The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Contemplation: Michael's Suffering over the Development of Humanity before the Time of his Earthly Activity

[ 1 ] In the further progress of the age of consciousness, the possibility of Michael's connection with the general human entity ceases more and more. Humanized intellectuality finds its way into it. Imaginative concepts that can show man the essential intelligence in the cosmos disappear from it. For Michael, the possibility of approaching man only began in the last third of the nineteenth century. Before that, it can only happen in ways that are sought as genuinely Rosicrucian.

[ 2 ] Man looks into nature with his burgeoning intellect. He then sees a physical, an etheric world in which he is not inside. Through the great ideas of Copernicus and Galileo, he gains an image of the extra-human world; but he loses his own. He looks at himself and has no possibility of gaining an insight into what he is.

[ 3 ] In the depths of his being, that which his intelligence is destined to bear is awakened in him. His ego connects with this. Thus man now carries a threefold within himself. Firstly, in his spirit-soul being, appearing as physical-etheric, that which once, already in Saturnian and solar times and then again and again, placed him in the realm of the divine-spiritual. This is where the human being and the Michael being can merge. Secondly, man carries within him his later physical and etheric being. That which has become him during moon and earth times. This is all the work and activity of the divine-spiritual; but this is no longer livingly present in it.

[ 4 ] It only becomes fully alive again when the Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ can be found in that which works spiritually in the physical and etheric body of man. Thirdly, man has within him that part of his spiritual-soul which has taken on a new nature in the times of the moon and earth. In this part Michael has remained active, while in the part facing the moon and earth he has become increasingly inactive. In this he has preserved his image of man-god for man.

[ 5 ] He was able to do this until the dawn of the age of consciousness. Then, as it were, the entire spiritual-soul of man sank into the physical-etheric in order to fetch the consciousness-soul from it.

[ 6 ] What his physical body and his etheric body could tell him about the physical and etheric in nature rose luminously in his consciousness. It sank before his vision what the astral body and ego could tell him about himself.

[ 7 ] A time is dawning in which humanity has the feeling that it can no longer reach itself with its insight. A search for knowledge of the human being begins. This cannot be satisfied by what the present can do. We go back historically to earlier times. Humanism rises in the development of the spirit. One does not strive for humanism because one has man, but because one has lost him. As long as we had it, Erasmus of Rotterdam and others would have worked from a completely different soul nuance than what humanism was to them.

[ 8 ] In Faust, Goethe later found a human form that had completely lost its humanity.

[ 9 ] This search for "the human being" becomes ever more intense. For one only has the choice of becoming numb to the feeling of one's own being; or to develop a longing for it as an element of the soul.

[ 10 ] Until the nineteenth century, the best people in the most diverse areas of European intellectual life developed ideas of various kinds - historical, scientific, philosophical, mystical - which represent a striving to find the human being in what has become an intellectualistic world view.

[ 11 ] Renaissance, spiritual rebirth, humanism rush, even storm after a spirituality in a direction in which it cannot be found; powerlessness, illusion, stupefaction - after the direction in which one must seek it. The breakthrough of the Michael-powers, in art, in knowledge, enters into man everywhere, only not yet into the reviving powers of the consciousness-soul. - A wavering of the spiritual life. Michael, turning all his forces backwards in the cosmic development, so that he may have the power to keep the "dragon" under his feet in balance. It is precisely under these efforts of Michael that the great creations of the Renaissance arise. But they are still a renewal of the soulful mind or spirit by Michael, not a working of the new powers of the soul.

[ 12 ] We can look at Michael with concern as to whether he is also in a position to fight the "dragon" in the long run, when he perceives how people in one area want to gain such an image of man from the newly acquired image of nature. Michael sees how nature is observed and how people want to form an image of man from what they call the "laws of nature". He sees how it is imagined that this characteristic of an animal becomes more perfect, that organ connection becomes more harmonious and thus man "arises". But in Michael's mind's eye, "a human being" does not come into being, because what is conceived in perfection, in harmonization, is only "conceived"; no one can see that it also comes into being in reality, because that is not the case anywhere.

[ 13 ] And so people with this kind of thinking about man live in insubstantial images, in illusions; they chase after an image of man that they only believe they have; but in truth there is nothing in their field of vision. "The power of the spiritual sun certifies their souls, Christ is at work; but they cannot yet recognize it. The power of the soul's consciousness works in the body; it does not yet want to enter the soul." This is how one can hear the inspiration that Michael speaks out of anxious concern. Whether the illusionary power in man will not give the "dragon" so much power that it will be impossible for him - Michael - to maintain the balance.

[ 14 ] Other personalities seek with more inner-artistic power to feel nature as one with man. The words spoken by Goethe when he characterized Winckelmann's work in a beautiful book sound powerful: "When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when the harmonious pleasure grants him a pure, free delight; then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being." What Lessing inspired with a fiery spirit, what inspired the great world view in Herder: it resounds in this word from Goethe. And Goethe's entire oeuvre is like an all-round revelation of this word of his. In his "Aesthetic Letters", Schiller described an ideal human being who, as this word suggests, carries the universe within him and realizes it in social union with other people. But where does this image of man come from? It shines like the morning sun over the spring earth. But it entered human perception from the contemplation of Greek man. People cherished it with a strong inner Michael impulse; but they could only develop this impulse by immersing their soul's gaze in the past. Goethe, in wanting to experience the "human being", felt the strongest conflicts with the soul of consciousness. He searched for it in Spinoza's philosophy; during the Italian journey, when he looked into the Greek being, he thought he sensed it all the more. He hastened from the soul of consciousness, which strives in Spinoza, but ultimately to the fading soul of understanding or mind. He can only transfer an unlimited amount of this into the soul of consciousness in his comprehensive view of nature.

[ 15 ] Michael also looks seriously at this search for man. That which is according to his meaning certainly comes into the human spiritual development; it is the human being who once saw the essentially intelligent when Michael still administered it out of the cosmos. But this, if it were not seized by the spiritualized power of the consciousness soul, would finally have to fall away from Michael's work and come under Lucifer's power. That Lucifer could gain supremacy in the fluctuation of the cosmic-spiritual equilibrium is the other anxious concern in Michael's life.

[ 16 ] Michael's preparation of his mission for the end of the nineteenth century flows along in cosmic tragedy. Down on earth there is often the deepest satisfaction with the work of the image of nature; in the region where Michael works, tragedy reigns over the obstacles that stand in the way of the image of man coming to life.

[ 17 ] In the past, Michael's tart, spiritualized love lived in the rays of the sun, in the shimmering of the dawn, in the twinkling of the stars; now this love had taken on the strongest note of the sadly awakening gaze on humanity.

[ 18 ] Michael's situation in the cosmos became tragically difficult, but also urgent for a solution, especially in the period preceding his mission on earth. People could only maintain intellectuality in the realm of the body and there only in the senses. Therefore, on the one hand, they took nothing into their insight that the senses did not tell them; nature became a field of sensory revelation, but this revelation was conceived entirely materially. In the forms of nature they no longer heard the work of the divine-spiritual, but something that was there without spirit and yet was claimed to produce the spiritual in which man lives. On the other hand, people only wanted to accept what the historical news spoke of as a spiritual world. Looking to the past was as strictly frowned upon as looking to the present.

[ 19 ] The only thing that still lived in the human soul was that which came from the present, which Michael did not enter. Man was happy to stand on "safe" ground. He believed he had it because he sought nothing in "nature" from thoughts in which he immediately feared the arbitrariness of fantasy. But Michael was not happy; he had to fight the battle against Lucifer and Ahriman on the other side of man, in his own territory. This resulted in a great tragic difficulty, because the more Michael, who also preserves the past, has to keep himself away from man, the easier it is for Lucifer to approach him. And so a fierce battle of Michael with Ahriman and Lucifer took place in the spiritual world immediately adjacent to the earth for man, while he kept his soul active in the earth realm itself against the salvation of his development.

[ 20 ] All this naturally applies to European and American spiritual life. It would have to be said differently for Asian life.

Goetheanum, December 14, 1924.

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Further guiding principles issued by the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum (with reference to the preceding Third Meditation: Michael's suffering concerning human development before the time of his earthly activity)

[ 21 ] 134. In the very first time of the development of the consciousness soul, man feels how the previously imaginatively given image of humanity, of his own being, has been lost to him. Powerless to find it in the consciousness soul, he searches for it in a scientific or historical way. He wants to recreate the old image of humanity within himself.

[ 22 ] 135. One does not thereby attain to a real fulfillment with the human entity, but only to illusions. But one does not notice it; and sees in it something that sustains humanity.

[ 23 ] 136. Thus, in the time that precedes his earthly activity, Michael must look with concern and sorrow upon the development of humanity. For humanity frowns upon all spiritual contemplation and thereby cuts off everything that connects it with Michael.