The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter VII

[ 1 ] I wrote down the ideas of an "epistemology of Goethe's world view" at a time when fate introduced me to a family that allowed me to spend many pleasant hours and a happy period of my life in their circle. For a long time there was one of my friends whom I had grown very fond of because of his fresh, sunny nature, his accurate remarks about life and people, and because of his open, loyal manner. He took me into his house with other mutual friends. There we met, besides the friend, two daughters of the house, his sisters, and a man in whom we were soon to recognize the bridegroom of the elder daughter.

[ 2 ] In the background of this family hovered something unknown that we never got to see. It was the siblings' father. He was there and he wasn't there. We heard something about the stranger from various sides. From what we heard, he must have been something strange. At first the brothers and sisters didn't talk about their father, who must have been in the next room. It was only gradually that they began to make one remark or another about him. Every word was filled with genuine reverence. They felt that they revered an important man in him. But one also sensed that they were very wary of the possibility that we might have seen him by chance.

[ 3 ] Our conversations in the family circle were mostly literary. The siblings would fetch many a book from their father's library in order to make reference to this or that. And circumstances meant that I gradually became acquainted with a lot of what the man in the next room was reading, whereas I never got to see him myself.

[ 4 ] In the end, I could no longer help but ask about many things that related to the stranger. And so a picture of the strange personality gradually emerged in my mind from the reserved but nevertheless revealing speeches of the siblings. I loved the man, who also seemed to me to be an important man. In the end, I admired in him a man whom life's difficult experiences had led to occupy himself only with the world within and to avoid all contact with people.

[ 5 ] One day we were told by visitors that the man was ill, and soon afterwards we had to report his death. The siblings gave me the eulogy. I said what my heart told me about the person I had only got to know in the way I had described. It was a funeral where only the family, the groom of one daughter and my friends were present. The siblings told me that I had given a faithful picture of their father in my eulogy. And from the way they spoke, from their tears, I could feel that this was really their conviction. And I also knew that the man was so close to me spiritually, as if I had spent a lot of time with him. A beautiful friendship gradually developed between the younger daughter and me. She really had something of the archetype of a German girl about her. She carried nothing of learned education in her soul, but lived an original, graceful naturalness with noble reserve. And this restraint of hers triggered the same in me. We loved each other and both knew it quite clearly; but neither of us could overcome the shyness of saying that we loved each other. And so the love lived between the words we spoke to each other, not in them. The relationship was the most intimate in my feelings, but it did not find the opportunity to take even one step beyond the emotional.

[ 6 ] I was happy in this friendship; I felt that my friend was the sunshine in my life. But this life later led us apart. What remained of the hours of joyful togetherness was a brief exchange of letters, then wistful remembrance of a beautifully spent period of life. A memory that, however, kept surfacing from the depths of my soul throughout the rest of my life.

[ 7 ] I once came to Schröer at the same time. He was completely filled with an impression he had just received. He had become acquainted with the poetry of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. At that time she had a volume of poems, an epic poem "Herman", a drama "Saul" and a story "The Gypsy Woman". Schröer spoke enthusiastically about these poems. "And all of this was written by a young personality before he was sixteen," he said. He added: Robert Zimmermann had said that this was the only real genius he had met in his life.

[ 8 ] Schröer's enthusiasm led me to read the poems in one go. I wrote a feature article about the poet. This gave me the great pleasure of being able to visit her. During this visit, I was able to have a conversation with the poet that I have often had in my life. At that time, she had already set herself a task of the greatest style, her epic "Robespierre". She spoke about the basic ideas of this poem. Even then, a pessimistic mood could be heard in her speeches. Her sentiment seemed to me as if she wanted to portray the tragedy of all idealism in a personality like Robespierre. Ideals are born in the human breast; but they have no power over the unimaginative, cruel, destructive workings of nature, which screams its relentless "you are only an illusion, a sham creature of mine that I keep throwing back into nothingness" at all ideals.

[ 9 ] That was her conviction. The poet then spoke to me of another poetic plan, a "Satanide". She wanted to portray the antithesis of God as the primal being that is the power revealing itself to man in cruel, unimaginative, crushing nature. She spoke with true genius of this power that dominates this being from the abyss of existence. I walked away from the poet deeply shaken. The greatness with which she had spoken stood before me; the content of her ideas was the antithesis of everything that stood before my mind as a view of the world. But I was never inclined to deny my admiration and interest to what seemed great to me, even if its content was completely contrary to me. Yes, I said to myself: such opposites in the world must find their harmony somewhere. And that made it possible for me to follow what I was resisting with understanding, as if it lay in the direction of my own state of mind.

[ 10 ] Shortly afterwards, I was invited to delle Grazie. She was to read from her "Robespierre" to a number of notables, including Schröer and his wife, as well as a friend of the Schröer household. We heard scenes of great poetic verve, but with a pessimistic undertone, of colorful naturalism; life painted from its most harrowing sides. Great people, betrayed by fate, emerged and sank down in poignant tragedy. That was my impression. Schröer became reluctant. For him, art was not allowed to descend into such depths of the "terrible". The ladies moved away. They had got some kind of cramp. I could not agree with Schröer. For he seemed to me to be completely imbued with the feeling that what is a terrible experience in a person's soul should never be allowed to become poetry, even if this terrible experience is honest. Soon afterwards, delle Grazie published a poem in which nature is praised as the highest power, but in such a way that it makes a mockery of all ideals, which it only calls into existence in order to beguile man, and which it throws back into nothingness when the beguilement has been achieved.

[ 11 ] Following on from this poem, I wrote an essay entitled "Nature and our Ideals", which I did not publish but had printed in a small number of copies. In it I spoke of the appearance of justification which the view of delle Grazies has. I said that a view that does not close its mind to the hostility that lies in nature towards human ideals is more important to me than a "shallow optimism" that has no eye for the abysses of existence. But I also spoke of the fact that man's inner free being creates out of itself what gives life meaning and content, and that this being could not fully develop if it received from outside, through a nature that gives happiness, what should arise within.

[ 12 ] This essay caused me great pain. When Schröer received it, he wrote to me that if I thought about pessimism like that, we would never have understood each other. And anyone who speaks of nature as I do in this essay shows that he cannot take Goethe's words "Know thyself and live in peace with the world" deeply enough.

[ 13 ] I was moved to the depths of my soul when I received these lines from the personality to whom I was devoted with the strongest affection. Schröer could become passionately agitated when he perceived a sin against the harmony in art that appears as beauty. He turned away from delle Grazie when, in his opinion, he noticed this sin. And he regarded the admiration I retained for the poetess as an apostasy from him and from Goethe at the same time. He did not see in my essay what I said about the human spirit overcoming the obstacles of nature from within; he was offended by the fact that I claimed of the natural external world that it could not be the creator of man's true inner satisfaction. I wanted to show the insignificance of pessimism, despite its justification within certain limits; Schröer saw in every inclination towards pessimism what he called "the dross of burnt-out spirits".

[ 14 ] I spent wonderful hours of my life in the house of Marie Eugenie delle Grazies. She had visiting evenings every Saturday. Personalities from many schools of thought gathered there. The poetess was the center of attention. She read from her poems; she spoke in the spirit of her view of the world with decisive eloquence; she illuminated human life with the ideas of this view. It was not sunlight. In fact, it was always moon gloom. Threatening cloudy skies. But flames of fire rose from people's homes into the gloom, carrying the passions and illusions in which people consume themselves. But everything was also humanly gripping, always captivating, the bitterness surrounded by the noble magic of a completely spiritualized personality.

[ 15 ] At delle Grazie's side appeared Laurenz Müllner, a Catholic priest, the poet's teacher and later provident and noble friend. He was then a professor of Christian philosophy at the university's theological faculty. He had not only the face, but the whole figure in the expression of the result of a spiritual development spent in a soul-ascetic way. A skeptic in philosophical matters, thoroughly educated in all aspects of philosophy, art appreciation and literature. He wrote stimulating articles on artistic and literary matters for the Catholic-clerical daily newspaper "Vaterland". The poet's pessimistic view of the world and life always came out of his mouth.

[ 16 ] The two were united by a fierce dislike of Goethe; in contrast, their interest was turned towards Shakespeare and the newer poets born out of the painful gravity of life or the naturalistic aberrations of human nature. Dostoyevsky had all their love; they regarded Leopold v. Sacher-Masoch as a brilliant portrayer, who did not shy away from any truth, of that which in modern swamp life protrudes as the destructive all-too-human. Laurenz Müllner's aversion to Goethe had something of the color of the Catholic theologian. He praised Baumgartner's Goethe monograph, which characterizes Goethe as the antithesis of the humanly desirable. With delle Grazie, there was something like a deep personal antipathy towards Goethe.

[ 17 ] The two were surrounded by professors from the theological faculty, Catholic priests of the finest erudition. Above all, the Heiligenkreuz Cistercian priest Wilhelm Neumann was always intensely inspiring. Müllner rightly revered him for his comprehensive erudition. He told me, when I once spoke of Neumann's far-sighted knowledge with enthusiastic admiration in his absence: "Yes, Professor Neumann knows the whole world and three villages. I gladly joined the learned man when we left the visit to delle Grazie. I had so many conversations with this "ideal" of a scientific man, but at the same time a "faithful son of his church". I would like to mention only two here. One was about the nature of Christ. I expressed my view of how Jesus of Nazareth had received the Christ into himself through extraterrestrial influence and how Christ has lived as a spiritual being with the development of mankind since the Mystery of Golgotha. This conversation remained deeply imprinted in my soul; it emerged from it again and again. For it was deeply significant for me. There were actually three people talking at the time. Professor Neumann and I and a third invisible person, the personification of Catholic dogmatics, who appeared behind Professor Neumann, accompanying him, as if threatening, visible to the mind's eye, and who always tapped him on the shoulder in a reprimanding manner when the scholar's subtle logic agreed with me too much. It was strange how the first sentence often turned into its opposite in the second. At that time I was confronted with the Catholic way of life in one of its best representatives; I got to know it respectfully, but also really thoroughly through him. Another time we talked about repeated lives on earth. The professor listened to me and spoke of all kinds of literature in which one could find something about it; he often shook his head quietly, but probably had no intention of going into the content of the subject, which seemed strange to him. And yet this conversation also became important to me. Neumann's discomfort with his unspoken judgments of my statements remained deeply inscribed in my memory.

[ 18 ] The church historians and other theologians were still the Saturday visitors. Other occasional visitors included the philosopher Adolf Stöhr, Goswine von Berlepsch, the deeply sensitive storyteller Emilie Mataja (who went by the pen name Emil Marriot), the poet and writer Fritz Lemmermayer and the composer Stroß. I got to know Fritz Lemmermayer, with whom I later became close friends, at the delle Grazie afternoons. He was a very strange person. He spoke everything he was interested in with an inwardly measured dignity. In appearance he was as much like the musician Rubinstein as the actor Lewinsky. He had an almost cult-like relationship with Hebbel. He had certain views on art and life, born of an intelligent knowledge of the heart, which were extremely deep-seated in him. He wrote the interesting, profound novel "The Alchymist" and many a beautiful and deep thought. He knew how to put the smallest things in life into the perspective of the important. I remember how I once visited him with other friends in his dear parlor in a side street in Vienna. He had just prepared a meal for himself: two soft-boiled eggs on a pressure cooker, served with bread. While the water was boiling, he said with emphasis: "This will be delicious. " I will still have to speak of him in a later phase of my life.

[ 19 ] Alfred Stroß, the composer, was a man of genius but deeply pessimistic. When he sat down at the piano at delle Grazie and played his Etudes, one had the feeling that Anton Bruckner's music was evaporating in tones that wanted to escape from earthly existence. Stroß was little understood; Fritz Lemmermayer loved him unspeakably.

[ 20 ] Both Lemmermayer and Stroß were great friends of Robert Hamerling. And I was later prompted by them to enter into a brief correspondence with Hamerling, of which I will speak later. Stroß ended up in serious illness, mentally deranged.

[ 21 ] The sculptor Hans Brandstetter also came to delle Grazie.

[ 22 ] Hovering invisibly above all this company, however, was the theologian-historian Werner, who was often described in wonderful terms and addressed as if in hymns. Delle Grazie loved him more than anything. While I was allowed to attend the Saturdays, he never appeared himself. But his admirer showed the image of the biographer of Thomas Aquinas from ever new angles, the image of the kind, loving scholar who remained naive in his old age. You had a man before you: so selfless, so devoted to the material of which he spoke as a historian, so exact that you said to yourself: oh, if only there were many such historians.

[ 23 ] There was a real magic about these Saturday meetings. When it got dark, the ceiling lamp wrapped in red fabric was lit and we sat in a space of light that made the whole company solemn. Then delle Grazie often became extremely talkative, especially when those standing a little further away had left, and you could hear many a word that sounded like a sigh of relief in the aftermath of difficult days. But you could also hear genuine humor about the perversities of life and tones of indignation about press and other corruption. In between came Müllner's sarcastic, often caustic remarks about all kinds of philosophical, artistic and other things.

[ 24 ] Delle Grazie's house was a place where pessimism manifested itself with immediate vitality, a place of anti-Goetheanism. People always listened when I spoke about Goethe, but Laurerz Müllner was of the opinion that I was ascribing things to Goethe that had little to do with the real minister of the Grand Duke Karl August. Nevertheless, every visit to this house - and I knew that they liked to see me there - was something to which I owed an unspeakable debt; I felt that I was in a spiritual atmosphere that was truly beneficial to me. For me, this didn't require agreement on ideas; it required an ambitious humanity that was receptive to the spiritual.

[ 25 ] I was now caught between this house, where I enjoyed spending time, and my teacher and fatherly friend Karl Julius Schröer, who never appeared at delle Grazie again after his first visits. My emotional life had a real rift as a result, because it was involved in both sides with honest love and admiration.

[ 26 ] But it was precisely at this time that the first thoughts for my later published "Philosophy of Freedom" matured. In the above-mentioned letter to delle Grazie on "Nature and our ideals", the following sentences contain the original cell of this book: "Our ideals are no longer shallow enough to be satisfied by reality, which is often so stale, so empty. - Yet I cannot believe that there is no elevation from the deep pessimism that comes from this realization. This elevation comes to me when I look at the world of our inner being, when I approach the essence of our ideal world more closely. It is a self-contained world, perfect in itself, which can gain nothing and lose nothing through the transience of external things. Are our ideals, if they are truly living individualities, not entities in themselves, independent of the favor or disfavor of nature? The lovely rose may be crushed by the merciless gust of wind, but it has fulfilled its mission, for it has delighted a hundred human eyes; it may please murderous nature tomorrow to destroy the whole starry sky: for thousands of years people have looked up to it with veneration, and that is enough. It is not the existence of time, no, it is the inner essence of things that makes them perfect. The ideals of our spirit are a world in themselves, which must also live out for themselves, and which can gain nothing through the cooperation of a benevolent nature. - What a pitiful creature would man be if he could not gain satisfaction within his own ideal world, but first needed the cooperation of nature? Where would divine freedom be if nature nurtured and cared for us, like underage children, leading us by the reins? No, it must deny us everything so that, if we become happy, this is entirely the product of our free self. Let nature destroy daily what we create, so that we can rejoice anew every day in what we create! We want to owe nothing to nature, but everything to ourselves!

[ 27 ] This freedom, you might say, is just a dream! In thinking ourselves free, we obey the iron necessity of nature. The loftiest thoughts that we conceive are only the result of the blind nature that rules within us.—O, we should finally admit that a being that recognizes itself cannot be unfree! We see the web of laws ruling over things, and this causes the necessity. We have the power in our cognition to detach the lawfulness of natural things from them and yet we should be the will-less slaves of these laws?" - I did not develop these thoughts out of a spirit of contradiction, but I was compelled to oppose what the view of the spiritual world told me to what I had to regard as the other pole of a view of life compared to my own, but which I also revered unspeakably because it revealed itself to me in true spiritual depth.

[ 28 ] In the same period in which I was able to experience so much stimulation in the house of delle Grazies, I was also able to join a circle of young Austrian poets. They met every week for a free discussion and to share with each other what one or the other had produced. The most diverse characters gathered there. From the optimistic, naïve life actor to the leaden pessimist, every outlook on life and mood was present. Fritz Lemmermayer was the soul of the circle. There was something of the onslaught against "the old" in the intellectual life of the time, which the Hart brothers, Karl Henckel and others had unleashed "out there" in the German Empire. But everything was immersed in Austrian "amiability". There was a lot of talk about how the time had come when new tones had to be heard in all areas of life; but it was done with the aversion to radicalism that is characteristic of the Austrian.

[ 29 ] One of the youngest members of this circle was Joseph Kitir. He aspired to a kind of lyric poetry, which he had been inspired to write by Martin Greif. He did not want to express subjective feelings; he wanted to portray a process, a situation "objectively", but as if it were not observed by the senses, but by feeling. He did not want to say that he was enraptured, but that the enrapturing process should be painted, and the enrapture should be felt by the listener or reader without the poet expressing it. Kitir created something truly beautiful in this direction. He was a naive nature. For a short while, he became closer to me.

[ 30 ] In this circle, I now heard talk of a German-Austrian poet with great enthusiasm and first became acquainted with some of his poems. These made a strong impression on me. I wanted to get to know him. I asked Fritz Lemmermayer, who knew him well, and a few others whether the poet could be invited to our meetings. But they told me that you couldn't get him here if you hitched up four horses. He was an eccentric and didn't want to go out among people. But I really wanted to get to know him. So the whole party set off one evening and wandered to the place where the "knowing ones" could find him. It was a small wine bar in an alley parallel to Kärtnerstraße. There he sat in a corner, his not-so-small glass of red wine in front of him. He sat as if he had been sitting for an indefinitely long time and wanted to stay seated for an indefinitely long time. A very old gentleman, but with youthful, shining eyes and a face that revealed the poet and idealist in the finest, most expressive features. He didn't see us coming in at first. For a nascent poetry was visibly running through his nobly shaped head. Fritz Lemmermayer first had to take him by the arm; then he turned his face towards us and looked at us. We had disturbed him. His affected look could not conceal this, but he revealed it in the most endearing way. We stood around him. There was no room for so many of us to sit in the narrow room. It was remarkable how the man who had been described as an "eccentric" proved after a very short time to be full of wit and conversation. We all felt that we couldn't stay in the dull confines of this room with what was going on between souls in conversation. And it didn't take much to bring the "eccentric" with us to another "restaurant". Apart from him and an acquaintance of his who had been in our circle for a long time, the rest of us were all young; but it soon became apparent that we had never been so young as we were that evening when the old man was with us, for he was actually the youngest of all.

[ 31 ] I was deeply moved by the magic of this personality. It was readily apparent to me that this man must have created something much more significant than he had published, and I boldly asked him about it. He replied almost shyly: yes, I still have some cosmic things at home. And I managed to get him to promise to bring them with him the next time we were allowed to see him.

[ 32 ] That's how I got to know Fercher von Steinwand. A pithy, imaginative, idealistic poet from Carinthia. He was the child of poor people and spent his youth under great hardship. The eminent anatomist Hyrtl learned to appreciate him and made it possible for him to live an existence in which he could devote himself entirely to his poetry, thoughts and senses. The world knew little of him for a long time. Robert Hamerling gave him the fullest recognition from the publication of his first poem, "Gräfin Seelenbrand". We no longer needed to fetch the "eccentric". He appeared almost regularly at our evenings. I was delighted that he brought his "cosmic things" to one of them. These were the "Chorus of Primal Urges" and the "Chorus of Primal Dreams", poems in which sensations live in lively rhythms that seem to approach the creative forces of the world. Ideas weave there as if in essence, in glorious melodiousness, acting as images of the world's germinal powers. I regard the fact that I was able to get to know Fercher von Steinwand as one of the important ones that came to me at a young age. For his personality was like that of a sage who reveals his wisdom in genuine poetry.

[ 33 ] I had wrestled with the riddle of man's repeated earthly lives. Many a view in this direction had occurred to me when I had come close to people who, in the habitus of their lives, in the character of their personality, easily reveal the traces of a content of being that one must not seek in what they have inherited through birth and experienced since then. But in Fercher's facial expressions, in his every gesture, I saw a soul that could only have been formed at the beginning of Christian development, when Greek paganism was still at work in that development. One does not gain such an insight when one ponders over the initially imposing expressions of a personality; one feels it aroused by the traits of individuality that apparently accompany such expressions, but in reality deepen them indefinitely and enter into intuition. Nor is it gained by seeking it while one is with the personality, but only when the strong impression lingers and becomes like a vivid memory in which what is essential in external life is extinguished and what is otherwise "unessential" begins to speak a very clear language. Anyone who "observes" people in order to unravel their previous lives on earth will certainly not reach their goal. Such observation must be felt as an insult inflicted on the observed; only then can one hope that, as if by a destiny coming from the spiritual outside world, the long past of the human being is revealed in the present.

[ 34 ] I acquired the definite views on the repeated earthly lives of man precisely in the period of my life described here. Before that they were not far from me; but they did not round out from the vague features into sharp impressions. But I did not form theories about such things as repeated earth lives in my own thoughts; I took them into my understanding from literature or other communications as something plausible, but I did not theorize about them myself. And it was only because I was aware of real insight in this area that I was able to have the aforementioned conversation with Professor Neumann. It is certainly not to be blamed if people convince themselves of the repeated earth lives and other insights that can only be attained by supersensible means; for a fully valid conviction in this field is also possible for unbiased common sense, even if the person has not brought it to view. But the way of theorizing in this field was not my way.

[ 35 ] During the time in which I was developing more and more concrete views through repeated earthly lives, I became acquainted with the theosophical movement that originated with H. P. Blavatsky. Sinnett's "Esoteric Buddhism" came into my hands through a friend to whom I spoke about these things. This book, the first I came across from the Theosophical movement, made no impression on me at all. And I was glad that I had not read this book before I had views from my own soul life. Because its content was repulsive to me; and my antipathy towards this way of depicting the supernatural would probably have prevented me from continuing on the path that had been marked out for me.