The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I drew your attention to how various historical forces intervene in the course of human development. As a result of this, and also through the crossing of one powerful current with another, certain periods of rise occur in certain cultural directions, as well as periods of decline, and this happens in such a way that while old cultures are still declining, while old cultures are, so to speak, passing into the external world, slowly and gradually prepare what the later cultures will inaugurate, what will actually enliven and give birth to the later cultures. So that we can generally represent the course of human cultural life schematically as follows: We find human culture rising from indeterminate depths to certain heights, then we find this cultural life ebbing away, more slowly than it rose. What a particular cultural epoch has brought about lives on long afterwards, lives on in the most diverse subsequent currents and folk cultures, and loses itself, as a stream would lose itself if it did not flow into the sea but trickled away in the plain. But while this is still trickling away, new cultures are preparing themselves, which were not yet noticeable during the decline of the old cultures, so to speak, in order to then begin their own development, their own rise, and contribute in the same or a similar way to the progress of humanity. If we want to imagine a characteristic cultural progress in the most eminent sense, we can guess that it must be one in which the general human nature, the weaving of the I in the I, has come out most strikingly. This was the case with ancient Greece, as we have shown. Now, when we consider this, we can see precisely how a culture progresses in a characteristic sense; for what took place in the three preceding cultures and what follows is modified in a completely different way by what lies outside the human being. Therefore, what lies within the human being, through which the human being, so to speak, acts in the world, is given to us in the middle, in the fourth cultural epoch, in everything that can express itself most humanly in him through supersensible powers.

[ 2 ] Now, however, we must also say the following with regard to Greek culture. It was preceded by the third period, which ebbed away, and while it ebbed away, Greek culture prepared itself. So during the ebb of Babylonian culture, which spread from the East to the West, the seed of what was to sink into humanity as the stream of a new life was sown, so to speak, on this small southern European peninsula that we call Greece. Now, we must say that this Greek life expressed pure humanity, that which man can find entirely within himself, in the most eminent sense; but one must not believe that such things do not need to be prepared. Even what we call pure humanity had to be taught to human beings by supersensible powers through the mysteries, just as the even higher freedom that must be prepared for the sixth cultural epoch is now being carried and taught in supersensible worlds by the corresponding leaders of human development.

[ 3 ] We must therefore say: where Greek culture appears to the external observer as if everything springs from the purely human, Greek culture has already gone through a period in which it was, so to speak, under the influence of the teaching of higher spiritual beings. These higher spiritual beings first made it possible for Greek culture to rise to its purely human height. And that is why what we today call Greek culture, when we trace it back, is lost in the depths of prehistoric times, when the foundation of Greek culture was laid in the mystery temples, where what was then grandly expressed in poetic form by Homer and Aeschylus as the legacy of the ancient temple wisdom was practiced. And so we must view what confronts us so magnificently in these unparalleled figures in such a way that these people did indeed process something in their souls that was entirely the content of their souls, entirely the weaving of the I within the I, but that had first been carried into these souls by higher beings in the sacred temple sites. That is why what lives in the poems of Homer and Aeschylus seems so unfathomably deep, so unfathomably great. One must not take these poems of Aeschylus from Wilamowitz's translation, but be clear that the full greatness of what lived in Aeschylus has not yet been exhausted in a modern language, and that the worst way to understand Aeschylus is the one taken by one of these latest translators.

[ 4 ] If we therefore consider this Greek culture on the basis of deep mysteries and sanctuaries, we can gain an inkling of the essence of this Greek culture. And because the secrets of life in the supersensible world were conveyed to Greek artists in a certain human way, Greek sculpture was also able to cast in marble or metal what was originally a temple secret. Yes, even what we encounter in Greek philosophy shows us quite clearly that the best that Greek philosophy had to offer was actually only ancient mysteries transformed into intelligence and intellectual understanding. This is symbolically expressed in the statement: The great Heraclitus presented his work on nature in the temple of Diana at Ephesus. This means nothing other than that he presented what he could say from his own weaving of the I in the I in such a way that he had to offer it as a sacrifice to the spiritual powers of the previous age with which he knew himself to be connected. And from this point of view we also understand the profound statement of Plato, who was able to give the Greeks such a deep philosophy and yet felt compelled to say that all the philosophy of his time was nothing compared to the ancient wisdom that had been received by the forefathers from the realms of the spiritual worlds themselves. And in Aristotle, everything already appears to us as if in logical forms; in this case, one can only say that it is abstracted ancient wisdom, living worlds brought into concepts. Nevertheless, because Aristotle stands, so to speak, at the final gate of the old current, something of what was ancient wisdom still breathes in Aristotle. In his concepts, in his ideas, although they are abstract, there is still an echo of the perfect sounds that rang out from the temples and which were the real inspiration not only of Greek wisdom, but also of Greek art and the entire Greek national character. For it is the peculiarity of every such culture at its dawn that it grasps not only knowledge, not only art, but the whole human being, so that the whole human being is an imprint of what lives in him as wisdom, as spirituality. And when we imagine that, from unknown depths, even while Babylonian culture was ebbing away, Greek culture was rising up, then we can recognize the full effect of all that the ancient temples brought to the Greek character in the age of the Persian Wars. For in these Persian Wars we see how the heroes of Greek culture, in their burning enthusiasm for what they had received from their forefathers, threw themselves against the current that was rolling toward them, so to speak, as the decaying current of the Orient. And what that opposition meant at that time, when the wisdom of the Greek temples, when the teachers of the ancient Greek mysteries fought in the souls of the heroes of the Persian Wars against the ebbing culture of the Orient, against the Babylonian culture as it had been adopted by the later Persians, what that meant, the human soul can grasp when the question is raised by that human soul: What would have become of southern Europe, and thus of the whole of later Europe, if the impact of the great physical masses from the Orient had not been repelled by the small Greek people at that time? What the Greeks did at that time sowed the seed for everything that has developed within European cultures up to our own time.

[ 5 ] And even what developed for the Orient from what Alexander then brought back — albeit in a way that cannot be justified in a certain respect — from the Occident to the Orient, even that could only develop after what was doomed to decay had first been repelled, also in terms of its physical power, by what what lived in the souls of the Greeks as a burning enthusiasm for the temple treasures. When we understand this, we will see not only the wisdom of Heraclitus' fire and the great ideas of Anaxagoras, we will see not only the comprehensive ideas of Thales, but also the real teachings of the guardians of the 'temple wisdom' in prehistoric Greece. We will feel this as the result of spiritual powers that brought to the Greeks what had to be brought to them. We will feel all this in the souls of the Greek heroes who fought against the Persians in various battles. This is how one must learn to feel history, my dear friends, for what is otherwise given to us as history is, at best, an empty abstraction of ideas. What later influences what came before can only be observed by going back to what has perhaps been given to human souls over thousands of years and then takes on real forms at a certain time. Why was it that, during this rise, the ancient temple treasures were able to give the Greeks so much? It lay in the universal, comprehensive, and carefree character of these temple treasures. It was something that was given as something original, something that could fill the whole human being, something that had, so to speak, an immediate guiding force.

[ 6 ] And this brings us to the actual characteristic of those cultures that are initially in the process of rising to their peak. In these cultures, everything that is alive and active in human beings—beauty, virtue, usefulness, purposefulness, everything that human beings want to do and achieve in life—is seen as emerging directly from wisdom and spirituality. And wisdom is that which contains virtue, beauty, and everything else. When human beings are imbued with and inspired by the wisdom of the temples, everything else follows naturally; such is the feeling for such ascending times. But the moment when questions and feelings fall apart, when, for example, the question of good or beauty becomes independent of the question of the divine source, that is when times of decline begin. Therefore, we can be sure that we are always living in a time of decline when it is emphasized that, in addition to the original spiritual, this or that should be particularly cultivated, that this or that should be the main thing. If one does not have confidence in the spiritual, that it can bring forth from itself everything that is necessary for human life, then the unified cultural currents that form a unity as they rise up disintegrate into individual currents. And we see this where interests outside wisdom, outside spiritual momentum, interfere in Greek life; we see it in state life, we also see it in that part of Greek life that interests us particularly, in the spiritual realm immediately after Aristotle. There, alongside the question, “What is true?”—which contains the question, “What is good and expedient?”—the latter question begins to take on a life of its own. People ask, “How should our knowledge be structured so that we can become human beings who achieve a practical goal in life?” And so we see a current flourishing in the period of decline that we call Stoicism. For Plato and Aristotle, wisdom and goodness were one and the same; all enthusiasm for goodness could only come from wisdom. The Stoics ask: What must a person do to become wiser in life, in the practice of life, in order to live a purposeful and good life? Practical goals in life become mixed up with what was once the universal enthusiasm for truth.

[ 7 ] In Epicureanism, something else comes into play, which we can describe as follows: People ask, how must I organize myself intellectually so that this life can be as blissful and as harmonious as possible? Thales, Plato, and even Aristotle would have answered this question by saying: Seek the truth, and it will give you the greatest happiness, the seed of love. But now the question is separated from the question of truth, and a current of decline arises. Thus, what is called Stoicism and Epicureanism is a current of decline. This always has the consequence that truth becomes questionable for people and loses all its power. Therefore, skepticism, the doubting of truth, arises at the same time as Stoicism and Epicureanism in times of decline. And when skepticism, doubt, Stoicism, and Epicureanism have run their course for a while, people who are still searching for the truth feel like they've been thrown out of the world soul and left to their own devices. Then he looks around and says to himself: There is no world epoch now in which impulses flow into humanity through the continuing stream of spiritual powers. Then man is thrown back on his own inner life, on his subject. We encounter this in the further course of Greek life in Neoplatonism, in that philosophy which no longer has any connection with external life, which looks inward and seeks to ascend to the truth through the mystical ascent of the individual. Thus we have a rising culture, and we have a gradually declining one. And what has developed in the ascent then slowly and gradually trickles away until, around the year 1250, an inspiration for humanity begins, which is not easily noticeable but no less great, which I characterized in a certain way yesterday and whose trickling away we have been experiencing again since the 16th century. For since that time, all the special questions have basically arisen again alongside the questions of truth; a standpoint is taken again that seeks to separate the question of the good, the question of external expediency, from the one great question of truth. And while those spiritual leaders who were under the influence of the year 1250 saw all human currents within the truth, we now see how the fundamental separation of the practical questions of life from the actual questions of truth is emerging in a very eminent sense. And at the entrance to the new age of decline, the age that truly signifies a downward spiral for spiritual life, Kant stands at the entrance. In his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he expressly states: I had to reject the pursuit of truth at its limits in order to free the field for what practical religion wants. And that is why there is such a strict separation between practical reason and theoretical reason. In practical reason, the postulates of God, freedom, and immortality are purely ordered toward the good; in theoretical reason, every possibility of knowledge is shattered in order to enter into some spiritual world. This is how things stand in world history. And certainly, what is the pursuit of wisdom in our time will continue to follow in Kant's footsteps for a long time to come. And when our truly spiritual current points to that expansion of the faculty of knowledge, to that elevation of the faculty of knowledge above itself, through which it can penetrate into supersensible worlds, then for a long, long time one will still hear it resounding from all sides: “Yes, but Kant says...!” It is indeed in such antitheses that the historical development of man takes place. And in what emerges instinctively as a premonition, it then becomes apparent that beneath what is mere Maya and what is accepted as truth, beneath the stream of Maya, the right thing flows to a large extent for human instincts. For it is extremely interesting that we see the downward course of human development up to the Greek-Latin period and the ascent we demand once again in certain intuitions that have been given for practical life out of the instincts of the people.

[ 8 ] How must people who had a feeling for such things have thought? When they looked back on the great leading figures of human history in pre-Christian times, or, let us say, in pre-Greek times, how must they have looked back on all those whom we could characterize as the instruments of higher hierarchical beings? They had to say to themselves, even the Greeks: This has come to us through people into whom superhuman divine powers have flowed. And we see this living in the consciousness of all ancient times: the leading personalities, down to the heroic figures, yes, down to Plato, were regarded as sons of the gods, that is, behind these personalities who appear in history, when they looked up into the past, when they raised their gaze further and further, they saw the divine; and what appeared there as Plato and in the heroic figures, they saw as having descended, even as having been born from divine beings. That was really the view that the sons of the gods united with the daughters of men in order to bring the spiritual down to the physical plane. Sons of gods, god-men, that is, those who had a connection between their being and the divine, were seen in those ancient times. In contrast, at the moment when the Greeks felt: Now we can speak of the weaving of the I in the I, of what lies within the human personality — they spoke of their highest leaders as the seven sages, thereby designating what had become, so to speak, purely human out of the sons of the gods.

[ 9 ] How did this continue in the instincts of the peoples in post-Greek times? It would be necessary to describe what human beings develop on the physical plane and how they carry this up into the spiritual world with its full fruit. So if in the very early days it was felt that one must see the spiritual before the physical human being and the physical human being as a shadow image — if during the Greek period one saw wise men who lived, so to speak, as the “I” within the “I” — then in the post-Greek period one had to see personalities who lived on the physical plane and then lived their way up into the spiritual through what lives in the physical. This concept has developed out of an instinctive knowledge. Just as the pre-Greek era had sons of gods and the Greeks had wise men, so the post-Greek peoples have saints who live their way up into spiritual life through what they achieve on the physical plane. Something lives in the instincts of the people, and we can see that behind the Maya there is something that historically drives humanity forward.

[ 10 ] And when we recognize this, what lives in these times shines into the individual human soul, and we understand how group karma must be modified by the fact that human beings are at the same time instruments of historical development. And we can thus understand what the Akashic Records show: how, for example, in Novalis we see something that goes back to the old Elias. It is an extraordinarily interesting sequence of incarnations. We see how the prophetic element emerges in Elijah, for the Hebrews had the mission of preparing what was to come later. And they prepared it in the transition from their patriarchs to the prophets, through the figure of Moses. While in Abraham we still see how the Hebrews feel the after-effects of God within themselves, in their blood, in Elijah we see the transition to the rapture into the spiritual worlds. Everything is gradually being prepared. In Elijah there lives an individuality that is already fulfilled in ancient times with what is to come in the future. And then we see how this individuality is to be a tool for preparing the understanding of the Christ impulse. We see how the individuality of Elijah is reborn in John the Baptist, who is the tool for something higher. An individuality lives in him that makes John the Baptist the tool; but the high individuality of Elijah was necessary in order to serve as such an instrument.

[ 11 ] We see later how this individuality is suited to molding what is to work into the future into forms that were only possible under the influence of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. Thus, strange as it may seem to us, this individuality reappears in Raphael and connects what is to work as the Christian impulse for all times with the wonderful forms of Greek culture in painting. And there we can see how the individual karma of this entelechy relates to the outer incarnation. For the outer incarnation, it is necessary that a power of the times be able to express itself in Raphael; the Elijah-John individuality is suitable for this power of the times. But time can only provide a physical body that must be fragile under such power; that is why he dies so early.

[ 12 ] The other side of its nature must express itself in a time when the individual currents are already falling apart again, and then it reappears as Novalis. Here we see how everything that is now given to us through spiritual science already lives in a unique form in this Novalis. For such apt statements about the relationship between the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, between waking and sleeping, have been given by no one outside spiritual science except Novalis, the resurrected Raphael. These are the things that show us how individualities are the tools of the flowing stream of human evolution. And when we see human development, when we look at this mysterious change in what happens historically, then we can sense what lives in it from deep spiritual powers. In a remarkable way, the earlier passes into the later.

[ 13 ] I have already said to some of you that a remarkable historical perspective can be observed in the transition from Michelangelo to Galileo. And a very intelligent man—mind you, I am not saying that this is a case of reincarnation, but rather a historical progression—a very intelligent personality pointed out how strange it is when we look at the wonderful architecture of St. Peter's Basilica and see how the human spirit has woven into it what it calls mechanical science. Oh, in these grandiose forms of St. Peter's Basilica we see embodied the mechanical thoughts that the human intellect was able to grasp, and moreover transformed into beauty, into grandeur: Michelangelo's thought! The effect that St. Peter's Basilica can have, my dear friends, manifests itself in the most diverse ways, and perhaps each of us has experienced a little of what the Viennese sculptor Natter experienced — or what was experienced with him. He was driving with a friend toward St. Peter's Basilica; they had not yet seen it when suddenly the other man heard Natter jump up from his seat, completely beside himself, and say, “I'm afraid!” For at that moment he had seen St. Peter's Basilica—he did not even want to remember it later. After all, everyone can experience something similar when they see something so magnificent. And now a very clever man, Professor Müällner, pointed out in a rector's speech that the great thinker of mechanical ideas, Galileo, taught humanity intellectually what Michelangelo built into the spatial forms of St. Peter's Basilica. So that in Galileo's thoughts, we encounter intellectually what stands crystallized as mechanics, as human mechanics, in St. Peter's Basilica. But it is strange that the same man had to point out in this lecture that the day of Michelangelo's death was the birthday of Galileo. This means that the intellectual, the thoughts that were mechanically shaped into intellectuality by Galileo, emerged in a personality who was born on the day of the death of the man who placed them in space. And so one should ask: Who, through Michelangelo, built into St. Peter's Basilica the mechanics that humanity only later acquired through Galileo?

[ 14 ] If, through the aphoristic and isolated thoughts that have been presented here in reference to the historical development of humanity, if from these, in their combination in your hearts, a feeling emerges of how the real, spiritual powers work through their instruments in history, then you will have received these explanations in the right way. And then one could describe this feeling as what can come into our hearts from occult-historical observation as a true feeling for becoming in time, for progress in time. And today, at a small turning point in time, it may be appropriate to direct our meditation to such a feeling of human progress and divine progress in time. And if each of you, my dear friends, would like to take this into your hearts—this feeling for the implementation of the science of occult progress in time—into a sense of the weaving and creating in becoming, in human progress, in which we are placed, if each of your souls would like to take this as a living feeling, then perhaps a New Year's wish may also live in the souls of all of you in this feeling. And I would like to let this New Year's wish sink into your souls at the end of this cycle from this place here: Consider what has been said as something that should form the starting point for a sense of time. And in a certain sense, it may be symbolic that we were able to use a small transition from one period of time to another to allow such ideas spanning the transition of times to take effect in our souls.