The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Historical Upheavals in the Emergence of the Consciousness Soul

[ 1 ] The fall of the Roman Empire in connection with the appearance of peoples approaching from the East - the so-called migration of peoples - is a historical phenomenon to which the gaze of the inquiring human being must be directed again and again. For the present still contains many after-effects of these shattering events.

[ 2 ] But the understanding of precisely these events is not possible from an external historical perspective. One must look at the souls of the people who were placed in the "migration of peoples" and the fall of the Roman Empire.

[ 3 ] Greece and Rome flourished at the time when the intellectual or emotional soul was developing in humanity. Yes, the Greeks and Romans are the actual bearers of this development. But the development of this stage of the soul in these peoples does not carry within itself a germ which could develop the soul of consciousness from itself in the right way. All that is contained in the spirit and soul content of the intellectual or emotional soul emerges in rich life in the existence of the Greeks and Romans. It cannot flow over into the consciousness soul by its own power.

[ 4 ] Nevertheless, the stage of the consciousness soul naturally occurs. But it is as if the consciousness soul were not something arising from the personality of the Greek and Roman, but something implanted from outside into his being.

[ 5 ] The connection and detachment from the divine-spiritual entities, of which so much has been said in these considerations, takes place with varying intensity in the course of time. In ancient times it was a power that intervened strongly in the development of mankind. In the Greek and Roman experience of the first Christian centuries it is a weaker power. But it is there. As long as the intellectual or emotional soul was fully developed within him, the Greek and Roman felt - unconsciously, but significantly for the soul - a becoming detached from the divine-spiritual beingness, an independent becoming of the human. This ceased in the first Christian centuries. The dawning of the consciousness soul was perceived as a connection with the divine-spiritual. One developed back again from a greater to a lesser independence of the soul. The Christian content could not be incorporated into the human consciousness soul because it could not be incorporated into the human entity itself.

[ 6 ] So this Christian content was perceived as something given from outside - from the spiritual external world - but not as something with which one grew together through one's powers of cognition.

[ 7 ] The situation was different with the peoples entering history from the north-east. They had passed through the stage of the intellectual or emotional soul in a state which they perceived as dependence on the spirit world. They only began to feel something of human independence when the first powers of the consciousness soul dawned in the Christian beginnings. With them the consciousness soul appeared as something connected with the human being. They felt themselves in a joyful inner unfolding of strength as the consciousness soul came to life in them.

[ 8 ] The Christian content fell into this sprouting life of the dawning consciousness soul among these peoples. They felt it as something coming to life in the soul, not as something given from outside.

[ 9 ] This was the mood in which these peoples approached the Roman Empire and everything connected with it. This was the mood of Arianism towards Athanasianism. There was a deep inner contradiction in the development of world history.

[ 10 ] In the conscious soul of the Roman and Greek, which was external to man, the divine-spiritual entity, which did not completely unite with earthly life but only radiated in, was at first at work. In the first dawning consciousness soul of the Franks, Germanic tribes and so on, only weakly that which of the divine-spiritual could unite with humanity was still at work.

[ 11 ] The next thing was that the Christian content, which lived in the consciousness-soul hovering above man, spread out in life; which, united with the soul, remained something that remained as a drive, an impulse in the inner being of man and waited for its unfolding, which can only occur when a certain stage in the unfolding of the consciousness-soul has been reached.

[ 12 ] It is the time, from the first Christian centuries up to the age of the development of the consciousness soul, a time in which a spiritual content prevails over mankind as an authoritative spiritual life, with which man cannot connect himself cognitively. He therefore connects himself externally; he "explains" it, and he reflects on the extent to which the soul forces are not sufficient to bring about the recognizing connection. He distinguishes between the area into which cognition reaches and that to which it does not reach. The renunciation of activating soul forces that rise cognitively into the spirit world becomes apparent. And so the time comes, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the powers of the soul directed towards the spiritual turn away from the spiritual in general. - One begins to live only in the powers of the soul that are directed towards the sensually perceptible.

[ 13 ] The powers of cognition for the spiritual become blunt, especially in the eighteenth century.

[ 14 ] The thinkers lose the spiritual content of their ideas. In the idealism of the first half of the nineteenth century, they assert the spiritless ideas themselves as the creative content of the world. Thus Fichte, Schelling, Hegel; or they point to a supersensible that evaporates because it is de-spiritualized. Thus Spencer, John Stuart Mill and others. Ideas are dead if they do not seek the living spirit.

[ 15 ] The spiritual eye for the spiritual is simply lost.

[ 16 ] A "continuation" of the old spirit-recognition is not possible. The soul forces must strive for their renewed elemental, directly living connection with the spirit world as the consciousness soul unfolds within them. Anthroposophy wants to be this striving.

[ 17 ] In the spiritual life of the age, it is precisely the leading personalities who initially do not know what it wants. And thus wide circles that follow these leaders are also held back. The leaders live in a soul content that has gradually become completely unaccustomed to using spiritual powers. For them it is like trying to get a person with a paralyzed organ to use it. For in the period from the sixteenth to the second half of the nineteenth century, the higher powers of cognition were paralyzed. And humanity remained completely unaware of this; it regarded the one-sided use of knowledge directed towards the sensory world as a special progress.

Goetheanum, March 1925.
Guiding principles no. 180 to 182
(April 5, 1925)

Further guiding principles issued by the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum (with reference to the preceding considerations on the historical upheavals accompanying the emergence of the consciousness soul)

[ 18 ] 180. The Greeks and Romans are the peoples particularly predisposed to the unfolding of the intellectual or emotional soul. They develop this stage of the soul to perfection. But they do not carry within them the germs to progress in a straightforward manner to the consciousness soul. Their soul life is absorbed into the intellectual or emotional soul.

[ 19 ] 181. But now, in the time from the emergence of Christianity to the age of the development of the consciousness soul, a spirit world prevails which does not unite with the human soul forces. These "explain" the spirit world, but they do not experience it.

[ 20 ] 182. In the peoples who advance from the northeast against the Roman Empire with the so-called "migration of peoples", there lives an emotional grasp of the intellectual or emotional soul. In their souls, on the other hand, the consciousness soul embedded in this emotional soul develops. The inner life of these peoples awaits the time when the soul can once again be fully united with the spirit world.