The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XXIX

[ 1 ] In the spiritual field, a new light was about to dawn on the development of humanity in the cognitive achievements of the last third of the century. But the spiritual sleep into which the materialistic interpretation of these achievements plunged prevented us from even suspecting this, let alone noticing it.

[ 2 ] So the time came up, which should have developed in a spiritual direction through its own nature, but which denied its own nature. The time that began to realize the impossibility of life.

[ 3 ] I would like to reproduce here a few sentences from remarks I wrote in March 1898 in the "Dramaturgische Blätter" (which had been attached to the "Magazin" as a supplement since the beginning of 1898). Of the "art of performance" I say: "In this field more than in any other, the learner is left entirely to himself and to chance ... With the form that our public life has taken, almost everyone is now in the position of having to speak in public more often ... The elevation of ordinary speech to a work of art is a rarity... We almost entirely lack the feeling for the beauty of speech and even more for characteristic speech... No one will be given the right to write about a singer who has no knowledge of correct singing... With regard to the art of acting, far lower demands are made... People who understand whether a verse is spoken correctly or not are becoming increasingly rare... Today, artistic speaking is often regarded as misguided idealism... We could never have come to this if we had been more aware of the artistic training capacity of language..."

[ 4 ] What I had in mind could only find a kind of realization much later in the Anthroposophical Society. Marie v. Sivers (Marie Steiner), who was enthusiastic about the art of speech, initially devoted herself to genuinely artistic speech; and with her help it then became possible to work towards elevating this field to a true art in courses for speech formation and dramatic presentation.

[ 5 ] I was allowed to cite this here to show how certain ideals have sought their development throughout my life, because many people want to find contradictions in my development.

[ 6 ] During this time, I became friends with the poet Ludwig Jacobowski, who died young. He was a personality whose emotional mood breathed inner tragedy. He bore the burden of his fate because he was Jewish. He headed a bureau which, under the direction of a liberal member of parliament, managed the association for the "defense against anti-Semitism" and published its journal. An overload of work lay on Ludwig Jacobowski in this direction. And work that renewed a burning pain every day. For it placed before his soul every day the idea of the sentiment against his people, from which he suffered so much.

[ 7 ] In addition, he developed a rich activity in the field of folklore. He collected everything he could get hold of as the basis for a work on the development of folklore since time immemorial. Some of the essays he wrote from his rich knowledge in this field are very interesting. They are initially written in the materialistic sense of the time; but Jacobowski, had he lived longer, would certainly have been accessible to a spiritualization of his research.

[ 8 ] Ludwig Jacobowski's poetry radiates from these activities. Not entirely original, but nevertheless full of deep human feeling and soulful experience. He called his lyrical poems "shining days". When the mood struck him, they were really what worked for him like spiritual sunny days in the tragedy of his life. He also wrote novels. All of Ludwig Jacobowski's inner tragedy lives in "Werther the Jew". In "Loki, Roman eines Gottes" he created a work born out of German mythology. The soulfulness that speaks from this novel is a beautiful reflection of the poet's love of the mythological in folklore.

[ 9 ] Overlooking Ludwig Jacobowski's achievements, one is amazed at the abundance in the most diverse areas. Nevertheless, he cultivated contacts with many people and enjoyed social life. At the time, he also published the monthly magazine "Die Gesellschaft", which meant an enormous overload for him.

[ 10 ] He was consumed by life, the content of which he longed for in order to shape it artistically.

[ 11 ] He founded a society called "Die Kommenden", which consisted of writers, artists, scientists and people interested in the arts. They met there once a week. Poets recited their poetry. Lectures were given on the most diverse areas of knowledge and life. An informal get-together concluded the evening. Ludwig Jacobowski was the center of the ever-growing circle. Everyone loved the amiable, idea-filled personality, who even developed a fine, noble sense of humor in this community.

[ 12 ] A sudden death tore the thirty-year-old out of all this. He perished from meningitis, the result of his incessant exertions.

[ 13 ] I was left with the task of delivering the funeral speech for my friend and editing his estate.

[ 14 ] The poet Marie Stona, with whom he was friends, set him a beautiful memorial in a book with contributions from his friends.

[ 15 ] Everything about Ludwig Jacobowski was worthy of love; his inner tragedy, his striving to emerge from it in his "shining days", his devotion to his eventful life. I have always kept the memory of our friendship alive in my heart and look back on the short time we lived together with heartfelt devotion to my friend.

[ 16 ] Another friendly relationship arose at that time with Martha Asmus; a philosophically-minded lady with a strong tendency towards materialism. However, this inclination was tempered by the fact that Martha Asmus lived intensely in the memories of her brother Paul Asmus, who had died young and was a staunch idealist. Like a philosophical hermit, Paul Asmus experienced the philosophical idealism of Hegel's time once again in the last third of the nineteenth century. He wrote a treatise on the "I" and one on the Indo-European religions. Both in the form of Hegel's style, but quite independent in content.

[ 17 ] This interesting personality, who had not been alive for a long time at the time, was brought very close to me by my sister Martha Asmus. She seemed to me like a new meteoric flash of the intellectual philosophy of the beginning of the century towards the end of the century.

[ 18 ] Less close, but nevertheless for a time significant relationships developed with the "Friedrichhageners", with Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche. Bruno Wille is the author of a book on the "Philosophy of Liberation through the Pure Means." Only the title is reminiscent of my "Philosophy of Freedom". The content is in a completely different field. Bruno Wille became known in the widest circles through his very important "Revelations of the Juniper Tree". A book on worldview written from the most beautiful sense of nature, imbued with the conviction that spirit speaks from all material existence. Wilhelm Bölsche is known for his numerous popular scientific writings, which are extremely popular in the widest circles.

[ 19 ] This was the source of the foundation of a "free university" to which I was drawn. I was assigned to teach history. Bruno Wille took care of the philosophy, Bölsche the natural sciences and Theodor Kappstein, a free-spirited theologian, the knowledge of religion.

[ 20 ] A second reason was the "Giordano Bruno Association". It was intended to bring together personalities who were sympathetic to a spiritual-monistic world view. The aim was to emphasize that there were not two world principles, matter and spirit, but that spirit was the unifying principle of all existence. Bruno Wille introduced this alliance with a very spiritual lecture, which he based on Goethe's words: "Matter never without spirit". Unfortunately, there was a slight misunderstanding between Wille and myself after this lecture. My words following the lecture, that Goethe, long after he had coined this beautiful word, had supplemented it in an important way by seeing polarity and intensification as the concrete spiritual formations in the effective spiritual activity of existence, and that this was what gave the general word its full content, were taken as an objection to Wille's lecture, which I nevertheless fully recognized in its meaning.

[ 21 ] But I came into complete opposition to the leadership of the Giordano Bruno Bund when I gave a lecture on monism itself. In it I emphasized that the harsh dualistic version of "substance and spirit" is actually a creation of the latest times. That spirit and nature, too, in the opposition that the Giordano Bruno League wants to combat, have only been brought together in the very last centuries. Then I drew attention to the fact that scholasticism is monism in contrast to this dualism. Even if it had withdrawn a part of existence from human knowledge and assigned it to "faith", scholasticism nevertheless represented a world system that showed a unified (monistic) constitution from the Godhead and the spiritual world right down to the details of nature. I thus also placed scholasticism higher than Kantianism.

[ 22 ] With this lecture I unleashed the greatest excitement. People thought I wanted to open the way for Catholicism to enter the Bund. Only Wolfgang Kirchbach and Martha Asmus were on my side among the leading personalities. The others had no idea what I actually wanted with "misjudged scholasticism". In any case, they were convinced that I was capable of bringing the greatest confusion to the Giordano Bruno Association.

[ 23] I must remember this lecture because it took place at a time when many later came to see me as a materialist. This "materialist" was regarded by many people at the time as someone who wanted to evoke medieval scholasticism again.

[ 24 ] Despite all this, I was later able to give my fundamental anthroposophical lecture in the Giordano Bruno Association, which became the starting point of my anthroposophical work.

[ 25 ] With the public communication of what anthroposophy contains as knowledge of the spiritual world, decisions are necessary that do not come easily.

[ 26 ] These decisions can best be characterized by looking at some historical facts. In accordance with the quite different constitutions of soul of an older humanity, there has always been a knowledge of the spiritual world until the beginning of modern times, until about the fourteenth century. It was just quite different from the anthroposophical knowledge appropriate to the cognitive conditions of the present.

[ 27 ] From this point in time, humanity was initially unable to produce any knowledge of the spirit. It preserved the "old knowledge", which the souls had seen in pictorial form, and which was also only available in symbolic-pictorial form.

[ 28 ] In ancient times, this "ancient knowledge" was only cultivated within the "Mysteries". It was communicated to those who had first been made ready for it, the "initiates". It was not supposed to reach the public, because there was too easy a tendency to treat it unworthily. This custom was maintained by those later personalities who became aware of the "old knowledge" and continued to cultivate it. They did so in the closest of circles with people who prepared them for it.

[ 29 ] And so it has remained to the present day.

[ 30 ] Of the personalities who confronted me with such a claim regarding the knowledge of the spirit, I will mention one who moved within the Viennese circle of Mrs. Lang, which I have characterized, but whom I also met in other circles in which I moved in Vienna. It is Friedrich Eckstein, the excellent connoisseur of that "old knowledge". Friedrich Eckstein did not write much while I was in contact with him. But what he did write was full of spirit. But no one could have guessed from his remarks that he was an intimate connoisseur of ancient spiritual knowledge. This works in the background of his spiritual work. Long after life had taken me away from this friend, I read a very important treatise in a collection of writings on the Bohemian Brethren.

[ 31 ] Friedrich Eckstein now vigorously advocated the opinion that esoteric spiritual knowledge should not be disseminated publicly like ordinary knowledge. He was not alone in this opinion; it was and is that of almost all connoisseurs of "ancient wisdom". The extent to which the "Theosophical Society", founded by H.P. Blavatsky, broke with the opinion strictly asserted as a rule by the keepers of "ancient wisdom" is something I will have to talk about later.

[ 32 ] Friedrich Eckstein wanted that, as an "initiate into ancient knowledge", one should clothe what one publicly represents with the power that comes from this "initiation", but that one should strictly separate this exoteric from the esoteric, which should remain in the narrowest circle that knows how to fully appreciate it.

[ 33 ] I had to decide to break with this tradition if I were to develop a public activity for spiritual knowledge. I saw myself confronted with the conditions of contemporary spiritual life. In the face of these conditions, secrecy, as it was taken for granted in older times, is an impossibility. We live in an age that wants publicity wherever any knowledge appears. And the idea of secrecy is an anachronism. The only possible way is to make personalities gradually acquainted with the knowledge of the spirit and not to admit anyone to a stage at which the higher parts of knowledge are communicated if he does not yet know the lower ones. This also corresponds to the institutions of the lower and higher schools.

[ 34 ] I also had no obligation of secrecy towards anyone. For I did not accept anything from "ancient wisdom"; whatever spiritual knowledge I have is definitely the result of my own research. Only when an insight has come to me do I draw on that which has already been published by some source of "ancient knowledge" in order to show the agreement and at the same time the progress that is possible in current research.

[ 35 ] So from a certain point in time I was quite clear about the fact that I was doing the right thing with a public appearance with the knowledge of the spirit.