The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The religious worldview of the Middle Ages in Dante's “Divine Comedy”

[ 1 ] Today we want to talk about one of the greatest creations of world literature, Dante's “Divine Comedy.” We must be aware that if we want to gain even a little understanding of this poem, we will need to transport ourselves back to the 13th and 14th centuries. Goethe has his Faust say:

What you call the spirit of the times,
Is basically the spirit of the masters themselves,
In which the times are reflected.

[ 2 ] When someone wants to interpret a poem from an earlier time, they usually do so by putting their own spirit into it and reading from the poem what comes from their subjective feelings.

[ 3 ] In Dante's “Divine Comedy,” one sees how difficult it is to transport oneself back to the Middle Ages. There are all kinds of interpretations. There is a German translation by Garneri. From the preface, it is clear that he undertook an extraordinary venture. He says that the Divine Comedy is always spoiled by the theological views introduced by interpreters. He introduced a purely human view. Carneri is the ethicist of Darwinism. On the basis of Darwinism, he has established a moral doctrine, a noble ethic, but materialistic, without awareness of the spiritual forces in the world. A materialistic attitude pervades his entire translation. This is “the spirit of the masters, in which the times are reflected.”

[ 4 ] Now let us really put ourselves in the shoes of those times. We must forget everything we have learned since childhood in order to transport ourselves into those bygone times. Back then, people thought and felt very differently. We have learned how the planets form a system with the sun, and that this system is one among many. At school we learn that the sun is at the center of one system, and the planets revolve around it. Abstract laws of reason govern everything that revolves, everything that lives, everything that floats in the infinite space around us. Those who think this way see nothing in this vast space but celestial bodies orbiting in the great, infinite empty space, celestial bodies and the living beings on them.

[ 5 ] The image of the world was very different for the people who lived in Dante's time. No one at that time thought of such abstract ideas. Our Earth was the center of the entire universe. But it was not only this solid planet; within the Earth there were beings that were related to human beings. There were forces that made human beings into animal-like beings. These were in the center of the Earth. Within it were the various levels of what was called hell. Just as Dante describes these things, they were considered real by people at that time. This is not fiction in Dante. Anyone who can even for a moment think that Dante regarded this as mere superstition does not understand him. At that time, people had the idea that on the other side of the Earth, gravity worked in the opposite direction. Medieval people imagined forces that were opposed to human beings, forces that detached them from everything that meant spiritual heaviness on earth. There was the purifying fire, Kamaloka.

[ 6 ] Looking out into the starry space from there, people had completely different ideas. The moon was not a mineral, but the body of a spirit being, on which many spirit beings lived, a world body. Beings lived on it who had undergone similar stages of development as humans. However, they had fallen deeper than humans, only their vices were understood as more spiritual than the animal vices of humans.

[ 7 ] Mercury was also imagined as a physical being that encompassed a spirit. Just as we derive human beings from the innermost part of the soul, medieval people thought of the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn as spiritual beings. At that time, people perceived spirit everywhere. For them, the world was populated by spiritual beings everywhere.

[ 8 ] Christ had lived in the fixed starry sky since he left the world. Beyond the fixed starry sky was the Empyrean, that is, the tenth heaven, which encompassed the primordial foundations of all existence. Humans imagined that those beings who were not here on Earth in this body lived in some area outside of Earth. According to the ideas of that time, we would have to look for a warrior who had passed through death on Mars. Someone who had led a contemplative life would be on Saturn. Those who had ascended even higher were to be found in the fixed starry sky, where Christ was after his death. Above them were even higher beings.

[ 9 ] Dante wrote his Divine Comedy based on this way of thinking. People today have no idea that people at that time still saw something spiritual in everything material. According to the view of that time, there is no such thing as purely physical or purely spiritual. Thus, the interweaving of the physical and the spiritual was a matter of course for all minds. When we put ourselves in such a perspective, we live and weave in the feelings from which the Divine Comedy is written. It is pointless to argue about whether Beatrice was only a symbol or Dante's beloved. There is no contradiction in this. Beatrice was a real person, but she was also the expression of everything spiritual. Beatrice is the true personification of theology, especially in the inner sense that has not been forgotten.

[ 10 ] Let us now examine the spiritual atmosphere from which the poem grew. It is the highest expression of Christian Catholicism in the 13th and 14th centuries, before the schism in the Church, from which such minds as Cardinal Nikolaus Cusanus, who grew out of scholasticism, emerged. Dante is a student of scholasticism. He viewed the world in the same way as his teacher Thomas Aquinas.

[ 11 ] What was the mission of Christianity? Its mission was to establish a different basic religious view than the one that had previously existed on earth. Previously, a belt of religious views had spread across the entire world. Now a different basic view came along.

[ 12 ] We have to go back a long way if we want to understand the underlying tone of Dante's poem. About ten thousand years before our era, the vast continent known as Atlantis began to sink more and more. In the magazine “Kosmos,” the natural scientist Arldt provides scientific proof of the existence of Atlantis. What we call the Flood is the gradual flooding of this continent. The ancestors of today's European and Asian humanity lived on this continent. A deep kinship can be found in the mythology of all these peoples. German mythology speaks of Atlantis and calls the Atlantic continent Niflheim, Nebelheim. What came over to Germany is the worldview brought to us by the figure who ruled as Wotan. Wotan is the same as Bodha or Buddha. Veda and Edda, for example, also have the same linguistic origin.

[ 13 ] All these views, which exist here as an older sediment, have one thing in common. Reincarnation was originally a matter of course for them. Buddhism, however, found its spread among Mongolian peoples, not among Aryan peoples. The Semitic element, which knows nothing of reincarnation, crept into the worldview of the Aryan peoples. The most sublime expression of this form of religion, which reckons only with one incarnation, is Christianity. Its characteristic feature is that it reckons with only one embodiment. This was not the case in esoteric Christian teaching, but the doctrine of reincarnation was not included in popular religion. Ancient Judaism and Arabism did not know the doctrine of reincarnation.

[ 14 ] If one assumes this, one has the basic tone from which Dante's magnificent poem grew. The poem depicts a vision based on Good Friday. That was the day that marked the victory of life over death. This was not imagined in abstract terms. On Good Friday and Easter, people felt that the sun was receiving the new power of spring. It rises, it enters the constellation of Aries or the Lamb. It brings forth the plant world. The sun was regarded as the expression of a spiritual being. People imagined a relationship between the spiritual and soul forces and the spirit of the sun. Thus, Good Friday night was felt to be the most appropriate time for the soul to enter into what lies beyond death.

[ 15 ] Dante's poem is a vision, a vision in the sense experienced by the initiate, a reality in the spiritual world. Dante can truly perceive the spiritual. He perceives what is in the spiritual world with his spiritual senses. He imagines this as a Christian Catholic initiate. In his vision, he brings with him what has become part of his organism from the Catholic world, but he sees it spiritually. At all times, human beings see the spiritual through the lens of their experiences. Just as a child's stay in its mother's womb relates to the physical plane, so does our stay in the spiritual world relate to what we experience spiritually here on earth. Here in our earthly life, we mature, as it were, as in the womb, in order to subsequently arise spiritually. The senses that we have developed for the spiritual depend on life on this earth. Here we mature for the hereafter; here we prepare our spiritual eyes and ears for the hereafter. That is why Dante had trained his spiritual organs in the way that the Christian Catholic world had produced.

[ 16 ] When we pass over into the other existence, we can perceive what is now within us. This then becomes visible to us externally. We say that passions, instincts, and drives belong to us. When we have entered the spiritual worlds, the contents of our soul organism become something that exists outside of us, just as external objects can be perceived in physical existence. What lives in our soul becomes symbolically visible to us.

[ 17 ] Dante names three symbols that represent the three main characteristics of his instinctual body, his astral body, his lower soul: a panther, a lion, and a she-wolf. His main passions thus confront him in the form of three animals. But this is not merely a symbol. When a person enters the astral plane, the lower passions really do confront them in the form 'animals. The she-wolf represents one passion. It is the same she-wolf that once suckled Romulus and Remus. This is the passion that was adopted by the people when the Roman nation was founded, the passion that lives in everything that is directed toward possession, greed, and, on the other hand, the right to personal property. This passion was instilled in people at the time when the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. Before that, people acquired the characteristic of bravery, which is expressed in the lion and can become a desire to rule. Even further back, greater cunning developed from the rule of priests: the panther, the characteristic of Odysseus. When Virgil confronts Dante, he says: I cannot free you from the three animals, least of all from the she-wolf. He says this because Dante has outgrown what remains of the ancient Roman passions in Italy. Dante had to take Virgil, who gave a picture of initiation in the Aeneid, as his guide. From Virgil, people at that time learned most about what the afterlife looks like. At that time, they constructed the afterlife in three stages: hell, purgatory, and heaven.

[ 18 ] There are only two consistent worldviews. One is that of Augustine, the other is that of reincarnation and karma. Augustine says: On this earth, some people are destined for good and some for evil. — The other view is that we develop through many incarnations. Only these two worldviews are possible. Dante stands on the ground of the Augustinian worldview. There, man prepares himself in this earthly life for a destiny for eternity. Therefore, this earthly life is immediately followed by hell, purgatory, or heaven. One considers this one earthly life to be decisive. One looks only at the personality of the human being.

[ 19 ] If one goes beyond personality, one goes beyond birth and death. Beyond personality is that which enters at birth and leaves again at death. That is individuality. What a person has caused as an individual must be balanced out in the next life. If you remove reincarnation and karma, everything must be balanced out in one life. If you seek retribution for everything that concerns the personality, you create the opposite image for the personal, which is hell. Hell is nothing other than being completely entangled in the personal. The counter-image of the personal in this life is hell in the hereafter. The personal must not be so entangled in this life that it embellishes existence. Christianity has brought into the world the idea that everything depends on how this one life between birth and death unfolds. That is why it had to make the earthly realm a vale of tears. It had to point out that one must strip oneself of the earthly. Pagan art, on the other hand, is what entangles us in the personal element. The ancient artists tried to make this earthly life beautiful. Those who see only the personal say: this personal aspect must strip away everything beautiful. It must make the earth less beautiful, tear the personality away from this world. That is why it was logical that Homer and all the poets of antiquity appeared to Dante in hell.

[ 20 ] His description of the miser and the spendthrift on the astral plane is true. There, people encounter their own passions as mirror images. On the astral plane, the miser sees what he causes with his miserliness as a spendthrift. The spendthrift sees his characteristics in the opposite image of the miser.

[ 21 ] In the city of Dis is Epicurus, the representative of the worldview that focuses on the development of the here and now. The city of Dis is supposed to express the representatives of the physical reality. There are people in coffins. The materialists are the living dead. They say that man is a mere corpse. Now they must lie in coffins as dead souls.

[ 22 ] From hell, Dante is led to purgatory. Princes who have neglected their own salvation in favor of the welfare of the state must also be purified in purgatory. The Christian-Catholic worldview is based on the development of the individual. Therefore, princes who have neglected this must languish in purgatory.

[ 23 ] The next area between purgatory and heaven is the Garden of Eden. There we are introduced to the Christian view of how the origin of the Church lies in the spiritual realm. Anyone who wants to understand what the Church should be like in the medieval sense must organize themselves to see its archetype in the hereafter. Dante derives this from the worldview of Dionysius Areopagita on the heavenly hierarchies. There is a sequence of levels that Dionysius describes: angels, archangels, primal forces, powers, authorities, dominions, thrones, cherubim, seraphim. The hierarchy of the Church should be a reflection of these heavenly hierarchies. Dante depicts this in the Garden of Eden, where the hierarchies symbolically confront us.

[ 24 ] Then Beatrice takes the lead. In the soul, we distinguish between a feminine element, the inner soul, and a masculine element, the spirit in the universe that fertilizes the soul. The female soul draws us upward. Medieval alchemists called the feminine in humans the “lilium.” That is why Goethe also speaks of the “beautiful lily” in his fairy tale. Beatrice is truly portrayed in the spirit of Dante's thinking in such a way that he can express the structure of scholastic theology in her.

[ 25 ] Beatrice is the first to be confronted with the beings of the moon who have broken their spiritual vows. They had broken their vow to serve only the spiritual and had fallen back into sensuality. In ancient Greek theosophy, Mercury was still the being who had contributed to the ancient Atlanteans' rise to the concept of the ego. The first Atlanteans did not yet have ego consciousness. The entity that represents the personal is the god Mercury, Hermes. Man becomes personal by falling into egoism. This has also made us people who strive for possessions. That is why Mercury is also the god of merchants.

[ 26 ] On Jupiter, Dante finds the princes who have practiced justice. Something very important is happening on the sun. On the sun, Dante is shown the true character of the eternal; how to understand it when one experiences a day called Judgment Day. The Last Day changes circumstances. Two people come to meet us: Thomas Aquinas and King Solomon. Thomas Aquinas represents life in the sense of Christianity, of the New Testament, and King Solomon is the teacher of the Old Testament.

[ 27 ] In the priesthood, Christians saw the physical expression of what Christ was to them in their spiritual development. After his earthly life, Christ ascended and made his triumphal procession into the fixed starry sky. Those who have prepared their spiritual embryo here in such a way that they can see spiritually are able to see Christ in the fixed starry sky. The most deeply initiated disciple, John, appears as the teacher of this view. Only Christ and Mary were able to take their bodies up into the fixed starry sky. A master individuality also has complete control over the body. Just as today's cultured human being learns to master his passions with his moral ideas, so too does the human being at a higher level learn to master the physical body. Jesus and Mary had sanctified their physical bodies to such an extent that they could take them with them to the highest regions.

[ 28 ] Then St. Bernard takes the lead into the higher realms, where he receives the vision of God, the immersion into the divine Self. Here Dante grows beyond the ecclesiastical Christian sphere. He sees the three circles, the threefold primordial being of the world, Father, Son, and Spirit. The Indian religion calls them Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Here the Trinity of the universe is represented, where Dante rises to pure spiritual contemplation.

[ 29 ] In the end, it is shown how we live, weave, and are in God, but cannot presume to understand God. Only the intuitive certainty of human knowledge of God is presented in the end. For Dante, his poem was the spectacle of the world seen from the other side.