The Course of My Life
GA 28
Translated by Steiner Online Library
Chapter XXXVII
[ 1 ] While the anthroposophical insights were being carried into society in the way that results - in part - from the private prints, Marie von Sivers and I cultivated the artistic element in our joint work, which was destined to become a moving force in the anthroposophical movement.
[ 2 ] On the one hand, there was the recitative, with its orientation towards dramatic art, which formed the object of the work that had to be done so that the anthroposophical movement would have the right content.
[ 3 ] On the other hand, there was the opportunity for me to immerse myself in the development of architecture, sculpture and painting on the journeys that had to be made in the service of anthroposophy.
[ 4 ] I have spoken at various points in this biography of the significance that the artistic has for a person who experiences within the spiritual world.
[ 5 ] However, until the time of my anthroposophical work, I was only able to study most of the works of art of human development in the form of reproductions. The only originals available to me were those in Vienna, Berlin and some places in Germany.
[ 6 ] When the journeys for anthroposophy were made together with Marie von Sivers, I was confronted with the treasures of the museums in the widest European circle. And so, from the beginning of the century, in the fifth decade of my life, I went through a high school of art studies and, in connection with this, a view of the spiritual development of humanity. Marie von Sivers was at my side everywhere, and with her fine and tasteful understanding of everything I was allowed to experience in the view of art and culture, she herself experienced everything in a beautiful, complementary way. She understood how these experiences flowed into everything that then made the ideas of anthroposophy mobile. For the impressions of art that my soul received permeated what I had to make effective in lectures.
[ 7 ] In the practical viewing of the great works of art, the world appeared before our souls, from which another soul configuration from older times speaks into the new. We were able to immerse our souls in the spirituality of art that still speaks from Cimabue. But by looking at art, we could also immerse ourselves in the mighty spiritual battle that Thomas Aquinas waged against Arabism in the heyday of scholasticism.
[ 8 ] For me, observing the development of architecture was of particular importance. In the quiet contemplation of stylistic design, what I was then allowed to shape into the forms of the Goetheanum grew in my soul.
[ 9 ] Standing before Lionardo's Last Supper in Milan, before the creations of Raphael and Michel Angelo in Rome and the conversations I had with Marie von Sivers following these contemplations must, I believe, be felt with gratitude towards fate, especially when they come before the soul for the first time at a more mature age.
[ 10 ] But I would have to write a book of no small length if I wanted to describe even briefly what I experienced in the manner indicated.
[ 11 ] You can see so deeply into the secrets of the development of mankind through the gaze that loses itself in the "School of Athens" or in the "Disputa", if the spiritual view is behind it.
[ 12 ] And if one proceeds with observation from Cimabue through Giotto to Raphael, one has before one the gradual fading of an older spiritual view of humanity to the modern, more naturalistic one. What had emerged for me from the spiritual view as the law of human development: it emerges, revealing itself clearly, in the development of the art of the soul.
[ 13 ] I always felt the deepest satisfaction when I could see how the anthroposophical movement received new life through this continual immersion in the artistic. In order to embrace the essential nature of the spiritual with ideas and to shape it in an imaginative way, we need mobility in the activity of ideas. The fulfillment of the soul with the artistic gives it.
[ 14 ] And it was absolutely necessary to protect society from the intrusion of all those inner untruths that are connected with false sentimentality. A spiritual movement is always exposed to this intrusion. If the communicative lecture is enlivened by the moving ideas that one owes to the life in the artistic, then the inner untruthfulness that comes from sentimentality in the listener is banished. - The artistic, which is borne by feeling and emotion, but which aspires to light-filled clarity in design and vision, can provide the most effective counterweight to false sentimentality.
[ 15 ] And so I feel it to be a particularly favorable destiny for the anthroposophical movement that in Marie von Sivers I was given a collaborator by fate who, from her deepest dispositions, was able to cultivate this artistic-emotional but unsentimental element with full understanding.
[ 16 ] A continuous counteraction against this inwardly untrue sentimental element was necessary. For it always penetrates a spiritual movement. It cannot simply be dismissed or ignored. For the people who initially give themselves over to this element are in many cases seekers in the deepest recesses of their souls. However, they initially find it difficult to establish a firm relationship with the content communicated from the spiritual world. They unconsciously seek a kind of anesthesia in sentimentality. They want to experience very special truths, esoteric ones. They develop the urge to segregate themselves into groups with these sects.
[ 17 ] The important thing is to make the right the sole guiding force of society as a whole. So that those who stray to one side or the other can see again and again how those who may call themselves the central carriers of the movement work because they are its founders. Working positively for the content of anthroposophy, not fighting against excesses, that was the essential thing for Marie von Sivers and me. Of course, there were exceptional cases in which it also became necessary to fight.
[ 18 ] For me, the time leading up to my Paris cycle of lectures is something that is closed as a developmental process in the soul. I gave these lectures in 1906 during the Theosophical Congress. Individual participants of the congress had expressed the wish to hear these lectures in addition to the events of the congress. At that time I had made the personal acquaintance of Edouard Schuré in Paris, together with Marie von Sivers, who had been in correspondence with him for some time and who had been engaged in translating his works. He was among the audience. I also had the pleasure of having Merezhkovsky and Minsky and other Russian poets among the audience on several occasions.
[ 19 ] In this lecture cycle, I gave what I felt was "ripe" in me in terms of the spiritual insights that guide the human being.
[ 20 ] This "mature feeling" of knowledge is something essential in the exploration of the spiritual world. In order to have this feeling, one must have experienced a perception as it first arises in the soul. At first it is still perceived as unclear, as blurred in its contours. It must be allowed to sink back into the depths of the soul to "mature". The consciousness is not yet far enough to grasp the spiritual content of the vision. The soul in its spiritual depths must be together with this content in the spiritual world undisturbed by the consciousness.
[ 21 ] In external natural science, knowledge is not asserted earlier than until all the necessary experiments and sensory observations have been completed, and until the calculations under consideration are flawless. - In spiritual science, methodical conscientiousness and cognitive discipline are by no means less necessary. It just takes a slightly different approach. Consciousness must be tested in its relationship to the truth of knowledge. One must be able to "wait" with patience, perseverance and inner conscientiousness until the consciousness passes this test. It must have made itself strong enough in its faculty of ideas in a certain area in order to take the view in question into the conceptual faculty.
[ 22 ] In the Paris cycle of lectures I put forward a view that had to undergo a long "maturation" in my soul. After I had explained how the members of the human being: physical body, etheric body - as mediator of life phenomena -, astral body - as mediator of sensory and volitional phenomena - and the "I-bearer" generally relate to each other, I communicated the fact that the etheric body of man is female; the etheric body of woman is male. This shed light within anthroposophy on a fundamental question of existence that was much discussed at the time. One need only recall the book by the unfortunate Weininger: "Gender and Character" and the poetry of the time. But the question was led into the depths of the human being. With his physical body, man is integrated into the forces of the cosmos in a completely different way than with his etheric body. Through the physical body man stands in the forces of the earth; through the etheric body in the forces of the extraterrestrial cosmos. The masculine and feminine are introduced to the mysteries of the world.
[ 23 ] For me, this realization was one of the most shattering inner soul experiences. For I always felt anew how one must patiently-waitingly approach a spiritual view, and how, when one experiences the "maturity of consciousness", one must then grasp the ideas in order to bring the view into the realm of human cognition.