The Rudolf Steiner Archive

19. Schiller and the Present

[ 1 ] I have often emphasized here that the Theosophical Movement cannot distract us from the immediate reality, from the duties and tasks that the day imposes upon us in our present time. It now remains to be seen whether this Theosophical Movement can also find the right words when it comes to bringing us closer to the great heroes of the spirit, who are, after all, the creators of our culture and education. These days, everything that counts as part of German education is turning its thoughts to one of our greatest heroes of the spirit, our Friedrich Schiller.

[ 2 ] A hundred years have passed since his death. The last major Schiller celebration, which was observed not only within Germany but also wherever people are committed to education—in England, America, Austria, and Russia—took place in 1859, marking the centennial of his birth. It was accompanied by lavish festivities and heartfelt tributes to Schiller’s highest idealism. These were words spoken across vast regions of the earth. Once again, there will be grand festivities held in these days in honor of our great spiritual hero. But as intimate, sincere, and honest as the words spoken back in 1859 were, the words spoken today about Schiller will not be as intimate, as devoted, or as spoken straight from the heart. The cultural and national view of Schiller has changed significantly over the past fifty years. In the first half of the 19th century, Schiller’s great ideals, the grand depictions of his dramas, took root slowly and gradually, and it was an echo of what Schiller himself had planted, an echo of what he had instilled in hearts and souls—words that once flowed in inspiring speech from the lips of the finest among the German people. The most outstanding figures of that era gave their all to express what they had to say. Among them were the brothers Ernst and Georg Curtius, the aesthetician Vischer, the linguist Jakob Grimm, Karl Gutzkow, and many others. They joined in the great chorus of the Schiller celebrations at that time, and everywhere it sounded as if one were hearing something from Schiller himself, something of what Schiller himself had planted.

[ 3 ] We must admit that things have changed in recent decades. Our direct connection to Schiller has diminished because Schiller’s great ideals no longer speak to our contemporaries as intimately or as familiarly as they once did, and so it may serve as a substitute to begin a Schiller festival by clearly and vividly bringing to mind what Schiller can still be for the present, what Schiller can still become for our future. For the theosophist, it is fitting above all to take up the great fundamental questions of theosophy and to ask whether Schiller has anything to do with these fundamental questions of theosophy. I hope that the course of this evening will show that it is not an artificial connection when we bring Schiller and the theosophical movement together, when we theosophists ourselves feel, in a certain sense, called upon to cherish the memory of Schiller.

[ 4 ] What, fundamentally, is our fundamental question here—that which our longing hinges upon, that which we wish to explore and fathom? It is the great question of finding the path between that which surrounds us as the object of our senses, as the world of our senses, and that which is transcendent to the sensory—the spiritual, the supersensory—which dwells within us and above us. Early on, this was also the question that moved our Schiller. I cannot go into details today. But I would like to show one thing: that throughout Schiller’s life and work, this fundamental question—How is the physical connected to the soul-spiritual, to the supersensible?—runs through as the very task Schiller sought to solve from the beginning of his life to the heights of his creative work, indeed, throughout his entire oeuvre, which is an artistic and philosophical expression of this question. He wrote a treatise back when he had completed his medical studies. This treatise, a kind of dissertation he wrote upon graduating from the Karlsschule, addresses the question: What is the connection between the sensory nature of human beings and their spiritual nature? — In this work, Schiller explores in a compelling and beautiful way how the beautiful and the spiritual are connected to the physical nature of human beings. The development of our time has long since surpassed Schiller’s answer to this question; but that is of no consequence at all when it comes to a genius as great as Schiller. What matters is how deeply he immersed himself in it and how he came to terms with such matters. Schiller understood it in such a way that there should be no conflict between the sensual and the spiritual. Thus, he sought in a subtle way to show how the spirit, how the soul of man, works down into the physical, how the physical is merely a means of expression for the spirit dwelling within man; every gesture, every form, and every linguistic expression is an expression of this. He first examines how the soul expresses itself in the body; then he examines how the physical condition works up into the spiritual. In short, the harmony between body and soul is the point of this treatise. The conclusion of the treatise is magnificent. There Schiller speaks of death as if it were not an end to life, but merely an event like other events in life. Death is not an end. He says beautifully: Life brings about death at some point; but life is not concluded by this; after experiencing the event of death, the soul passes into other spheres to view life from the other side. But has the human being truly extracted all experience from life at that moment? Schiller suggests that it may well be that the soul’s life within the body unfolds as when we read a book: we read through it, set it aside, and after some time pick it up again to understand it better; then we set it aside again, pick it up after some time, and so on, to understand it better and better. He is telling us: The soul does not live in the body just once, but just as a person picks up a book again and again, so the soul returns again and again to a body to gain new experiences in this world. It is the great idea of reincarnation that Lessing had briefly touched upon shortly before in The Education of the Human Race, as in his literary testament, and which Schiller now also expresses where he writes about the connection between the sensual nature and the spiritual nature of man.

[ 5 ] Right from the start, Schiller begins to view life from the highest perspective.

[ 6 ] Schiller’s early dramas have a grand and powerful effect on those who have a heart attuned to the greatness within them. If we ask ourselves why Schiller’s grand ideas flow so deeply into our hearts, we find the answer in the fact that Schiller touches upon matters in his dramas that belong to the highest concerns of humanity. One does not always need to comprehend or abstractly grasp what is going on in the poet’s soul when he is alone, shaping the figures of his imagination. But what lives there in the poet’s breast as he shapes his figures, which then move across the stage—we already see that as young people in the theater, or when we read the dramas. What lives in the poet’s soul flows into us. And what was living in Schiller’s soul back then, when he poured his youthful spirit into his The Robbers, into Fiesco, into Intrigue and Love! We must take him out of the intellectual currents of the 18th century if we are to grasp him, if we want to understand him fully.

[ 7 ] Two intellectual currents were sweeping across the intellectual horizon of Europe at that time. One of these currents is epitomized by a phrase from French materialism. If we wish to understand it, we must look more deeply into the developmental process of the peoples. What was fermenting in Schiller’s soul had its origins in the striving and thinking of the centuries. Around the turn of the 15th to the 16th century, the era began in which people looked up at the stars in a new way. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo—they are the ones who ushered in a new age, an age in which the world was viewed differently than before. Something new crept into people’s souls as they came to rely on the external senses. Anyone wishing to compare the worldview of the 12th and 13th centuries with what emerged around the turn of the 16th century with Copernicus and later with Kepler must compare what takes place in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” with the worldview of the 17th and 18th centuries. One may object to the medieval worldview as much as one likes. Today, it can no longer be ours. But it did have one thing that the 18th century no longer had: it presented the world as a great harmony, and humanity was placed within this divine world order as its center; humanity itself belonged to this great harmony. All things were the outflow of the divine, of the creative power that was revered in faith, namely in Christianity. The higher realm was the object of faith. It had to hold and sustain. And this effect extended down to the plants and minerals. The whole world was enveloped in a great harmony, and humanity felt itself standing within this harmony. They felt that they could be redeemed from that from which they longed to be redeemed through their being intertwined and interwoven with this divine harmony. They rested in what they perceived themselves to be in the world permeated by God, and felt content. That changed and had to change in the era when the new worldview made its way into people’s minds, when the world was permeated by the modern spirit of inquiry. A comprehensive view of the material world had been gained. Through philosophical and physiological research, insight into the sensory world had been obtained. What people thought about the sensory world could not be reconciled with faith. Other concepts and other views took hold. But people could not reconcile their new discoveries with what they thought, felt, and sensed about the spirit. They could not reconcile it with what they were compelled to believe about the sources of life according to the ancient traditions. Thus, something emerged during the French Revolution that can be expressed by the statement: “Man is a machine.” People had grasped the material world, but they had lost the connection to the spirit. They felt the spiritual within themselves. But they did not feel how the world was connected to it; they no longer had that. The materialists created a new worldview in which there was essentially only matter. Goethe felt repelled by such a view, as found in Holbach’s Système de la nature; he found it empty and desolate. But this worldview of Holbach’s was derived from the scientific perspective. The external truth existed once more. How, then, is a person who has lost the spirit to relate to this? They have lost the connection; they have lost the harmony that medieval people felt—the harmony between the soul and the material world. Thus, it could not be otherwise than that the greatest minds of that era strove to rediscover that connection, or that they were compelled to choose between the spiritual and the sensual.

[ 8 ] As we have seen, this was the fundamental question—Schiller’s “question of youth”—of finding this connection between the ideal and reality, nature and spirit. But the spirit of the times had torn a deep chasm between the spiritual and the sensual; it weighed on his soul like a nightmare. How can one reconcile the ideal and reality, nature and spirit? — that was the question.

[ 9 ] This rift had been opened up by yet another intellectual movement, one that drew on the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau had, to a certain extent, rejected the culture of his time. He believed that this culture had caused humanity to become alienated, to tear itself away from nature. He had not only become estranged from nature through his worldview; he could no longer find a connection to the source of life. He therefore had to yearn for nature, and so Rousseau posits the principle that, fundamentally, culture has led humanity away from the true harmonies of life, that it is a product of decline.

[ 10 ] At that time, the question of the intellectual, the spiritual, and the ideal had presented itself in a new form to the greatest minds of the age: And how could it not be there, when they were contemplating life itself! In an era when the ideal of life was felt so deeply, one could not help but feel a double sense of conflict when looking at real life as it had developed, and then again at what existed in human society. Schiller’s youth fell within this period. It all piled up; and that was what Schiller could not help but perceive as disharmony. His early dramas emerged from this mood. Back to the ideal! What is the right way for humans to live together, as prescribed for us in a divine world order? These are the feelings that lived within Schiller in his youth, which he then expressed in his early dramas, in The Robbers, but especially in the court dramas; we sense them when we allow the great drama Don Carlos to take effect upon us. We have seen how the young doctor Schiller raised the fundamental question of the relationship between the sensual and the spiritual, and that, as a poet, he presented it to his contemporaries.

[ 11 ] After the severe trials brought on by his early dramas, he was invited to the home of Körner, the “poet of freedom,” who did everything necessary to promote intellectual life. Körner’s refined philosophical education also drew Schiller to philosophy, and now the question arose anew in Schiller’s mind: How can the connection between the sensory and the spiritual be rediscovered? — We find a record of what was discussed and exchanged in grand ideas between Schiller and Körner in Dresden at that time in Schiller’s philosophical letters. These may indeed seem somewhat immature compared to Schiller’s later works. But what is immature for Schiller is still very mature for many other people and important for us, because it can show us how Schiller struggled his way up to the highest heights of thought and imagination.

[ 12 ] These philosophical letters, Theosophy of Julius, depict the correspondence between Julius and Raphael; Schiller as Julius, Körner as Raphael. The world of the 18th century comes to life before us. There are beautiful sentences in this philosophy, sentences similar to those that Paracelsus expressed as his worldview. In the spirit of Paracelsus, the entire external world reveals to us what the divine creative power has fashioned in the most diverse realms of nature: minerals, plants, and animals with the most varied characteristics are spread throughout nature; and humanity is like a great synthesis, like a world that, much like an encyclopedia, repeats within itself everything that is otherwise scattered. A microcosm, a small world within a macrocosm, a great world! Like hieroglyphs, says Schiller, is that which is contained in the various kingdoms of nature. Man stands as the pinnacle of all nature, so that he unites within himself and expresses on a higher level what is poured out throughout all nature. Paracelsus expressed the same thought in a grand and beautiful way: All entities of nature are like the letters that make up a word, and when we spell out nature, nature reveals itself in its essence; thus there is a word that manifests itself in human beings. Schiller expresses this in a vivid, emotional way in his philosophical letters. So vivid is this for him that the hieroglyphs in nature speak a vivid language. “I see,” says Schiller, “in nature outside the chrysalises transforming into butterflies. The chrysalis does not perish; it shows me a transformation, and that is my assurance that the human soul, too, transforms in a similar way. Thus, the butterfly is for me a guarantee of human immortality.”

[ 13 ] In the most magnificent way, the thoughts of the spirit in nature thus intertwine with the thought that Schiller conceives as the one that lives in the human soul. He then struggles to reach the insight that the power of love lives not only in human beings, but is expressed in certain stages throughout the entire world—in minerals, plants, animals, and humans. It expresses itself in the forces of nature and most purely in human beings. Schiller expresses this in a way that recalls the great mystics of the Middle Ages. What he has thus articulated, he calls the “Theosophy of Julius.” From this, he developed his later views on life. His entire way of life, his entire striving, is nothing other than a great self-education, and in this sense, Schiller is a practical theosophist. Fundamentally, theosophy is nothing other than the self-education of the soul, a continuous working on the soul and its further development toward the higher stages of existence. The theosophist is convinced that the higher he develops himself, the higher things he can then perceive. Those who have become accustomed only to the sensual can perceive only the sensual; those trained in the spiritual and mental see soul and spirit all around them. We must first become spiritual and divine ourselves; only then can we recognize the divine. This is what the Pythagoreans already said in their secret schools, and this is what Goethe also said in harmony with an ancient mystic:

Were it not for the sun-like eye,
The sun could never be seen,
Were it not for God’s own power within us,
How could the divine delight us?

[ 14 ] But we must first develop the strengths and abilities that lie within us; we must first cultivate the capacity for them within ourselves. Thus, throughout his entire life, Schiller sought to educate himself.

[ 15 ] His aesthetic letters, the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, mark a new stage in his personal development. They are a jewel in our German intellectual life. Only those who are familiar with these aesthetic letters can feel and sense what mysteriously flows between and from the words—including those of Schiller’s later dramas; they are like the balm of life. Anyone who has given even a little thought to the lofty intellectual and pedagogical ideals that live in his aesthetic letters will have to say: We must call these aesthetic letters a book for the people. Only when our schools study not only Plato, not only Cicero, but with equal weight Schiller’s aesthetic letters for the youth, will one recognize how something unique, something brilliant, lives within them. What lives in the Aesthetic Letters will only bear fruit when the teachers of our secondary schools are imbued with this spiritual lifeblood, when they allow some of what Schiller sought to instill in his pupils to flow into them through this magnificent work he has given us. In today’s philosophical works, you will find no reference to these aesthetic letters. Yet they are more significant than much of what has been accomplished by professional philosophers, for they appeal to the innermost being of the human person and seek to elevate this innermost being to a higher level.

[ 16 ] Once again, it is the great question that confronts Schiller at the beginning of the 1790s. He now poses the question as follows: On the one hand, human beings are subject to sensual needs, sensual desires, and passions. He is subject to their necessities; he follows them; he is a slave to his instincts, desires, and passions. On the other hand, there is the logical necessity: You must think in a certain way. — On the other hand, there is also the moral necessity: You must submit to certain duties. - Intellectual education is logically necessary. Moral necessity demands something else, demands something that goes beyond the modern worldview. Logic gives us no freedom; we must submit to it; duty, too, gives us no freedom; we must submit to it. Placed in between is the human being; placed between logical necessity and natural instinct. If he follows one or the other, he is unfree, a slave. But he is to become free.

[ 17 ] The question of freedom confronts Schiller’s soul with a depth perhaps never before seen in the entire history of German intellectual life. Kant had also raised this question shortly before. Schiller was never a Kantian; at the very least, he soon moved beyond Kantianism. While writing these letters, he no longer held Kant’s position. Kant speaks of duty in such a way that duty becomes a categorical imperative. “Duty! You sublime, great name, which contains nothing pleasing, nothing that carries flattery within you, but demands submission,” you who “establish a law … before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly oppose it…” Kant demands submission to the categorical imperative. Schiller, however, has broken away from this Kantian conception of duty. He says: “Gladly do I serve my friends, yet alas, I do so out of inclination”—and not with that which kills inclination, which kills even love itself. Kant demands that we do what we ought to do out of duty, out of the categorical imperative. Schiller seeks a harmony between these two, a harmony between inclination and passion on the one hand and duty and logic on the other. He finds it first in the contemplation of beauty. For Schiller, working within beauty becomes a great cosmic music, for he has declared: “Only through the morning gate of beauty do you enter the realm of knowledge.” When we have a work of art, the spiritual shines through it. Thus, the work of art does not appear to us as an ironclad necessity, but as a radiance that expresses the ideal, the spiritual, and the transcendent to us. Spirit and sensuality are balanced in the Beautiful. For Schiller, spirit and sensuality must also be balanced within the human being. Where the human being is between these two states—where he is dependent neither on natural necessity nor on logical necessity, but lives in the state that Schiller calls the aesthetic—there passion is overcome. He has brought the spirit down to himself; he has purified sensuality through beauty; and thus man has the impulse and the desire to voluntarily do what the categorical imperative demands. Then morality in man is something that has become flesh and blood within him, so that the impulses and desires themselves embody the spiritual. Spirit and sensuality have thus permeated the aesthetic human being; spirit and sensuality have permeated one another within the human being, because he loves what he ought to love. What lies dormant within the human being is to be awakened. That is Schiller’s ideal. Even with regard to society and the laws, people are compelled by necessity or by the rational state to live together in accordance with the law. In between stands the aesthetic society, where love accomplishes what is longed for from person to person and is imposed upon him by his innermost inclination. In the aesthetic society, people cooperate freely; there they have no need for external laws. They themselves are the expression of the laws according to which people must live together. Schiller beautifully and sublimely depicts this society, where people live together in love and mutual affection and, out of freedom, do what they ought to do and must do.

[ 18 ] I was able to express the ideas in Schiller’s aesthetic letters only in broad strokes. But they are effective only if they are not merely read and studied while reading, but if they accompany people throughout their lives like a book of meditation, so that they aspire to become what Schiller himself aspired to be. Back then, the time for that had not yet come. It has only arrived today, when one can perceive the vast scope of a society that makes a community of people based on love its first principle. Back then, Schiller sought, through art, through the “morning gate of beauty,” to penetrate into such an understanding and into such a way of living together among people. Thus, because the time was not yet ripe for him to create free human beings in a free society, Schiller sought at least to pre-educate people through his art, so that they might one day become ready for it. It is sad how little these very most intimate thoughts and feelings of Schiller have found their way into educational life, which ought to be entirely permeated by them, which ought to be an outline of them.

[ 19 ] I have explained how we should understand Schiller in relation to the present in the lectures on Schiller that I gave at the “Freie Hochschule.” There I attempted to present these ideas in a coherent and comprehensive manner. You can read in detail there about many things that I can only hint at today. In all Schiller biographies, you can basically find very little of these Schillerian intimacies. But once, an educator—a sensitive, dear educator—took it upon himself to distill the essence of Schiller’s aesthetic letters into beautiful letters of his own. The man’s name was Deinhardt. I don’t think you can still find the book in bookstores. All teachers, especially those in our secondary schools, should have bought it. But I believe it has been pulped. The man who wrote it could barely manage to secure a meager position as a private tutor. He had the misfortune of breaking his leg; the doctors who were called in declared that the broken leg could be healed, but that the man was too poorly nourished. Thus he died from the consequences of this accident.

[ 20 ] After Schiller had risen to prominence in this way, something very important happened to him: a fact came to Schiller that had a profound impact on his life and also on the life of our entire nation. It is an event of great significance, significant indeed for the entire modern intellectual life. This is the bond of friendship between Schiller and Goethe. It came about in a peculiar way. It was at a meeting of the “Natural History Society” in Jena. Schiller and Goethe attended a lecture by an eminent naturalist, Batsch. It so happened that the two left the hall together. Schiller said to Goethe: “That is such a fragmented way of viewing natural beings; the spirit that lives in all of nature is missing everywhere.” — Thus Schiller posed his fundamental question to Goethe once again. Goethe replied: “There might well be another way of looking at nature.” — He had also alluded to this in Faust, where he says that whoever seeks to drive out the spirit in this way, and thus holds the parts in his hand, “unfortunately lacks only the spiritual bond.” Goethe saw in all plants something he calls the “primordial plant,” and in animals something he calls the “primordial animal.” He saw what we call the etheric body, and Goethe then sketched this etheric body for Schiller with a few characteristic strokes. He was clear that something truly living expresses itself in every plant. Schiller objected: “Yes, but that is not an experience, that is an idea!” To which Goethe replied: “I can very much appreciate that I have ideas without knowing it, and even see them with my eyes.” Goethe was clear that this was nothing other than the very essence of the plant itself.

[ 21 ] Schiller now faced the task of rising to the level of Goethe’s grand and comprehensive vision. The letter I have mentioned before is a beautiful one; it contains the deepest psychology that exists, and through it Schiller strengthens the bond of friendship with Goethe. “For a long time now, though from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have charted for yourself with ever-renewed admiration. You seek the necessity of nature, but you seek it by the most arduous path, one that any weaker force would surely avoid. You take all of nature together to gain insight into the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the explanatory basis for the individual. From the simplest organization you ascend step by step to the more complex, in order finally to construct the most complex of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire edifice of nature. By recreating him, as it were, in nature, you seek to penetrate his hidden mechanism. A grand and truly heroic idea, which amply demonstrates how firmly your mind holds the rich whole of its concepts together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would suffice for such a goal, but merely to set out on such a path is worth more than to complete any other—and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad, between Phthia and immortality. Had you been born a Greek, or even merely an Italian, and had an exquisite nature and an idealizing art surrounded you from the cradle, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps rendered entirely superfluous. Even in your first perception of things, you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences, the grand style would have developed within you. Now, since you were born a German, since your Greek spirit was cast into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself, or to replace in your imagination what reality withheld from it by the aid of the power of thought, and thus, as it were, to give birth to a Greece from within and by rational means.” This is something that had a lasting effect on Schiller, as we shall soon see.

[ 22 ] Schiller now returns to poetry. The legacy of his earlier work comes to meet us in his dramas. Life confronts us in a grand and all-encompassing way, just as in Wallenstein. You need not believe that you will find the thoughts I am now developing in this form when you read Schiller’s dramas. But they lie deep within his dramas, just as blood pulses in our veins without us seeing that blood in our veins. They pulse through Schiller’s dramas like the lifeblood. Here, the impersonal plays a role in the personal. Schiller told himself: There must be something more comprehensive that transcends birth and death. He sought to understand how the great, transpersonal destiny intervenes in the personal. We have often referred to this law as the law of karma. In “Wallenstein,” he depicts the great destiny that crushes or elevates human beings. Up in the stars, Wallenstein seeks to fathom it. But then he realizes once more that he is being pulled by the threads of fate, that our stars of destiny shine once again within our own breasts. In “Wallenstein,” Schiller seeks to poetically master the personal, the sensual nature, in connection with the divine. It would be unartistic to try to enjoy the drama with these thoughts in mind. But unconsciously, the great impulse that emanates from this connection flows into us. We are lifted up and carried along to what pulses through this drama. In each of his subsequent dramas, Schiller seeks to ascend to a higher level, to educate himself and to draw others up with him. — In The Maid of Orleans, forces at work are transpersonal and interplay with the personal. In “The Bride of Messina,” he seeks to embody something similar; there he seeks to build upon the ancient Greek drama. He seeks to introduce a chorus and a lyrical element into it. He wanted to portray destinies that rise above the merely personal, not in ordinary colloquial language, but in elevated language.

[ 23 ] Why did Schiller draw on Greek drama? We must bear in mind the origins of Greek drama itself. If we look back in Greek drama beyond Sophocles and Aeschylus, we arrive at the Greek mystery drama, the primal drama, of which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are merely later stages of development. In his book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche attempted to explore the origins of drama. In grand dramatic spectacles, the Greeks were presented annually with something that, for the Greeks in the ancient Homeric era, was at once religion, art, and science—truth, piety, and beauty. What, then, was this primordial drama? This primordial drama was not a drama that depicted human destinies. It was meant to portray the god himself as the representative of humanity—Dionysus. The god who descended from higher spheres, incarnated himself in material substances, ascended through the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms to humanity, in order to celebrate his redemption and resurrection in humanity. This journey of the divine through the world finds its most beautiful expression in what was called the descent of the god and the resurrection and ascension of the divine.

[ 24 ] This primal drama unfolded in manifold forms before the eyes of the Greek audience. There the Greek saw what he wanted to know about the world, what he was meant to know as the truth about the world: the triumph of the spiritual over the natural. For them, science was what was presented in these dramas, and it was presented in such a way that this presentation was linked to piety and could serve as a model for what human beings experienced. Art, religion, and wisdom were what unfolded before the audience. Not in ordinary language, but in elevated language, the individual performers spoke of the descent, the suffering, and the overcoming; of the spiritual resurrection and ascension. And what was taking place there was reflected by the chorus, which, in the simple music of that time, rendered what was unfolding in the midst of it all as a divine drama. From this unified source flows what we know as art, as science that became physical, and as religion that emerged from these mysteries. Thus we look back upon something that links art with truth and religious piety.

[ 25 ] The great interpreter of the ancient Greek drama, the French writer Edouard Schuré, attempted in modern times to reconstruct this drama. You can read about this truly ingenious reconstruction in The Sacred Drama of Eleusis. Through his deep immersion in this drama, he arrived at the idea that it is a task of our time to renew the theater of the soul and the self. In his Children of Lucifer, he attempts to create a modern work that once again combines self-reflection and beauty, dramatic power, and truth. If anyone wishes to know something of what drama is to become and aspires to be in the future, they can form a picture of it from these Schurean images in “The Children of Lucifer.” What, then, is the entire Wagner circle striving for, if not to portray something transpersonal in drama once more? In Richard Wagner’s dramas, we see the progression from the personal to the transpersonal, to the mythical. That is why Nietzsche, too, when he sought the birth of tragedy in the primal drama, found his way to Wagner. What the 19th century strove for in this way, Schiller had already attempted in his “Bride of Messina,” where the spiritual is presented in elevated language, where the chorus sets before us the echo of divine actions. From what depths he sought at that time to give birth to a Greece, he explains in his extraordinarily insightful preface to the treatise “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy,” which is yet another gem of German literature and German aesthetics.

[ 26 ] And Schiller sought to do exactly what the 19th century aspired to—to enter the realm of knowledge through the morning gate of beauty and to be a missionary of truth. In the drama “Demetrius,” which he was unable to complete because death snatched him away, in this drama he sought to grasp the problems of the human self with a clarity so great and powerful that none of those who attempted it could finish “Demetrius,” because Schiller’s great wealth of ideas is not to be found in them. How deeply he grasps the human self that lives within man! Demetrius finds within himself certain signs that he is the true Russian heir to the throne. He does everything to attain what is rightfully his. At the very moment when he is close to reaching his goal, everything that has filled his self collapses. He must now be that which he has made of himself solely through the power of his inner being. The self that was bestowed upon him is no longer there; a self that is to be his own creation must arise. It is from this that Demetrius must act. It is the problem of the human personality grasped with a grandeur unlike that of any other playwright in the world. Such greatness was in Schiller’s mind when death snatched him away. In this drama lies something that will now find greater resonance among those who could not put it into clear words. And that which was embedded in the hearts and depths of people’s souls flowed forth again in 1859.

[ 27 ] The year 1859 marked a turning point in modern education as a whole. Four works happened to be published around this time. They set the tone for our education. One is Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which gave rise to a materialist movement. The second work was equally significant, particularly in relation to Schiller, if we recall the words Schiller addressed to the astronomers: “Don’t talk to me so much about nebulae and suns! Is nature great only because it gives you something to count? Your subject is certainly the most sublime in space; but, friends, the sublime does not dwell in space.” But it was precisely this sublime in space that became comprehensible through a work published at that time by Kirchhoff and Bunsen on spectral analysis. And the third work stood in a certain contrast to Schiller. In an idealistic spirit, Gustav Theodor Fechner wrote *The Pre-School of Aesthetics*. An aesthetics “from below” was to be created. Schiller had begun it from above in a powerful way. Fechner started from simple sensory perception. The fourth work brought materialism into social coexistence. What Schiller sought to establish as society was placed under the perspective of the crudest materialism in Karl Marx’s work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. All of that crept in there. These are things that must remain far removed from the immediate intimacy that Schiller poured into people’s hearts, honestly and sincerely. And now those to whom this flows from modern literature will no longer be able to look upon Schiller in such an ideal way. Recently, in the last decade of the 19th century, a man who was thoroughly steeped in aesthetic culture wrote a biography of Schiller. The first words in it were: “In my youth, I was a Schiller-hater!” And it was only through his scholarly engagement with him that he was able to work his way up to an appreciation of Schiller’s greatness.

[ 28 ] Anyone who can listen even a little to what is sweeping through our time will see that a certain inner compulsion is at work. The times have changed. That is why, perhaps, many a grand, enthusiastic word and many a beautiful celebration will still be associated with Schiller. But those who are able to listen more closely will not be able to hear something that still moved the spirits and minds half a century ago, when we revered Schiller. We must understand this; not the slightest reproach is thereby expressed toward those who today stand somewhat apart from Schiller. But in view of the immense greatness of what Schiller created, we must admit to ourselves: He must once again become an integral part of our spiritual education. The immediate present will have to lean on Schiller once more. And how could a society that strives so earnestly for spiritual deepening, such as the Theosophical Society, how could it not take up the thread of Schiller? For he is, after all, the first preparatory school for self-education if we wish to reach the heights of the spirit. We will arrive at knowledge in a different way if we pass through him. We will arrive at the spiritual if we pass through his “Aesthetic Letters.” We will come to understand the Theosophical Society as a union of human beings, regardless of nation, gender, tribe, and so on, as a union based solely on pure love of humanity. Throughout his life, Schiller strove upward toward the heights of spiritual being, and his dramas are, in essence, nothing other than an artistic attempt to penetrate the highest realms of this spiritual being. What he sought for the human soul was nothing other than to cultivate within that human soul something that is eternal and imperishable. If we recall Goethe very briefly: he used the word “entelechy” to describe that which lives in the soul as the imperishable, that which the human being cultivates within themselves, works out for themselves through experience in the real world, and sends upward as their eternal essence. Schiller calls this the form that shapes. For Schiller, this is the eternal that lives in the soul, that the soul continually develops within itself, enlarges within itself, and carries over into the realms that are imperishable. It is a victory that the form wins over physicality, which is transitory and in which the form merely lives itself out. Schiller calls it the eternal in the life of the soul, and we may, like Goethe, who coined the words “He was ours” after Schiller had passed away, we may, when we grasp Schiller again in the living spirit, allow ourselves to be permeated once more by what lived within him and with which he lives in the other world, which kindly and lovingly received his best; we may also, as Theosophists, celebrate that mysterious connection with him, which we can celebrate as the Schiller Festival. Just as the mystic unites with the spiritual essence of the world, so does the human being unite with the great spiritual heroes of humanity. Everyone who strives toward a spiritual worldview should celebrate such a festival, a “unio mystica,” for themselves, alongside the grand and resounding Schiller festivals. Nothing should be objected to regarding these grand festivals. But Schiller’s work is found only by those who celebrate this intimate festival in their hearts, which connects them intimately with our Schiller. In striving toward the spirit, we will best find the path if we do as Schiller did, who educated himself throughout his life. He expressed it, and it sounds like a motto of the theosophical worldview:

Only the body is subject to those powers,
That weave the dark fate;
But free from every power of time,
The playmate of blissful natures,
She walks above in the halls of light,
Divine among gods—the form.