The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Thirteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] In the last reflections of our evening gatherings, we have mentioned various points of view, all of which point to the mysterious interaction between human being and spiritual worlds, spiritual entities, which are actually continually around us, and not only around us, but also continually pass through us in a certain relationship, with which we continually live. We must not imagine, however, that a relationship develops between man and the spiritual beings of his environment only in that, one might say, coarser relationship, which we mentioned in the last reflections; but also through the manifold activities and deeds of men, which are more within the scope of human thought, a relationship develops between man and the spiritual world.

[ 2 ] In the two previous considerations, we had to refer to spiritual entities that are subordinate to a certain extent. But we know from earlier lectures that we also deal with spiritual entities that are above human beings, and that relationships and conditions also exist between human beings and more exalted spiritual entities. We have mentioned that there are exalted spiritual entities that do not consist of a physical body, etheric body, astral body and so on, as humans do, but that have the etheric body as the lowest link, which thus, so to speak, surround us. They are not visible to the ordinary eye because their physicality is a fine ethereal one, so that the human eye sees through them. And then we come to even higher spiritual beings, whose lowest link is the astral body, which therefore offer the human being an even less dense physicality.

[ 3 ] All these entities, however, are related to man to a certain extent, and what is most important to us today is that man can definitely do something to enter into very specific relationships with such entities during his life here on the earthly stage. Depending on what people do here on earth for their living conditions, they always establish relationships with higher worlds, however improbable that may seem to a person in today's, as they say, enlightened times, which are not at all enlightened with regard to many profound truths of life.

[ 4 ] Let us first take beings who have an ethereal body as their lowest form of body, live with this fine etheric body around us, surround us, and send their effects and revelations down to us. Let us visualize such beings in our mind's eye before our soul and ask ourselves: Is there something that a person can do here on this earth, or rather, have people always done something to help these beings to connect, to build a bridge through which they can have a more intense effect on the whole person? Yes, people have always done something to help! We have to delve into some of the sensations and ideas that we have been able to absorb in the last few hours if we want to get a clear idea of this bridge.

[ 5 ] So let us imagine that these beings, so to speak, live out of the spiritual worlds and extend their etheric bodies from there, as it were. They do not need a physical body such as humans have. But there is a physical form through which they can, so to speak, connect their etheric bodies with our earthly sphere—an earthly form that we can, so to speak, place upon our Earth, and which forms a bond of attraction, so that these beings descend with their etheric bodies to this earthly form and take the opportunity to dwell among human beings. Such opportunities for spiritual beings to dwell among human beings are, for example, the temples of Greek architecture and the Gothic cathedrals. When we place those forms of physical reality—with their lines and relationships of forces, as found in a temple or in a sculptural work of art—into our earthly sphere, they create an opportunity for the etheric bodies of these beings to nestle and blend in from all sides, according to these relationships of forces, into the works of art we have erected. And art is a true and real link between human beings and the spiritual worlds. Up to those art forms that take shape in space, we have physical bodies on Earth to which beings with etheric bodies descend.

[ 6 ] Entities that have the astral body as their lowest form of embodiment, however, need something else here on earth as a bond between the spiritual world and our earth, and that is the musical, the phonetic arts. A room that is filled with the sounds of music is an opportunity for the easily movable, self-determined astral body of higher entities to express itself in this room. The arts and what they mean to people take on a very real meaning. They form the magnetic forces of attraction for the spiritual beings who, after their mission, after their task, want to and should have something to do with people. Our feelings for human artistic creativity and human artistic perception deepen when we look at things in this way. And our feelings can deepen even more when we absorb the human source of artistic creation and thus also of artistic enjoyment from the point of view of spiritual science within us. If we wish to do this, we must first consider the various forms of human consciousness in somewhat greater detail.

[ 7 ] We have already pointed out, for various purposes, that in a person who is wide awake we have before us the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I. In the sleeping human being, we have, lying in bed, the physical body and the etheric body, and outside the physical body and the etheric body, the I and the astral body. It is good if we consider these two states of consciousness, which change for each person within twenty-four hours, in more detail for our present purpose. In the human being, we first have the physical body, then the etheric or life body, then what we call the astral body in the coarser sense of the word, the soul body, which belongs to the astral body but is connected to the etheric body. This is the part of the human being that the animal also has here in the physical life down on the physical plane. But then we know that what is otherwise summarized under the term 'ego' is connected to these three members of the human being - you can read about this in my 'Theosophy' - that is actually a three-part being: the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul and the consciousness soul, and we know that the consciousness soul is in turn connected to what we call the spirit self or manas. If we consider this more detailed structure of the human being, then we can say:

[ 8 ] What we call the sentient soul and what otherwise belongs to the astral body and is also of an astral nature is released when a person falls asleep at night; but part of the soul body nevertheless remains connected to the ether body, which remains in bed. Essentially, the sentient soul, mind soul and consciousness soul separate out in a person. In a person who is awake during the day, all of this is connected, and as a result, all of this then also always works in the person. So that which takes place in the physical body affects the entire inner being, the sentient soul, mind soul and also the consciousness soul. What affects a person in their ordinary, actually quite disorderly and chaotic life, the disorderly impressions that they absorb from morning till night - just think about what impressions you absorb when you through the clatter and hubbub of a big city. These are all impressions that pass into all the members that are connected with the waking consciousness in the physical body and etheric body. During the night, the soul's inner life – sentient soul, mind soul and consciousness soul – is in the astral world, where it draws the forces and harmonies that are lost to it during the waking day through the chaotic impressions of the day. There is what is called in the broader sense of man's I-soul, in a more orderly, more spiritual world than during the waking day. In the morning, this soul inwardness emerges from this spirituality and submerges into the threefold physicality of the physical body, the etheric body and that part of the astral body that is actually connected to the etheric body and remains connected to the etheric body during the night.

[ 9 ] If a person never slept, that is, never drew new strength from the spiritual world, then everything that lives in his physical body and permeates his physical body with forces would ultimately fall into decay and be undermined more and more. But through the fact that every morning a strong inwardness submerges into the powers of the physical body, there comes ever new order, one might say a rebirth of the powers into this physical body. Thus the human soul brings something from the spiritual world for each of the limbs, something that takes effect when the soul's inner life, which is outside at night, and the outer physical tool are together.

[ 10 ] What now happens in the interaction between the soul's inwardness and the actual physical tool, that can, if the person is receptive to the reception of the harmonies in the spiritual world, penetrate the physical body in its powers in its substances during the night - with the powers that might be called the powers of space. Because man in our present culture is so estranged from the spiritual world, these spatial forces are of little avail to him. Where the soul's inwardness meets the densest part of the human body, the forces must be very strong indeed if they are to find full expression in the robust physical body. In more delicately feeling cultural epochs, the soul impulses brought with them the soul inwardness and more easily penetrated this physical body, and then people felt that forces are always going through physical space in all directions, that this physical space is by no means an indifferent, empty space, but that forces permeate it in all directions. There is a feeling for this distribution of power in space; this is brought about by the conditions that have just been described. You have to visualize this with an example.

[ 11 ] Imagine one of the painters who still belonged to great art times, when one still had a real feeling for the forces at work in space. With such a painter, you could see him painting a group of three angels in space. You stand before the picture and immediately have the sensation: these three angels cannot fall; it is self-evident that they are floating, because they hold each other through the active forces of space, as the globes of the world hold each other through the forces of space. Those people who, through the interaction between the soul's inwardness and the physical body, acquire this inner dynamism, for them there is the feeling: That must be so; the three angels hold themselves in space. You will find this especially in some older painters, but less so in the newer ones. No matter how much Böcklin is appreciated, the figure that hovers over the “Pietà” evokes in every person the feeling that it must plop down at any moment; it does not hold itself in space.

[ 12 ] All these powers that move to and fro in space, that a person feels so acutely in space, are realities, and all architecture arises from this sense of space. Genuine, true architecture arises from nothing other than the fact that one lays the stones or bricks in the lines that must already be there in space, doing nothing but making visible what is already there in space, ideally and spiritually distributed, by stuffing matter into it. This sense of space was most clearly perceived by the Greek architect, who in his temple expressed in all its forms that which lives in space and can be sensed in space. The simple relationship that the column supports – and it supports either the horizontal or the sloping lines – is a representation of the spiritual forces within the space. And the entire Greek temple is nothing more than a materialization of that which lives within the space. Therefore, the Greek temple is the purest architectural thought, crystallized space. And however strange it may seem to modern man, the Greek temple is, because it is a physical corporeality composed of thoughts, the opportunity for the forms which the Greeks knew as their divine forms to truly touch with their etheric bodies the spatial lines with which they were familiar and to dwell in them. It is more than a mere figure of speech when it is said that the Greek temple is a dwelling of the god. The Greek temple has a peculiar quality for those who have a real feeling for such things: it has the peculiar quality that one can imagine that there is no human being far and wide to see it, nor is there anyone inside. The Greek temple does not need a person to look at it, or to enter it. Imagine the Greek temple standing alone, with no human being in sight. Then it is what it is meant to be most intensely. Then it is the dwelling of the god who is meant to live in it, because form is what god can live in. Only in this way can one truly understand Greek architecture, the purest architecture in the world.

[ 13 ] Egyptian architecture, for instance in the pyramid, is something quite different. We can only touch on these things now. There the spatial relationships, the spatial lines, are arranged in such a way that they point the way in their relationships and forms to the soul soaring up to the spiritual worlds. From the paths that the soul takes from the physical world into the spiritual world, we have given the forms that are expressed in the Egyptian pyramid. And so, in every kind of architecture, we have the only thought that can be grasped from the spiritual world.

[ 14 ] In Romanesque architecture, which has the round arch and which, for example, arranged church buildings in such a way that we have a main nave and side aisles, but also a transept and an apse, so that the whole has the shape of a cross and is topped by a dome, there we have the spatial idea growing out of the burial place. You cannot think of the Romanesque building in the same way as the Greek temple. The Greek temple is the home of the god. The Romanesque building cannot be conceived otherwise than as a burial place. The crypt is part of it; not that people in the immediate life are not also in it; but it belongs to it, that it is a place that draws together all feelings that relate to the preservation and protection of the dead.

[ 15 ] In the Gothic building, you have something else again. As true as it is that the Greek temple can be imagined far and wide without a human soul, it is nevertheless populated because it is the dwelling place of the god. Just as true is the Gothic cathedral, with its pointed arches at the top, inconceivable without the devout multitude within. It is not complete. If it stands alone, it is not the whole. The people inside belong to it with their hands folded, just as the pointed arches are folded. Only then is the whole there, when the spaces are filled with the feelings of the devout believers. These are the forces that become effective in us, which are felt in the physical body as a sense of feeling into the space. The true artist thus feels the space and shapes it architecturally.

[ 16 ] If we now move up to the etheric body, we have again what the soul's inwardness appropriates in the spiritual world at night and brings with it when it slips back into the etheric body. What we have in this way as an expression in the etheric body is felt by the real sculptor, the real sculptor, and he embosses it on the living forms. There it is not the idea of space, but the tendency to show and shape more of the living form than what was presented to him in nature. What the Greek artist knew more about, for example in the case of Zeus, is what he brought with him from the spiritual world, what comes to life and is felt when it enters into a reciprocal relationship with the etheric body.

[ 17 ] Furthermore, such interaction occurs with what we call the soul body. When the soul's inwardness comes together with the soul body, the feeling for the guidance of the line, for the first elements of painting, arises in the same way. And through the fact that in the morning the sense-saddle unites with the soul body and permeates it, the feeling for color harmony arises. So we have, first of all, the three forms of art that work with external means, that take their material from the outside world.

[ 18 ] Now, because the soul of mind or feeling flees every night into the astral world, something else arises. When we use the term “mind soul” in the sense of spiritual science, we do not have to think of the dry, sober mind that one thinks of when one speaks of mind in ordinary life. For spiritual science, “mind” is the sense of harmony that cannot be embodied in external matter, the sense of experienced inner harmony. That is why we also speak of the soul of mind or feeling. When the soul of mind or feeling plunges into the harmonies of the astral world every night and becomes aware of them again in the morning in the astral body – in the same astral body that returns, but which is not aware of its inwardness during the night in today's human being – the following happens: During the night the soul of understanding or feeling lives in what we have always called the harmonies of the spheres, the inner laws of the spiritual world, those harmonies of the spheres to which the old Pythagorean school pointed as that which the one who can perceive into the spiritual worlds hears as the conditions of the great spiritual world. Goethe also hinted at this when he transports us to heaven at the beginning of his Faust and characterizes it by saying:

The sun resounds in the old way
In the song of the spheres,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

[ 19 ] And the image remains with us when, in the second part, where Faust is raised up again into the spiritual world, the words are used:

For the ears of the spirit,
the new day is already born.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter.
What a roar brings the light!
It drums, it trumpets,
eye blinks and ear is amazed,
unheard-of things are heard.

[ 20 ] That is, the soul lives during the night in these spherical sounds, and these spherical sounds ignite as the astral body becomes aware of itself. In the creative musician, we have no other process than that the perceptions of the nocturnal consciousness during the day-consciousness struggle through, become memory, memories of the astral experiences or, in particular, of the mind or soul. All that humanity knows as musical art is an expression, an imprint of what is unconsciously experienced in the harmonies of the spheres. To be musically gifted means nothing more than having an astral body that is receptive during the waking state to what has been buzzing through it all night long. To be unmusical means to have this astral body in such a state that such a memory cannot take place. What man experiences in the art of music is the resounding of a spiritual world. And because the art of music brings into our physical world that which can only be kindled in the astral, I said that it connects man with those beings that have the astral body as their lowest link. Man lives with these beings at night; he experiences their deeds in the harmony of the spheres and expresses them in his daily life through his earthly music, so that these harmonies of the spheres appear in earthly music like a shadow image. And as that which is the element of these spiritual beings enters into this earthly sphere, permeates and lives through our earthly sphere, these spiritual beings have the opportunity to plunge their astral bodies again into the surging sea of musical effects, and as the mind soul experiences its deeds in the night and brings the impressions felt into the physical world, a bridge is created between these entities and the human being through art. There we see how, at such a level, what we call the art of music comes into being.

[ 21 ] What does the consciousness soul hear when it enters the spiritual world at night, without the person being able to become aware of it in the present cycle of humanity? It hears the words of the spiritual world. It receives messages whispered to it, which it can only receive from the spiritual world. Words are whispered to her, and when these words are brought through into the consciousness of the day, they appear as the basic forces of poetry. Thus, poetry is the shadow image of what the consciousness soul experiences in the spiritual world during the night, and we take this opportunity to really think about how man, through his connection with higher worlds – and only through this – can bring forth reflections and revelations of spiritual reality here on our earthly sphere in the five arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. However, this is only the case when art truly rises above mere external sensory perception. In what is roughly called naturalism today, where man only imitates what he sees outside, there is nothing of what he brings with him from the spiritual world. And the fact that today we have such purely external art in many fields, which only seeks to imitate what is outside, is only proof of how people in our time have lost their connection with the spiritual-divine world. A person who is absorbed in the external physical world, in what the outer senses alone are willing to accept, works so hard on his astral body through this mere interest in the external physical world that it becomes blind and deaf in the night when it is in the spiritual worlds. No matter how gloriously the spheres resound, no matter how high the spiritual tones whisper to the soul, it brings nothing into the life of the day! And then man scoffs at idealistic, spiritualistic art and says that art is only there to photograph external reality, because only that is real, tangible underfoot.

[ 22 ] Thus speaks the man who feels and perceives in a materialistic way because he has no realities in the spiritual world. The true artist, however, speaks differently. He will say, for example: “When I hear the tones of the orchestra, it is as if I heard the tones of primeval music speaking in them, which already resounded when there was not yet a human ear to hear them.” He can also say: In what resounds in a symphony lies a realization of spiritual worlds that is higher, more significant than anything that can be logically proven and argued in conclusions.

[ 23 ] These two sayings are from Richard Wagner, who wanted to convey to humanity so powerfully that where true art begins, there must at the same time be an elevation above the external sensual. When the spiritual-scientific view says: There is something in man that goes beyond man, something superhuman in today's man, which must appear more and more perfect in future incarnations, Richard Wagner feels it so that he says: I do not want figures that stand before me and walk across the stage like everyday people in the earthly sphere. He wants people who are elevated above everyday life. Therefore, he takes mythical figures who have a more comprehensive content than ordinary people. He seeks the superhuman in the human. Richard Wagner wants to present the whole human being with all the spiritual worlds as they shine in on the human of the physical earth. Before him, at a relatively early age, stood two images: Shakespeare and Beethoven. Shakespeare appeared to him in his artistically ingenious visions in such a way that he said to himself: “If I take everything together that Shakespeare has given to humanity, I see figures striding across the stage in Shakespeare's plays who act. — Actions — and words are also actions in this context — take place when the soul has felt what cannot be represented externally in space, what it has already experienced. The soul has felt the whole gamut from pain and suffering to joy and bliss and has sensed how this or that nuance gives rise to this or that action. In Shakespearean drama, Richard Wagner believes, everything appears only in its result, where it takes on spatial form, where it becomes external action. This is a drama that only the externalized inner life can present; and man can at most guess what lives in the soul, what goes on during this action.

[ 24 ] Alongside this, the image of the symphonist appeared to him, and he saw in the symphony the reproduction of what lives in the soul, in the full gamut of suffering and pain, desire and bliss, in all their nuances. In the symphony, it lives itself out, he told himself, but it does not become action, it does not step out into the room. And an image appeared before his mind's eye, which, as it were, brought him the feeling that at one point this inner life had burst as if in artistic creation in order to flow outwards. In his work, Beethoven remains within the musical framework, from which he only steps out once, in the Ninth Symphony, where the feelings have swelled so powerfully that they break through the word.

[ 25 ] From these two artistic phenomena sprang the vision in his soul: Beethoven and Shakespeare in one! And we should have a long way to go if we wanted to show how Richard Wagner, through his unique treatment of the orchestra, tried to create that great harmony between Shakespeare and Beethoven, that the inner life is expressed in sound and at the same time flows into the action. Profane language was not enough for him; for it is the means of expression for events of the physical plane. That language, which can only be given in the tones of song, becomes for him the means of expression for that which grows beyond the physical-human as a superhuman.

[ 26 ] Theosophy does not need to be merely expressed with words, felt with thoughts. Theosophy is life. It lives in the process of the world, and when it is said of it that it is to lead the various separate human soul currents together into one great stream, we see this feeling living in the artist who sought to bring together the individual means of expression so that what lives in the totality may find expression in the one. Richard Wagner does not want to be a musician, a playwright, or a poet. All that we have seen flowing down from spiritual worlds becomes for him a means of uniting in the physical world with something even higher, because he has an inkling of what human beings will experience when they increasingly live in that evolutionary epoch in which humanity must live, where the spirit self or manas unites with what man has brought with him since ancient times. And an inkling of that great human impulse of uniting what appeared in the times of separation lies in the confluence of the individual means of artistic expression in the works of Richard Wagner. In other words, he had an inkling of what human culture will be like when everything that the soul experiences is absorbed into the spiritual self-principle or Manas, where the soul will immerse itself in its fullness in the spiritual worlds. From the point of view of the history of ideas, it is of profound significance that in art the first dawn has appeared for humanity for the life towards that future that beckons to humanity, where everything that man has conquered in the various fields will flow together in an all-culture, in a total culture. In a sense, the arts are the forerunners of the manifesting spirituality in the sensual world. And much more important than individual assertions of Richard Wagner in his prose writings is the basic trait that lives in them, a religious-wisdom-filled, solemn trait that flows through them all and that is most beautifully expressed in his brilliant writing about Beethoven, where you have to read more between the lines, but where you can feel the breath of air in which the dawn announces itself here.

[ 27 ] Thus we see how, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, we can deepen our understanding of human activities that find expression in human deeds. We have seen today in the field of the arts that man does something, accomplishes something, whereby, if we can say so, the gods can dwell with him, whereby he grants the gods a dwelling in the earthly sphere. If spiritual science is to make man aware that spirituality is in interaction with physical life, art has certainly done so in physical life. And spiritual art will always permeate our culture when people will at all delve into spirituality with their souls. Through such considerations, what is otherwise only taught in spiritual science, as a mere doctrine, a mere world view, is expanded into impulses that permeate our lives and can tell us what is to be and what must be. In the musician and poet Richard Wagner, the new star first arose that sends the light of spiritual life to Earth. This impulse of life that he gave must expand and expand until all outer life is a reflection of the soul.

[ 28 ] Everything that confronts us on the outside can become a reflection of the soul. Do not take this as something superficial, but as something that can be gained from spiritual science. It will become as it was centuries ago, when in every door lock, in every key, we encountered something that was a reflection of what the person had felt and experienced. Likewise, when true spiritual life is in humanity again, all of life, everything that appears to us externally, will appear to us again as an image of the soul. Profane buildings are only profane buildings as long as man does not have the ability to imprint the spirit in them. The spirit can be imprinted everywhere. The image of the train station can light up before us, which is again artistically conceived. Today we do not have it. But when one will feel again what forms should be, then one will feel that one can architecturally design the locomotive, and that the train station could be something that relates to the locomotive as the outer shell relates to what the locomotive expresses in its architectural forms. Only then will they behave like two things that belong together when they are conceived architecturally. But then it is not unimportant how we assume left or right in the forms.

[ 29 ] When man learns how the inner expresses itself in the outer, then there will be culture again. Truly, there were times when there was no Romanesque architecture, no Gothic architecture, when those who carried a new, emerging culture in their souls gathered in the catacombs of the old Roman city. But what lived in them, what could only be buried in the old caves in scant form, what you find on the coffins of the dead, that dawned there, and that is what appears to us in the Romanesque arch, in the Romanesque column, in the apse. The idea was carried out into the world. If the first Christians had not carried the idea in their souls, it would not have become what we know as world culture. The theosophist only feels like a theosophist when he is aware that he carries a future culture in his soul. Let others then ask him: What have you achieved? – He will then say to himself: Yes, what did the Christians of the catacombs achieve, and what came of it!

[ 30 ] Let us try to expand in our minds that which lives in our souls as a slight impulse of feeling when we sit together, just as the thoughts of the Christians might have expanded to include the wonderful arches of the later cathedral. Let us imagine that in such hours, when we are together, we expand outwards and are carried out into the world. Then we have those impulses within us that we should have when we are aware that Theosophy should not be a hobby for a few people sitting together, but something that should be carried out into the world. The souls sitting here in their bodies will, when they reappear as reincarnated beings, find much of what lives in them today already realized. We take such thoughts with us when we meet for the last time during a season and process the spiritual-scientific thoughts of the winter. Let us implement spiritual-scientific thoughts in such a way that they can act as cultural impulses. Let us try to imbue our soul with feelings and emotions, and let us live towards the summer sunshine, which shows us the active cosmic power from the outside, in the physical. Then our soul will increasingly absorb this mood and be able to carry into the outer world what it experiences in the spiritual worlds. This is part of the development of the theosophist. So we will make further progress if we take such feelings and perceptions with us and use them to absorb the strength of summer.