The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XXX

[ 1 ] The will to bring the esoteric that lived in me to public display urged me to write an essay on Goethe's fairy tale of the "green snake and the beautiful lily" in "Magazin" on August 28, 1899, Goethe's hundred and fiftieth birthday, under the title "Goethe's Secret Revelation". - This essay is still not very esoteric. But I couldn't expect more from my audience than I gave. - The content of the fairy tale lived in my soul as a thoroughly esoteric one. And the explanations are written from an esoteric mood.

[ 2 ] Since the 1980s, I have been preoccupied with imaginations that have been linked to this fairy tale. I saw Goethe's path from the contemplation of external nature to the interior of the human soul, as he presented it to his mind not in concepts but in images, depicted in the fairy tale. Goethe found concepts far too poor, too dead, to be able to depict the life and workings of the soul's forces.

[ 3 ] Now, in Schiller's "Letters on Aesthetic Education", he was confronted with an attempt to capture this life and work in concepts. Schiller tried to show how man's life is subject to the necessity of nature through his physicality and to the necessity of the spirit through his reason. And he believes that the soul must establish an inner balance between the two. In this equilibrium, man then lives a truly humane existence in freedom. This is spiritual, but far too simple for the real life of the soul. The latter allows its forces, which are rooted in the depths, to light up in consciousness; but in' lighting up, after they have influenced other equally fleeting forces, they disappear again. These are processes that already pass away in their emergence; abstract concepts, however, can only be linked to something more or less permanent.

[ 4 ] Goethe knew all of this in a perceptive way; he contrasted his pictorial knowledge in the fairy tale with Schiller's conceptual knowledge.

[ 5 ] With an experience of this Goethean creation, one is in the forecourt of esotericism.

[ 6 ] It was at this time that Countess and Count Brockdorff invited me to give a lecture at one of their weekly events. These events brought together visitors from all walks of life. The lectures that were given covered all areas of life and knowledge. I knew nothing about any of this until I was invited to give a lecture, nor did I know the Brockdorffs, but was hearing about them for the first time. They suggested a lecture on Nietzsche as my topic. I gave this lecture. Now I noticed that the audience included people with a great interest in the spiritual world. So when I was asked to give a second lecture, I suggested the topic: "Goethe's secret revelation". And in this lecture, I became quite esoteric in connection with the fairy tale. It was an important experience for me to be able to speak in words that were shaped by the spiritual world, after I had previously been forced by circumstances in my time in Berlin to only allow the spiritual to shine through my representations.

[ 7 ] Now the Brockdorffs were the leaders of a branch of the "Theosophical Society", which had been founded by Blavatsky. What I had said in reference to Goethe's fairy tale led to the Brockdorffs inviting me to give regular lectures to the members of the "Theosophical Society" associated with them. I explained, however, that I could only speak about what lived in me as spiritual science.

[ 8 ] I really couldn't talk about anything else. For I knew very little of the literature emanating from the "Theosophical Society". I already knew Theosophists from Vienna, and later got to know others. These acquaintances prompted me to write the derogatory note about the Theosophists in "Magazin" when a publication by Franz Hartmann appeared. And most of the other literature I knew was completely unsympathetic to me in terms of method and attitude; I had nowhere to tie in with my comments.

[ 9 ] So I gave my lectures by drawing on the mysticism of the Middle Ages. Through the opinions of the mystics from Meister Eckhard to Jacob Böhme, I found the means of expression for the spiritual views that I had actually set out to present. I then summarized the lectures in the book "Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens".

[ 10 ] One day Marie von Sivers appeared as an audience member at these lectures, who was then chosen by fate to take over the leadership of the "German Section of the Theosophical Society", which was founded soon after my lectures began. Within this section, I was now able to develop my anthroposophical activities in front of an ever-growing audience.

[ 11 ] No one was left in the dark about the fact that I would only present the results of my own exploratory vision in the Theosophical Society. For I said so at every possible opportunity. And when the "German Section of the Theosophical Society" was founded in Berlin in the presence of Annie Besant and I was elected its General Secretary, I had to leave the founding meetings because I had to give one of the lectures to a non-Theosophical audience, in which I dealt with the spiritual development of humanity, and in which I had expressly added "An Anthroposophy" to the title. Annie Besant also knew that I presented what I had to say about the spiritual world in lectures under this title at that time.

[ 12 ] When I came to London for a Theosophical congress, one of the leading personalities told me that in my book "The Mysticism . . " contained the true Theosophy. I could be satisfied with this because I had only given the results of my spiritual vision; and these were accepted in the Theosophical Society. There was now no longer any reason for me not to present this spirit-knowledge in my own way before the Theosophical public, which at that time was the only one that was completely receptive to spirit-knowledge. I did not subscribe to any sectarian dogmatics; I remained a person who expressed what he believed he could express entirely according to what he himself experienced as the spirit world.

[ 13 ] At the time of the founding of the Section, I gave a series of lectures entitled "From Buddha to Christ" to the circle of "comers". In these lectures I tried to show what a tremendous advance the Mystery of Golgotha represents compared to the Buddha event and how the development of humanity, by striving towards the Christ event, comes to its culmination.

[ 14 ] I also spoke in the same circle about the nature of the Mysteries.

[ 15 ] All this was accepted by my listeners. It was not found to contradict earlier lectures I had given. It was only when the section was justified and I appeared to be labeled a "theosophist" that the rejection began. It really wasn't the thing; it was the name and the association with a society that nobody wanted.

[ 16 ] But on the other hand, my non-theosophical listeners would only have been inclined to be "stimulated" by my remarks, to take them up "literarily". There was no understanding for what was on my mind, to insert the impulses of the spirit world into life. However, I was gradually able to find this understanding in people interested in theosophy.

[ 17 ] At the Brockdorff circle, to whom I had spoken about Nietzsche and then about Goethe's secret revelation, I gave a lecture at this time on Goethe's "Faust" from an esoteric point of view. (It is the same one that was later published together with my remarks on Goethe's fairy tales by the philosophical anthroposophical publishing house)

[ 18 ] The lectures on "Mysticism ..." led to the same theosophical circle asking me to speak to them again the following winter. I then gave the series of lectures which I summarized in the book "Christianity as a Mystical Fact".

[ 19 ] I made it clear from the outset that the choice of the title "as a mystical fact" was important. For I did not simply want to present the mystical content of Christianity. My aim was to show the development from the ancient Mysteries to the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that in this development it is not merely earthly historical forces that are at work, but spiritual extraterrestrial impulses. And I wanted to show that in the ancient Mysteries cult images of cosmic processes were given, which then took place in the Mystery of Golgotha as a fact transferred from the cosmos to the earth on the plane of history.

[ 20 ] This was not taught anywhere in the Theosophical Society I stood with this view in complete opposition to the Theosophical dogmatics of the time, before I was asked to work in the Theosophical Society.

[ 21 ] Because this invitation came just after the lecture cycle on Christ described here. Marie von Sivers was in Italy (Bologna) between the two lecture cycles that I gave for the Theosophical Society, in order to work there in the Theosophical branch of the Theosophical Society.

[ 22] So the facts developed until my first visit to a Theosophical congress in London in 1902. At this congress, which was also attended by Marie von Sivers, it was already regarded as a finished fact that a German section of the Society was now to be founded with me, who had shortly before been invited to become a member of the Society, as General Secretary.

[ 23 ] The visit to London was of great interest to me. I met important leaders of the Theosophical Society. I was allowed to stay at the home of Mr. Bertram Keightley, one of these leaders. I became very friendly with him. I got to know Mr. Mead, the writer of such merit in the Theosophical movement. It was at Bertram Keightley's house that the most interesting conversations imaginable were held about the spiritual insights that lived in the Theosophical Society.

[ 24 ] These conversations became particularly intimate with Bertram Keightley himself. H.P. Blavatsky came alive in these conversations. Her whole personality with its rich spiritual content was described to me and Marie von Sivers with the greatest vividness by my dear host, who had experienced so much through her.

[ 25 ] I got to know Annie Besant more fleetingly, as well as Sinnett, the author of "Esoteric Buddhism". I did not meet Mr. Leadbeater, whom I only heard speak from the podium. He made no particular impression on me.

[ 26 ] All the interesting things I heard moved me deeply; but they had no influence on the content of my views.

[ 27 ] I tried to use the time I had left over from attending the congress meetings to visit London's natural science and art collections diligently. I may say that the scientific and historical collections gave me many an idea about the development of nature and mankind

[ 28 ] So I had experienced a significant event for me during this visit to London. I left with the most varied impressions that deeply moved my soul.

[ 29 ] In the first "Magazin" issue of 1899, you will find an article of mine entitled "New Year's reflection of a heretic". What is meant here is not a heresy towards a religious creed, but towards the cultural orientation that the time had adopted.

[ 30 ] We were standing at the gates of a new century. The previous one had brought great achievements in the fields of external life and knowledge.

[ 31 ] The following thought occurred to me: "Despite all these and many other achievements, e.g. in the field of art, the person who looks deeper cannot be quite happy about the educational content of the time. Our highest spiritual needs demand something that time provides only to a meagre degree." And with regard to the emptiness of contemporary culture at that time, I looked back to the time of scholasticism, when spirits at least still lived conceptually with the spirit. "One should not be surprised if, in the face of such phenomena, spirits with deeper spiritual needs find the proud thought structures of scholasticism more satisfying than the idea content of our own time. Otto Willmann has written an excellent book, his "History of Idealism", in which he pontificates in praise of the world view of past centuries. It must be admitted: the human spirit longs for that proud, comprehensive illumination of thought which human knowledge experienced in the philosophical systems of the scholastics." "Despondency is a characteristic feature of intellectual life at the turn of the century. It clouds our enjoyment of the achievements of the recent past."

[ 32 ] And to the personalities who argued that "true knowledge" in particular proves the impossibility of an overall picture of existence in a world view, I had to say: "If it were up to the opinion of the people who allow such voices to be heard, one would be content to measure, weigh and compare things and phenomena, to examine them with the available apparatus; but never would the question be raised as to the higher sense of things and phenomena. "

[ 33 ] This is the mood of my soul from which the facts that brought about my anthroposophical activity within the Theosophical Society must be understood. If at that time I was absorbed in the culture of the time in order to have the spiritual background for the editorship of the "Magazin", then afterwards I felt a deep need to "recover" my soul by reading something like Willmann's "History of Idealism". Even if there was an abyss between my spiritual outlook and Otto Willmann's ideas, I still felt that these ideas were close to the spirit.

[ 34 ] At the end of September 1900, I was able to let the "Magazin" pass into other hands.

[ 35 ] The facts reported show that my aim of communicating the contents of the spirit world had already become a necessity before I gave up the "Magazine" because of the state of my soul, that it was not connected with the impossibility of continuing the "Magazine".

[ 36 ] As if into the predestined element of my soul, I entered into an activity that had its impulses in the knowledge of the spirit.

[ 37 ] But even today I still have the feeling that, if the obstacles described here had not been present, my attempt to lead through scientific thinking to the spiritual world could have been a promising one. I look back on what I expressed from 1897 to 1900 as something that had to be expressed to the way of thinking of the time; and on the other hand I look back as something in which I went through my most intensive spiritual test. I have become thoroughly acquainted with where the forces of the times lie that dissolve and destroy culture and strive away from the spirit. And from this realization, much has been added to the strength that I still needed in order to work out of the spirit.

[ 38 ] Even before the period of activity within the Theosophical Society, still in the last period of editing the "Magazin", lies the elaboration of my two-volume book "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert", which was then expanded from the second edition onwards to include an overview of the development of world views from Greek times to the nineteenth century as "Rätsel der Philosophie".

[ 39 ] The external occasion for the creation of this book is to be regarded as a completely secondary matter. It was given by the fact that Cronbach, the publisher of the "Magazin", was organizing a collection of writings which were to deal with the various fields of knowledge and life as they developed in the nineteenth century. He also wanted this collection to include a presentation of world and life views and entrusted me with this task.

[ 40 ] I had all the material of the book in my soul for a long time. My reflections on world views had a personal starting point in that of Goethe. The contrast into which I had to bring Goethe's way of thinking to Kantianism, the new philosophical approaches at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel: all this was for me the beginning of an epoch of worldview development. The spiritual books of Richard Wahles, which represented the dissolution of all philosophical worldview striving at the end of the nineteenth century, closed this epoch. In this way, the nineteenth century's striving for a world view rounded itself off into a whole that lived in my view and which I gladly seized the opportunity to portray.

[ 41 ] When I look back on this book, it seems to me that the course of my life is symptomatically expressed in it. I did not, as many believe, move forward in contradictions. If that were the case, I would gladly admit it. But it would not be the reality of my spiritual progress. I moved forward in such a way that I added new areas to what lived in my soul. And a particularly lively exploration in the spiritual field took place soon after I had finished working on the "World and Life Views"

[ 42 ] In addition, I did not penetrate anywhere into the spiritual realm on a mystical-emotional path, but wanted to go everywhere through crystal-clear concepts. The experience of concepts, of ideas, led me from the ideal into the spiritually real.

[ 43 ] The real development of the organic from primeval times to the present stood before my imagination only after the elaboration of the "world and life views".

[ 44 ] During this time I still had the scientific view before my soul's eye, which had emerged from Darwin's way of thinking. But this was regarded by me only as a sensory series of facts existing in nature. Within this series of facts, spiritual impulses were active for me, as Goethe had in mind in his idea of metamorphosis.

[ 45 ] So the scientific series of development, as represented by Haeckel, never stood before me as something in which mechanical or merely organic laws prevailed, but as something in which the spirit drives the living beings from the simple through the complicated up to man. I saw in Darwinism a way of thinking that is on the way to Goethe's, but lags behind it

[ 46 ] This was all still thought by me in ideal content; I only worked my way through to an imaginative view later. Only this view brought me the realization that in primeval times there was a completely different beingness in spiritual reality than the simplest organisms. That man as a spiritual being is older than all other living beings, and that in order to take on his present physical form, he had to separate himself from a world being that contained him and the other organisms. These are thus waste products of human development; not something from which he emerged, but something that he left behind, separated from himself, in order to take on his physical form as an image of his spiritual being. Man as a macrocosmic being who carried all the rest of the earthly world within himself and who came to the microcosm by separating the rest, that was a realization for me that I only gained in the first years of the new century.

[ 47 ] And so this realization could not have an impulsive effect anywhere in the explanations of the "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen". I wrote the second volume of this book in such a way that in a spiritualized form of Darwinism and Haeckelism seen in the light of Goethe's world view, the starting point of a spiritual immersion in the mysteries of the world should be given.

[ 48 ] When I later worked on the second edition of the book, the realization of the true development was already in my soul. I found it necessary, although I held to the point of view I had adopted in the first edition as that which thinking without spiritual perception can give, to make small changes in the form of expression. They were necessary, firstly, because the book had a completely different composition due to the inclusion of the overview of philosophy as a whole, and secondly, because this second edition appeared when my explanations on the true development of the living of the world were already available.

[ 49 ] In all of this, the form that my "Riddles of Philosophy" have taken has not only a subjective justification as a recorded point of view from a certain stage of my intellectual development, but a completely objective one. This consists in the fact that thinking, even if it is experienced spiritually, as thinking, can only imagine the development of living beings as it is presented in my book. And that the next step must take place through spiritual contemplation.

[ 50 ] So my book represents quite objectively the pre-anthroposophical point of view into which one must immerse oneself, which one must experience in immersion in order to ascend to the higher one. This point of view emerges as a stage on the path of knowledge for those who seek the spiritual world not in a mystical, hazy way, but in a spiritually clear way. In the representation of what emerges from this point of view, there is something that the cognizer needs as a preliminary stage of the higher.

[ 51 ] In Haeckel I saw the personality who courageously took the intellectual standpoint in natural science, while the other world of researchers excluded thinking and only wanted to accept the sensory results of observation. The fact that Haeckel placed value on creative thinking in the exploration of reality: that is what drew me to him again and again. And so I dedicated my book to him, even though its content - even in the form it took at the time - was not at all written in his spirit. But Haeckel was not at all philosophical in nature. He approached philosophy entirely as a layman. And that is why the attacks of the philosophers, who were hailing Haeckel at the time, seemed to me to be completely inappropriate. In opposition to them, I dedicated the book to Haeckel, just as I had already written my book "Haeckel and his opponents" in opposition to them. Haeckel, in complete naivety towards all philosophy, had turned thinking into a means of representing biological reality; philosophical attacks were directed against him in an intellectual field that was alien to him. I don't think he ever knew what the philosophers wanted from him. This came to me from a conversation I had with him after the publication of "Welträtsel" in Leipzig on the occasion of a performance of Borngräber's play "Giordano Bruno". He said: "People say I deny the spirit. I would like them to see how the materials are shaped by their forces, they would perceive 'spirit' in every retort process. There is spirit everywhere." Haeckel knew nothing at all of the real spirit. He already saw "spirit" in the forces of nature.

[ 52 ] At that time, it was not necessary to take a critical approach against such blindness to the spirit with philosophically dead concepts, but to see how far removed the age is from experiencing the spirit and to try to strike the spark of the spirit from the foundations that were offered, the biological explanation of nature.

[ 53 ] That was my opinion at the time. I also wrote my "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert" based on this opinion.