the environment for the time, which he dictates to himself. He must be so composed—and he has to acquire the practise in this contemplation—that one may shoot a gun beside him, and he is not disturbed directing his attention upon his inner life. In addition, he has to become free from any memory of the everyday life. Consider now how exceptionally hard these preconditions are to be produced in our civilisation, how little one has an idea of such isolation, of such spiritual loneliness. You have to achieve all that on one condition, namely on that never to lose the harmony, the complete balance compared with the outside world in any way. This is exceptionally easy with such a deep sinking in your inside. What settles down deeper and deeper in your inside has to produce the harmony with the outside world even more distinctly at the same time. Nothing that is reminiscent of estrangement, of distance from the outer practical life is allowed to appear with you, otherwise you go astray, and otherwise, perhaps, you are not able to distinguish your higher life from insanity to a certain degree. It is really a kind of insanity if the inner life loses its relations to the outer one. Imagine once—to give you an example—you are clever concerning our earthly conditions; you have all experience and wisdom that can be collected on earth. You fall asleep in the evening, but you wake in the morning not on the earth, but on Mars. However, on Mars are conditions quite different from those on the earth. Any science, which you have collected on earth, benefits you by no means. There is no longer any harmony between your inner life and that, which takes action outside you. Hence, you would be probably put into a Mars lunatic asylum already after an hour because you cannot find the way in the new conditions. To such a road, anybody can be easily directed who loses the connection with the outside world developing his inner life. One strictly has to pay attention to it that this does not happen. All that causes big difficulties in our civilisation. The other obstacle is a kind of egoism concerning inner soul qualities, an account of which the present humanity normally gives to itself. This is tightly connected with the spiritual development of the human being. For it belongs to the preconditions that one does not strive for it from egoism. Who strives for it from egoism cannot come far. However, our time is selfish until the inside of the human soul. You can hear repeatedly: on the other hand, how useful are these teachings to me which occultism propagates if I myself cannot experience them? Who starts from this condition and also does not desist from it, can hardly get a really higher development, because the most intimate consciousness of human community belongs to the higher development, so that it is irrelevant whether I myself or another experience this or that. Hence, I must meet somebody whose development is higher than mine is with boundless love and full trust. First, I have to bring myself to this consciousness, to the consciousness of infinite trust towards my fellow man if he says I have experienced this and this. Such trust must be a condition of the community life, and wherever such occult abilities are used more extensively, there it is unlimited trust; there one has the consciousness that the human being is a personality in which a higher individuality lives. The basis is trust and confidence at first because we are searching not always only in ourselves for our higher selves, but also in our fellow men. Everybody who lives round us is according to his inner nature in undivided unity with us. As long as it depends on my lower self, I am separated from other human beings. However, if it concerns my higher self—and only this can ascend to the supersensible world—, then I am no longer separated from the fellow men, I am a uniform being with my fellow men, then is that who speaks to me of the higher truth: I myself. I must drop this difference between him and me completely, I must overcome the feeling completely that he has something over me. Try to settle down in this feeling completely, so that it penetrates till the thinnest little fibres of the human soul and any egoism disappears, and the other who is farther than you stands like your own self before you, then you have understood one of the preconditions that are necessary to wake the higher spiritual life. You can hear just where the instructions of the occult life are given—often very incorrectly and erroneously—: the higher self lives in the human being, he only needs to let his inside speak and the highest truth is revealed.—Nothing is more correct on the one hand and, on the other hand, more infertile than this assertion. If the human being tries once to let his inner human being speak, he will see that as a rule his lower self speaks, even if he imagines ever so much that his higher self appears. We do not find the higher self in ourselves at first. We have to look for it outside ourselves first. From anybody who is farther advanced we can learn a piece, because we keep it in sight as it were. We can never profit anything from our own selfish ego for our higher self. Where anybody is who has farther advanced than I have, there I am in the future. According to my disposition, I really bear the seed in myself of that which he is. However, first the ways to Mount Olympus must be illumined, so that I can pursue them. A feeling is the basic condition of any esoteric development, you may believe it or not—every practical occultist who has experience confirms it to you—, a feeling which is mentioned in the different religions. The Christian religion calls it with the known sentence that one must understand as an occultist completely: “Whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it” (Mark 10:15, Matthew 18:3). Only that understands the sentence who has learnt reverence in the highest sense of the word. Assume once that you would have heard of an adorable person in your earliest youth, a personality by which in you the highest idea has been woken in a direction, and the opportunity is offered to you to get to know this personality closer. A holy shyness of this personality lives in you during the day, which should bring you the moment where you see him in person for the first time. Standing before the door of this person, you can have the feeling to be afraid to touch the handle and to open the door. If you look to such an adorable personality this way, you have understood the feeling approximately which also Christianity means if it says that one should become like the little children to participate in the kingdom of God. It depends not so much on whether that to whom the feeling is directed deserves it in full measure, but it depends on the fact that we have the ability to look up reverentially at something from our inside. This is the important aspect of admiration that you yourselves are drawn up to that at whom you look up. The feeling of admiration is the raising force, the magnetic force that pulls us up to the higher spheres of the supersensible life. This is the principle of the occult world that everybody who looks for higher life has to write into his soul as with golden letters. From this basic mood of the soul, the development has to begin. Without this feeling, one can generally attain nothing. Then that who looks for inner development must be clear in his mind that he does something tremendous concerning the human being. What he looks for is nothing more and nothing less than a new birth, namely in the proper sense. The higher soul of the human being should be born. As well as the human being was born with his first birth from deep inner reasons of existence as he came to the sunlight, somebody who looks for inner development steps out of the sunlight, out of that which he can experience in the sensory world, to a higher spiritual light. Something is born in him that rests in the usual human being, who represents the mother, as deeply as the child in the mother before it is born. Who is not aware of the far-reaching consequences of this fact does not know what is called occult or esoteric development. The higher soul that is deep in the whole human nature at first and is interwoven with it is got out. If the human being stands in the everyday life before us, his lower and higher natures are closely related, and this is a piece of luck in the everyday life. Somebody, who lives among us, would perhaps bring evil, bad qualities to light if he followed his lower nature, but within him, mixed with the lower nature, the higher one lives which keeps it in check. You can compare this mixture with a mixture of a yellow liquid and a blue one in a glass, resulting in a green liquid in which we can no longer distinguish yellow and blue. The lower nature is mixed with the higher one in the human being that way and both are not to be distinguished. As you can extract the blue liquid from the green liquid by chemical means, so that only the yellow fluid remains, and the uniform green is separated into a duality, in blue and yellow, you separate the lower nature from the higher one by means of the esoteric development. You pull the lower nature out of the body like the sword from the scabbard, which remains alone then for itself. This lower nature comes out in such a way that it appears almost nightmarish. When it was still mixed with the higher nature, nothing of it was to be noticed. Now, however, when it is separated, all evil, bad qualities come out. Human beings who had seemed benevolent before often become quarrelsome and envious. These qualities sat already in their lower nature, however, were controlled by the higher one. You can observe this with many people who are led on anomalous ways. The human being becomes a liar very easily when he enters the supersensible world. He easily loses the ability to distinguish true from wrong. It belongs inevitably to the esoteric training that the strictest training of the character is paralleled by it. What history tells of the saints as their temptations is not a legend but literal truth. Someone who wants to develop in any way to the higher world is easily exposed to this temptation if he has not developed the strength of character and the highest morality in himself to be able to hold down everything that approaches him. Not only that desire and passions grow, this is not even so much the case, but—and this seems miraculous at first—also the opportunities increase. Like by a miracle, opportunities of the evil, which were concealed to him before, lie in wait of someone who ascends to the higher world. In every fact of life, a demon lies in wait for him which tries to lead him astray. What he has not seen once, he sees now. The splitting of his nature conjures up such opportunities as it were everywhere from the secret sites of life. Therefore, the so-called white magic—that school of esoteric development which leads the human being to the higher worlds in good, real and true way—demands a particular development of character as essential. Every practical esoteric says to you that nobody should dare to pass that narrow gate—one calls the entrance to the esoteric development that way—without practicing these qualities repeatedly. They are a necessary pre-school of the esoteric life. The first ability that the human being must develop is to separate the unimportant from the significant, the transient from the imperishable on all his ways through life. One can demand this easily, but it is often difficult to carry it out. It is, as Goethe says, indeed, easy, however, the easy is difficult. Have a look, for example, at a plant or at a thing. You learn to recognise that everything has an important and an unimportant side and the human being mostly is interested in the unimportant, in the relation of the thing to him or in a subordinated quality. Someone who wants to become an esoteric has to get into the habit of seeing and looking for a being in everything. Seeing a watch, for example, he has to be interested in its principles. He must be able to disassemble it in the minutest detail and develop a feeling of its principles. Suppose further that a mineralogist looks at a rock crystal. He gets already by an external view to a significant knowledge of the crystal. However, the esoteric must take a stone in hand and can vividly feel what is indicated in the following monologue: in certain respect, you are below humanity, but in certain respect, you outrank humanity by far. You are below humanity because you cannot conceive ideas of human beings because you do not feel. You cannot imagine, you cannot think and you do not live, but you have something over humanity, you are chaste in yourself, you do not have any wish and desire. Every human being, every living being has wishes, cravings, desires; you do not have them. You are perfect and contented with that which was bestowed on you, a model for the human being with which he has still to connect his other qualities. If the esoteric can feel this rather deeply, he has grasped the significant that the stone can say to him. Thus, the human being can take something important from everything. If this has become a habit that he separates the significant from the unimportant, then he has appropriated another of the feelings, which the esoteric must have. Then he must connect his own life with the significant. The human beings are deceived in that in particular very easily in our time. The human beings believe very easily that the place on which they stand is not commensurate with them. How often are people inclined to say, my destiny has put me in a place in which I do not fit. I am, we say, for example, postal clerk. If I were put to another place, I could provide high ideas to the people; I could give great teachings and so on. The mistake of these human beings is that they do not connect their lives with the significant of their occupations. If you see anything significant in me because I can talk to the people here, you do not see the significant in your own life and occupation. If the postmen did not carry away the letters, the whole exchange of letters would come to a standstill, a lot of work, which has already been performed by others, would be in vain. Hence, everybody is of extraordinary importance for the whole on his post, and nobody is higher than the other is. Christ tried to indicate this the nicest in the downright marvellous way in the thirteenth chapter of the St. John's Gospel with the words: “a servant is not greater than his master, nor a messenger than the one who sent him” (13:16). These words were spoken, after the master had washed the disciples' feet. With it, he wanted to say, what would I be without my disciples? They must be there, so that I can be there in the world, and I have to pay tribute to them degrading myself before them and washing their feet.—This is one of the most significant hints to the feeling, which the esoteric must have towards the significant. One is not allowed to confuse the externally significant with the internally significant. One has to pay strict attention to that. Then we must develop a number of qualities. First, we have to become masters of our thoughts, of the chains of our thoughts in particular. One calls that the control of thoughts. Consider once how in the human soul the thoughts are bustling about, how they are wandering around aimlessly: here appears an impression, there another, and every single one changes the thought. It is not true that we control the thoughts; rather the thoughts control us completely. However, we must advance so far that we are engrossed in a certain thought during a certain time of the day and say to ourselves, no other thought is allowed to enter my soul and to control me.—With it, we ourselves lead the reins of the thought life for some time. The second quality is that we behave in a similar way to our actions, that is that we control our actions. It is necessary that we reach so far at least to commit such actions now and again to which we are caused by nothing that comes from outside. Nothing that is induced by our state, our occupation, and our position leads us deeper into the higher life. The higher life depends on such intimacies, for example that we make the decision to do something for the first time, something that arises from our very own initiative, and even if it is a quite unimportant fact. All other actions contribute nothing to the higher life. The following, the third quality is endurance. The human beings alternate between joy and grief, once they are on top of the sky, then they are down in the dumps. Thus, the human beings drift on the waves of life, of joy and grief. However, they have to attain equanimity, calmness. The biggest grief, the biggest joys must not confuse them, they must stand firm, get endurance. The fourth quality is the understanding of any being. What it means to understand any being is nowhere better expressed than in a legend about Christ Jesus, which has been preserved to us not in the Gospels, but in a Persian story. Jesus walked with his disciples overland, and they found a rotting dog on the way. The animal looked awkward. Jesus stopped and glanced admiring at it, saying, “However, what nice teeth has this animal.” Jesus spotted the beautiful of the awkward. Strive for approaching the marvellous everywhere in such a way, and then you see something in everything outdoors to which you can say yes. Make it like Christ who admired the beautiful teeth of the dead dog. This direction leads to great tolerance and to the understanding of anything and any being. The fifth quality is the complete impartiality towards everything new that faces us. Most people judge something new according to something old that they know already. If anybody comes to say anything to you, you immediately answer: I am of another opinion about that.—However, we are not allowed to confront a communication, which we get with our opinion immediately, we must be on the lookout for something new that we can learn. We can still learn something from a little child. Even if one is the wisest human being, he must be inclined to restrain his judgment and to listen to others. We must develop this ability of listening to anybody, because it enables us to face the things with maximal impartiality. In esotericism, one calls this “confidence,” and this is the strength to maintain the impressions, which the new makes on us, by that which we hold against it. The sixth quality is that which everybody receives by itself after he has developed the cited qualities. This is the inner harmony. The human being who has the other qualities has the inner harmony. Then it is also necessary that the human being who looks for the esoteric development has developed the feeling of freedom to the highest degree. This feeling of freedom which enables him to look for the centre of his being in himself and to stand firm on own feet so that he does not need to ask anybody what to do, but that he stands straight and acts freely. This is also something that one has to acquire. If the human being has developed these qualities in himself, he is above any danger that could cause the splitting of his nature in him. Then the qualities of his lower nature can no longer work on him, and then he can no longer lose his way. Hence, these qualities must develop very exactly. The esoteric life comes then whose expression causes a certain rhythmisation of life. The term rhythmisation of life expresses the corresponding ability. If you look at nature, you find a certain rhythm in it. You will consider it as a matter of course that the violet blossoms annually at the same time in the spring that the grain on the field, the grapes on the grapevine become ripe at the same time. This rhythmical succession of the phenomena is found everywhere outside in nature. Everywhere is rhythm; everywhere is repetition in regular sequence. If you go up to the higher beings which, you see this rhythmical sequence more and more decreasing. You also see with the animal, still in a higher degree, all qualities rhythmically arranged. At certain time of the year, the animal gets particular functions and abilities. The higher the being is developed, the more life is given in own hands of the being, the more this rhythm ceases. You must know that the human body is only one of the members of his being. Then the etheric body comes, the astral body, and finally, the higher members, which form the basis of those. The physical body is highly subject to the rhythm to which the entire external nature is subjected. As the plant life and animal life proceed in their external form rhythmically, the life of the physical body proceeds. The heart beats rhythmically, the lung breathes rhythmically and so on. Everything proceeds so rhythmically because it is ordered by higher powers, by the wisdom of the world, by that which the scriptures call the Holy Spirit. The higher bodies, and in particular the astral body, are left, I would like to say, by these higher spiritual powers in a certain way and have lost their rhythm. Can you deny that your activity is irregular concerning wishes, desires, and passions that it cannot be compared with the regularity that prevails in the physical body? Who learns the rhythm of the physical nature finds the model of spirituality in it. If you look at the heart, this marvellous organ with the regular beat and its implanted wisdom, and compare it to the desires and passions of the astral body that release all possible actions against the heart, then you recognise how disadvantageously the passion works on its regular way. However, the functions of the astral body must become as rhythmical as the performances of the physical body are. I want to state something that will seem absurd to most people, namely concerning the fasting. We have completely lost the consciousness of the importance of fasting. However, from the point of view of the rhythmisation of our astral body, fasting is something exceptionally meaningful. What is fasting? It means to control the desire of eating and to eliminate the astral body concerning the desire of eating. He who fasts eliminates the astral body and has no appetite. This is in such a way, as if you switch off a force in a machine. Then the astral body sleeps, and the rhythms of the physical body and its implanted wisdom work on the astral body and make it rhythmic. As well as the seal is imprinted by a signet, the harmony of the physical body is imprinted in the astral body and it would be transmitted much more permanently if it were not always made irregular by the desires, passions and wishes, also by spiritual desires and wishes. The modern human being needs more than in former times to bring in rhythm to his entire higher life. Just as God planted rhythm into the physical body, the human being must make his astral body rhythmic. The human being must dictate the course of the day to himself; arrange it for the astral body in such a way as the spirit of nature arranges it for the lower realms. Early in the morning, at a particular time, one must do a spiritual exercise, at another time, which must be again observed strictly, another exercise, in the evening another exercise again. These spiritual exercises must not be chosen arbitrarily, but must be suitable to the continuing development of the higher life. This is a kind to take charge of life and to control it. Determine an hour in the morning where you concentrate. You must observe this hour. There you have to produce a kind of calm, so that the great esoteric master can wake in you. There you have to meditate on big contents of thought, which have nothing to do with the outside world, and to liven these contents of thought up in you. A short time is enough, maybe a quarter of an hour, even five minutes if one does not have more time. However, it is worthless and useless if one exercises irregularly. If one exercises regularly, so that the activity of the astral body becomes regular like a clock, then these exercises have value. The astral body gets another appearance if you exercise regularly. Sit down in the morning and exercise; the forces develop which I described to you. However, it must happen regularly because the astral body expects that the same is carried out with it at the same time, and it gets into a mess if it does not happen. One must have a mind to exercise regularly at least. If you make your life rhythmic in such a way, you perceive the results in not too long a time, namely the spiritual life, which is hidden to the human being at first, becomes apparent to some extent. As a rule, the human life changes between four states. The first state is the perception of the outside world. You look with the senses and perceive the outside world. The second state is that which we can call imagination which is somewhat related to the dream life, even belongs to it. There the human being is rooted not in the surroundings, but is detached from them, there he has no realities before him, memories at the most. The third state is the dreamless sleep. There the human being has no consciousness of his ego, and the fourth state is that in which the human being lives in his memory. This is different from perception; this is something abstract, spiritual. Had the human being no memory, he could not get any spiritual development generally. Inner life starts developing by means of tranquillity and meditation. The human being notices then eventually that he is no longer dreaming chaotically, but that he dreams in extremely significant way and that to him strange things manifest, which he recognises gradually as manifestations of spiritual truths. Of course, one can easily raise the trivial objection: all that is just dreamt, what does this concern to us?—However, if anybody invented the dirigible airship in his dreams and carried out it, this dream would just have revealed the truth. Thus, an idea can be grasped still in a way different from the usual, and then the truth of it must be found in the realisation. We have to be convinced of its inner truth from the outside. The next stage of the spiritual life is that where we grasp truth using our own qualities and direct our dreams consciously. If we start directing the dreams regularly, we are on that level where truth becomes transparent to us. One calls the first stage the material knowledge where the object must be there. The other stage is the imaginative knowledge. One develops this by meditating, organising life rhythmically. It is laborious to gain it. If it is obtained, the time also comes when there is no longer any difference between the perception in the usual life and the perception in the supersensible. If we live among the things of the everyday life, in the sensuous world, and change our spiritual state, we experience the spiritual supersensible world perpetually if we have exercised enough in this way. This is the case, as soon as we are able to become blind and deaf compared with the sensory world, to remember nothing of the everyday life and still to have a spiritual life in us. Then our dream life starts becoming conscious. If we are able to pour something of it in our everyday life, then also that quality appears which makes the spiritual qualities of the beings round us perceptible. Then we do no longer see the outside of the things only, but then we also see the inside, the concealed essence of the things, the plants, the animals, and the human beings. I know that most people say: these are other things.—This is quite right; these are always things quite unlike those, which the human being sees, who do not have such senses. The third state is usually completely empty, but starts to be animated if the continuity of consciousness occurs. The continuity comes completely by itself, and then the human being does no longer sleep unconsciously. He experiences the supersensible world during the time when he sleeps otherwise. What does sleep consist of, otherwise? The physical body lies in the bed and the astral body lives in the supersensible world. In this supersensible world, you are strolling. As a rule, the human being of the present disposition cannot go far away from his body. If anyone has now developed organs of the astral body, strolling during sleep, by the rules which spiritual science gives, he starts realising during sleep. The physical body would be blind and deaf if it had no eyes and ears, and the astral body that strolls at night is blind and deaf because it still has no eyes and ears. However, these develop by meditation; it is the means of forming its organs. This meditation must then be performed regularly. It is performed in such a way that the body of the human being is the mother and the spirit of the human being is the father. The body of the human being, as it stands physically before us, is in every member, which it shows to us, a mystery, namely in such a way that any member belongs in certain but concealed way to a part of the astral body. The esoteric knows these matters. He knows, for example, where to the point between the eyebrows belongs in the physical body. It belongs to a certain organ in the astral organism. While the spiritual scientist indicates how to direct your thoughts, feelings and sensations to the point between the eyebrows, you connect something that develops in the physical body with the corresponding part of the astral body and you get a certain sensation in your astral body. However, it must happen regularly, and one must know how. Then the astral body starts being structured. It develops from a lump to the organism in which the organs form. I have described the astral senses in the magazine Lucifer-Gnosis. One also calls them lotus flowers. These lotus flowers develop using certain formulae. If they have developed, the human being is able to perceive the spiritual world. This is the same world, which he enters when he walks through the gate of death. The saying by Hamlet is then wrecked that from that unknown land no traveller has come back. You can go or, better said, you can slip from the sensuous world into the supersensible world, and live here and there. This is no life in a cloud-cuckoo-land, but a life in that area which only makes the life in our area explicable and clear. As well as a usual human being who has not studied the principles of electricity goes into an electrically powered factory, sees the miraculous activities and does not understand them, he also does not understand the activities in the spiritual world. The ignorance of the visitor of this factory exists as long as he does not know the principles of electricity. Thus, the human being is also ignorant in the fields of the spiritual, as long as he does not know the principles of the spiritual. There is nothing in our world that does not depend on the spiritual world wherever one goes. Everything that surrounds us here is an external expression of the spiritual world. There is no material. Every material is compressed spirit. To somebody who looks into the spiritual world, the whole material, sensuous world, the world generally spiritualises itself. As the ice melts before the sun to water, everything sensuous melts to something spiritual before the soul, which looks into the spiritual world. The primal ground of the world reveals itself bit by bit before the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear. In reality, this life, which the human being gets to know in this way, is the spiritual life that the human being has already led inside perpetually about which he knows nothing because he does not know himself until he has developed the organs for the higher world. Imagine once that you would be a human being with the qualities, which you have now, however, you would have no senses. You would know nothing about the world round you, you would have no understanding of the physical body, and, nevertheless, you would belong to the physical world Thus, the human soul belongs to the spiritual world, however, it does not know it because it does not hear and see. As our body is taken from the forces and materials of the physical world, our soul is taken from the forces and materials of the spiritual world. We do not recognise ourselves in ourselves, but only in our surroundings. As true as you cannot see the heart and brain, without perceiving them with your fellow men by your senses—even with the help of the X-rays your eyes can only see the heart—, it is true that you cannot see or hear your own soul, without recognising them by the spiritual senses in the environment. You can recognise yourselves only by your environment. There is no inside knowledge in reality, no introspection, there is only a knowledge, a revelation by organs of the physical as well as of the spiritual life around us. We belong to the worlds around us, to the physical, astral, and spiritual worlds. We learn from the physical world, if we have physical organs and from the spiritual world, from all souls if we have soul organs, spiritual organs. There is no other knowledge than world knowledge. It is idle and empty tranquillity if the human being is brooding in himself and believes to be able to reach anything by mere introspection. The human being finds God in himself if he wakes the divine organs in himself and then finds his higher divine self in his environment, as he can only find his lower self in the surroundings using his eyes and ears. We understand ourselves as physical beings by the contact with the sensory world, and we understand ourselves in a spiritual respect while we develop spiritual senses in ourselves. Developing the inside means opening ourselves to the divine life in the outside world round us. You understand now why it is necessary that someone who ascends to the higher world experiences an infinite consolidation of his character first. The human being can get to know by himself at first how the world is because his senses are already opened. For a benevolent divine spirit that had seen and heard in the physical world stood beside the human being aeons ago, before he could see and hear, and opened his eyes and ears. Just from such beings, the human being has to learn to see spiritually, from the beings, which are already able to what he has to learn. We must have a guru who says to us how to develop our organs who says to us what he did to develop the organs. Who wants to instruct has to acquire a basic quality: absolute veracity, and this is also a main demand, which must be made on the student. Nobody is allowed to be trained as an esoteric, unless he has acquired this basic quality of absolute veracity before. Concerning the sensuous experiences, one can examine what is said. However, if I tell you anything of the spiritual world, you must have confidence because you are not yet so far that you can check it. Who wants to be a guru must have become so true that it is impossible for him to take such statements slightly with regard to the spiritual world and the spiritual life. The sensuous world immediately corrects the mistakes, which we do concerning this world, however, in the spiritual world, we must have that guideline in ourselves, we must be rigorously trained, so that we are not forced to control by the outside world, but have the control in ourselves. We can only acquire this control, while we appropriate the most rigorous veracity already here in the world. Therefore, the Theosophical Society also had to accept the principle: no law above truth, when it began revealing some elementary teachings of esotericism to the world. A few understand this principle. Most people are content with it if they can say to themselves, I am aware that it is true, and if it is wrong, they say, I have erred. The esoteric is not allowed to insist on his subjective honesty. There he is on the wrong track. He must always comply with the facts in the outside world and he must regard an experience, which speaks against it as a mistake, as an error. The esoteric is no longer responsible or not. He must absolutely harmonise with the facts of life. He must start feeling responsible in the strictest sense of any statement, which he makes. Then one educates himself to the unconditional assurance that that must have for himself and others who wants to be a spiritual guide. Thus, you see that I had to indicate—we have to speak about this subject once again to add the higher parts—a number of qualities and procedures. They seem to you too intimate to speak about them with others, every soul has to sort them for itself and they may seem to you inappropriate to attain the great aim, which should be attained, namely the entrance of the supersensible world. That will absolutely arrive at the entrance who walks on the way, which I have characterised. When? About that, one of the most superior members of the theosophical movement, our long since deceased member Subba Rao (Tallapragada S. R., 1856-1890), appropriately expressed himself. He answered to the question, how long it lasts: seven years, maybe also seven times seven years, maybe also seven incarnations, maybe also only seven hours.—It completely depends on that which the person brings into life along with him. A person may face us, who is apparently quite silly who has brought a higher life along with him, which is concealed now and must only be got out. Today, most human beings are farther advanced in esoteric relation than it seems, and this would become known to many people if our material conditions and our material time did not strike back so much into the inner soul life. A big percentage of modern humanity advanced rather far in earlier times. It depends on different matters whether that which is in the human being comes out. However, one can give some help. Imagine that a human being faces me. In his former incarnation he was a far advanced individuality, however, he has an undeveloped brain now. An undeveloped brain may sometimes conceal great spiritual talents. However, if one teaches him the usual profane abilities, it is possible that also the inner spiritual ones come out. However, it does not depend only on this, but also on the surroundings in which the person lives. In quite significant way, the human being is a reflection of his surroundings. Assume that a human being is a highly developed personality, but lives in surroundings, which only wake and form certain prejudices in him that work so vigorously that the higher disposition cannot come out. If such a human being does not find anybody who gets out it, then it just remains concealed in him. I could only give you a few indications about that; however, we speak again about the other and deeper matters after Christmas. The one idea I wanted to wake is that the higher life develops not tumultuously but quite intimately, in the deepest soul, and that the great day when the soul awakes and enters the higher life really comes like the thief at night. The development of the higher life leads the human being into a new world, and after he has entered this new world, he sees the other side of existence, so to speak, then that presents itself to him, which was hidden to him before. Everybody should say that to himself, perhaps, not everybody is able to do this, maybe only a few are able. However, this should not discourage him from entering that way which at least is open to everybody to hear something of the higher worlds. The human being is destined to live in community, and who separates himself cannot get to spiritual life. However, it is a seclusion in the higher sense if I say, I do not believe this, this is not related to me, this may have validity for the other life; this does not apply to the esoteric. The esoteric has the principle to regard the other human beings as a revelation of his own higher self because he knows then that he has to find the others in himself. A subtle difference exists between both sentences “find the others in yourself” and “find yourself in the others.” That is in the higher sense: you are that. In the highest sense, it means, you recognise yourself in the world and understand the word of the poet, which I quoted some weeks ago in another connection: “Somebody was successful to lift the veil of the goddess of Sais.—But what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—his self!” You do not find true self-knowledge in your selfish inside but unselfishly in the world. |
36. Collected Essays from “Das Goetheanum” 1921–1925: The Goetheanum in Its Ten Years
Rudolf Steiner |
---|
On this occasion, the distinguished English educationalist decided to invite English teachers to visit the Goetheanum during the Christmas holidays. Together with a number of teachers from the Stuttgart Waldorf School, I was invited to speak again in the hall of the south wing about pedagogy, education and teaching practice. |
36. Collected Essays from “Das Goetheanum” 1921–1925: The Goetheanum in Its Ten Years
Rudolf Steiner |
---|
IThe remains of the Goetheanum now cover the Dornach hill. Its construction was the result of an initiative by members of the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy is the name I used when, twenty years ago in Berlin, I gave a lecture cycle on the world view that I believe is a direct continuation of Goethe's way of thinking. I chose the name in memory of a book by the Herbartian Robert Zimmermann, “Umriß einer Anthroposophie” (Outline of an Anthroposophy), which appeared decades ago. The content of this book, however, has nothing to do with what I presented as “anthroposophy”. It was modified Herbartian philosophy in the most abstract form. I wanted to use the word to express a world view that, through the application of the spiritual organs of perception of the human being, brings about the same knowledge of the spiritual world as natural science brings about through the sensory organs of perception of the physical. About a year and a half before the lecture cycle mentioned above, I had already given lectures on another area of this anthroposophical world view at the invitation of Countess and Count Brockdorff in the “Theosophical Library” in Berlin at the time. The content of these lectures is published in my book “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life”. As a result of these lectures I was invited to join the Theosophical Society. I accepted this invitation with the intention of never advocating anything but the content of what had presented itself to me as the anthroposophical world view. It was always my view that I should lecture to all people who wanted to hear me, regardless of the name of the party under which they had joined together in any group, or whether they came to my lectures without any such preconception. At the same time that I was invited to join the Theosophical Society, a number of members of that society founded a German section of it. I was invited to become its General Secretary. Despite serious misgivings, I accepted. I did not change my intention to present the Anthroposophical worldview to the world. What I myself call “Theosophy” is clearly evident from my book “Theosophy”, which I wrote shortly afterwards. This Theosophy emerges as a special field of Anthroposophy. At the same time that the members of the Theosophical Society were inaugurating the German section in Berlin with speeches by Annie Besant, I was giving the series of lectures on anthroposophy that I have just mentioned. I was now invited to give lectures to members of the Theosophical Society quite often. But basically, from the very beginning of this activity, I was opposed by those members of the Theosophical Society who were dogmatically attached to the teachings of some of the older leaders of that society. The circle of those personalities who found something in the Anthroposophical worldview increasingly formed itself as an independent one. In 1913, these leaders expelled them from the Theosophical Society when I called the consequences drawn from the teachings of these leaders and presented to the world absurd and declared that I did not want to have anything to do with such absurdities. The Anthroposophical Society was founded in 1912 under the influence of these events. With the help of those personalities who later held leading positions in the Society, I was able to add the performance of “mysteries” to my lecturing activities even before that. As early as 1907, the anthroposophically oriented members in Munich performed Schuré's adaptation of the Eleusinian mystery at the Theosophical Congress. In 1909, he presented the play “Children of Lucifer” by the same author, which was followed by the presentation of “The Children of Lucifer” by the same author in Munich in 1909. As a result, in the following years, 1910-1913, my four own, very modern mystery dramas were performed for the members of the anthroposophical circle, also in Munich. This expansion of anthroposophical activity into the field of art was a natural consequence of the nature of anthroposophy. The reasons for this have been frequently presented in this weekly publication. Meanwhile, the circle that had become the Anthroposophical Society had grown so much that the leading figures within it were able to build Anthroposophy a home of its own. Munich was chosen as the location for this, because most of the supporters of the building intention were located there and had developed a particularly dedicated activity at that time. I myself saw myself only as the representative of these supporters of the building intention. I believed that I had to concentrate my efforts on the inner spiritual work of Anthroposophy and gratefully accepted the initiative to create a place of work for it. But at the moment when the initiative was realized, the artistic design was for me a matter of inner spiritual work. I had to devote myself to this design. I asserted that if the building was to truly frame the anthroposophical world view, then the same principles from which the thoughts of anthroposophy arise must also give rise to the artistic forms of the building. The fact that this should not be done in the manner of a straw-and-stone allegory of building forms or of a symbolism tainted by thought is inherent in the nature of anthroposophy, which, in my opinion, leads to real art. The idea of building the structure in Munich could not be carried out because influential artistic circles there objected to the forms. Whether these objections would have been overcome later is not worth discussing. The supporters of the building intention did not want the delay and therefore gratefully accepted the gift of Dr. Emil Grossheintz, who had already purchased a piece of land on the Dornach hill for the building. So the foundation stone was laid in 1913 and work began immediately. The supporters of the building project named the building the “Johannesbau” in reference to a character in my mystery dramas named Johannes Thomasius. During the years of construction, I often said that I started from the study of Goethean forms of thought in the construction of the anthroposophical worldview many years ago, and that for me their home is a “Goetheanum”. As a result, non-German members of the Anthroposophical Society in particular decided to continue to give the building the name “Goetheanum”. Since anthroposophy, at the time when the building was started, had already found members with academic training and experience in the most diverse fields, and therefore stood in prospect of applying spiritual scientific methods in the individual sciences, I was allowed to suggest adding to the name of the building: “Freie Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaft” (Free University for Spiritual Science). Friends of anthroposophy have been working on this building for almost ten years. Difficult material sacrifices came from many sides: artists, technicians and scientists worked together in the most dedicated way. Anyone in the anthroposophical circle who had the opportunity to work on the project did so. The most difficult tasks were willingly taken on. The spirit of the anthroposophical world view worked through enthusiastic hearts on the “Goetheanum”. To my great joy, the construction workers, who at first were at least indifferent to anthroposophy, have been of the opinion since 1922 that the misgivings about anthroposophy that were expressed in such wide circles are unfounded. My colleagues and I had turned our thoughts to the continuation of our work. We had planned a science course for the end of December and the beginning of January. Friends of the anthroposophical cause from many countries were present again. In addition to the artistic activities, eurythmy and declamation had been added years ago, under the direction of Mrs. Marie Steiner, who has made this one of her many fields of work. On New Year's Eve, we had a eurythmy performance from 5 to 7 p.m. My lecture began at 8 p.m. and ended half an hour after 9 p.m. I had spoken about the connection between human beings and the phenomena of the course of the year in an anthroposophical way. Shortly thereafter, the Goetheanum went up in flames; by New Year's morning 1923 it had burned down to the concrete substructure. IIWhen I had the honor of inaugurating the first course of lectures held at the Goetheanum in September and October 1920, it seemed to me to be of primary importance to point out how spiritual-scientific knowledge, artistic form and religious inwardness are sought from a single source in anthroposophy. In the opening speech I briefly pointed this out, and in lectures on the building idea in Dornach I wanted to show how art in the Goetheanum was drawn from the same spirituality that seeks to reveal itself in ideas when anthroposophy appears in the form of knowledge. In this respect, the attempt that was made with the Goetheanum has been misunderstood by many. It has been said that the work here is done in symbolism. Those who have spoken in this way always seemed to me to be people who had visited the Goetheanum but had not really looked at it. They thought: a particular world view is presented here. The people who produce it want to create symbols of what they teach in the building forms and in the rest of the artistic work that they add inside and out. With this dogma, one often visited the Goetheanum and found it confirmed, because one did not look at it and because one judged the matter as if anthroposophy were nothing more than a rational science. Such a science, however, if it wants to express itself artistically, will usually achieve nothing more than symbolism or allegory. But at the Goetheanum, no abstract ideas were embodied. The shaping of ideas was completely forgotten when form was created from artistic perception, line from line and surface from surface. When colors were used on the wall to depict what was also seen directly in the color picture. When I occasionally had the opportunity to personally show visitors around the Goetheanum, I said that I actually dislike “explaining” the forms and images, because the artistic should not be suggested by thoughts, but should be accepted in direct contemplation and perception. Art that arises from the same soil as the ideas of true anthroposophy can become real art. For the soul forces that shape these ideas penetrate into the spiritual realm from which artistic creativity can also come. What one forms in thought out of anthroposophical knowledge stands for itself. There is no need to express it symbolically in a semi-artistic way. On the other hand, through the experience of the reality that anthroposophy reveals, one has the need to live artistically in forms and colors. And these colors and forms live for themselves again. They do not express any ideas. No more or no less than a lily or a lion expresses an idea. Because this is related to the essence of anthroposophical life, anyone who used their eyes and not their dogmatizing minds when visiting Dornach will not have become aware of symbols and allegories, but of real artistic attempts. But there was one thing I always had to mention when speaking of the architectural idea of the Goetheanum. When the time came to carry out this building, one could not turn to an artist who was supposed to create a home for Anthroposophy in the antique, Renaissance or Gothic style. If anthroposophy were mere science, mere content of ideas, then it could have been so. But anthroposophy is life, it is the grasping of the universal human and the world in and through man. The initiative of the friends of this world view to build the Goetheanum could only be realized if this building, down to the last detail of its design, was created out of the same living spirit from which anthroposophy itself springs. I have often used an image: look at a nut and the nutshell. The shell is certainly not a symbol of the nut. But it is formed out of the same laws as the nut. Thus the structure can only be the shell, which artistically proclaims in its forms and images the spirit that lives in the word when Anthroposophy speaks through ideas. In this way, every style of art is born out of a spirit that has also revealed itself ideationally in a world view. And in a purely artistic sense, a style of building has been created for the Goetheanum that had to move from symmetry, repetition and so on to that which breathes in the forms of organic life. The auditorium, for example, had seven columns on either side. Only one on the left and right had capitals of the same shape. In contrast, each following capital was the metamorphic development of the previous one. All this resulted from artistic intuition; not from a rational element. It was not possible to repeat typical motifs in different places; rather, each structure was individually designed in its place, just as the smallest link in an organism is individual and yet designed in such a way that it necessarily appears in its formation in the place where it is. Some people have taken the number seven of the columns as an expression of something mystical. This too is a mistake. It is precisely a result of artistic perception. By allowing one capital form to arise artistically from the other, one arrived at the seventh with a form that could not be exceeded without falling back on the motif of the first. It may be said, without indulging in illusions, that the building at the Goetheanum was not the only one to be confronted with the prejudices just mentioned. Gradually, quite a number of people came forward who wanted to look with unprejudiced eyes at what had arisen from unprejudiced perception. Goethe speaks from his artistic feeling the words: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her secret, feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art,” and “Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would have remained hidden forever if it had not appeared.” According to the forms that the human concept of knowledge has taken in modern times, it is believed that the essence of natural things and natural processes can only be expressed by formulating laws (natural laws) in a conceptual way. But what if there were an artistic basis to nature's creative activity? Then the person who starts from the prejudice that it can only be expressed intellectually would not come close to the full essence of nature. And so it is. When one has penetrated to the secrets of nature through the realm of ideas, full of the life of the world, then one experiences: there is still something that does not yield to thought, that one can only reach when one tunes the soul into the realm of ideas through artistic contemplation. Goethe felt this when he wrote the sentences quoted. And the Goetheanum was shaped out of such a feeling. Anyone who sees a sect in people who practice anthroposophy will easily explain the symbolism of a sectarian view into the architectural forms of the Goetheanum. But anthroposophy is the opposite of all sectarianism. It strives for the purely human in full impartiality. The small domed room of the Goetheanum was painted in such a way that it was not started from an ideational figurative, to which colors were glued, but rather a color experience was there first; and from this the figurative was born. In devotion to the essence of the color, the soul's creative power is strengthened to the figurative that the experienced colors demand. When painting, one feels as if there were nothing in the world but living, weaving colors, which are creative and generate essence out of themselves. When one has to speak about the intentions behind the creation of the Goetheanum, one feels the pain of its loss, for which words are not there. For the whole essence of this building was geared towards contemplation. The memory hurts unspeakably. For one remembers soul experiences that urge towards contemplation. But the possibility of contemplation has been taken away since that New Year's Eve. IIIAt the Goetheanum, an artistic sense could lead one to the insight that anthroposophy is not a sect or a religion. You can't build a church or a temple in this style. Two cylinder casings, with different sized bases, interlocked on the sides where they were cut out. They were closed at the top by a larger and a smaller dome. The domes were hemispherical and also interlocked, with sectors cut out where they touched. The small domed room was to serve as a stage for mystery plays when it was completely finished. But it had not yet been set up for that purpose. Until now, only eurhythmy performances had taken place in this room. — The larger domed room enclosed the rows of spectators and listeners. There was nothing that would have given this two-part room the character of a temple or cult building. The bases of the twelve columns around the small domed room had been converted into twelve chairs. One could recognize a meeting room for a limited number of participants; but not something church-like. Between the columns there was to be a sculptured group in the center of which was to be a figure in which one could recognize Christ. It was to be the emblem that genuine spiritual knowledge leads to Christ, thus uniting with the content of religion. Those who entered through the main portal should be addressed by the whole in an artistic way: “Recognize the true human being.” The building was designed to be a home of knowledge, not a “temple. The two rooms were separated by a curtain. In front of the curtain was a lectern that could be lowered when the stage area was used. One need only look at the shape of this lectern to see how little was thought of it in terms of a church. All these forms were artistically drawn from the overall design of the building and from the meeting of the designs that led to the place where the speaker stood. These forms were not an architectural and sculptural temple interior, but the framing of a place of spiritual knowledge. Anyone who wanted to see something else in them had to first interpret artistic untruth into them. But it was always satisfying for me when I was allowed to hear from those who were authorized to say: these forms speak in the true way of what they want to be. And that I was able to hear such words, that happened several times. But it should not be denied that some things about the building must have been strange to those who approached it with familiar ideas about architecture. But that was in its essence; and it could not be otherwise. When people become acquainted with anthroposophy, some of them also experience something of this kind of alienation. It initially appears as knowledge of the human being. But as it develops its knowledge of the human being, it expands into knowledge of the world. The human being recognizes his own nature; but this grasping is a merging with the content of the world. When you entered the Goetheanum, you were surrounded by walls. But the treatment of the wall in its sculptural design had something that contradicted the character of the wall. We are accustomed to seeing the wall treated in such a way that it closes off a space from the outside. Such a wall is artistically opaque. The walls of the Goetheanum, with their protruding column forms and the designs that were supported by these columns, were intended to be artistically transparent. They were not meant to shut out the world, but to catch the eye with their artistic formations in such a way that the observer felt connected to the vastness of the universe. If one could not immediately focus one's attention on this peculiarity, these forms appeared as if one suddenly became aware of an incomprehensible window where one had expected an opaque blackboard. The glass windows set into the outer wall were also adapted to this character of the wall. These were visible between two columns. They were made of monochrome glass, into which the artistic motifs were engraved. It was a kind of glass etching. The image was created by the different thicknesses that the monochrome glass acquired through the etching. It could only be seen as an image in strong sunlight. Thus, what had been artistically conceived in terms of form for the rest of the wall was also physically achieved in these windows. The image was only there when the wall interacted with the outside world. Two windows on the left and right were the same color. The windows from the entrance to the beginning of the stage were different colors, arranged in such a way that the colors in their sequence created a color harmony. At first, what was seen in the windows might have been incomprehensible. But for those who had absorbed the anthroposophical world view, the strangeness would have been revealed purely through contemplation, not through intellectual or symbolic interpretation. And the whole was a home for those who sought anthroposophy. Anyone who claimed to understand these pictures without an anthroposophically oriented view resembled someone who wanted to enjoy a poem in a language artistically without first understanding the language. The same applied to the pictorial motifs that covered the inner two dome surfaces. But it is wrong to say that one should first have a worldview in order to understand the images and forms. One did not need to read books or listen to lectures in order to have an anthroposophical orientation for these images, but one could also gain this orientation without the preceding word by simply looking into the images. But one had to come to it. If one did not want to, one stood before it, as – without, of course, even remotely suggesting an artistic comparison of values – before Raphael's Disputa, if one did not want to orient oneself to the mystery of the Trinity. The auditorium was designed for nine hundred to one thousand people. At the western end of the auditorium, there was a raised space for the built-in organ and other musical instruments. This entire wooden structure stood on a concrete substructure that was larger in plan, so that there was a raised terrace around the outside of the auditorium. In this substructure, under the auditorium, were the places for depositing clothes, and under the stage area were machines. It must have seemed amusing to those who had seen the contents of this concrete substructure when they heard that opponents of the anthroposophical worldview were talking about all sorts of mysterious things, even about underground meeting places in this concrete building. The Goetheanum had goals that truly did not require dark, mysterious meeting places or magic instruments. Such things would not have fitted into the architectural concept of the whole. They would have been artistically unmotivated. The domes were covered with Nordic slate from the Voß slate quarries. The bluish-grey sheen in the sunlight combined with the color of the wood to create a whole that many a person who has made their way up the Dornach hill to the Goetheanum on a bright summer's day has welcomed with sympathy. Now they encounter a pile of rubble with a low concrete ruin rising up out of it. IVThe art of eurythmy seemed to come into its own at the Goetheanum. It is visible speech or singing. The individual performs movements with his limbs, especially the most expressive movements of the arms and hands, or groups of people move or take up positions in relation to each other. These movements are like gestures. But they are not gestures in the usual sense. These relate to what is presented in eurythmy as the child's babbling to the developed language. When a person reveals himself through language or song, then he is there with his whole being. He is, so to speak, in the system through his whole body in motion. But he does not express this system. He captures this movement in the making and concentrates it on the speech or sound organs. Now, through sensual-supersensible observation – to use this Goethean expression – one can recognize which movement of the whole physical human being underlies a tone, a speech sound, a harmony, a melody, or a formed speech structure. In this way, individuals or groups of people can be made to perform movements that express the musical or linguistic element in a visible way, just as the speech and singing organs express it aurally. The whole person, or groups of people, become the larynx; the movements speak or sing as the larynx sounds. Just as in speech or song, nothing in eurythmy is arbitrary. But it makes just as little sense to say that momentary gestures are preferable in eurythmy as it does to say that an arbitrary tone or sound is better than those that lie within the lawful formation of speech or sound. But eurythmy is not to be confused with dance either. Musical elements that sound simultaneously can be eurythmized. In this case, one is not dancing to music but visibly singing it. Eurythmic movements are derived from the human organism as a whole in the same orderly way as speech or song. When poetry is eurythmized, the visible language of eurythmy is revealed on stage and at the same time the poetry is heard through recitation or declamation. One cannot recite or declaim to the eurythmy as one often likes to do, by merely pointing out the prose content of the poetry. One must really treat the language artistically as language. Meter, rhythm, melodious motifs and so on, or even the imaginative aspect of sound formation, must be worked out. For every true poetry is based on a hidden (invisible) eurythmy. Mrs. Marie Steiner has tried to develop this kind of recitation and declamation, which goes hand in hand with the eurythmic presentation. It seems as if a kind of orchestral interaction of the spoken and visibly presented word has really been achieved. It turns out to be inartistic for one person to recite and perform eurythmy at the same time. These tasks must be performed by different people. The image of a person who wanted to reveal both in themselves would fall apart for the immediate impression. The development of the art of eurythmy is based on insight into the expressive possibilities of the human body, insight that draws on both the senses and the supersensory. As far as I know, there is only scant evidence of this insight from earlier times. These were times when the soul and spirit were still able to shine through the human body to a greater extent than they are today. This scant tradition, which incidentally points to quite different intentions than those present in eurythmy, was of course used. But it had to be independently developed and transformed, and above all, it had to be completely reshaped into an artistic form. I am not aware of any tradition in the formal movement of groups of people that we have gradually developed in eurythmy. When this eurythmic art appeared on the stage of the Goetheanum, one should have the feeling that the static forms of the interior design and the sculpture related to the moving human beings in a completely natural way. The former should, so to speak, accept the latter pleasantly. The building and the eurythmic movement should merge into a single whole. This impression could be heightened by accompanying the sequence of eurythmic creations with lighting effects that flooded the stage in harmonious radiance and sequence. What is attempted here is light eurythmy. And if the forms of the stage took up the eurythmic designs as something belonging to them, so did those of the auditorium take up the recitation or declamation that occurred in parallel with the eurythmy, which sounded from a seat on the side of the stage, where it meets the auditorium, through Marie Steiner. Perhaps it is not inappropriate to say that the listener should feel in the building itself a comrade in the understanding of the word or tone heard. If one does not want to claim more than that such a unity of building form and word or music was striven for, then what has been said will not sound too immodest. For no one can be more convinced that all this has been achieved only in a highly imperfect way than I myself. But I have tried to shape it in such a way that one could feel how the movement of the word naturally ran along the forms of the capitals and architraves. I would only like to suggest what can be tried for such a building: that its forms do not merely enclose what is depicted in them on the outside, but contain it in a living unity in themselves in the most direct impression. And if I were to express my opinion on this, I would hold back. But I have heard what has been said from others. I also know that I have shaped the forms of the building sensitively, out of the state of mind from which the eurythmy images also come. The fact that the forms of eurythmy were continuously shaped in the experience of what could be experienced in the creation of the building forms will not be perceived as a contradiction of what has been said. For the harmony between the two was not achieved by intellectual intention, but arose out of a homogeneous artistic impulse. Probably eurythmy could not have been found without the work on building. Before the building idea, it existed only in its first beginnings. The instructions for the soul-based shaping of the moving speech forms were first given to the students in the hall built into the south wing of the Goetheanum. The interior architecture of this hall in particular was intended to be a resting eurythmy, just as the eurythmic movements within it were moving plastic forms, shaped by the same spirit as these resting forms themselves. It was in this hall that the smoke was first detected on December 31, which came from the fire that destroyed the entire Goetheanum when it grew up. One feels, when one has been lovingly connected with the building, the merciless flames painfully penetrating through the sensations that poured into the resting forms and into the work attempted within them. VOf course, some objections can be raised against the stylistic forms of the Goetheanum. I have always described them as a first attempt to undertake something artistic in the direction characterized in the preceding remarks. Those who refuse to accept any transition from the cognitive representation of the nature of the world and of world processes through ideas to pictorial artistic embodiment must reject these forms of expression. But what is it ultimately based on, this desire to visualize something of the world's content through knowledge in the soul? But only because in the experience of the ideas of knowledge one becomes aware of something in which one knows the outer world to be continuously active within oneself. Through knowledge the world speaks in the human soul. He who merely imagines that he has formed his own ideas about the world, he who does not feel the world pulsating within him when he lives in ideas, should not speak of knowledge. The soul is the arena in which the world reveals its secrets. But anyone who thinks of knowledge in such a realistic way must ultimately come to the conclusion that his thinking must pass over into artistic creation if he wants to experience the content of the world in certain areas within himself. One can close one's mind to such a view. One can demand that science must stay away from artistic visualization and express itself only in the formation of ideas that are demanded by logical laws. But such a demand would be mere subjective arbitrariness if the creative process of nature were such that it could only be grasped artistically in certain areas. If nature proceeds as an artist, then man must resort to artistic forms in order to express it. But it is also an experience of knowledge that in order to follow nature in its creative work, the transition of logically formed ideas into artistic images is necessary. For example, up to a certain point it is possible to express the human physique through logical thinking. But from this point onwards, one must allow the process to enter into artistic forms if one does not want a mere ghostly image of the human being, but rather the human being in his or her living reality. And one will be able to feel that in the soul, by experiencing the form of the body in artistic and pictorial terms, the reality of the world is revealed in the same way as in the logically formed ideas. I believed I was presenting Goethe's view of the world correctly when, at the end of the 1980s, I described his relationship to art and science as follows: “Our time believes it is doing the right thing when it keeps art and science as far apart as possible. They are said to be two completely opposite poles in the cultural development of humanity. Science should, so it is thought, sketch out for us a world view that is as objective as possible; it should show us reality in a mirror or, in other words, it should adhere purely to what is given, divesting itself of all subjective arbitrariness. The objective world is decisive for its laws; it must submit to it. It should take the standard of truth and falsity entirely from the objects of experience. The two creations of art are to be completely different. The self-creative power of the human mind gives them their laws. For science, any interference by human subjectivity would be a falsification of reality, a transgression of experience; art, on the other hand, grows on the field of ingenious subjectivity. Its creations are the product of human imagination, not reflections of the outside world. Outside of us, in objective being, lies the origin of scientific laws; in us, in our individuality, that of aesthetic ones. Therefore, the latter have not the slightest cognitive value; they create illusions without the slightest reality factor. Anyone who understands the matter in this way will never gain clarity about the relationship between Goethean poetry and Goethean science. But this means that both are misunderstood. The world-historical significance of Goethe lies precisely in the fact that his art flows from the source of being, that it contains nothing illusory, nothing subjective, but appears as the herald of the lawfulness that the poet has overheard in the depths of natural activity to the world spirit. At this level, art becomes the interpreter of the secrets of the world, as science is in another sense. This is how Goethe always understood art. For him, it was a revelation of the primal law of the world; science was the other. For him, art and science arose from the same source. While the scientist delves into the depths of reality to express the driving forces of reality in the form of thoughts, the artist seeks to incorporate these same driving forces into his material. Goethe himself puts it this way: “I think that science could be called knowledge of the general, abstract knowledge; art, on the other hand, would be science applied to action. Science would be reason and art its mechanism, which is why it could also be called practical science. And so, finally, science would be the theorem, art the problem.” And Goethe expresses something similar with the words: ”Style rests on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, insofar as we are allowed to recognize it in visible and tangible forms.” (See my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings, which will soon be published as an independent book by the Stuttgarter Kommenden Tag-Verlag.) What I meant at the time: that Goethe is right when he thinks of the relationship between art and science in this way; that seems right to me today too. That is why what was expressed in his work in the form of knowledge could be presented in artistic form at the Goetheanum. Anthroposophy has the supersensible content of the world for its representation, insofar as it is accessible to human contemplation. One feels that every expression of this content through logically formed ideas is only a kind of thought-gesture that points to this content. And the artistic form appears as the other gesture through which the spiritual world responds to the thought-gesture; or perhaps the other way around, the world reveals the idea in response when one asks it through the artistic image. The stylistic forms of the Goetheanum could not, therefore, be a naturalistic imitation of any inanimate or animate object in the world around us. The experience of what is happening in the spiritual world had to guide the hand that formed the sculpture and applied the paint to the surface. The spiritual content of the world had to be allowed to flow into the lines and reveal itself in the color. No matter how many objections are raised against these stylistic forms of the Goetheanum, the attempt that was made was to create an artistic home for a striving for knowledge in the sense of Goethe's intentions, a home that was from the same spiritual source as the knowledge cultivated in it. The attempt may have been imperfectly successful; it was there as such: and the Goetheanum was built in the spirit of Goethe's view of art. Thus one came to feel that the Goetheanum was the home of Anthroposophy; but after the disaster of December 31, after the one side, one also feels, with Anthroposophy, homeless. Sympathetic visitors came to the scene of the fire on January 1st, saying: we want to keep alive in our hearts what we have experienced in this building. VIThe Goetheanum has only experienced nine major events. In September and October 1920, lecture series took place over three weeks on a wide range of scientific topics. The impetus for this came from the circle of scientists working in the Anthroposophical Society. The entire organization of the lecture cycles was also in their hands. Teachers from the Free Waldorf School and other personalities with training in various fields of knowledge — including artists — were involved. The idea behind the event was to show how the individual scientific fields can be illuminated by the anthroposophical method of research. It struck me at the time, as I witnessed these cycles, that not everything appeared as if it had been born out of the spirit of the Goetheanum. When individual insights into nature or history were illuminated out of the spirit of anthroposophical concepts as a whole, one felt harmony between the structure and the presentation of knowledge. When individual questions were discussed, this was not the case. I had to think of how, during the construction, the anthroposophical work had grown beyond the stage it was at when construction began. In 1913, the idea of those personalities who had decided to build it was to create a place for the anthroposophical work in the narrower sense and for those artistic performances that had grown out of the anthroposophical perception. At that time, the individual scientific fields were only included in the anthroposophical work of knowledge to the extent that they naturally integrated into the broader presentations of spiritual scientific observation. The building was conceived as an artistic vessel for this spiritual content. This relationship was the basis for the design of the building. It was allowed to be so. For it was important to express artistically how anthroposophy should be placed in the context of human life as a whole. If the treatment of individual scientific fields was considered later, this should be done in separate extensions. A different approach is needed for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum. The construction of a central place for anthroposophy in the narrower sense was obvious because it was the will of the personalities who advocated its construction to build this place out of wood. Such a central place can be artistically imbued with this material. Another material would then have been considered for the extensions. A second wooden structure is out of the question. Before the Goetheanum was tackled, I told the leading personalities what artistic feelings for wood and for another material would be considered. They decided on wood because at that time they took the view that they should proceed as idealistically as possible. This idealism bore the beautiful fruit that understanding souls had before them, at least for a short time, a home for anthroposophy that could not have been built in another material with such verve in the lines and such expressiveness in the forms. Today, this fruit is a tragic memory. There are no words for the pain of loss. The idealism of those who commissioned me to build in wood must therefore be given all possible credit. The building is closely connected with the fate of anthroposophical development in recent years, precisely because of the lack of the marked harmony at the first event. The first series of lectures as a whole reveals itself as something that did not grow quite organically out of the same idea as the building itself. It was as if something had been carried into the purely anthroposophical building. In the outer reality of human coexistence, things do not always follow the path demanded by the inner workings of a spiritual context. Anthroposophy is absolutely predisposed to extend its developmental tendencies to where they also lead into the most specialized fields of knowledge. But that is not how it happened in the Anthroposophical Society. A different path has been taken. Scientifically educated personalities have become members of the Society. Science was their way of life and their education. Anthroposophy has become a matter of the heart for them. They have allowed themselves to be inspired by it for their science. Thus we have received scientific explanations from anthroposophically minded personalities before the individual fields of knowledge were born out of anthroposophy itself. Much has been achieved by the fact that, when the need arose, lecture cycles were held in front of small groups from the most diverse fields of knowledge, inspired by the anthroposophical spirit. What came out of this is not to be presented here as something that was hasty or the like. But just as, for example, in the pedagogical field, educational methods have emerged directly from anthroposophy, as is the case in the artistic field with eurhythmics, so it has not been destined by fate for the Anthroposophical Society to do so in other fields. In certain areas, a faster pace was demanded of anthroposophy out of a well-seen contemporary necessity. This requires that individual scientific fields that are already being worked on and anthroposophical development must first grow into each other. This was also expressed in the disharmony of the first event in 1920, as described. If a reconstruction comes about, it will be able to contain - in a different material - individual rooms - for example on the first floor - for scientific events and artistic work, and thus the space for the anthroposophical in the narrower sense. On the one hand, such a building will correspond to its material, and on the other hand to the development that anthroposophical endeavors have taken in recent years. The disharmony was only an expression of the endeavor to create a home for anthroposophy in the narrower sense that was artistically appropriate to its stage of development up to 1918. Perhaps I may cite this as proof of how Anthroposophy as a spiritual content and its home as an artistic unity were felt during the elaboration of the latter. But today, in a strange harmony with this architectural idea of the Goetheanum, I feel what was then in me, when the first event was set up in it, to open the Goetheanum itself in a festive manner. The program of that series of lectures could not be taken as the occasion for such a celebration. It should only take place when an event had become possible whose whole would be in complete harmony with the original building idea. It did not come to that. The Goetheanum died away before then. In the hearts of those who loved it, there was a lasting funeral service. The next essay will deal with the further events that could still take place in the dear building. VIIEven if it was not possible for us to reveal the opening ceremony, the building idea and the event of the Goetheanum in full harmony, we were still able to make attempts in various directions over the course of more than two years to bring the anthroposophical spirit to bear. The first three-weekly lecture cycle was followed by a second one-weekly cycle in April 1921. The aim was to show how the individual fields of human knowledge can be significantly expanded if their paths of research are continued into the spiritual realm. On this occasion, it gave me particular satisfaction to be able to point out such a possible expansion for a number of fields of knowledge through my own lectures. During these events, I was also always given the task of showing visitors around the building and talking about the artistic aspects of the Goetheanum. On the one hand, I was reluctant to say anything theoretical about art. Art is meant to be looked at. But these tours had another side to them. One could avoid wanting to 'explain' art in an unartistic way. I did that too, as far as it seemed permissible to me from those who were looking at the building. But there were plenty of opportunities to talk about anthroposophical matters in a free, fragmentary, aphoristic way, linking it to the forms and images that could be seen. And the lectures could then be woven into a whole with what was said during the tour. Then one felt very intimately how good the anthroposophically oriented word was when spoken at a pillar or under a picture that came from the same spirit as the word itself. These events always included eurythmy performances. They made it clear how the building demanded that the insights presented in it had to be shaped into a whole by artistic means. The inner space of the Goetheanum seemed to brook no lecture cycle that was not rounded off by artistic elements. I believe it was felt to be a necessity when Marie Steiner added her art of recitation and declamation to the lecture events from the organ room. We also had the joy of hearing Mrs. Werbeck-Svärdström unfold her wonderful art from this organ room, sometimes together with her three sisters. What the participants were able to hear there will certainly be unforgettable. Personally, it always gave me the greatest joy to hear Albert Steffen speak from the Goetheanum podium. What he says is always meant to be felt in plastic forms. He is like a sculptor of language; a sculptor who carves in wood. I perceived a harmony between the building forms and his language sculptures, which he placed in the building at once deliberately and confidently. In August 1921, we were able to hold an event that was thanks to the English painter Baron von Rosenkrantz. This event felt particularly at home in the building. The band stepped before the soul's eye, connecting spiritual-scientific research and spirit-revealing art. It is understandable that attention was drawn to what the building was intended to be an experiment for, on this occasion in particular. At the end of September and the beginning of October, a number of German theologians who carried the impulse for a Christian religious renewal gathered at the Goetheanum. What was worked out here came to a conclusion in September 1922. I myself must count among the festivals of my life what I experienced with these theologians in September 1922 in the small hall of the south wing where the fire was later discovered. Here, with a group of nobly enthusiastic people, it was possible to follow the path that leads spiritual knowledge into religious experience. At the end of December and beginning of January 1922, a group of English teachers gathered at the Goetheanum. That this was possible was due to the dedicated efforts of Prof. M. Mackenzie. She and Prof. Mackenzie had taken part in the course organized by Baron von Rosenkrantz in August. On this occasion, the distinguished English educationalist decided to invite English teachers to visit the Goetheanum during the Christmas holidays. Together with a number of teachers from the Stuttgart Waldorf School, I was invited to speak again in the hall of the south wing about pedagogy, education and teaching practice. The English educators were joined by others from Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and so on. In September 1922, I was invited to give ten lectures on “Cosmology, Philosophy and Religion from the Point of View of Anthroposophy”. Once again, the cycle of my lectures was rounded off by teachers from the Waldorf School and other personalities from the Anthroposophical Movement, through their lectures and the discussions they held with the participants. I went to each of my lectures and came away from them with a deep sense of gratitude to those who initiated the building of the Goetheanum. For it was precisely in these lectures, in which I had to cover a wide range of knowledge from an anthroposophical point of view, that I had to feel the benefit of being able to express ideas that had been given artistic form in the building. Events such as the “Dramatic Course”, given by Marie Steiner in July 1922, and a National Economic Course, which I myself held in July and August 1922, did not take place within the rooms that were lost to us on New Year's Eve. But they belong to the circle of what the Goetheanum has inspired. Eurythmy performances have been taking place at the Goetheanum for many years. I have tried to describe their close connection with the nature of the building in an earlier article. A cycle of lectures on natural science was planned for the end of December and beginning of January 1922 to 1923. Once again, personalities working in the field of anthroposophy were to give lectures and hold discussions with me. I added other lectures on purely anthroposophical subjects to the lectures on knowledge of nature. Only the first part of this event could still take place at the Goetheanum. After the eurythmy performance and my lecture on New Year's Eve, the flames took the building in which we would have liked to continue working. The lectures had to be continued in an adjoining room, while outside the flames consumed the last remains of the Goetheanum, which we loved so much. |
180. Ancient Myths: Their Meaning and Connection with Evolution: Duality of the Human Being, Head and Trunk
12 Jan 1918, Dornach Translated by Mabel Cotterell Rudolf Steiner |
---|
And on the other hand the ‘bon Dieu citoyen’, as at Christmas we learnt to know him in Heinrich Heine's words, the ‘bon citoyen’ Jesus, who is divested of all divinity, the God of the liberal pastors and liberal priests. |
180. Ancient Myths: Their Meaning and Connection with Evolution: Duality of the Human Being, Head and Trunk
12 Jan 1918, Dornach Translated by Mabel Cotterell Rudolf Steiner |
---|
The matters which we are now discussing are connected with a fact that sounds strange at first hearing but which corresponds to a deep and significant truth—namely, man wanders over the earth but has in reality no true understanding of himself. One could say that this statement applies particularly to our own time. We know that once in ancient Greece the great and significant inscription ‘Know thyself’ stood on Apollo's temple as a challenge to those who sought for spiritual things. Nor was this inscription on the Delphic temple ‘Know thyself’ merely a phrase at that time, as we know from our various studies. For even in this Grecian age it was still possible to bring about a deeper knowledge of man than is possible at the present time. This present time, however, is also a challenge to us to strive again for a real knowledge of man, for a knowledge of what man on the earth actually is. Now it seems as if the things that must be said in connection with this question are difficult to understand. In reality they are not, in spite of the fact that they sound as if they were difficult. They are only so for the present day because people are not accustomed to let their thinking and feeling flow into such currents as are necessary for a right understanding of something of this nature. The point is, that what we call understanding at the present day is actually the result of our always seeking to understand through abstract concepts. But one cannot understand everything through abstract concepts. Above all one cannot understand the human being through abstract concepts; one requires something different for the understanding of man. One must put oneself in the position of taking man as he wanders about over the earth, as a picture, as a picture which expresses something, which discloses something, which wants to reveal something to us. One must revive the consciousness that the human being is a riddle that wants to be solved. We shall not, however, solve the riddle of man if we are content to continue to be so indolent, so theoretic in our thinking as we now prefer. For you see, the human being is—this we have stressed again and again—a complicated being. Man is more, vastly more than the physical form that wanders about before our eyes as man—far, far more is man. But this physical structure that wanders round before our eyes as man, and all that belongs to it, is none the less an expression for the whole comprehensive being of man. And one can say: Not only can one recognize in the human form, in the physical man that goes about among us, what man is between birth and death here in the physical word, but, if one only will, one can also recognize in the human being what he is as immortal, as eternal being of soul. One must only develop a feeling that this human form is a complexity. Our modern science, which is made popular and so can reach everyone, is not fitted to call forth a feeling of what a miraculous structure this human being actually is, who wanders about on earth. One must regard man quite differently. You have assuredly all seen a human skeleton—remember then that the human skeleton is actually twofold, if one disregards everything else. One could speak much more exactly, but if one disregards all the rest, the skeleton is a duality. You can easily lift up the skull from the skeleton; it is really only set upon it, and then the rest of the human being remains skull-less. The skull is very easily lifted off. The rest of the man without the skull is still a very complicated being, but we will now grasp it as a unit and leave aside its complexity. But we will first consider the duality which we see when we look at a human being, as, let us say, head-man, and for the rest trunk-man. And so too is the complete flesh and blood man a duality, though it is there less clearly shown. Now in spiritual science we need not be so fond of comparisons as to treat them as absolute, develop them metaphysically—that we will not do. But by employing comparisons we wish to make various things clear. And so it is very natural, since it actually corresponds to what we see, to say: man in respect of his head is above all ruled by the spherical form. If one desires to express in a diagram what the human head is, we can say: man is ruled by the spherical form (see diagram). If we wish to have a diagrammatic picture for the rest of man, we should naturally have to pay attention to the complications, only we will not do that today. You will, however, easily see that disregarding certain complications, just as schematically one can picture the human head as a sphere, so one can picture the rest of man in such a form as this (see diagram: moon form), only, of course, the two circles must be placed in varied positions according to the corpulence of each individual. But we can, as it were, really conceive of man so—as spherical form and as moon-form. This has a deep inner justification; however we will not discuss this, but only think of the fact that the human being falls into these two members. Now, man's head is in the first place a true apparatus for spiritual activity, for all that man can produce by way of human thoughts, human feelings. The head, the apparatus ... but, if we were committed to the thoughts, the feelings, that the head as apparatus can supply, we should never be in the position of really understanding the being of man. If we were committed to use the head alone as an instrument of our spiritual life, we should never be in the position of really saying ‘I’ to ourselves. For what is this head? This head is in truth, as it meets us in its globular form, an image of the whole cosmos, as the cosmos appears to you with all its stars, fixed stars, planets and comets; even meteors—irregularities, as we know—make their appearance in many heads. The human head is an image of the macrocosm, an image of the whole world. And only the prejudice of our time—I have indicated this in another connection—knows nothing of the fact that the whole world has a share in the coming about of a human head. But now, if through heredity, through birth, this human head is transposed to the earth, it can be no apparatus for comprehending the being of man himself. We have been given in our head an apparatus, as it were, which is like an extract of the whole world, but which is not competent to comprehend man. Why? Well, by reason of the fact that man is more than all that we can see and can think through our head. Many people say nowadays ‘there are limits to human knowledge, one cannot get beyond these limits!’ But this is only because they merely reckon with the wisdom of the head, and the wisdom of the head, it is true, does not get beyond certain limits. This wisdom of the head, my dear friends, has also made what a few days ago we described as the Greek Gods. The Greek Gods have proceeded from the wisdom of the head. They are the upper Gods; they are therefore only Gods for all that the head of man can encompass with its wisdom. Now I have often brought to your attention that besides this external mythology the Greeks had their Mysteries. The Greeks revered in the Mysteries other Gods as well as the celestial Gods, namely, the Chthonic Gods. And of one who was initiated in the Mysteries one could say with truth: he learns to know the upper and the lower Gods, the Upper and the Lower Gods. The upper Gods were those of the Zeus-circle; but they only have rulership over what is spread out before the senses, and what the intellect can understand. The human being is more than this. Man is rooted with his being in the kingdom of the lower Gods, in the kingdom of the Chthonic Gods. But it is no good, my dear friends, if one only looks at the part of man which I have drawn here in the sketch. If one is to turn one's mind to the rooting of man in the kingdom of the lower Gods then one must complete this drawing and make it so: one must also, as it were, include the unillumined moon. (See drawing below.) In other words, one must regard the head of man differently from the rest of the organism. With the rest of the organism one must far more have in mind what is spiritual, what is super-sensible and invisible. The head of man as it confronts us is externally complete. All that is spiritual has formed for itself an image in the head. In the rest of man that is not the case; the remaining part is only a fragment as physical man, and it is not enough for the rest of man if one takes this bodily fragment which wanders visibly about on earth. Now this already shows us that we must accept man as complicated. But, does what I have just said ever come before us in life? What I have just said seems to be abstract, it seems paradoxical and hard to understand, but yet the question must arise: does it ever come before us in life? That is the important thing: it appears in life quite clearly. The head is the instrument of our wisdom; it is so strongly the instrument of our wisdom, that our immediate wisdom is connected with its development. But even external anatomical physiological observation—look how a head develops, how a man grows up—shows that the head goes through a quite different development from the rest of the organism. The head develops quickly, the remaining organism slowly. The head in a child is relatively already quite finished, it develops very little further. The rest of the organism is still little perfected and goes slowly through its stages. This is connected with the fact that in life as well we are really a duplex being. Not only does our skeleton show the head and the remaining organism, but life itself shows this twofold nature: our head develops quickly, the rest of our organism slowly. At our present time the head develops practically up to our twenty-eighth or twenty-seventh year, the rest of the organism needs the whole of life up to death to do this. One can in fact only experience in a whole lifetime what the head acquires in a relatively short time. This is connected with many mysteries. The spiritual investigator has a special knowledge of these things if he is able to observe a fatal accident... again it sounds strange but it expresses the full truth, in a fatal accident. Imagine that a person is struck down, dies by an accident. Let us suppose that a man is struck dead in his thirtieth year. To outer physical observation such a sudden death is a kind of accident: but from a spiritual science outlook it is simply absurd to regard such an affair as accidental. For in the moment when from outside, from any external cause, a man suddenly meets with death, an immense amount rapidly takes place. Think to yourselves: this same man who has been killed at the age of thirty would have become in the ordinary course of things perhaps seventy, eighty, ninety years old. If he had still lived from thirty to ninety years he would slowly have gone through, one after another, many life experiences. What he would thus have experienced during sixty years of life, he now goes through rapidly, it might even be in half-a-minute, if he is killed at the age of thirty. When it is a matter of the spiritual world, time relationships are different from what they seem to us here on the physical plane. A sudden death caused by external circumstances—one must treat the matter quite exactly—can cause the experience, I say the experience, the life-wisdom of the whole life that might still have been lived, to be passed through under certain circumstances very rapidly. One is in this way enabled to see how a man assimilates life-wisdom, life-experience all his life through. And one can study through it the relation between what the head can provide with its short development, and what the rest of the human being can furnish with its long development in the social life. It is really true that during his young days a man takes in certain ideas and concepts that he learns; but he then only learns them. They are then head-knowledge. The rest of life that runs more slowly, is destined to transform the head-knowledge gradually into heart-knowledge—I now call the other man not the head-man, I call him the heart-man—to transform head-knowledge into heart-knowledge, knowledge in which the whole man shares, not only the head. We need much longer to transform head-knowledge into heart-knowledge than to assimilate the head-knowledge. Even if the head-knowledge is an especially clever knowledge, one needs today the time into the twenties, is it not so? then one is a quite clever person, academically quite clever. But in order to unite this knowledge fully with the whole man, one must keep flexible one's whole life through. And one needs just as much longer to change head-knowledge into heart-knowledge as one lives longer than to the twenty-seventh or twenty-sixth year. In so far is the human being also of a twofold nature. One quickly acquires the head-knowledge and can then in the course of life change it into heart-knowledge. It is not quite easy to know what this actually signifies. And, perhaps I may venture to instance an experience of the spiritual investigator through which something may be more easily known concerning these things than through other results of spiritual research. If one makes oneself acquainted with the speech which the human souls speak who have gone through the gate of death, who live in the spiritual world after death, one understands to some degree the speech of the dead, the so-called dead, one can then make the experience that the dead express themselves in a very special way upon many things connected with human life. The dead have a speech today that we who are living cannot yet quite understand. The comprehensions of the dead and the living lie somewhat far apart from one another today. The dead have a thorough consciousness of how man develops quickly as headman and slowly as heart-man. And if the dead wish to express what really happens when the quickly gained head-knowledge lives itself into the slower course of the heart-knowledge, they say there wisdom-knowledge is transformed through what ascends from man as heart-warmth or love. Wisdom is fructified in man by love. So say the dead.1 And that is in fact a profound and significant law of life. One can acquire head-knowledge rapidly, one can know a tremendous amount precisely in our age, for natural science—not the natural-scientist—natural science has made very great advances in our time and has a rich content. But this content has remained head-knowledge, it has not been transformed into heart-knowledge because people—I pointed this out yesterday—no longer pay attention to what approaches in life after the twenty-seventh year, because people do not understand how to become old—or I could say, to remain young in growing old. Because men do not keep the inner livingness their heart grows cold; the heart warmth does not stream up to the head; love, which comes from the rest of the organism, does not fructify the head. The head-knowledge remains cold theory. There is no necessity for it to remain cold theory, all head-knowledge can be transformed into heart-knowledge. And that is precisely the task of the future; that head-knowledge shall gradually be transformed into heart-knowledge. A real miracle will happen if head-knowledge is transformed into heart-knowledge! One is completely right if one vigorously declaims today against the materialistic natural science, or, really, natural-philosophy—one is completely right, but all the same, something else is true. If this natural science which has remained mere head-knowledge in Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley, etc. and is therefore materialism, became heart-knowledge, if it were absorbed by the whole man, if humanity were to understand how to become old, or younger in old age as I showed yesterday, this science of today would become really spiritual, the true pursuit for the spirit and its existence. There is no better foundation than the natural science of the present day, if it is transformed into what can flow to the head from the rest of man's organism, that is to say from the spiritual part of the organism. The miracle will be accomplished when men also learn to feel the rejuvenation of their etheric body so that the materialistic natural science of today will become spirituality. It will the sooner become spirituality the greater the number of people who reproach it with its present materialism, its materialistic folly. But together with this will be linked a complete transforming which can be felt by one who has but a slight feeling for what is taking place at the present time: linked with it will be a complete transforming of the nature of education and instruction. Who could deny, if he has an open eye for the social, moral, historical conditions of the present, who could deny that mankind as a whole is not in a position—though it sounds grotesque—to give children an adequate education, especially an adequate instruction? We can, to be sure, make children officials, industrialists, we can even make them pastors, etc. etc., but we are but little in a position to make children today into complete human beings, into all-round developed men. For it is a deep demand of the time that if man is to be a complete all-round developed organism of soul and spirit, he must be in the position to transform all his life through what he took in quickly, rapidly as a child. The whole life through must the human being remain fresh in order to transform what he has absorbed. For what do we really do today in later life? (These things are not looked on unprejudicedly [?] enough). We have learnt a certain amount in youth, the one more, the other less; we are proud, are we not, that we have no more illiterates in Western Europe? One learns much, another less, but all have learnt something in youth. And what do we do in later life with what we learnt, no matter whether it was much or little? It is all of such a nature that one only remembers what one has learnt, it is present in man in such a way that one can remember it. But what do men work on there? It is not conveyed to the human soul so as to work in the soul, so that heart-contents may arise from head-knowledge. It is in no way fitted for that. Much water must still flow down the Rhine, if what we can give to youth today—(let us observe it only in one field, but it is applicable in all fields) is to be something that is fitted really to be transformed into heart-knowledge. What must that be? We have in fact today no possibility at all of giving our children anything that could really become heart-knowledge. For that we lack two conditions, and only Spiritual Science rightly understood can bring about these two conditions. Two conditions are lacking for really giving to children today something that refreshes life, something which throughout life can be a source of joy in life and a supporting of life. Two things are lacking. The one is that, from all the current ideas that we have today, that modern culture can give us, man can gain no conception of how he stands in relation to the universe. Just think of all that is conveyed to one in school. It is imparted even to the smallest children—at least, what they are told is put into such words as contain what I am now expressing to you. Reflect that the human being grows up today under these ideas: there is the earth, it swings with such and such a velocity through universal space, and beyond the earth there are the sun, planets, fixed stars. And then what is said of the sun, the planets, the fixed stars, is at most a kind of cosmic physics—it is no more—cosmic mechanics, cosmic physics. What the astronomer says today, what our general culture today says about the structure of the universe, has that anything to do with this human being who walks about here below upon the earth? Most certainly not! Is it not true that for the natural scientific idea of the world, man goes about as a somewhat more highly developed animal; he is born, dies, is buried, another comes, is born, dies, is buried, etc. etc. and so it goes from generation to generation. Out in the great cosmic space events take place which are calculated purely mathematically as in a great world machine. But for the modern clever men what has all that takes place out there in the universe to do with the fact that here on earth this somewhat more highly evolved animal is born and dies? Priests, pastors, know no other wisdom to put in place of this comfortless wisdom. And since they do not know that, they say that they do not occupy themselves in any way with science, but that faith must have an entirely different origin. Well, we need not enlarge on this. But they are two utterly different things that are spoken of by atheistic science and by the so-called religious faith of this or that Confession at Church, feebly upholding the theistic element. It was essential that for a certain time in humanity's evolution the present world conception should take the place of the earlier ideas. We need not go back very far—only people don't think of it today—and men were then still aware that they did not wander on the earth as higher animals who were just born and buried. Rather did they bring themselves into connection with the star-world, with the whole universe, and knew in their own way, in a different way from that in which it must be striven for now, of the connection with the universe. But one must therefore also conceive of the universe differently. You see, such a world conception as is imparted even to children today would be unthinkable in the twelfth, thirteenth centuries; they could not in the least imagine having such an opinion of the world of the stars. They looked up to the stars, to the planets as we do today, but they did not merely calculate, as the modern mathematical astronomer does, the orbits of the planets, and believe that up there is a globe which passes through world space—the science of the Middle Ages saw in each globe the body of a spiritual being. It would have been simply a piece of folly to represent a planet as a mere material globe. Read about it in Thomas Aquinas.2 You will find everywhere that in each planet he sees an Angelic Intelligence. And so in the other stars. Such a universe as modern astronomy fabricates was not imagined. But for a certain length of time, in order to progress, one must drive the soul, as it were, out of the universe, in order to conceive the skeleton, the pure machinery of the universe. The Copernicus, the Galileo, the Kepler world conceptions had to come. But only the foolish see them as something valid for all time. They are a beginning, but a beginning that must evolve further. Many things are known already to Spiritual Science which official astronomy does not yet know. But it is important that just these things which Spiritual Science knows and official astronomy does not yet know, should pass over into the general consciousness of humanity. And although these concepts may seem difficult today they will become something that one can impart to the children, they will be an important possession for the children, to keep the soul full of life. We still have to speak of these things, however, in difficult concepts. For as long as Spiritual Science is received, as it is at present by the external world, it has no opportunity of pouring things into such concepts and such pictures as are needed if they are to become the subject of children's education. There is something, for instance, of which modern astronomy knows nothing. It knows nothing of the fact that the earth speeding through the universe, speeds too fast. She rushes too fast, the earth! And since she rushes too fast, since the earth moves quickly, we also have our head-development quicker than we should have if the earth were to move as slowly as to correspond with our whole life's duration. The rapidity of our head-development simply depends on the fact that the earth races too quickly through universal space. Our head takes part in this speed of the earth, the rest of our organism takes no part in it, the rest of our organism withdraws itself from cosmic events. Our head which, as a sphere, is an image of the heavens, must also participate in what the earth performs in celestial space. Our remaining organism which is not formed on the model of the whole universe, does not participate, it makes its development more slowly. Were our whole organism to participate today in the speed of the earth, were it to develop in correspondence to the speed of the earth, then none of us could ever be older than twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years would be the average life of man. For in fact our head is finished when we are twenty-seven years old; if it depended on the head, man would die at the age of twenty-seven. Only because the rest of man is planned for a longer life time, and continually sends its forces to the head after the twenty-seventh year, do we live as long as we do. It is the spiritual part of the remaining organism which sends its forces to the head. It is the heart portion that exchanges its forces with the head. If humanity knows some day that it has a twofold nature, a head-nature and a heart-nature, then it will know too that the head obeys quite other cosmic laws than the rest of the organism. Then the human being takes his place again within the whole macrocosm, then man can do no other than form concepts that lead him to say ‘I do not stand here upon earth as merely a higher animal, to be born and to die, but I am a being formed from out the whole universe. My head is built up for me out of the whole universe, the earth has attached to me the rest of my organization, and this does not follow the movements of the cosmos as my head does.’ Thus, when we do not look at man abstractly, as modern science does, but regard him as picture in his duality, as head-man and heart-man in connection with the universe, then the human being is placed again into the cosmos. And I know, my dear friends, and others who can judge such things know it also: if man can make heart-warm concepts of the fact that when one looks at the human head it is seen to be an image of the whole star-strewn space of the world with its wonders, then there will enter the human soul all the pictures of the connection of man with the wide, wide universe. And these pictures become forms of narrative which we have not yet got, and which will bring to expression, not abstractly, but linked with feeling, what we can pour into the hearts of the youngest children. Then these hearts of young children will feel: here upon earth I stand as human being, but as man I am the expression of the whole star-strewn universal space: the whole world expresses itself in me. It will be possible to train the human being to feel himself a member of the whole cosmos. That is the one condition. The other condition is the following: when we are able to arrange the whole of education and instruction so that man knows that he is an image of the universe in his head, and in the remaining organism is withdrawn from the universe, that with his remaining organism he must so work upon what falls down like a rain of the soul—the whole universe—that it becomes independent in man here upon earth, then this will be a particular inner experience. Think of this two-fold human being, whom I will now draw in this curious fashion. When he comes to know that from the whole universe there flow unconsciously into his head, stimulating its forces, the secrets of the stars, but that all this must be worked upon his whole life through by the rest of his organism, so that he may conserve it on earth, carry it through death back again into the spiritual world—when this becomes a living experience, then man will know his twofold nature, he will know himself as head-man and heart-man. For what I am now saying means that man will learn to solve his own riddle, to say to himself: inasmuch as I become more and more heart-man, inasmuch as I remain young, I view in later years through what my heart gives me, that which in childhood and youth I learnt through my head. The heart gazes up to the head and will see there an image of the whole starry heavens. The head however will look to the heart and will find there the mysteries of the human riddle, will learn to fathom in the heart the actual being of man. The human being will feel as regards his education: To be sure, I can learn all sorts of things with my head. But as I go on living, as I live on towards death that is to bear me into the spiritual world, what I learn through the head is fructified in the future through the love ascending from the rest of the organism and becomes something quite different. There is something in me as man that is only to be found in me as man; I have to await something. Very much lies in these words and it means very much when man is so educated that he says: I have something to await. I shall be thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old, and as I grow older from decade to decade, there comes towards me through growing older something of the mystery of man. I have something to await from the fact that I live on. Imagine if that were not mere theory, if it were life-wisdom, social life-wisdom. Then the child is educated in such a way that he knows ‘I can learn something; but he who teaches me possesses something that I cannot learn; I must first be as old as he before I can find it in myself. If he relates it to me, he gives me something which must be a sacred mystery for me, since I can hear it from his mouth, but cannot find it in myself.’ Just think what a relationship is created again between children and their elders, which is entirely lost in our age—if man knows that age offers something that is to be awaited. If I am not yet forty years old, that sum of mysteries cannot lie in me that can lie in one who is already forty years old. And if he imparts it to me, I receive it just as information, I cannot know it through myself. What a bond of human fellowship would be formed, if in this way a new earnestness, a new profundity came into life! This earnestness, this depth, is precisely what is lacking to our life, what our life does not possess. Our present life only values head-knowledge. But true social life will in this way die out, approach dissolution, for here on earth men wander about who have no idea what they are, who really only take seriously what there is up to the age of twenty-seven, and then employ the remainder of life in carrying about the corpse in them, but not in transforming the whole man into something which can still carry youthfulness through death. Because people do not understand this, my dear friends, because an age has come that could not understand this, everything that refers to spiritual things remains so unsatisfying, as I had to say yesterday concerning Friedrich Schlegel. He was a gifted man, he had understood much, but he did not know that a new revelation of the spirit was necessary, he thought that one could simply take the old Christianity. In many respects he could even express right ideas with ringing words—I will read you a passage from the last lecture by Friedrich Schlegel in the year 1828. He sought to prove, as he said, ‘that in the course of world-history a divine guiding hand and disposition is to be recognized, that not merely earthly visible forces are co-operating in this evolution, or opposing and hindering it, but that the conflict is in part directed under divine assistance against invisible powers. I hope to have established a conviction of this, even I though it is not proved mathematically, which would here be neither proper nor applicable, and that it will nevertheless remain active and vigorous.’ He had a presentiment, but not a living consciousness that man, by living through history, has to become familiar in history with divine forces, and together with these divine forces fights against opposing spiritual powers—he says expressly, ‘opposing spiritual powers’. For in certain respects people flee from the real science of the spirit. Since the third century of our era, when in the West the prejudice as it was called, arose against the persuasion of the false gnosis (so they called it: the persuasion of the false gnosis!) people have gradually begun to turn aside from all that can be known of the spiritual worlds. And so it came about that even religious impulses prepared materialism, and that these religious impulses could not prevent the fact that we have really nothing to give to youth. Our science does not serve the young; in later life one can only remember it, it cannot become heart-wisdom. In the religious field it is just the same. Man has finally come, one might say, to two extremes. He seems to have forgotten how to conceive of the super-sensible Christ and desires to know nothing of that cosmic power of which spiritual science must speak again as the power of Christ-Jesus. On the other hand there is the quite delightful, really lovely and charming picture which developed in the course of the Middle Ages and modern times through poets and musicians—a charming poetic picture which has developed round the Infant-Jesus. But pictures and ideas related to the dear Jesus-Babe cannot satisfy a man religiously his whole life through! It is in fact characteristic that a really paradoxical love for the sweet little Jesus is expressed in countless songs and so on. There is nothing to be objected to in this, but it cannot remain the only thing. That is the one aspect, where man, in order to have at least something, has clung to the smallest, since he cannot raise himself to the great. But it cannot fill up life. And on the other hand the ‘bon Dieu citoyen’, as at Christmas we learnt to know him in Heinrich Heine's words, the ‘bon citoyen’ Jesus, who is divested of all divinity, the God of the liberal pastors and liberal priests. Now do you believe that he can really grip life? Do you believe in particular that he can take youth captive? He is from the outset a dead theology-product, not even a theology-product, but a theology-history-product. In this sphere, however, mankind is far removed from directing its gaze to what is spiritual power in history. Why is this so? Simply because for a time mankind must go through a stage of gazing into the world purely from a materialistic standpoint. The time has also come when modern natural science which is so fitted for spirituality must be transformed into heart-knowledge. Our natural science is either execrable, if it remains as it is, or it is something quite extraordinarily grand, if it changes into heart-knowledge. For then it becomes spiritual science. The older science which is involved in all sorts of traditions had already transformed head-science into heart-science; the modern age has had no gift for transforming into heart-science the science it has acquired up to the present, and so it has come about that head-science, especially in the social field, has performed the only real work, and has thus brought about the most one-sided product it is possible to have. You see, man's head can know nothing at all of the being of man. Hence when man's head ponders over the being of man and his connection with the social life, it has to bring something quite foreign into the social common life. And that is the modern socialism, expressed as social-democratic theory. There is nothing that is such pure head-knowledge as the Marxist social-democracy. This is only because the rest of mankind has shirked any concern in world problems, and in the Marxist circles they have only occupied themselves with social theories. The others have only—no, I will be polite—let themselves be prompted by professorial-thoughts, which are purely traditional. But head-wisdom has become social theory. That is to say, people have tried to establish a social theory with an instrument which is least of all capable of knowing anything about the human being. This is a fundamental error of present-day mankind, which can only be fully disclosed when people know about head-knowledge and heart-knowledge. The head will never be able to refute socialism, Marxist socialism, because in our times the head's task is to think out and devise. It will only be refuted through Spiritual Science, since Spiritual Science is head wisdom transformed through the heart. It is extraordinarily important that one should realize these things. You see why even such a man as Schlegel suggested unsuitable means—since he was willing to accept the old, although he realized that man must re-acquire vision for the invisible that goes about amongst us. But our age is a challenge to direct the gaze to what is thus invisible. Invisible powers were always at hand as Schlegel divined: unseen powers have taken part in working upon what is being accomplished in mankind. Humanity, however, must evolve. Up to a certain degree it did not matter so much if people in the last few centuries gave no thought to the super-sensible, invisible forces, for instance, in social life. That will not do in the future. In the future, in face of the real conditions, that won't do! I could quote many examples to show this; I will bring forward one. In the course of the last decade and a half I have spoken of this from other points of view. Anyone who observes the social state of Europe, as it has developed since the 8th, 9th centuries, knows that many different things have worked into the structure of European life, into this complicated European life. In the West it has retained the Athanasian Christianity, it has thrust back eastwards (as I said here a few weeks ago) an older Christianity, originally linked with Asiatic traditions, the Russian Christianity, the Orthodox Christianity. It has developed in the West the various European members of this European social totality—inasmuch as it has gradually created a member out of the preserved Roman element with the newly revived German and Slav elements in Europe—altogether a complicated organism. One could find one's way about in it up to now, if one disregarded what lives there unseen; for the configuration of Europe has much force in its structure. But an essential and important force in this structure is, among others, the relation in which France has stood to the rest of Europe. I do not now mean merely the political relation, I mean the whole relation of France to the rest of Europe, and by this I mean all that any European could feel in the course of centuries, since the 8th, 9th centuries, with regard to anyone belonging to the French nation. There is this peculiarity, my dear friends, that, so far as the relation of the rest of Europe to France is concerned, it comes to expression in feelings of sympathy and antipathy. We have to do with sympathy and antipathy, and hence purely with a phenomenon of the physical plane. One can understand the human relationship coming into play between France and the rest of Europe if one studies what hearts, what human souls live out on the physical plane. What has developed for France, at any rate outside France, is to be understood through physical plane conditions. Hence it did no harm—there were similar relationships in Europe in the last centuries—it did no harm if people neglected to see the super-sensible powers playing into things, since the sympathies and antipathies were caused by relations of the physical plane. Much of what has thus played its part for centuries will become different. We are standing before mighty revolutions, even in regard to innermost relations that are coming over the European social structure. One need not believe it to have been lightly spoken if I have once again stressed the fact that things are to be taken more earnestly than men nowadays are inclined to take them. We are standing before mighty revolutions—and it will be necessary in the future for men to turn their eyes—the eyes of the mind—to spiritual relationships; for it will no longer be possible merely from physical plane relations to understand what is going on. It can only be understood if one can take spiritual relations into consideration. What took place in March—the fall of the Czar—has a metaphysical character. One can only understand it if one has in mind its metaphysical character. Why then was there a Czar at all? The question can be grasped in a higher sense than in the external trivial-historical sense. Why was there a Czar at all? If one disregards individual pacifist cranks who have seen something serious in the tomfoolery of the Czar's Peace-Manifesto, then one must say: even those who from all sorts of reasons have ranged themselves with the Russian realm have not loved Czardom. And in those who loved it, the love was certainly not very genuine. But why was there a Czardom? There was a Czardom—my dear friends, I will now express it paradoxically, somewhat extremely:—so that Europe had something to hate. It was necessary to provoke those forces of hatred. There was a Czardom, and the Czardom behaved as it did, so that Europe had something to hate. Europe needed this hate as a sort of fresh impetus to something else. The Czar must be there in order in the first place to serve as the point on which the hatred concentrated; for a wave of hatred was prepared, as may now even be seen externally. What is now taking place will be transformed into powerful feelings of hatred. It will no longer be possible to understand these, as the sympathy and antipathy of former times were to be understood—from the aspect of the physical plane. For, my dear friends, not mere human beings will hate. Central and Eastern Europe will be hated, not by men, but by certain demons which will dwell in men. The time will certainly come when Eastern Europe will perhaps be hated even more than Central Europe. These things must be understood and they must not be taken lightly. They can only be understood if men lift themselves to seek a connection with the spiritual world. For what has already been to some extent divined by such spirits as Friedrich Schlegel, will certainly come to pass, though they have not seen the foundations and the roots. Things must be grasped without prejudice in the eye of the soul, so that man can look back over the last centuries and what they have brought ... and then they will be able to co-operate in what must be founded. Among the fine passages that occur from time to time in Schlegel's addresses there is this: ‘In the evolution of mankind all depends on the inner being of the soul and on the sincerity in the soul, and harmful above all is every kind of political idolatry.’ That is a fine passage of Friedrich Schlegel's. This political idolatry, how it has laid hold of our time! How it rules our time! And the political idolatry has created a fine symptom for itself, by which one is able to recognize what is there. But one must look through circumstances! Yes, my dear friends, one must perceive what is living in our times. We have no possibility today, if we do not deepen knowledge through the heart, of giving children what they need in order to keep young and fitted for life all their life through. We have not yet this possibility3—and we understand that as soon as we look at the true nature of the head-man and heart-man. It must be established, it must come. If we want to put things in a few words we can say: Schoolmastering is utterly and entirely unable to fulfil its mission today. What ranks as Schoolmastering is completely foreign to the true being of man. But the world threatens to be ruled by a schoolmaster,4 revered through political idolatry. Schoolmastering, the least of all fitted for guiding men in the modern epoch, is supposed to be high politics. At least some few people ought to realize these things. For they are things which are profoundly connected with the deep knowledge which man can only gain if he seeks a little to penetrate the secrets of humanity. The world today can neither be grasped nor in any way governed through desires and instincts, through Chauvinism and nationalism, but solely through the good will which tries to penetrate into true reality.
|
186. The Fundamental Social Demand of Our Times: Understand One-Another
21 Dec 1918, Dornach Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
And yet, I know I am speaking in the spirit of the true Christmas peace in placing the following paradox before you. My dear friends, you know well that I am not speaking of the individual human beings but of the nations as a whole when I refer to these differentiations. |
186. The Fundamental Social Demand of Our Times: Understand One-Another
21 Dec 1918, Dornach Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
My dear friends, Once again there comes to life in our hearts the verse that has resounded through the centuries, of the Divine Mysteries manifesting in the Heights and of the peace on Earth for men of good-will. And at this moment I imagine, especially in our time, the question will arise within our hearts: What then does mankind need, over the whole Earth's round, for the prospering of earthly evolution and of that peace of which the Gospel tells? Well, my dear friends, we have been speaking for weeks past of what is needful to mankind all the Earth over, especially in this our time—questionable as it is and so fraught with questions. And if we would gather up into a single sentence what has been passing through our souls in recent weeks—then we may say: It is necessary for men to strive ever more and more for a full mutual understanding. This quest of a true mutual understanding among men coincides with what we explained yesterday as to the fundamental impulse underlying what we here call Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science strives for an insight into those things which can only be seen by spiritual vision in the world and in the evolution of the world. What is it that shall come to birth in human souls through this cosmic understanding? It is the true—not the apparent and illusory, but the true content of the social demands of the present time, and it consists in calling forth mutual understanding among men. We must strive for this understanding of humanity over the whole Earth—strive for it on the one hand with sincerity and on the other hand with strength. And this can only be done today with an active spiritual life, I mean a spiritual life which does not merely wish to devote itself to the world passively, but seeks to be inwardly active, partaking in the inner impulses of all existence and so arriving at an understanding of the world and man. Yesterday I told you, we are living in an age when new revelations of the Spirit are penetrating through the veil of outward phenomena. We cannot take this truth too earnestly. For he alone who takes it in full earnest will prove equal to the task which our age requires, of every single human being who claims to be awake in life. If you will think back over many things which we have considered in the last few weeks, you will realize that this understanding of man over the whole Earth cannot be attained so easily as many people think. We have tried to throw light on the peculiarities of the groupings of peoples in the Western and Eastern regions of the Earth and in the Middle. Without letting sympathies or antipathies come into play in the very least, we have tried to understand what are the deepest characteristics of the peoples of the West, the Middle and the East respectively. Why did we do so? To take an example, we pointed out that our age is characterized especially by the development of intellectuality, and that in the Western—especially the English-speaking—peoples, this intellectuality comes to expression in such a way that it acts, as it were, instinctively. Whereas in the Middle peoples, intellect does not work instinctively—in fact, to begin with, it is not innate in them at all; they must acquire it by education. This, we showed, is a very significant difference between the peoples of the West and of the Middle. Thereafter we pointed to the peoples of the East and we said: There, the evolution of intellect comes to expression in such a way that, to begin with, the Eastern peoples actually recoil from it. They are loath to awaken this intellectuality to life within them; they want to preserve it for the knowledge of the Spirit-Self in the future. We pointed to other differentiations also, over the earth. Today let us ask ourselves: Why do we indicate these differentiations? Why do we seek from our point of view to characterize the different groups of people over the Earth? We do so, my dear friends, because in future the mere “Love one-another” will no longer suffice. In future, men will only attain mutual understanding as to their several tasks over the whole Earth if they know what is working in one or in another territory of the Earth. They must be able to look consciously at the several characteristics of the different groups of people. Once we can rise to the inner feeling, which is indeed essential to such understanding, this understanding will indeed be brought about. The feeling to which I refer, my dear friends, is this; the moment we begin to characterize human beings all the Earth over in this way, we must rid ourselves of the impulse to judge and value in the way we judge and value an individual human being as to his moral qualities. In seeking to characterize the nations it simply will not do to judge of their worth as we do in the case of a single human being. It is the very essence of the evolution of the individual human beings on Earth, that man develops the moral qualities as an individual being. Morality can only be evolved by the individual, not by groups of human beings. It would be the worst of illusions if we continued to believe that groups of human beings—or, as one likes to call them nowadays, nations—can enter into a like relationship to one another as man to man. One who can understand concretely what groups of human beings (nations, too, therefore) are in reality, will see the nations guided, as you know from our lecture cycle on the Folk Souls, by those Beings of the Hierarchies whom we call Archangels. He will never ascribe to the mutual relationship of nations that which he must see in the relation of one human being to another. What the nations are, they are in face of the Divine Beings. Here there arises a very different valuation from that which obtains as between man and man. It is for this very reason that man becomes an individual in the course of his evolution. He wrests himself free from the mere folk or nation, so that he may enter fully into what we call the moral order of the world. This moral order of the world is a concern of the individual man. Such things must be understood by real spiritual knowledge. The true progress of Christianity itself in our time consists in this. I said the other day: We are living in a time when the Spirits of Personality rise in a sense to creative activity. They become Creators. This is exceedingly important, for inasmuch as they become Creator-Spirits there penetrates through the veil of phenomena what we described yesterday as a new revelation. The Spirits of Personality, therefore, are taking on the character of Creators. They become different in a sense from what they were before. They in their being take on a character like that which certain other Spirits (the Spirits of Form) possessed, for earthly evolution, since Lemurian times. This means that in a certain sense man will henceforth confront an altogether changed world-picture. We must become conscious of this, for this is the great thing in our time. Man is beginning to confront an altogether changed world picture, one that comes forth—to use a Goethean expression—out of the gray depths of the Spirit. If we look back with Spiritual Science into the historic evolution of mankind—we may look back into pre-Christian times—the farther we go back, the more we find that men possessed in an old instinctive way an extensive cosmic knowledge, which inspires us with all the greater reverence the more we learn to know it. For the seer it becomes a fact that at the outset of earthly evolution an immense Wisdom was poured out as it were over the earthly life of man. In course of time this Wisdom gradually filtered away. And strange as it may sound, my dear friends, yet it is true, it had reached a kind of zero level at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha came with a blessing to mankind. During that time all that humanity had known in former ages fell into a kind of chaos in the consciousness of man. Those who have understanding of these matters express themselves with perfect agreement on this fact. During that time, they say, the evolution into which man is woven had reached once more the point of utter ignorance. Yet into this gray ignorance which overlay mankind there fell the greatest earthly revelation—the Mystery of Golgotha—the starting point of new knowledge, new revelations for humanity. Nevertheless, through many centuries, as concerns man himself, the dark gray ignorance persisted in a sense. It does enlighten us, my dear friends, in the deepest sense, if, looking back on the last two thousand years, we ask ourselves with understanding: What, after all, did men produce out of themselves during these last two thousand years? All they possessed by way of Wisdom (independent of the Mystery of Golgotha) was old tradition—inheritance from old traditions. Let us understand one another aright. Needless to say, I will not say humanity has had no Wisdom at all during the last two thousand years, nor will I cast aspersions on the Wisdom which they had. The point is this: The Wisdom that was present in the old pre-Christian times—whose relics are still observable in the last centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha—this Wisdom was seen, albeit instinctively, seen in the Spirit of the olden times. Now however they had lost the power of relating themselves, with independent spiritual vision, to the content of the cosmic Wisdom. What had existed in olden times was preserved, as it were, in a historic memory. Even the Mystery of Golgotha, as I said yesterday, was clothed in the old Wisdom, expressed in the conceptions of the old-remembered Wisdom. All this went on through many centuries. An advance-guard—albeit only an advance guard—for a renewed penetration of man into Cosmic Wisdom emerged in the mode of thought of modern Natural Science. True, to begin with it emerges in an apparently godless form; yet it is so. It is something which man seeks to acquire by his own activity of soul. Have I not often emphasized that for the future men must learn to regard the spiritual world anthroposophically, even [as], since Copernicus, they have regarded the purely mechanical, external order of Nature? To learn to behold the Divine just as men learned to behold the outer mechanical aspect of the universe since Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—this is the task that must permeate us if we would come to a true understanding of our time. Of course there are many things against this true understanding of our time. Towards such understanding, as you know, such things are necessary as are said for instance in my book on Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment where we have shown what ways the soul must take to penetrate into the spiritual world even as Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno sought to penetrate the outward mechanical order of Nature. Those who have no deeper understanding for human aspirations may well be astonished that the most vigorous opposition arises out of the spirit of the old religious faiths (if we may call them so) against this endeavor to show what ways the human soul must take to find the spiritual world. It is especially so when the old spirit appears in the form of Jesuitism. Among the many stupid accusations which have appeared in three articles in the Stimmen der Zeit this year, the following also occurs: “The Church,” they say, “forbids this treatment of the human soul to find the paths into the spiritual world.” My dear friends, for many a modern believer in authority this may sound like something new; but they fail to remember that the very same Church also forbade the researches of Copernicus and Galileo! The Church dealt with external scientific research in exactly the same way. We need not therefore wonder if it metes out the same treatment to the inner researches of spiritual science. It is only remaining true to its old habits. Even as the Catholic Church rebelled until 1827 against the Copernican doctrine, so it rebels against the conscious penetration into the spiritual world. This penetration into the spiritual worlds is no mere talking in abstractions; it is something real and concrete. It means that we transcend in fact once more the state of dark, gray ignorance and penetrate with knowledge into the underlying spiritual content of the world. Was it not also part of this gray ignorance that man looked out upon the world and saw the nations—the groups of human beings—and spoke of them as of a formless chaos. They spoke of the peoples of the West, of the Middle and of the East, but they did not distinguish nor characterize them. At best they knew that the leaders of the nations were Archangeloi, but they did not strive really to know the specific characters of the several nations—of the Archangeloi themselves. This belongs to the new revelation:—we must now observe and understand how the several Archangeloi are working over the face of the Earth. And this will be a real enrichment of man's consciousness all the Earth over. Through the very inability to rise from the dead level of gray ignorance to real differentiation, the gulf has been brought about which I described yesterday, between the subject of the Sunday sermons and what is regarded as the business of everyday life in the outer world. Within the sphere of the religious faiths they talk about the Divine World and its relation to mankind, but all this talking proves too feeble to penetrate the life and business of men on Earth. It can say no more to them than “Love one another,” which is about as sensible as if I were to say to the stove: Warm the room, that is your duty as a stove. Such teaching has not power really to take hold of the hearts of man. They cannot unite their knowledge of everyday affairs with what is brought down to them in this way as abstract precepts, customs, dogmas about the spiritual world. This gulf is there, my dear friends, and the religious faiths would only like to hold it fast. The strangest flowers spring from the presence of this gulf and from the conscious desire to maintain it. The Jesuits, for instance, object to anthroposophical Spiritual Science because it looks for something in the human being which is capable of inner evolution so as to lead man to the Divine. To do so, they say, is heretical, for the Church teaches us and forbids us to say anything different from this—that God in His Being has nothing to do with the world, nay more, that in substantial identity He has nothing to do with the soul of man. He who declares that the soul of man bears something of the Divine Being within it in any respect whatever, is for the Catholic Church—as conceived by the Jesuits—a heretic. Into such statements is instilled the inmost tendency of that Church, which is not to let the human beings reach to the Divine but to shut them off from it. Dogma itself assumes a form such as to prevent man from reaching the Divine. No wonder, therefore, since they have not been permitted to reach to the Divine, if in the fifth Post-Atlantean age (which had to bring the Spiritual Soul, once and for all) World-knowledge has become not a Divine but a pure Ahrimanic knowledge. For that which is recognized as Natural Science today is a purely Ahrimanic achievement. We have often characterized it thus. Strange, that the Catholic Church should prefer the Ahrimanic Natural Science to the anthroposophical; for the Ahrimanic Natural Science is no longer considered heretical today, while the anthroposophical Natural Science is anathematized. A truly enlightened man of today needs to be clear about these things. He must recognize that the same thing must now need to be undertaken on the path of the Spirit as has hitherto been undertaken on the path of Nature. Only so can the path of Nature be saved from its aberration into a purely Ahrimanic realm. It has already suffered this aberration, because in fact the path of the Spirit could only be added to it at a later stage. But from now onwards and for the future of mankind, the path of the Spirit must be added to it, so that Natural Science may be lifted again to its Divine Spiritual height; so that the life in which we live between birth and death be reunited with the life of which the science of the Spirit has to tell, namely that life in which we live in the time between death and a new birth. Yet this will only happen in our time if we have the will really to understand this life all the Earth over, to understand it as it works in man himself. Moreover we can only understand the single human being if we understand the character of human groupings. Only so shall we be enabled to see into the true reality. Not long ago I drew your attention to a strange fact which may well surprise many people. I will repeat it briefly. You know that here in Switzerland there lived a worthy philosopher, Avenarius, who undoubtedly regarded himself as a good, law-abiding bourgeois citizen; who did not think himself in the remotest degree a revolutionary. He founded a school of thought written in so difficult a language that very few people can read it. Moreover, writing a rather more popular language, but in a similar sense, there lived a philosopher in Vienna and in Prague—Ernst Mach, who equally regarded himself as a good law-abiding citizen. Truly, neither of them has a vein of revolution in them. Yet the fact is, these two philosophers have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks have adopted them as their State Philosophers—so we may put it, if we do not misunderstand the expression. True, Avenarius and Mach would turn in their graves if they were to discover that they are now looked up to by the Bolsheviks as their State Philosophers. As I said on the former occasion, we only do not understand such a phenomenon because we confine ourselves to abstract logic instead of holding fast to the logic of realities, the logic of facts, the logic of things seen. Though you may think that this lies far afield from your point of view, I will nevertheless refer to it again from another aspect. In particular, I will mention one point in the philosophy of Avenarius which may help us to answer the interesting questions: How could it be that Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks? The very fact is after all significant enough of the utter confusion of our time. Avenarius, you see, raises various questions. If we spoke in his technical language—of “introjections” and the like, of all the purely epistemological concepts he evolved—we should be speaking a pretty unintelligible language for most people. Yet in this unintelligible language he raises a question which is after all very interesting from the point of view of Spiritual Science. Avenarius asks: If a man were all alone in the world, would he still speak of the distinction between that which is in his own soul and that which is outside in the world? Would he still distinguish the subjective and the objective? Richard Avenarius is clever enough to declare: We are only tempted to speak of the difference between “subjective” and “objective” through the fact that we are not alone in the world. When we stand face to face with another man, we assume that that which we carry in our brains—of a table or of any other object—is in him too. By projecting into his brain the same picture which we carry in ourselves, the whole thing acquires a picture-like character, and this leads us to distinguish the things in our soul from the things outside—the things that we confront. Avenarius opines that if there were not other people outside us in the world we should not speak of the differences between that which is in our own soul and that which is outside us. We should regard ourselves as one with the things, merged with the things of the world. We should not distinguish ourselves from the world. We may truly say, my dear friends, from a certain point of view Avenarius is right in his assertion, but from another point of view appallingly mistaken. It is indeed of some importance that in the course of our earliest childhood (though in our conscious memory we know nothing of that time) we came into touch with human beings. Our whole ideation—our whole way of thinking—was influenced by this. It is quite true, things would be very different if we had not come into touch with others; but they would not be as Avenarius supposes. He who can apprehend the underlying facts by spiritual vision arrives at the real truth. Our whole world-picture would indeed be different if at the time in life when we cannot yet think consciously we did not meet with other human beings. But this is the curious thing, my dear friends. The different world-picture which we then should have would contain the spiritual Beings who underlie the world. It would not be as Avenarius supposes. Incidentally, what a dreadful abstraction! We should not fail to distinguish ourselves from the world if we were alone in the world and there were no other human beings. Behind the minerals and plants (for there would have to be no animals, they too would disturb the world-picture by their presence) we should perceive the Divine-Spiritual World. In other words, my dear friends, our living-together with other men is the reason why, in the ordinary way of life, we do not perceive the spiritual world behind the plants and minerals. Our fellow-men place themselves before this spiritual world and hide it from us. Think what this means! At the cost of not perceiving the Divine world of the Hierarchies, we acquire all that comes to us through our living together with other men on the physical Earth. Our fellow-men place themselves before the world of the Gods and hide it from us, as it were. Naturally, Avenarius was unaware of this, hence he carried the question in an entirely wrong direction. He imagined that if no human being were there we should see ourselves unseparated from the world—should not distinguish ourselves from the world. The truth is we should distinguish ourselves—not indeed from other men or from plants and minerals—but from the Gods whom we should then have all round us. That is the truth. If you consider this you will realize what is very important to realize in our time. Strange to say, it is in many respects our destiny today! Precisely the most penetrating spirits of our time will often touch on the most vital questions—yet always so as to lead them in the most wrong direction, so as to lead away from the perception of the Spirit. It would indeed be difficult to lead away from the perception of the Spirit more radically than Avenarius does. His philosophy is extremely sharp-witted—written with all the refinement of professorial language—and it is therefore well-adapted to lead men away from the Spirit in a state of sleep. And when men are led asleep away from the Spirit they regard this leading away from the Spirit as a necessity—a kind of mathematical necessity. So long as they do not observe that they are being led away from the Spirit, they take it all as scientifically proven. That is the one thing, my dear friends. Here we have a philosopher (and much the same could be said of Mach) the inmost nerve of whose thought is to found a system which shall lead man radically away from the Spirit. In Bolshevism, my dear friends, the intention is to found a social order to the exclusion of all things spiritual—to group mankind in their social life so that the Spiritual plays no part in it at all. That is the real inner connection of the two, and it makes itself connection of the two, and it makes itself felt in the logic of facts. Not for a mere external reason but by a deep inner kinship, Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks. You see, it is quite possible—with judgments that are prevalent today—to stand more or less fixedly before these things in blank astonishment. How do the Bolsheviks come to have Avenarius and Mach as State Philosophers? For us however it is possible even now to see the real inner connections. Only to do so, we must look for the underlying spiritual facts, as we have done in this instance, where we perceive how it would be in reality if man [were] alone on the physical Earth without any other men. There are many facts and phenomena entering into our life today—especially in the mutual relationships of men—which paralyze men's minds to contemplate, because they can gain no understanding of them without Spiritual Science. I have just given an instance from the spiritual life; quite everyday facts, however, might also be mentioned in this way. Do not imagine that it was so in all ages. Such phenomena also existed in ancient times, but they were instinctively intelligible to men—intelligible by the old instinctive clairvoyance. Then, through the long gray period of ignorance, such phenomena were absent from the mutual intercourse of men. Now they are making their appearance once more. Not that the souls of men are evolving; the world is evolving. The world itself is changing, and it reveals its change to begin with in the mutual intercourse of men. In the next epoch it will also reveal the change in the relation of man to the other kingdoms of Nature. Life will remain unintelligible to men, in the present and in the immediate future, so long as they are unwilling to consider it through Spiritual Science. Illusion after illusion will take hold of the soul, if man will not have recourse to the spiritual-scientific concepts. There are some here present to whom at the outbreak of the present War-catastrophe I repeated one thing again and again. It is quite possible, I said, to write of the so-called world-historic facts of the last few centuries according to the records in the archives—by looking up the records and writing histories in the style of Ranks of the rest. But of the outbreak of this War-catastrophe it is impossible to write so. However much they delve into the archives, if they do not observe what was the mood of soul of those who were concerned in the outbreak of this War, and how this mood of soul gave entry for the Ahrimanic powers into the Earth's affairs, and how thereby the causes of this War-catastrophe came from an Ahrimanic side—if, in a word, they are willing to observe the starting-point of this catastrophe with Spiritual Science, it will remain forever dark. This War-catastrophe, my dear friends, is a real challenge to mankind, to learn from it. Much can be learned from what happened during the last four or five years as a consequence of the preceding events. Above all things, we should learn to put certain questions, not so one-sidedly as heretofore, but in keeping with the real needs of the time. As I have often said, we have no reason to comfort ourselves too lightly about the misfortunes of our time, still less to shut our eyes to them. But we have also no reason to be pessimistic. Only consider the following. We can say to ourselves: immense and terrible events have taken place in the last four or five years over the Earth. And yet, what is the essential thing in all these terrors? It is what human souls have experienced through them. That is the essential thing—what human souls have experienced through these events, with respect to their soul's evolution, needless to say throughout all Earth-existence. Seen in this light, a question fraught with deep significance emerges. The question is strange and paradoxical, but so only because it is fraught with such deep meaning, unaccustomed to our everyday thought. Could we really desire that mankind should have lived on without any such catastrophe, in the way they had grown accustomed to live until the year 1914? Can we really say that that would have been desirable? In putting this question I may be permitted once again to point to what I said before the outbreak of this War, in my lecture cycle at Vienna (April 1914, Cycle XXXII). I said: If we really see what is living in the world of man today, the mutual relationship of men, their social life, appears to us like a social carcinoma—a cancerous growth—eating its way through mankind. Men had only shut their eyes to this carcinoma of the social commonweal. They were unwilling to look the real facts in the face. No one who sees things at their deepest could say that it would have been good for mankind to go on in that way. For on the lines which I have indicated they would have gone more and more downhill, farther and farther from the Spirit. And as to those to whom we look with souls full of pain—the millions who have been swept away from the physical plane by this dread catastrophe and who are now living on as souls—they it is who ponder most of all how different now their situation is, inasmuch as they are spending the rest of their life in the spiritual world; how different it would have been if their Karma had still kept them on the physical Earth. Sub specie aeterni—from the aspect of eternity—things after all appear quite different, and this must not be left unsaid. Only on the other hand we must not take these things lightly or superficially. True as it is, it is infinitely sad that this catastrophe has taken place, yet it is no less true, my dear friends; by this very catastrophe man has been preserved from an appalling downfall into materialism and utilitarianism. And though it does not yet show itself today, yet it will show itself—above all in the Middle Countries and the East, where, in place of an order that had been imbued with materialism, a state of chaos is now developing. Truly we cannot refer to this chaos without an undertone of pain and suffering. I mean the social chaos which has overcome the Middle and Eastern countries, and that shows outwardly little prospect of transforming into any kind of harmony. And yet there is another aspect. Wherever this chaos exists, the world in the near future will give men very, very little through the purely physical plane. The blessings of the physical plane will truly not be great in the Middle and the Eastern countries. Of all that can be given to man so that he feels his life sustained by external powers—of this there will be precious little. Man will have to take hold of himself in his own soul in order to stand fast, and in the very act of doing so he will be able to set forth along the path into the spiritual world. He will resolve to go towards the Spirit, whence alone the salvation of the future can come. This, my dear friends, will be the essential thing for the future. Our outer bodily existence will, as it were, be slipping away from us. The outer bodily nature, as I said yesterday, will no longer be so sound and healthy as in times past; it has more death in it than it had in bygone ages. The content of the World-riddle is not to be found with that with which our bodily nature is connected; no, we must rise into the spiritual world to find the necessary impulse, and also the impulse which we need for the social order. This insight will arise when men are able to find as little as possible in the physical world. For the physical world itself will only be able to assume a form of harmony when it seeks for this form out of the spiritual life. The Bible, my dear friends, in its first pages, does not tell us that is was Lucifer or Ahriman who drove man out of Paradise; it was the Jahve—God Himself who did so. And as we know, this very expulsion from paradise signifies man's becoming free—the conscious experience of freedom by mankind. The possibility, the seed of freedom, was given by the expulsion from Paradise. Is it then contrary to the Biblical wisdom if we say: Once more, it was Divine Wisdom which drove men out of the present age that was leading them down into materialism and utilitarianism, thus planting seeds, which, spiritually taken hold of, can really help the world. It sounds to us out of the painful depths of the last four-and-a-half years: “Spiritual life is wishing to reveal itself through the veil of the outward phenomena; men shall learn through misfortune to turn their eyes to these revelations of the Spirit, and it will be for their salvation.” This too is a language which will seem paradoxical to many a modern man and yet, it is the language which Christ Himself is guiding us to speak. Today it lies inherent in the very progress of Christianity to grasp the Christian truths in a new way. This can only be done if they are taken hold of spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha, my dear friends, is a spiritual event which has entered into the evolution of the Earth. It can only be fully understood by a spiritual way of knowledge. As in the last resort it was through misfortune that mankind found the Christ, we too shall have to seek through our misfortune for the Christ through the new way of comprehension. I admit, my dear friends, this is no ordinary comfort. Yet if we are ready to put all trivialities aside in the deeper sense of the word it is after all no little comfort, nay perhaps, it is the only comfort in our time, worthy of the dignity of man. It is not the kind of comfort which says to man: Only wait, and without your cooperation all the divine things will be vouchsafed to you! Rather does it say: Make use of your own forces, and you will find that the God is speaking and abounding in your souls. Then, through this God, you will also find the God in the great Universe, and—which is the most important—you yourselves will be able to work in communion with Him. We must depart from the mere passive attitude to super-sensible knowledge. Man must bestir himself within to find himself, and as he does so, recognize himself as part of the World-Order. Let the religious faiths rebel, which want to make things nice and comfortable for lulling a man's spirit to sleep in clouds of incense (I speak figuratively) so that he may then find his way to the Divine passively and without active cooperation on his part. Let them rebel however much against the call that now springs forth out of the spiritual worlds!—“Man shall now look for his true worth in inner spiritual activity—in the active inner development of spiritual life!” This, my dear friends, must be; and it must be so especially if we are to reckon with the social demands of our time. I have said so already in these weeks. We are living—at any rate, a great part of our educated humanity are living—from the achievements of Greek culture; but we do not always remember how these achievements, by which we live, were created. Greek civilization was unfolded on a basis of slavery. A great proportion of mankind had to live as slaves in order to bring about at all what we now feel as the blessings of Greek culture. Let us face the fact fully and clearly. All that Greek Art, Greek learning signifies—all this and many other things arose on the foundation of slavery. Then, my dear friends, we shall ask ourselves with renewed intensity: What is it that has brought about the inner change? We today no longer think as did the great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, who took slavery as an absolute matter of course. At that time it went without saying, even for the wisest of men, that nine-tenths of mankind must live as slaves. For us today it no longer goes without saying. On the contrary, we regard it as an offence against the dignity of man that anyone should think so. What was it then that brought it about for Western humanity—this radical change in men's way of thought? It was Christianity which freed men from slavery and led them to recognize, at least in principle, that all men are equal before God, as to their soul. For this was the principle which uprooted slavery out of the social order of mankind. But as we know—for we must refer to it again and again from many points of view—one thing has been left behind until our day. It is that of which I told you that it is the salient point in the consciousness of the modern working man. One thing has been left behind, namely the possibility—in our social order—for a part of the human being to be bought as a commodity and sold by himself as a commodity. Moreover it is a part of man that takes its course in his very body. The salient point of the social question—the perpetual irritant, the thing that continually incites—is the fact that human labor-power can be paid for. This too creates at the very foundations of all our social order the character of Egoism. For egoism cannot but prevail in the social (I say once more, in the social order—please understand me aright) if to obtain what he requires for his own needs a man must get his labor paid for. He is obliged to earn for himself. This is the next and necessary stage—after the overcoming of slavery—it must be made impossible for any man's labor to be a commodity. This is the true salient point of the social question, and it is this which the new Christianity will solve. In recent lectures I have told you something of the solving of the social question. For that three-folding of the social order, of which I told you there, sets free the commodity from the labor-power of man. In future, men will only buy and sell commodities—outer objects, things separate from man himself—which (as I wrote already in my essay on Theosophy and the Social Question which appeared in 1905) one man will work for another from motives of brotherly love. It may be a long way to go to attain this end. Yet this and this alone will solve the social question. Whoever will not believe today that this must come about in the world-order is like a man who would have said, at the time of the origin of Christianity: “Slaves there must always be.” Even as he would have been wrong at that time, so likewise today the man is wrong who says: “Labor must always be paid for.” At that time it seems unimaginable that a certain number of men should not be slaves. Not even Plato or Aristotle could conceive it. Today the cleverest of men cannot conceive a social order wherein Labor would have quite another value—quite another meaning than of being paid for. Needless to say, even then the product will proceed from the labor, but the product alone will be able to be bought and sold. Socially, this very fact will be the salvation of men. To realize these things it is indeed necessary to have the knowledge of spiritual vision, the logic of things seen. Without it humanity will not go forward. The logic of spiritual vision is the fuel to create what must arise among mankind in future, namely that human love which springs from the understanding between man and man. Strange as it sounds, my dear friends, today, when all manner of atavistic remnants are still there in men in one way or another—today everything is still regarded with sympathies and antipathies. So it is, for instance, when we explain such distinctions as I here did a little while ago. I said that of the three members of human nature the Western peoples are called especially to develop the abdominal nature, the Middle peoples the heart-nature and the Eastern peoples the head nature. Nowadays, such things are nearly always treated as judgments of relative value, in one way or another. At least, somewhere inside him every man still has a little pigeon-hole where he does so. Such valuation must absolutely cease, for this very vision of the differentiations of mankind over the whole Earth's sphere will become the basis of sympathetic, understanding love. From understanding, not from ignorance, true human love—reaching over the whole Earth—will spring, during this age of the Spiritual Soul. Then will men know, over the whole Earth, how to find themselves in Christ. Christ is no concern of one nation or another. He concerns all mankind; but to recognize this, many an illusion must first give way. Men must be able to raise themselves, to look without illusions into the true nature of things. Today, in many spheres of life, they are unwilling to do so. And yet, I know I am speaking in the spirit of the true Christmas peace in placing the following paradox before you. My dear friends, you know well that I am not speaking of the individual human beings but of the nations as a whole when I refer to these differentiations. It is so easy to misunderstand these things unless one has good will. As I have pointed out so often, the single human individuality who grows out of the nation is not intended; only nations as such. I beg you to bear this in mind when I now say the following:— You see, my dear friends, let us consider the one or other of the judgments which have been passed during the last four years on the countries, or States, of the Middle of Europe. I can thoroughly understand such feelings. I do not want to say anything in the least against those who are filled with enthusiasm for the Entente. Far be it from me—everyone has his opinion, and that is justified from a certain point of view. But, my dear friends, suppose we now look away from the opinion which prevailed in the past few years and consider its prolongation in the present time. Then after all, perhaps we may find something rather hard for understanding. For we may ask ourselves: Is it necessary for the judgments which were passed, while the potentates of the middle countries held the reins of power, to be continued now? Nay is it necessary to do all that one can—and by the most refined of methods—so as to be able to prolong these judgments? Is it necessary? Is it equally explicable? Superficially considered, it is certainly not so easy to explain as many such things were before. More deeply considered however, it is still explicable, my dear friends. More deeply considered we can understand it—albeit not out of the character of the individuals (for the individuals themselves in Western countries will want to bring about a healing of these matters). Those, however, whose judgments merely spring from their respective nationalities, or rather, national prejudices—they have in their subconsciousness something which we may characterize as follows:— Some weeks ago I explained that in our conception of the world and notably our way of thinking at the present time much that belongs to the Old Testament is still alive, while the essential nerve of Christianity has only entered to a slight extent as yet. Now it is characteristic of Jahve-worship that it concerns all those things to which we do not bring ourselves up between our birth and death, but which are given to us as an inheritance—i.e., the things which lie inherent in our blood, which in the normal course only have influence on us while we sleep, while we ourselves are outside the body. This Jahve-conception still lives and throbs in our time to a very large extent, and it can only rise into the Christ-conception if we turn in this intellectualistic age with all our power to the conquest of the spiritual world, not through birth, not through what is inspired into us with our birth, but through our own self-education in this life. Now by nature the West is not predestined to pass from the service of Jahve to that of Christ. Such predestination only begins in the Middle of Europe and goes towards the East. This applies once more, needless to say, not to the individual but to the nation. Hence, my dear friends, the characteristic form of Wilsonian thought, steeped as it is entirely in Old Testament conceptions. However much it may deny the fact, the form of thought stands out as though it would fain exterminate what is trying spiritually to emerge in the Middle Countries and in the East. Hence it is outwardly so hard to understand. Under all manner of pretexts, these people still prolong the same hostile spirit, though they have swept away what they professed they wanted to sweep away, and only the peoples themselves are left, against whom—so they assured us—they had no ill intentions. They do so because in reality they are resisting what has arisen in spiritual evolution in the Middle Countries and in the East during the last few centuries, which, nonetheless, is necessary to mankind. Subconsciously, they want to expunge it. They do not want to enter into these things. We are now living in a most important crisis of the world. I have often heard people ask; how is it that the men of the West especially the English and the French—have such a dreadful hatred of the Germans? There is a very simple answer, my dear friends, and yet it is an exhaustive answer. Man always sees himself differently (especially himself as member of a nationality) than he sees his fellow men. I can assure you, my dear friends, such thoughts as Mach had when he got into the bus or walked along the street are very often there in the subconscious lives of men. You know how Mach himself relates the story. Once, very tired, he got into a bus and did not notice that there was a mirror on the side opposite the door. Someone else, he thought, got in at the same time from the other side, and he said to himself: What a horrid old schoolmaster that is! He knew himself very little in his outward person and when he saw himself he did not like it at all. Now, my dear friends, observe the spiritual history of Middle Europe—not in its more intimate features but as a whole. Down to Lessing, far down into the last third of the 18th century, the Germans took pains to be like the French. You could see it in everything. From a certain moment onward (approximately in the 12th century) till far beyond the middle of the 18th century, the Germans endeavored to be like the French—to behave in such a way that they also might become Frenchmen. What the French could not see in themselves—or, if they saw it, were inclined to rate it highly—all this they hated with a dreadful hatred when they saw it in the imitation. Unconsciously, man does indeed practice a strange form of self-knowledge. At bottom, in their deepest being, the Germans were never hated by the French. The French only hated themselves when they saw their mirrored image in the German soul. Since then a very remarkable English influence has arisen, the extent of which is by no means adequately realized. The English naturally see themselves just as little as Mach did; but they notice themselves well enough when they see themselves in this mirrored image which has entered so strongly into the German soul since the 18th century. It is the Englishman whom they now judge in the German. There is the simple psychological solution, my dear friends. If the world-crisis had not arisen, this state of affairs would have gone on for a long time, and we should have a great mixture, as it were a broth, out of which single individualities would nevertheless have arisen, possessing the intimate qualities of the true German. Now, however, out of the world-crisis, chaos and misfortune will cause to arise what must arise: that which was always present, though under the power of the West it was unable to unfold. These are the real facts. There is no ground for pessimism, even in Middle Europe. We must only dive to the deeper foundations which underlie the process of evolution. My dear friends, what the Entente Powers are doing today may appear thus, or thus. It matters very little how it appears, for at the bottom of their hearts they are wanting what is quite impossible. They are wanting to prevent the rise of something which absolutely must unfold in the Middle of Europe and in the East, for it is connected with the spiritual progress of mankind; it cannot be prevented. But it must also call forth this, my dear friends:—If man is to take the future of the Earth in earnest he must truly have faith in the Spirit; only out of the power of the Spirit will there come what must come, even for the solving of the burning social needs of our time. In the machine age it was necessary for these 50 million invisible human beings—that is to say, human beings visible as machines—to arise, so that men might gradually learn to feel that they must not be paid like machines are paid. And it was also necessary for this appalling catastrophe to arise, wherein the machine age has celebrated its greatest triumphs. Out of this catastrophe man will begin to unfold his real strength, and as he does so, he will gain a certain power once more to unite himself with the Divine and Spiritual. If we may now compare what many people have rightly called the most appalling event in the Earth's history with the beginning of Earth-evolution we may say: just as it was no mere misfortune for men to be driven out of Paradise, so too it is no mere misfortune that such a catastrophe has overtaken mankind. In the end, my dear friends, the most valuable truths are paradoxes today, as I have often pointed out, we may well say: Men were so infamous as to nail to the Cross the greatest Being Who ever appeared on the Earth—Jesus Christ. They killed Him. We may well say that it was infamous of them. And yet this Death, my dear friends, is the very content of Christianity; for through this Death there took place what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. Without it there would be no Christianity. This Death is the good fortune of men; this Death is the abounding strength of earthly man. So paradoxical are things in their reality. For on the one hand we may say: how infamous it was of men to nail Christ to the Cross; and yet, with this Death—this nailing to the Cross—the greatest event on Earth is brought about. A misfortune is not always merely a misfortune; often it is the starting-point for the achievement of human greatness and of human strength. |