The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner
1910
The work of this year began in Scandinavia, where Rudolf Steiner lectured in Stockholm, Norrköping, and Lund. Between January 2 and 15 he gave a cycle of eleven lectures in Stockholm on The Gospel of St. John and the Three Other Gospels, and a public lecture on The European Mysteries and Their Initiates. We have already referred to Dr. Steiner’s statement of the mood of anticipation and of prophecy regarding Christianity contained in the Nordic Mysteries. A lecture to members in Stockholm was now given in the spirit of the events of 1909 on The Appearance of Christ in the Etheric.
After the return to Berlin and the resumption of the winter lectures in the Architektenhaus, the lectures of the year were characterized by special attention to artistic and scientific practice. The first lecture, on January 20, dealt with the theme Spiritual Science and Speech. We have mentioned already how the artistic method of speaking (Sprachgestaltung) arose out of the results of research in this period. During the year 1910, a performance of the first Mystery Drama was anticipated. In the course of the year, the educational and medical fields of application in spiritual science were enriched anew by a lecture on March 3 on Sickness and Healing, supplemented toward the end of the year by discussions on psychotherapy and medicine.
During a lecture tour early in the year in Germany—to Cologne, Stuttgart, and Munich—lectures were given in Cologne on Special Questions Regarding Reincarnation and Destiny and The Circuit of the Human Being through the Worlds of the Senses, the Soul, and the Spirit; in Stuttgart, on March 5 and 6, on Mysteries of the Universe. The Cometary and the Lunar, the coming age and clairvoyance in the future. In intimate addresses to the members, Dr. Steiner now repeated his statements about the event of the appearance of Christ in the etheric world, as a new stage in the evolution of the earth and of man.
Between March 12 and 16 he was in Munich. The first lecture there dealt with The Mission of Devotion. We cite here as characteristic of the impressions made by such lectures upon creative personalities, a brief report taken by the great poet Albert Steffen from his diary of a lecture given by Dr. Steiner in Munich on May 3, 1911. Albert Steffen speaks in the third person as if this were the report of an unnamed young man:
“In the evening he went to the group of the Anthroposophical Society, of which he had recently become a member. How astonished he was as he suddenly saw Rudolf Steiner instead of the person who generally read a lecture there.
“There are not many more persons present than usual—one reads in this diary—and it seems as if all had been as surprised as I. Rudolf Steiner himself seems gay and friendly and looks exceptionally young, in spite of the fact that he is nearly fifty years old. He speaks on Original Sin and Grace.
“Human beings, he says, did not yet possess the ego when the temptation by Lucifer occurred; and, for this reason, the expression original sin is the correct designation for the result of that deed. The individual person as such can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, the effect was that he sank lower and lower. With respect to the propagation of his kind, he destroys his life-body, which he possesses in common with the plant world, even from his fourteenth year on. The opposite pole of original sin [Erbsiinde, hereditary sin] is grace. We can do just as little about the fact that the way leads upward, in order that we may once more evolve upward. What is placed in our hands is only to seek for the union with the heavenly Ego, as this became manifest on earth for the first time in Christ. That is our ideal. Before Christ there were no ideals. Ideals do not any longer remain abstract, when personalities appear who devote their entire being in behalf of the ideals. Ideals ought to come to realization in every-day life. Christ in the ether body will become visible in a few decades for the inner vision of more and more human beings.
“Only reluctantly—so the report ends—do we leave the hall. My acquaintances still chat with each other in the passage way. I can not bring myself to doing this as they do. I go out alone into the English Garden, through which the germinating of spring is weaving wonderfully. The stars twinkle down into the young green.”
Unfortunately, not all lectures are reported in so penetrating personally experienced, and artistic a manner. Moreover, since we have been able to establish that Dr. Steiner gave two hundred lectures in 1910, we cannot undertake to present more than the main essence of very few.
Between March 17 and April 6, Rudolf Steiner was in Austria. He gave a lecture series in Vienna on Macrocosm and Microcosm. In the final lecture he speaks of the spiritual and physical organs of man, as these have developed in the wisdom-filled cosmic evolution, or have become potentialities for the future. His listeners were warned not to entrust only to the sense organs, grown old as it were, the cognizing and shaping of the environing world, but to consider and invoke also the creative potency which resides particularly in the sensible-supersensible forces of speech, bestowed on earth upon man alone as the lowest stage of spiritual Hierarchies but the highest stage in the earthly kingdoms of nature:
“We have physical organs which as such point prophetically to the future. . . . Such an organ, for example, is the larynx. This belongs to the higher human organs. At present, it is only on the way toward a higher development. ...
“Not only do we receive influences from the macrocosm, but we also give influences back, although we have as yet no particular power over them. . . . In that man not only breathes but is able also to transform his breathing processes into these configurations of song and speech, something is given to him which is capable of the highest development.”
In the years that followed, Dr. Steiner devoted special attention to the development of these creative powers of speech. For in them is germinally present for future unfolding one of the most mysterious spiritual human faculties. The art of speech-formation, artistic speaking (Sprachgestaltung), initiated by Rudolf Steiner and developed by him through a special method of training, is not intended to serve aesthetic beauty alone. That inner dynamic which is given to man in his organs of speech bears within it, in the best sense of the word, magic forces and opens to him through its powers a supersensible sphere of activity to which the highest tasks in future evolution are assigned.
After the Vienna cycle, Dr. Steiner spoke on April 5 at the institution of a Group in Klagenfurt on The Nature of Man and on The Riddle of Life.
During that month of April he traveled through Italy all the way to Sicily. In Rome the important problems of the relation of man to spiritual guidance were presented in such lectures as those on Higher Worlds and Their Connection with Ours and The Intervention of Great Personalities Who Share in Our Earth Evolution. Among many Italians and other visitors who attended these lectures in the palace of the Principessa d’Antuni, was present Harry Collison, a well-known London painter, resident in Rome. The impression this first lecture of Dr. Steiner that he had ever heard made upon him influenced decisively the remainder of his life. In a previous journey around the world, he had followed an easterly route via Greece, Turkey, Egypt, India, America, always seeking for something inwardly desired but never found. Now it was given at last to him in Rome by Rudolf Steiner. Later he undertook a trip around the world again, but in a westerly direction, by way of America, Australia, and New Zealand, founding Groups of the Society. In this way a single lecture of Rudolf Steiner’s could often release an endless chain of events in human destiny. Even today it is impossible to compute the number of lives which this one lecture in Rome has affected.
From Rome Dr. Steiner went by the way of Monte Gassino to Naples. In Monte Gassino, as Frau Marie Steiner informed the author, he visited the famous cloister. This is the birthplace of the Benedictine Order, founded in 529 by St. Benedict, at a place where there had stood a Temple of Apollo—mentioned also by Dante in the Paradiso. In the cloister, famous for its remarkable library and for the cultivation of scientific research, Dr. Steiner visited the cell of St. Benedict, which is painted with frescoes after the manner of Egyptian and ancient Christian masters. He carried on a vivid conversation with one of the fathers both here and also in the famous library. After luncheon, together with the fathers, he enjoyed a further inspection of the cloisters and the church, still surrounded by the granite columns of the ancient Temple of Apollo. Since Dr. Steiner spoke from time to time on the spiritual and scientific work of the learned orders of monks, and was exceptionally familiar with the whole history of scholasticism and especially the work of Thomas Aquinas, as well as the history of St. Benedict and his order, this visit must have been intensely interesting to him, and he must have left an impression upon those with whom he conversed.
Continuing the trip to Palermo, he spoke on the figure of Empedocles, whose relation with the personality of Faust he later disclosed in a spiritual-scientific survey.
A visit to Palermo was the occasion of a trip to other interesting historical and artistic centers—the cathedral with the splendid paintings by Ruggero; Monreale, with its fascinating mosaics presenting the history of creation. Experiences and impressions of Dr. Steiner came out later in his lectures on art with lantern slides. Such a contact of the spiritual researcher with the monuments of history and art was an act of resurrection and gave meaning to the continuity of history.
In spite of very great difficulties in primitive methods of travel, Dr. Steiner visited also Segesta, making part of the journey even on foot. This trip led to that ancient place founded according to Greek legends by Aeneas. A temple there, standing in the magnificent mountain environment, is one of the best preserved sacred Greek places in Sicily. For the spiritual vision of Rudolf Steiner, we may assume that there would have arisen here an especially living inner picture of the ancient Greek Mystery culture. In the following years, he dealt in lectures with the spiritual substance and the significance in world history of that Greek culture, its Mystery places and temples.
Returning from Sicily to Naples, he visited the museum there, rich in treasures, and also Pozzuoli and Paestum. He then climbed Mount Vesuvius, whose crater was still manifesting the activity of the inner earth. He then moved northward by way of Ancona and Trieste, to take up again his lecturing activity.
The next event of importance was the Whitsun cycle of lectures of May 16-28 in Hamburg on The Manifestations of Karma. On this occasion, Rudolf Steiner gave the most important information from Western spiritual research into the working of destiny and freedom, the special rhythmical and cyclic division of the time-organization of a human life and of repeated lives on earth. He answers the question how the relation of destiny and freedom is manifest in concrete situations in life: in health and sickness, cure and incurability, natural and accidental illness, accidents, catastrophes of nature—such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, epidemics, and the like. He dealt also with the question whether and in what manner the concept of destiny is applicable to the kingdoms below man—the animal kingdom, for instance—and whether it is valid in the world of Beings higher than man. He brought to light the links between individual and social karma and the karma of the Higher Beings. He then spoke of free will and karma in the future of human evolution. The space-organization and time-organization of the human bodily life and of spiritual evolution became the subject matter of exact knowledge; in this way man becomes, not the object of destiny, but its master.
The journey continued to Scandinavia. After a stop of several days in Copenhagen, there followed a cycle of lectures between June 7 and 17 in Christiania, which expanded the knowledge of individual human destiny to the systematic exposition of the destinies and tasks which are given to each person in his spiritual association with other persons in their ethnical and geographical relations. Even the title of the eleven lectures, The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with Germanic Nordic Mythology, shows that the point of departure chosen for these lectures was the lofty tradition which points to an earlier wisdom-filled insight into these spiritual connections. We have already indicated that Rudolf Steiner meant by the term “Folk-Souls” and “Time-Spirit,” not merely abstract concepts, but actual spiritual entities which, in the evolution of history, of peoples, and of cultural epochs, are actually working toward a goal. It is certainly no mere coincidence that Dr. Steiner gave these lectures just when those with deeper vision were able to detect on the spiritual horizon the first storm clouds of the pending catastrophe for the peoples.
Let us consider for a moment the world situation at that time. Although the first World War did not begin until four years later, developments which gradually led toward it were already actualities. The almost constant unrest in the Balkans was intensified by the action of Austria in the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1909 Bethmann-Hollweg became Imperial Chancellor in Germany, the personality who was to remain in this primary position until and during the World War. In May 1910 King Edward VII of England died; leaving a difficult situation for his successor, the son whose destiny it was to preside over the fate of his country through the World War. The conflagration was in course of preparation during this time in the southeast. It is evident that the time was at hand in June 1910 to lift into the realm of full consciousness for humanity the spiritual realities of the Folk-Souls and the Time-Spirit, quite independently of the external phenomena which were moving toward the great catastrophe.
Unfortunately, the world did not grasp what was here presented in comprehensive connections. Even though Rudolf Steiner continued in the following years to set forth the missions of the individual Folk-Souls, the task of the Time-Spirit, humanity remained a victim of the catastrophic forces at work behind the visible world. Only after it was too late to prevent the catastrophe of the World War, could that particular cycle on the mission of the individual Folk-Souls be used again and again in the effort to point out to individual persons in places of primary responsibility the objective truth of spiritual evolution. After the close of the war, for instance, Rudolf Steiner gave permission for this cycle of lectures of 1910 to be presented to the German Imperial Chancellor of that time, Prince Max von Baden. Certainly what had occurred could not be undone, but there was still an opportunity for a new beginning. Even this endeavor, however, brought about no change in the external decisions of those who had the affairs of the world in their hands.
We shall have occasion to refer to this problem again in connection with the decisive years 1918—T9. At the time in question, June 1910, Rudolf Steiner did not touch, of course, upon those approaching external events, but set forth only what could be presented then and also later as objective basis for knowledge. But his choice of the moment for expressing certain truths often shows the nearness of the actuality of the spiritual substance he is communicating.
As a preface to those lectures for the printed edition published in 1918, he wrote:
“For a real psychology of the characters of peoples, the anthropological, ethnographical, and even the historical view of ordinary science can provide no sufficient foundation. By means of what is offered by this science, one achieves nothing more than is achieved by means of anatomy and physiology with respect to a knowledge of the soul-life of the individual human being. Just as one must proceed in the case of the individual person from the body to the soul in order to become acquainted with his inner life, so is it necessary in regard to the characters of peoples to advance to the underlying soul and spirit element if one seeks to attain to real knowledge. But this soul and spirit element does not mean a mere working together of the souls of individual human beings; on the contrary, it is a soul and spirit element above those. To modem science, this is an entirely unfamiliar conception. Before that tribunal, it seems paradoxical to speak of Folk-Souls as entities, just as one speaks of the thinking, feeling, and willing of the individual person. And it is equally paradoxical before this tribunal to connect the earthly evolution of peoples with the forces of the heavenly bodies in cosmic space. In order, however, to find this no longer paradoxical, it is necessary only to consider that no one would think of seeking within the magnetic needle itself for the forces which dispose it in a north-south direction. This phenomenon is attributed quite correctly to the magnetism of the earth. The cause of the needle’s direction is sought in the cosmos. Similarly would it not be reasonable to seek outside of the relations of a people, within the cosmos, for the causes of the evolution of the characters of peoples, their migrations, etc.? Quite apart from the Anthroposophical point of view, which holds that higher spiritual Beings are a spiritual reality, something quite different is intended in these lectures. This view certainly takes a higher spiritual reality as a basis for the evolution of peoples, and seeks in such a reality for the sources which give to that evolution its direction. But the consideration then descends to the facts which come to light in the life of peoples. It grows quite clear that these facts become comprehensible through adopting this foundation. By this means can be discerned the life conditions of different peoples as well as their mutual relations; whereas, without such a basis, there exists no true knowledge in this domain. Either we must dispense with a psychology of peoples altogether, or we must seek a basis for it in spiritual reality. . . .
“Perhaps, the very theme Folk-Souls is one which shows how a spiritual contemplation, applying itself to the real supersensible nature of existence, gives at the same time a true practical conception of life, throwing light upon its most detailed aspects. A life conception which applies to the evolution and the character of peoples only such conceptions as are rightly considered valid for natural science, cannot do this. This mechanistic-physical science has made its highest contribution in the production of the mechanical, physical, and chemical means of civilization. As regards the means for culture of the spiritual life of mankind, a spiritually oriented science is necessary. Our age demands a science of that kind.”
On the basis of the knowledge and the stimulations derived from Rudolf Steiner, already a series of scientific works have been published in the area of the science of peoples. A list of these would occupy much too large a space to be included here. In order to draw attention to the deeper-lying forces at work in history—still for the most part hidden—Rudolf Steiner gave toward the end of 1910 a course of lectures on Occult History: Personalities and Events of World History in the Light of Spiritual Science. For at that time there began to descend into the sphere of Europe’s destiny premonitory events which could have been averted only by the most watchful attention and not by the indolent thinking inherited from the nineteenth century.
The months of July and August, 1910, were devoted to the preparation for one of the most important events in the history of the Movement, the initial presentation of Rudolf Steiner’s first Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation. The second seven-year period was intended to serve above all in the artistic sphere, which has always been the best mediator between nature and spirit. The lectures had brought people to the knowledge of the existence, the nature, the activity of the spiritual world; personal esoteric training served for the gradual achievement of the experience of their realities; it was now the function of the Mystery Art to bring spiritual events before the mind in pictures, in order that the human soul might recognize itself in these pictures and that the presentation of the spirit world might find its echo in the conscious and unconscious mind of man. For the truth has in man a sphere akin to itself, an echo which, in the experience of true art, is able to affirm: Yet, so it is.
The Mystery Dramas are the noblest fruit of the interplay of spiritual vision and artistic formative power. Every work has its appointed place within the spiritual structure. This work Rudolf Steiner had, undoubtedly, borne within him for years, allowing it to come to maturity. But now the moment pressed on to its initial production; and even while the actors were studying the first pages of the script, Dr. Steiner, although training and instructing during the day in reference to stage-craft, costumes, scenery, and everything else, was at night writing out the final pages of his work. This now made its first appearance before an absorbed audience as the first one of the four symphonies of word, picture, plastic form, color, and music. The reader may study this drama for himself—better still, witness it. We are concerned here only with the meaning of what was being striven for and with the historical events themselves. Later on, Dr. Steiner pointed out that the four Mystery Dramas contain the whole essence of Anthroposophy; that, if through some unlikely chance the four Mystery Dramas alone should survive, in them the essential content of Anthroposophy would be preserved.
In the lecture cycle given the next year on Wonders of the World, the Soul's Probation, and Spirit Revelation, he drew attention to two historical streams in Hellenism which, through their differentiation, had tremendous influence upon the Mystery Arts of the following ages. The one brought about a more priestly religious development of culture, fructified by the still existent faculty of clairvoyance. The other inaugurated rather a development in the direction of intellectual thinking. The latter became the point of departure for our modem intellectual civilization:
“In that civilization which the ancient Greeks attached to the names of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Menelaos, one finds what we recognize today as our external spiritual culture, having no longer any contact with clairvoyant powers. ... If there existed only this external culture which can be traced back in the true meaning of the ancient Greeks to the names Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Menelaos, then the heart and soul forces of man would long since have withered under the influence of this culture.”
The other current, of which the spiritual figures of Demeter and Persephone are representative, stood for a civilization which could still penetrate through clairvoyance as far as the elemental spiritual beings manifest in nature. Schuré made a connection with this current in his dramas, for which reason the drama of this writer with its essential relation to Hellenism was again presented at this time as a prelude to the performance of Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Drama. Schuré's creation, however, was a revival, though in the loftiest artistic form, of the Greek nature. But Rudolf Steiner initiated with his Mystery Dramas an art of the future, grounded in the clairvoyance and spiritual vision of the present age. Such figures as Lucifer and Ahriman, Philia, Astrid, and Luna, the Guardian of the Threshold, and other spiritual Beings in these dramas, are no longer remote deities or elemental beings of nature in the sense of Hellenism, but spirit and soul beings at work in the psychic structure of modem man, in his thinking, feeling, and willing, releasing within him antagonistic soul-tensions or participating in the spiritual guidance on his path of self-schooling.
A problem of the most difficult kind now presented itself for which a solution had to be found. A new art such as this could not simply be placed in the hands of professional actors, but had to be entrusted to persons who were already intimately bound up with the spiritual processes therein presented. What had to be done, therefore, was to train in a few weeks for these difficult roles persons who had never practiced the dramatic art. Of the numerous collaborators available, there were only three who had previously been actors. All of the others appeared upon the stage for the first time. Marie von Sivers, who played the role of Maria, certainly had already achieved a mastery of speech through many years of study and training in the art of recitation; and Mieta Waller, who took the part of Johannes, was closely linked with the sphere of art through her studies. One can comprehend, however, the magnitude of the task which Rudolf Steiner had to achieve in the rehearsing and the stage direction if one considers that the majority of the performers were in ordinary life engaged in occupations having no relation whatever with stage or art. For example, the leading figure in the drama, Benedictus, was played by Dr. Peipers, a physician in ordinary life; the Spirit of the Elements by Herr W. Sellin, a colonial official, while Count Lerchenfeld, Imperial Councilor and farmer, acted the part of the Spirit of the Earth. Nevertheless— or, perhaps, because of this fact—the performance bore the character of a spiritual unity. It was a sphere of the spirit, extending far beyond the purely technical stage-craft, in which the performers had lived together for many years in common study and discipline. It is, unfortunately, impossible to mention separate names and achievements of all of those who collaborated in the Mystery Dramas. The examples mentioned above are intended merely to indicate how much it was here a question of original creation, even in the human situations of the actors. In regard to Rudolf Steiner’s aim, he said:
“With us there is no question—or, better said, there ought not to be any question—of representing characters as they are represented on our public stages. Those who are already feeling something of what we are trying to achieve through impressing upon art the unique character of spiritual knowledge, will know that we are concerned with something quite different. It will be known to them that anything capable of achieving a degree of perfection only in the future is bound to display imperfections in the present. It is not our business to compete with outside stage productions. It does not enter into our minds in any way to try to do something similar, and a mere comparison with other external stage achievements would be a mistake.”
This effort towards something entirely new in the art of the stage was concerned, not only with the art of expression of the actors in speech, gesture, movement, and grouping, but also with the use of color and light, scene-painting, and the creation of stage-pictures in which the difficult problem had to be solved of presenting occurrences of the spiritual world. In special lectures on stage art given later by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, he provided directives for all of these different areas in dramatic art. The possibility of realizing his aims fully appeared only after the suitable space had been created in the Goetheanum building. But it is a proof of his extraordinary capacity for inspiring people to an unusual effort that he was able in only a few weeks to bring to life the beginnings of a new art of the theater, in spite of the unsuitable accommodation of the Gartnerplatz Theater in Munich, and with entirely untrained personnel; with performers many of whom had never before trod the boards of a stage, with painters who had no previous experience of scene-painting; with assistants who had never before made stage costumes, and so on. In a few words, or by means of a sketch, he made his wishes known and there arose—through the artistic understanding of such painters as Hermann Linde, Haass, and Volkert, through the musical compositions of Adolf Arenson, and with the aid of many other gifted and devoted helpers—a finished whole which realized the aims and impulses of the creator in the artistic harmony of the stage ensemble. In various workshops modeling, carpentry, painting, sewing, embroidery were carried on, framework for scenery constructed, practice and rehearsals held. Rudolf Steiner himself went from morning to night through the workshops, the rehearsal rooms, gave directives, wielded hammer, paint brush, and sketching pencil himself, supervised speech rehearsals and developments on the stage.
All this was possible only because a common consciousness of the spirit permeated every one sharing, and in response to the stimulations from the guiding personality. In a report on that period of preparation, Mathilde Scholl wrote: “Those who had the privilege before the actual performance of catching a glimpse of the most intimate sphere of the stage and whose fortunate star allowed attendance at the rehearsals which were of such importance, could only have been astonished at the tremendous diligence and loving care, extending to the minutest details, which held sway over so many individual talents. One perceived everywhere that an extraordinarily intensified capacity for achievement had been brought to pass, borne upon the waves of genuine enthusiasm. This was perceptible, not only in the artistic coloring of the costumes, with their most delicate shades of color, and the whole decor, but also in the wonderful success on the part of the performers in identifying themselves with the spirit of the roles allotted to them.”
The great day of the opening performance of the first Mystery Drama was thus a day of fulfillment. As a preliminary, there was a repeat performance of Schuré's drama, presented during the previous year. On August 15, 1910, the throng of people from many countries which quite filled the festively bedecked Munich theatre witnessed for the first time Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation. The performance that took place here was one which led into the very depths of the soul-being of man, a revelation of the path to spiritual training. It was a solemn event for those experiencing it, and a significant moment in spiritual history. Just as the Greek epoch of culture gave of its spiritual essence in the Mysteries of Eleusis, the twentieth century requires the revelation of its spiritual vision through the Mystery Art of our own time. The man of today has to pass through the portal of initiation on the level of consciousness of his own century.
In a lecture given the following day, Dr. Steiner observed regarding the spiritual aims of this artistic supplementation of the previous striving for knowledge:
“We endeavored yesterday to unfold before you an artistic picture showing the path to heights upon which a human being is able to experience what is intended to flow through Anthroposophical development. . . . The life had to be shown of him who aspires to spiritual knowledge; it was necessary to show how he grows out of the physical plane . . . ; how even on the physical plane everything that occurs around him which might, perhaps, seem to another person something entirely commonplace becomes significant for him. The soul of the seeker must grow out of the events of the physical plane. And then it was necessary to show what this soul must experience in itself when there streams into it everything that is going on in the nature of human destiny, human suffering, human desire, human endeavor, and human illusion around him. . . .
“Not how every one rises upward to initiation, but how the individual figure of Johannes Thomasius, on the basis of his own determinative characteristics, can draw near to the portal of knowledge,—this is what had to be shown.”
He stressed the fact that there could be no question in the Mystery Dramas, of which this was the first, of any kind of allegory or symbolism; that they had to do with a “realistic” presentation of concrete spiritual occurrences, realistic in the sense that the spiritual beings at work in cosmos and in man appear before the eyes of the spectator as real figures, acting, hindering, helping, unveiling their spiritual power and their plan. This was not to be asserted in a vague, general sense, as is customary in religious movements of the present day; it was to be shown in its sensible-supersensible reality in connection with the experiences of initiation of definite persons who pass through the portal of initiation for the first time:
“One sees not merely that small section which the sense world displays, but one learns to comprehend that what appears to sight in the world of the senses is only the expression in this way of something spiritual. . . .
“Then appears before us that from which every event of the immediate moment hangs as if by a spiritual thread. Then appears before us the spiritual world, with which man is always in connection even though he is not able to see into it with his external physical reason or with his external senses.”
But the human being is not merely an object of cosmic planning. His own thoughts, words, and deeds influence and even change the supersensible sphere of forces in which he is constantly active either consciously or unconsciously. In the Mystery Drama this is also brought before the mind of every one:
“What the human being expresses through his words, what is active in his thoughts, what is living in his feelings, stands in connection with the whole cosmos; and every word, every feeling, every thought continues. Without man’s awareness, his errors and false feelings work destructively in the elemental realms of our existence. And what impresses itself above all upon the person who treads the path of knowledge out of these first experiences in the spiritual world is the great feeling of responsibility which says to us: What you do as a human being is not done merely at the isolated spot where your lips are moving, where you are thinking or where your heart is beating; it belongs to the whole world. If fruitful, then it is fruitful for the whole world; if it is destructive, evil, then it is a destructive force for the whole world.”
Thus the Mystery Drama brings about self-knowledge, catharsis, purification, world-vision, and the knowledge of far-reaching responsibilities before the human being is able consciously to approach the Guiding Powers of cosmic evolution.
“Man must go through all these things in full reality if he truly desires to approach that which one may call The Temple of Knowledge, if he wishes to ascend to a real understanding of those great Powers of the world which in a certain sense govern and guide world-destiny, and which are represented by the four hierophants in the temple.”
The task of man for the future stood then, and has stood ever since, before the eyes of those who experienced one of the new Mysteries. “That this humanity will advance toward a time in which the human being will feel himself to be a mediator between the spiritual world and the physical world,—to make it possible for this premonition to awaken, for this purpose, were those presentations produced.”
In succession to these artistic experiences, Rudolf Steiner gave between August 16 and 26 a course of lectures entitled Biblical Secrets of Creation. He described how the pre-Christian myths of the creation, if they are understood in the right spiritual sense, represent a stage preliminary to that Christ-permeated cosmogenesis which he had explained in the previous years in the light of the primordial words of the Gospel of St. John. He stressed at the end of every such lecture course that it was not merely a question of enriching knowledge, but that the mood of a world conception created by every item of knowledge of the spiritual and of the physical must result in a better solution of life problems and tasks:
“May these teachings which have flowed out of a more thorough examination of Genesis continue to work in our souls, even if we again forget many of the details. It may be permissible to say this at the end of these days in which, for a short time, we have wished to plunge once more really into the stream of Anthroposophical life. Let us strive to carry with us from its teaching the powers which must result from such teachings. Let us carry them forth; let our lives be fructified from these forces in the outside world. ... It is in activity that this Anthroposophical teaching will be confirmed, a blessing for man’s environment, comforting, joy-bestowing, refreshing, health-giving for our own souls, for our own bodily nature. We shall become better, healthier, stronger persons through the fact that we take Anthroposophical teaching into ourselves. It is in this sense most of all that such a cycle of lectures is intended to work.”
At the beginning of September, numerous participants from several European countries came together in Bern to hear Dr. Steiner’s next Gospel course on The Gospel of St. Matthew. He opened these lectures with the following historical allusion:
“This is now the third time that the opportunity has been given to me in Switzerland to discuss in a certain aspect the greatest Event of earthly and human history. The first time was in Basel when this Event was spoken of in the aspect afforded by the Gospel of St. John; the second time was when the characteristic features of this Event were dealt with for which the Gospel of St. Luke provides a basis.
“On this, the third occasion, the impulse is to be derived from the Gospel of St. Matthew. It has often been pointed out by me that there is something very significant in the very fact that this Event has been preserved for us in four records apparently to a certain extent divergent. That which provides the occasion in a certain degree for the modern external materialistic temper to criticize with a negative and disintegrating effect is precisely what appears to us of the greatest importance from the point of view of Anthroposophical conviction. No one should presume to characterize a being or a fact which he has looked at from only one side. The following comparison has often been used by me: If a person takes a photograph of a tree from one side only, he is not entitled to maintain that he has obtained through his photograph an actual reproduction of the entire appearance of the tree. If, on the other hand, he photographs the tree from the four sides, obtaining four different pictures bearing little resemblance to one another, a total view of the tree is obtained if one looks at the four pictures together. If this is true in such an external way, how could one fail to suppose that an event so pregnant with significant happenings, so pregnant with the very essentials of existence for human beings, is simply not to be embraced in a description in one aspect only. Hence these are not contradictions which we meet with in the four Gospels. Rather, the underlying fact is that the chroniclers were aware that each one had the power to describe this tremendous Event only in one aspect, and that mankind might succeed in arriving gradually at a total picture through viewing the different descriptions together. And so we, . too, must be patient and strive gradually to get nearer to the greatest fact in earth development, by supporting ourselves upon these four accounts, and must develop even what we do know with the help of the document which we have designated as the New Testament.”
The four greatest primal records of spiritual history were lifted by Rudolf Steiner above the sphere of controversy among theological critics. They are to be understood, he said, only if we approach them, not with the magnifying glass of the experts in historical documents or professors in archives of the present type, but see in them the spiritual figures of the four evangelists with their varying soul-structures, and with their gift of clairvoyance, then still existent, which reflected in various aspects the genuine experience of Christ’s influence, bringing it to expression in a picture-language whose interpretation according to the spirit again mediates a harmonious picture of their spiritual experiences. Only he who is able to recognize the spiritual cosmogony in its unity with the spiritual structure of the individual man, derived from it, is able to do full justice to the Logos-Word of the Gospel of St. John, and at the same time to the character of these Evangelists in their full accord. Such a spiritual-scientific view is able to show us how, in its universal and earthly actions, the Being of Christ in His cosmic and earthly deeds, was reflected in each of the four disciples. For one who does not wish merely to study the four Gospels like any other historical documents, or to look upon them as many modem persons do, only as a collection of valuable sayings, Rudolf Steiner’s reflections first provided the opportunity to unite oneself inwardly and intimately with these documents and to understand and affirm them in parts where the thinking of the nineteenth century had erected apparently insuperable barriers. Through this achievement, even if certain theologians are not willing to admit its truth, Rudolf Steiner has restored the four Gospels in the soundest and truest manner to innumerable persons the world over.
After the twelve lectures on the Gospel of St. Matthew, he spoke publicly in Bern on September 19 on The Nature of Human Destiny and on September 17 in Basel on Self-Knowledge and on the new Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation.
For the Berlin Group a series of lectures began on October 17 under the title Excursus in the Area of the Gospel of St. Mark, which supplemented the preceding reflections and was preparatory for the lecture cycle on this Gospel in Basel in 1912. Attention may here be drawn to the whole inner attitude out of which Rudolf Steiner offered these truths to humanity, as this is manifest, indeed, in the last words of this lecture cycle. There are now, as then, two false paths in the presentation of scientific and religious truths. In the scientific field, this consists in the fact that an enormous amount of knowledge has been accumulated and is continually increased, while the scientists for the most part no longer question, or even regard as important, how far the content of this knowledge affects the soul and spirit elements in the human being. The propagation of knowledge and its application in external practice have become the only decisive factors. Rudolf Steiner, however, stated in those lectures:
“What rests in the lap of the future may become living if there are enough souls who are aware that knowledge is a duty because we dare not return our souls in an undeveloped state to the World Spirit; for we should thus have withheld from the World Spirit Himself something which He has incorporated in our powers.”
In another place, when speaking on The Limits of the Knowledge of Nature, he said:
“Sciences without human self-knowledge are injurious. Sciences plus the counterpart of human self-knowledge,—these are a benefit to humanity, because they lead mankind actually to that for which it is destined in the time approaching. There should be no science which is not brought into some sort of relation with man. There should be no science which is not capable of being traced into the innermost being of man, where it is seen in its true meaning only when it is traced to that point.”
In the sphere of religious truth, on the other hand, the danger exists today of truth’s being preached merely in an external way from the outside in the form of “Thou shalt” or “Thou must,” of its being demanded as moral maxims. This mere preaching has estranged many persons in our time from the truths of religion. Rudolf Steiner, who in the realm of religion also was one who bestowed out of knowledge, imparted to his listeners at the same time the consciousness that truth does not approach them from outside but is already present as spiritual substance in every man and needs only his own power to awaken it. The final words of that Gospel were, therefore, the following:
“However imperfect my words may be, what matters is not the manner in which the thought is expressed, but what it is in reality. And that which it is in reality can live in every single soul. For the sum total of truth is present as a germ in every soul and is able to blossom when the soul surrenders itself to these germs.”
The harmony of scientific and religious truths was expressed in that Gospel cycle in its ultimate consequence in the words “that in every book on physiology there should stand the opening words of the Gospel of St. John; that everything in science ought to have a trend in the direction of these words.”
At the annual General Meeting on October 30, Dr. Steiner gave a survey of the year’s work, and advocated most of all a continual development and intensification of the introductory courses which members had arranged in the individual Groups to introduce newly interested persons into the fundamentals of Anthroposophy. The membership had increased that year to 2,000. The new impulse directed in this second seven-year period toward furthering all artistic work in particular led for the first time at this meeting to a discussion of the possibility of erecting a building for the Society.
Already on the occasion of the staging of the first Mystery Drama in Munich, the need for a worthy architectural enclosure for this artistic activity had been discussed by certain friends. At the present meeting, Herr Horst von Henning made the tentative proposal that a suitable building should be erected in Weimar. Rudolf Steiner, however, rejected fundamentally this choice of a site. He drew attention to the fact that putting up a building could not at this stage be the concern of the Society as such, since it had no legal status—in this connection the serious decisions which were to come in 1912, no doubt, played a role—but that initiative had come from several friends in whose hands its fulfillment must first be left, although all members and friends would naturally be free to aid through donations. He said the erection of such a building would require primarily the cooperation of the various artistic talents in the Movement, for which reason also Weimar would be unsuitable, whereas Munich could be considered. He added the following interesting observation:
“But, in addition to this, an inner reason has to be taken into consideration, which is in keeping with spiritual law. This is that places which have had a period of flourishing in the past are, in fact, not fruitful for later epochs. Herr von Henning’s proposal favors that Weimar be chosen because it was there that the flowering of German spiritual culture was once developed. In Weimar only an archive activity is possible at the present time. Societies are founded there in memory and in the elaboration of what is past. This fact, too, would be against Weimar, in that precisely the greatness which emanates from Weimar would oppose itself to our plans, and we should not be able to succeed.”
Rudolf Steiner knew Weimar, of course, and its bygone greatness only too well, since he himself had cooperated in its revival through the Goethe Archives, but he knew also the prevailing one-sided archive direction of view, turned toward the past. Munich, on the other hand had shown new impulses in artistic development. In the meantime, a repository was established to which contributions for the carrying out of this plan could be sent. At the end of the meeting, Dr. Steiner read a telegram of greeting from the Italian Section with the information that the next year’s Congress was to be held in Genoa. As we shall later see, owing to the rapid development of events, this Congress did not take place.
In the autumn months of 1910, as at the beginning of the year, scientific, medical, and educational aspects were brought to the fore. On November 1, Rudolf Steiner began a lecture series on Psychosophy. It was necessary here also to put in the place of the arid theories regarding the soul which were then prevalent, concepts once more “infused with spirituality from within,” to recognize the life of the soul not only as dependent upon corporeality, but also as mediator of the spiritual structure of man. This was a point of departure bound to have a far-reaching influence upon the art of healing. Dr. Steiner spoke in that sense on November 2 in connection with a medical lecture on psychotherapy.
In the course of the Architektenhaus lectures also during the winter season, natural-scientific themes were dealt with, such as The Human Soul and the Animal Soul; Human Spirit and Animal Spirit; and The Nature of Sleep. In these reflections it was made clear that the individual-spiritual has entered into the body only in the case of man, whereas in the lower kingdoms of nature it is operative as an entity, as a “group-soul,” not from within but from without. Man cannot, therefore, be understood through analogy with those kingdoms of nature, in the manner attempted by Darwinism in the previous century.
Important and fruitful research in the field of animal life and nature has since then been carried out by students of Rudolf Steiner.
On November 14 Dr. Steiner gave a public lecture in Nuremberg on Disposition, Talent, and Education of the Child. Here, too, a basis in knowledge was worked out for what was carried into practical life in such a great measure during the third seven-year period of the Movement.
The Christmas lecture on December 27 dealt with The Yuletide Festival, the Christ Festival Symbols and the World-Historical Temper of the Anthroposophical Form of Conception. The world-historical mood which had already given to the year 1910 its stamp in the cycle on The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls was now at the end of the year once more brought into consciousness by a lecture cycle in Stuttgart on Occult History—Personalities and Events of World History in the Light of Spiritual Science. Whereas the Christiania cycle of 1910 had thrown light rather upon the tasks and aims of the higher individualities of the Time-Spirit and the Folk-Souls and their representatives, in these December lectures there were exhibited through concrete examples rather the inner meaning and rhythm of spiritual currents and the metamorphoses of the single individuality in its progression through repeated fives on earth in different epochs. What was then sketched in basic outline found fourteen years later a comprehensive presentation in the spiritual-historical lectures of the years 1923—24.
The lecture cycle of June 1910 on The Mission of Individual Folk-Souls and the following lectures had already contained most essential aspects of a spiritual-scientific view of history and of the truth of the Folk-Souls. The events descending upon mankind during the following years up to the first World War might have had a different issue if the leading personalities, or even a majority of the people of that time, had taken the insights presented by Rudolf Steiner into the spiritual structure of world and human history as their guiding principles in knowledge and action, and had introduced them even then into the molding of world history and practical life.