The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. Giordano Bruno and Angelus Silesius

[ 1 ] In the first decade of the sixteenth century, at the castle of Heilsberg in Prussia, the scientific genius of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) devised a system of thought that forced the people of the following ages to look up at the starry heavens with different ideas than their ancestors had in antiquity and the Middle Ages. For them, the earth was their dwelling place resting at the center of the universe. The celestial bodies, however, were to them entities of a perfect nature whose movement ran in circles, because the circle is the image of perfection. - In what the stars showed the human senses, something spiritual was immediately seen. The things and processes on earth spoke a different language to man; the shining stars, which appeared beyond the moon in the pure ether like a spiritual being filling space, spoke a different language. Nicolaus of Cusa had already formed other ideas. Through Copernicus, the earth became for man a brother being to the other celestial bodies, a celestial body that moves like others. All the differences that it exhibited for man could now only be attributed to the fact that it was his dwelling place. He was forced no longer to think differently about the processes of this earth and those of the other universe. His sensory world had expanded into the most distant spaces. He had to accept that what entered his eye from the ether was now just as much a sense world as the things of the earth. He could no longer seek the spirit in the ether in a sensual way.

[ 2 ] From then on, anyone striving for higher knowledge had to come to terms with this expanded world of the senses. In earlier centuries, the sensing human spirit stood before a different world of facts. Now it was given a new task. No longer could the things of this earth alone express their essence from within man. This inner being had to encompass the spirit of a world of the senses that fills the spatial universe in the same way everywhere. - The thinker from Nola, Philotheo Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), was faced with such a task. The senses have conquered the spatial universe; the spirit can no longer be found in space. Thus man was instructed from outside to seek the spirit henceforth only where, out of deep inner experiences, the glorious thinkers, whose series the preceding remarks have led us past, have sought it. These thinkers drew from themselves a view of the world to which advanced natural science later forced people. The sun of ideas, which was later to fall on a new view of nature, is still below the horizon with them; but its light already appears as dawn at a time when men's thoughts about nature itself are still in the darkness of night. - The sixteenth century gave to natural science the celestial space of the sense world, to which it rightfully belongs; by the end of the nineteenth century this science had reached the point where it could also give to the sense world of facts that which belongs to it within the phenomena of vegetable, animal and human life. Neither above in the ether nor in the development of living beings may this natural science now seek anything other than actual sensuous processes. Just as the thinker of the sixteenth century had to say: The earth is a star among stars, subject to the same laws as other stars - so the thinker of the nineteenth century must say: "Man, whatever his origin, whatever his future, is for anthropology only a mammal, and the one whose organization, needs and diseases are the most complex, and whose brain, with its admirable efficiency, has reached the highest degree of development." (Paul Topinard: "Anthropology"). (Paul Topinard: "Anthropologie", Leipzig 1888, p. 528.) - From such a point of view, achieved by natural science, a confusion between the spiritual and the sensual can no longer occur if man understands himself correctly. Developed natural science makes it impossible to seek in nature a spirit conceived in the manner of the material, just as sound thinking makes it impossible to seek the reason for the advance of the hands of a clock not in mechanical laws (the spirit of inorganic nature) but in a special demon that caused the movement of the hands. Ernst Haeckel was right to reject the crude notion of a God conceived in material terms as a natural scientist. "In the higher and more abstract forms of religion, this physical appearance is abandoned and God is worshipped only as 'pure spirit', without a body. 'God is a spirit, and whoever worships him should worship him in spirit and in truth. Nevertheless, the soul activity of this pure spirit remains completely the same as that of the anthropomorphic God person. In reality, even this immaterial spirit is not conceived as incorporeal, but invisible, gaseous. We thus arrive at the paradoxical idea of God as a gaseous vertebrate." (Haeckel, "Die Welträtsel", p.333.) In reality, a sensual, factual existence of a spiritual being may only be assumed where direct sensual experience shows spirituality; and only such a degree of spirituality may be assumed as is perceived in this way. The excellent thinker B. Carneri was allowed to say (in the essay "Sensation and Consciousness", p. 15): "The sentence: No spirit without matter, but also no matter without spirit, - would entitle us to extend the question also to the plant, yes, to the next best boulder, in which hardly anything should speak in favor of these correlative concepts." Spiritual processes as facts are the results of various activities of an organism; the spirit of the world is not present in the world in a material way, but only in a spiritual way. The soul of man is a sum of processes in which the spirit appears most directly as a fact. In the form of such a soul, however, the spirit is only present in man. And it means misunderstanding the spirit, it means committing the worst sin against the spirit, if one looks for the spirit in soul form elsewhere than in man, if one thinks of other beings as animated as man. Whoever does this only shows that he has not experienced the spirit itself within himself; he has only experienced the external manifestation of the spirit, the soul, which reigns within him. But this is just as if someone were to take a pencil-drawn circle for the real mathematical-ideal circle. He who experiences nothing else in himself but the soul-form of the spirit then feels compelled to presuppose such a soul-form in non-human things as well, so that he need not remain with the gross-sensual materialist. Instead of thinking of the primordial ground of the world as spirit, he thinks of it as world-soul, and assumes a general ensouling of nature.

[ 3 ] Giordano Bruno, who was influenced by the new Copernican view of nature, could not grasp the spirit in the world, from which it had been expelled in the old form, in any other way than as world soul. If you delve into Bruno's writings (especially his profound book "On the Cause, the Principle and the One"), you get the impression that he thought of things as animated, albeit to varying degrees. He did not actually experience the spirit in himself, so he thought of it in the manner of the human soul in which he alone encountered it. When he speaks of spirit, he conceives of it in this way: "Universal reason is the innermost, most real and most proper faculty and a potential part of the world soul; it is an identical thing that fills the universe, illuminates the universe and instructs nature to bring forth its species as they should be." Although the spirit is not described in these sentences as a "gaseous vertebrate", it is described as a being that is like the human soul. "Be the thing as small and tiny as it will, it has within it a part of spiritual substance, which, when it finds the substrate suitable for it, strives to become a plant, an animal, and organizes itself into any body, which is commonly called animated. For spirit is found in all things, and there is not even the smallest little body that does not contain such a part of itself that it does not animate itself." - Because Giordano Bruno did not really experience the spirit as a spirit within himself, he was also able to confuse the life of the spirit with the external mechanical processes with which Raymundus Lullus (1235-1315) sought to unveil the secrets of the spirit in his so-called "Great Art". A more recent philosopher, Franz Brentano, describes this "great art" as follows: "Concepts were recorded on concentric, individually rotatable circular disks, and then the most diverse combinations were produced." What chance superimposed during the rotation was formed into a judgment on the highest truths. And Giordano Bruno, on his manifold wanderings through Europe, appeared at various high schools as a teacher of this "great art" He had the bold courage to think of the heavenly bodies as worlds, completely analogous to our earth; he extended the view of scientific thinking beyond the earth; he no longer thought of the worldly bodies as physical spirits; but he still thought of them as soulful spirits. One must not be unfair to the man whose advanced way of thinking made the Catholic Church pay the penalty of death. It took a tremendous effort to include the entire celestial realm in the same view of the world that until then had only been held for earthly things, even if Bruno still thought of the sensual in spiritual terms.

[ 4 ] In the seventeenth century, Johann Scheffler, called Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), appeared as a personality who once again illuminated in a great spiritual harmony what Tauler, Weigel, Jacob Böhme and others had prepared. The ideas of the aforementioned thinkers appear in his book "Cherubinischer Wandersmann. Spiritual rhymes of meaning and conclusion." And everything that Angelus Silesius utters appears as such a direct, self-evident revelation of his personality that it is as if this man had been called by a special providence to embody wisdom in personal form. The natural way in which he lives wisdom is expressed by the fact that he presents it in sayings which are also admirable in their artistic form. He hovers like a spiritual being above all earthly existence; and what he speaks is like a breath from another world, freed from the outset from all coarseness and impurity from which human wisdom otherwise works itself out only with difficulty. - In the sense of Angelus Silesius, only those who bring the eye of the universe to see within themselves are truly cognizant; only those who feel this action carried out within themselves by the hand of the universe see their actions in true light: "God is in me the fire, and I in him the light: are we not intimately common to one another?" - "I am as rich as God; there can't be a little stick that I - believe me - don't have in common with him." "God loves me above himself: if I love him above myself, I give him as much as he gives me of himself." - "The bird in the air, the stone rests on the land; in the water lives the fish, my spirit in God's hand." - "If you are born of God, God blossoms in you: and his divinity is your sap and your ornament." - "Stop, where art thou going; heaven is within thee: if thou seekest God elsewhere, thou lackest him for ever." - For the one who feels this way in the universe, all separation between himself and another being ceases; he no longer feels himself as a single individual; rather, he feels everything about him as a member of the world, but his actual being as this universe itself. "The world does not hold you; you yourself are the world that holds you so strongly captive within yourself." - "Man has not complete bliss until unity has swallowed up otherness." "Man is all things: if he lacks one thing, he truly does not know his own riches." - As a sensual being, man is a thing among other things, and his sensual organs bring him, as a sensual individuality, sensual knowledge of the things in space and time outside him; but if the spirit speaks in man, then there is no outside and no inside; nothing is here and nothing is there that is spiritual; nothing is earlier and nothing is later: space and time have disappeared in the vision of the All-Spirit. Only as long as man looks as an individual is he here, and the thing there; and only as long as he looks as an individual is this earlier, and this later. "Man, where you swing your spirit above place and time, you can be every glance in eternity." - "I myself am eternity when I leave time and merge myself into God and God into me." - "The rose that your outer eye sees here has bloomed from eternity in God." - "Sit in the center, and you will see everything at once: what happens now and then, here and in the kingdom of heaven." - "As long as place and time are in your mind, my friend, you cannot grasp what God is and what eternity is." - "When man withdraws from diversity and turns to God, he comes to unity." - The height has thus been reached on which man steps beyond his individual ego and abolishes all opposition between the world and himself. A higher life begins for him. The inner experience that overcomes him seems like the death of the old and a resurrection in the new life. "When you rise above yourself and let God rule, then the ascension is held in your spirit." - "The body must rise in the spirit, the spirit in God: if you want to live eternally blessed in him, my human being." - "As much as my ego languishes and diminishes in me, as much as the Lord's ego gains strength from it." - From such a point of view, man recognizes his significance and the significance of all things in the realm of eternal necessity. The natural universe appears to him directly as the divine spirit. The thought of a divine All-Spirit, which could still exist and endure above and beside the things of the world, disappears as an idea that has been overcome. This All-Spirit appears to have flowed into the things, to have become one with the things, so that it could no longer be conceived if only a single element of its essence were to be removed. "Nothing is but I and Thou; and if we are not two, God is no longer God, and heaven falls in." - Man feels himself to be a necessary link in the chain of worlds. His actions no longer have any arbitrariness or individuality about them. What he does is necessary in the whole, in the world chain, which would fall apart if this action of his were to fall out of it. "God may not make a single worm without me: if I do not keep it with him, it must break apart." - "I know that without me God cannot live a moment: if I do not, he must give up the ghost from need." - Only at this height does man see things in their true essence. He no longer needs to attach a spiritual essence from outside to the smallest, the grossest things. For just as this smallest thing is, in all its smallness and coarseness, it is a member of the universe. "No stalk is so small, no speck is so small: the wise man sees God gloriously within." - "In a mustard seed, if you want to understand it, is the image of all things above and below." - Man feels free at this height. For compulsion is only where a thing can still compel from the outside. But when everything external has flowed into the internal, when the contrast between "I and world", "outside and inside", "nature and spirit" has disappeared: then man feels everything that drives him only as his own impulse. "Lock me up in a thousand irons, as strictly as you like: I will be completely free and unfettered." - "If my will is dead, then God must do what I want: I myself write the pattern and the goal before him." - Now all external moral norms cease; man becomes his own measure and goal. He is under no law; for even the law has become his essence. "The law is for the wicked; if no commandment were written, the pious would still love God and their neighbor." - Thus, on the higher level of knowledge, the innocence of nature is restored to man. He carries out the tasks that are set for him with a sense of eternal necessity. He says to himself: it is given into your hand by this eternal necessity to withdraw from this same eternal necessity the link that is allotted to you. "You humans, learn from the little meadow flower: how you can please God and still be beautiful." - "The rose is without reason, it blooms because it blooms: it does not care for itself, does not ask whether it is seen." - Man, who has risen to a higher level, feels within himself the eternal, necessary urge of the universe, like the meadow flower; he acts as the meadow flower blooms. The feeling of his moral responsibility grows immeasurably in all his actions. For what he does not do is withdrawn from the universe, is the killing of this universe, insofar as the possibility of such killing lies with him. "What is not sinning? You must not ask for long: go, the silent flowers will tell you." - "All must be slain. If you do not slaughter yourself for God, eternal death will ultimately slaughter you for your enemy."