150. The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence: Luciferic and Ahrimanic Aspects of Contemporary Cultural Life
12 Jan 1913, Leipzig Rudolf Steiner |
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Notes from a lecture Our life must, so to speak, represent what we can become through anthroposophy. This requires a clear view of life and a healthy judgment about it. In our time, life is more complicated than it was in the previous age. |
150. The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence: Luciferic and Ahrimanic Aspects of Contemporary Cultural Life
12 Jan 1913, Leipzig Rudolf Steiner |
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Notes from a lecture Our life must, so to speak, represent what we can become through anthroposophy. This requires a clear view of life and a healthy judgment about it. In our time, life is more complicated than it was in the previous age. Even in periods of time that lie just behind us today, it was much less complicated. This was due to the simple circumstances. At that time, the soul and the qualities associated with it were more widespread in humanity than they are today. But many other things have also changed significantly. And we all live in this changed life and must try to penetrate the sphere of life in which we live as it is necessary. It is precisely part of contemporary life that we achieve harmony of soul and inner unity of mind despite the fragmentation of modern life. This cannot be fully explained in a lecture; we can only highlight a few points. Today we find materialism everywhere, including a materialism that permeates all of practical life, brought about by machine operation. The latter has made the conditions of business life, of life in general, much more complicated, has given rise to the hustle and bustle in which humanity must live and not come to its senses. People often do not even realize how their entire labor, their entire thinking and pondering from morning till evening is devoted to material needs. It is only natural that in the age in which we are surrounded by machines, people begin to think materialistically about all matters. Truly, the spread of materialistic and monistic worldviews would be impossible in any other age. We anthroposophists stand in a new worldview. The spiritual movement is entering the world. Consider the difficulties we face, consider how small spiritual science has remained despite its magnificent potential. Let us compare what prevails in the world as religious denominations, which are to be seen as remnants from times gone by. We find many religious aspirations. We should certainly take a look at them. We find a very intellectual approach to religion. There are preachers, Christian ones, who no longer believe in a human Christ, no longer believe in immortality. People are happy when a Jatho movement and the like appears and is presented as rationally as possible. All old authorities can no longer prevail against the blind faith in what science has proven. These phenomena are all related to moral concepts. Anyone who works in a business will confirm how little truth there is in today's interactions between salespeople and customers. Many a person who stands in between suffers as a result. Do the cobweb-thin concepts of such rational preachers have any moral force in them? Even the public opinion of which we are so proud today did not exist in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as it does now through the newspaper system. Great philosophers have long since said: Public opinion is private error. Who could possibly make an Ostwald and the like believe that spiritual entities have anything to do with him? But by denying them, he is summoning very specific spiritual entities. Behind every Ostwald there is an army of very specific spirits. The spirit lives in all matter. There is a spirit that has every interest in denying its spirit, and that is Ahriman. When man directs all his attention to the material laws, he does not banish the spirits, but conjures them up; they creep into the minds of the materialists. Mephistopheles sends Faust to the realm of the Mothers and says: There you will find the Nothing. — Faust answers him: “In your Nothing I hope to find the All.” — But humanity today does not answer like Faust, for materialistic people are obsessed by Ahriman. In the religious-rationalistic direction, on the other hand, another spirit is at work, namely Lucifer. Through abstract, cobweb-thin concepts, he detaches people from the real spiritual. Ideas are now supposed to live in history, which is just as clever as expecting a painter who is only painted to paint pictures. This amalgamation with matter had been in preparation for a long time, and today it has reached a preliminary climax. Heraclitus diluted Theosophy into philosophy through the influence of Lucifer. This is expressed figuratively in the saying that he offered his book as a sacrifice to Diana of Ephesus. Now let us look at public opinion. It arises from the law that Lucifer and Ahriman had to intervene in the world view. In the past, instead of public opinion, there were people whose spiritual life extended to the spiritual mysteries. For better or for worse, these personalities had an influence on world life. This can be understood by studying the history of Florence between the years 1100 and 1500, for example. Today, this influence corresponds to those people who strive to achieve a connection with the spiritual. However, the luciferic beings who have remained behind on the moon and determine public opinion have not progressed to this point. As a result, public opinion is about a thousand years behind. The very lowest among them, the recruits, so to speak, of the luciferic army, work on public opinion. Beings are formed in them that will later appear as powerful entities. They sit behind the editorial desk, they stand behind the popular speaker and so on. These are just beginning luciferic spirits, actually still little ones. To know about life, that is part of practical spiritual science. Man forms his image of the world with his mind. What now arises from this knowledge of the mind and senses? There is an old word for it. Not even the appointed representatives can grasp it. The serpent says: You will be like God, knowing good and evil. All intellectual and sensory knowledge is Luciferic, is its actual hallmark. The insistence on external experience, which does not recognize anything other than atoms, is a fantasy. Behind Maya are not atoms, but spiritual realities. All the phenomena that are described are not realities; the realities are the spiritual beings. The monads do not exist if we do not grasp them in reality as the higher hierarchies. There are many hierarchies, among the highest are also the deities of the Trinity. Philosophy speaks only of one unity. But the spirits are many, and unity exists only in the souls of the spirits. Those who have become accustomed to thinking in such a way that they know themselves to be in the community of spirits have the moral laws. Ahriman lets human beings sink into the swamp of matter; Lucifer draws them away from the truth, preventing them from realizing that they are lost in an illusory world. Maya has a right to exist if it is understood as an expression of the reality behind it. |
94. Popular Occultism: Lemurian Development
06 Jul 1906, Leipzig Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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The task of the subsequent sixth epoch will be to lead external civilisation again to a more spiritual life. Its standard-bearer is Anthroposophy. The future task or civilisation as a whole consists in becoming reunited with the Spirit. Every epoch has its particular tasks. |
94. Popular Occultism: Lemurian Development
06 Jul 1906, Leipzig Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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The human soul is capable of development, its present state may be changed by training, particularly by a training of the etheric body. People who precede others in their inner development are called Initiates. The path which they tread and teach is that of occult schooling. Our root-race (5th post-Atlantean epoch), the Aryan, descends from the most highly developed sub-race of the Atlanteans, the original Semitic race, that lived approximately in the region of present-day Ireland. The island Poseidonis mentioned by Plato may be considered as a last remnant of descending Atlantis. Manu, a leader of the Atlanteans, guided the most mature men to the East. From there, they wandered into the region of present-day India. An ancient civilisation arose: This ancient Indian civilisation arose long before the time of the Vedas. It still had a dream-like, altogether inner character. The soul-constitution of the ancient Hindoo was the very opposite of our modern one. To him everything external and visible was Maya, Illusion; he saw reality only in Brahman and in what could be grasped by Brahman. A second civilisation arose further west. This second culture is the ancient Persian one, whose inaugurator and chief guide was the great Zarathustra, or Zoroaster. The Persias were already able to harmonize spirit and matter and. began to work and to transform the physical world through the human spirit. A third civilisation arose still further west, namely the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian culture. Man's gaze turned still more towards the physical world, the external branches of science arose, with the study of the forces of Nature and of their laws. From the very outset, this ancient primeval science revealed the following truths concerning our earth: The earth too is a being subjected to reincarnation. It passed through earlier stages and in future it will pass through further incarnations. One speaks of seven planetary conditions or Planets", through which the earth passes in its development. The names of these "Planets" are not identical with our present planets, but refer to past or future condition of the earth. But these conditions are related to the planets after which they are named. The first incarnation of our earth is called. "Saturn". Then comes the "Sun", followed by Moon"; "Mars" and Mercury" are the designations for the first and second half of the earth's development. The conditions which will follow are "Jupiter" and "Venus", These seven incarnations of the earth are intimately connected with man's development and are therefore even mirrored in ordinary life; names of the days of the week.
The world of the stars is thus closely connected with ordinary life. The ancient Egyptians still arranged their whole civilisation in accordance with the stars, the affairs of State, agriculture, and so forth. The genius of the Dog-star, Sirius, was the one who indicated the inundations of the Nile, when that star appeared in a special constellation. A fourth epoch of culture is the Graeco-Latin one. It imprints on matter the Wisdom of things. This is how works of art arise. In the middle of this epoch falls the deed of Christ; the Mystery of Golgotha. We ourselves live in the fifth epoch of culture, of the fifth root-race belonging to the fifth age of the earth. This is the Germanic-English-American culture; its chief task is the conquest of the physical plane. The task of the subsequent sixth epoch will be to lead external civilisation again to a more spiritual life. Its standard-bearer is Anthroposophy. The future task or civilisation as a whole consists in becoming reunited with the Spirit. Every epoch has its particular tasks. Modern science has rejected the Ptolemaic world-system as erroneous and has adopted the world-systems of Galilei and Copernicus: but for the astral plane the Ptolemaic system is correct; for there one sets out from quite different perspectives. The sixth epoch of Culture still reposes as a seed in the East of Europe; it will be the carrier of the spiritual culture of the future. A time will come when the human being will have overcome bi-sexuality. Lower forces, sexual instincts will change into higher ones. It is not a question of destroying any instinct, but of refining, ennobling them. Thus phantasy is a product of spiritual ennoblement, the result of already purified passions. When phantasy reaches a higher stage of development it leads to clairvoyant imagination. In future all human beings will be able to perceive as Initiates do now, the soul-content of their fellows. To-day the word can transmit spiritual experiences through the medium of the air; in the future spiritual beings will be produced through the word, and finally the word itself will become creative; then the human beings will be magicians of the word. The indications on occult training come from a deeply-founded knowledge. There are two fundamental qualities which man must have; he must be able to bear what one calls great loneliness, and he must gain a certain fundamental mood of devotion. In regard to the first, the loneliness of a few minutes each day is meant, in the middle of the active life of daily living, minutes dedicated to concentration and meditation. Even this can give inner strength to the soul. At first there will be an inner feeling of emptiness and sadness; but this must be overcome. All people who achieved a great deal require this inner loneliness for their concentration. The second fundamental requirement is devotion, the capacity to look up to something with feelings of reverence and devotion. Those who wish to ascend to higher stages of development must first be below and feel that they are there below. The occult training of India calls for a complete submission of the pupil to his Guru. The Rosicrucian Initiation is the right one for Modern people of the West. Before that there was the Christian Initiation. All three kinds of Initiation are in reality the expression of one and the same initiation, but the forms of initiation must change with the times. |
281. Poetry and the Art of Speech: Lecture V
30 Jul 1921, Darmstadt Tr. Julia Wedgwood, Andrew Welburn Rudolf Steiner |
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But the reinvigoration of spiritual life to which Anthroposophy aspires means precisely the reimmersing of intellect in the primordial forces of man’s soul life. The artistic will not then appear in the so-much-dreaded gloom of intellectual pallor; imagination will not be drawn down through Anthroposophy into logic and materialism, but will on the contrary be made to bear fruit. From living together with the spiritual it will be nourished and bear fruit. An enhancement of art is to be hoped for just through its being pervaded by Anthroposophy and the anthroposophical way of thinking – the whole bearing and demeanour of Anthroposophy. What applies to the arts as a whole we will show today with reference to recitation and declamation. |
281. Poetry and the Art of Speech: Lecture V
30 Jul 1921, Darmstadt Tr. Julia Wedgwood, Andrew Welburn Rudolf Steiner |
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Today, seeing that from a living grasp of the anthroposophical world-conception there results something for the whole human being, for man in his totality, we would like to put forward something taken from the art of recitation. As I have mentioned already, there is a certain fear in artistic circles, especially among poets, reciters and so on, that everything approaching the conceptual, everything which takes a “scientific” form, is really foreign to art – and actually inimical to the original and vital in it, choking instinctive and intuitive art. And as regards that intellectuality which has arisen in the course of recent centuries of human development this is absolutely the case. Yet this very intellectuality is also connected with an inclination toward what is present in external, physical reality: our very languages have gradually adopted a certain form – what might be called a tendency towards materialism. In our words and their meaning lies something which points directly to the external sense-world. Hence this intellectuality, which possesses only picture-being and is all the more authentic the less it contains of life and reality from man’s inner nature – this intellectuality will indeed have little in common with the primordial vitality that must lie at the root of all art. But the reinvigoration of spiritual life to which Anthroposophy aspires means precisely the reimmersing of intellect in the primordial forces of man’s soul life. The artistic will not then appear in the so-much-dreaded gloom of intellectual pallor; imagination will not be drawn down through Anthroposophy into logic and materialism, but will on the contrary be made to bear fruit. From living together with the spiritual it will be nourished and bear fruit. An enhancement of art is to be hoped for just through its being pervaded by Anthroposophy and the anthroposophical way of thinking – the whole bearing and demeanour of Anthroposophy. What applies to the arts as a whole we will show today with reference to recitation and declamation. Over the last decades recitation and declamation have been steered more and more into a predilection for endowing with form the meaning-content of the words. A stress on the word-for-word content has become increasingly conspicuous. Our times have little understanding for such a treatment of the spoken word as was characteristic of Goethe, who used to rehearse the actors in his plays with special regard for the formation of speech, standing in front of them like a musical conductor with his baton. The speech-formation, the element of form that underlies the word-for-word content – it is really this which inspires the true poet as an artist. The point must be emphasized: Schiller, when he felt drawn by inner necessity to compose a poem, to begin with had something in the way of an indeterminate melody, something of a melodic nature as the content of his soul; something musical floated through his soul and only afterwards came the word-for-word content, which had really only to receive what was for the poet, as an artist, the essential thing – the musical element of his soul. So we have on the one hand something musical, which as such would remain pure music; and on the other, the pictorial, painterly element to which in declamatory-recitative art we must return. To say something merely as an expression of the prose-content – it is not for this that true poetry exists. But to mould the prose-content, to re-cast it into measure and rhythm into unfolding melody – into what really lies behind the prose-content – for all this the art of poetry exists. We would surely not be favoured with such a mixed bag of poetry if we did not live in unartistic times when in neither painting nor sculpture, nor poetry nor its recitative-declamatory rendering, is true artistry to be found. If we look at the means by which poetry is brought to expression, which in our case is recitation and declamation, then we must naturally refer to speech. Now speech bears within it a thought- and a will-element. The thought tends toward the prosaic. It comes to express a conviction; it comes to express what is demanded within the framework of conventions of a social community. And with the progress of civilization language comes to be permeated more and more with expressions of conviction, with conventional social expression and to that extent becomes less and less poetic and artistic. The poet will therefore first have to struggle with the language to give it an artistic form, to make it into sornething which is really speech-formation. In my anthroposophical writings I have drawn attention to the character of the vowels in language. This character man experiences in the main through his inner being: what we live through inwardly from our experience in the outer world finds expression in the vowel-sounds. Occurrences that we portray objectively, the essential forms of the external world, come to expression in the consonants of a language. Naturally, the vocalic and consonantal nature of language varies from language to language. Indeed from the way in which a language deploys its consonants and vowels can be seen the extent to which it has developed into a more or less artistic language. Some modern languages, in the course of their development, have gradually acquired an inartistic character and are falling into decadence. When a poet sets out to give form to such a language, he is called upon to repeat at a higher level the original speech-creative process. [Note 17] In the construction his verses, in the treatment of rhyme and alliteration (we shall hear and discuss examples of these later) he touches upon something related to the speech-creative process. Where it is a matter of bringing inner being to expression, the poet will be drawn, by virtue of his intuitive and instinctive ability, to the vowels. The result will be an accumulation of vowels. And when the poet needs to give form to outward things or events, he will be drawn to the consonants. One or the other will be accumulated, depending an whether something inward or something external is being expressed. The reciter or declaimer must take this up, for he will then be able to re-establish the rhythm between inner being and the outer world. On this kind of speech-formation, on the bringing out of what lies within the artistic handling of speech, the formation of a new recitative and declamatory art-form will largely depend. We will now introduce a few shorter poems to show how recitation and declamation must be guided by speech-formation.
[We encounter a similar movement and transition in style in the course of this English sonnet:
[A series of three-line stanzas with recurring rhymes is a comparatively simple representative of a poetic form that is capable of being extended almost indefinitely. Our first poem is a relatively uncomplicated example; a second shows something of what can be achieved by a poet working within very strict limitations.
The highly-developed, courtly poetry of the late Middle Ages provides many examples of this type of elaborate and difficult structure. This Balade is a moderately ambitious and very beautiful instance:
A scene will next be presented from my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. What we have here is a representation of experiences connected with the spiritual world. One might be tempted to look upon something like this as contrived by the intellect, as though we were going after some sort of “symbolic” art – but that would not really be art at all. What will be spoken here, despite the psychic-spiritual nature of the events, was actually seen, in concrete form. Everything was there, down to the very sound of the words. Nothing had to be manufactured, or put together, or elaborated allegorically: it was simply there. We have attempted to give form to man’s manifold experiences in relation to the spiritual worlds; we have tried simply to give form to soul-forces, to what man can experience inwardly as differentiated soul-forces. Something results from this quite spontaneously, that is not shaped by any intellectual activity. As it is here a matter of purely spiritual contents, it is especially important to realize that it is not a matter of giving information or the prosaic word-for-word content, but of giving form to the actual spiritual contents. On the one hand a musical element will be perceptible – at the very point where one might suspect an intellectualising tendency – and on the other we will have a pictorial element, which must be particularly brought out whenever we are giving form to some kind of event. [Note 18]
When we come to the sonnet it is, of course, to be taken for granted that a sonnet does not arise from the intention to compose a sonnet, but by necessity from the working out of inner experiences. It is evident that the sonnet tends toward something visual or pictorial that lives in the language – we have an experience which is in some way twofold. Such an experience presents itself, and we wish to give it a form, such as appears in the first two strophes. But we are then thrown into a contradiction of inner experience. The second strophe confronts the first wave, so to speak, like a counter-wave. And in the last two strophes we feel the contradictions that govern the universe. The human heart and the human mind strive for a unison, a harmonious association, so that they may resolve in harmony what found expression in discord and overcome the material dissonance through the spirituality of harmony. This is manifested even in the rhyme-scheme of the first two strophes and in the linked rhymes of the concluding strophes. In as far as there is not such a necessity of inner experience, a sonnet cannot arise; for it must manifest itself even down to the rhyme-scheme as a picture-form. And now, the musical element infiltrates this pictorial form: a musicality that depends principally on vowel sounds, and on what enters the vowel from the consonant – for every consonant has its vowel-element. This gives what one might call musical substance to the primarily pictorial form taken by the sonnet. What is present within the sonnet, shaping it, is metrical and, in the art of speaking, metre is brought to expression specifically through recitation: something the Greeks managed to bring to a certain eminence. The Greeks lived in the metre; that is to say, in the plastic element of the language. If, on the other hand, we look at what comes to us from the Nordic or Central European, Germanic tradition, we see how into the plasticity of speech there enters something musical from within. Here we have something which streams out more from the will, more from the personality whereas with the Greeks everything flows from metrical clarity of vision. With the Greeks it was primarily the art of recitation that attained a certain peak, whereas among the Germanic peoples it was declamatory art, drawing on the musical principle and flowing into themes and rhythms and cadences, which stirred into activity. And whereas in recitation we have to do with something in speech that in one sound broadens, in another makes ‘pointed’, forming it pictorially – in musicality we have what endows language with a melodic quality. It is in fact something like this that we can see in the sonnet and its treatment in the several regions of Europe. We can see how the declamatory united with the recitative, how the Germanic later united with the Greek feeling for measure. [Note 19] It is of some importance for us to realise the musical as well as the plastic quality inherent in speech-formation, for us to learn to introduce into declamation and recitation something which essentially leads us from what has significance for the senses to what is moved by the spirit. For this, it is once again necessary to have a feeling for poetic form as such – the form of a ritornello or a rondeau, for instance. This does not in truth make for a poetry wanting in thought; it simply expresses thought, not through abstractions, but through its productive creativity. If it is to adapt itself to forms created in this way, the art of speaking must be restored to a life in the actual waves of speech – the recitative with its pure formation; and the high or low intonations, the melodic forms of declamation. And if a dramatic touch has to be added, as in the scene you have just heard, which dealt with purely spiritual experiences, the intellectual significance or literal meaning must be completely overcome, completely transformed from a literal communication of prose fact into actual speech-formation. We thus have in immediate presentation the same experience as when in a prose piece we pass from prosaic understanding to a vision of what is represented in the prosaic. The pleasure of the prosaic is indirect: we must first understand, and through understanding we are then led to visualisation. This entails from the first something inartistic, for the aesthetic quality lies in immediacy. The art of speech-formation must have direct expression. What is actually presented (and not an intellectual imitation of it) must show itself and be given form. In our times we often see so-called poets working up intellectual imitations, rather than those immediate responses which make themselvesfelt in speech-formation. Goethe, who expresses so beautifully a living apprehension of tranquillity – a tranquillity preceding that of sleep – gives it utterance in these lines:
Compare Shelley, “Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa.”
There is complete accord between the feeling for the summits and the tree-tops and what goes on in our own heart. A harmony lies in the sounds, in the very word-formation, so that what is mediated to us through the outer world sounds again – especially if we really listen to the poem – in the word- and speech-formation. All our experience of the outer world has passed over into the speech-formation itself. That would be the ideal of true poetry: to be able to present an experience received from outside in the very treatment of the language. The mere repetition of external experience, simply trying to express external experience in words – this is not poetry. The art of poetry only arises when something experienced in the outer world is reconstituted out of the life of the human soul in terms of pure speech-formation. [Note 20] We can observe this in a truly artistic poet like Goethe, when he feels the need to recreate an identical prose-content out of a different mood and feeling. From living with the Gothic and the mood it transmitted to him, from the feeling let us say for the pointed arches striving upwards, which he felt most deeply in his appreciation of Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe had gained at the beginning of his time in Weimar a sensibility which, when given poetic form, became something like inner declamation. Thought and feeling took such a form in him that we can experience directly in speech-formation something also to be found in contemplating a Gothic cathedral. We can see something striving upwards, something unfinished, in a Gothic cathedral; and this was Goethe’s mood in Weimar when he conceived his Iphigeneia. Driven by a deep longing for the fulfilment of his poetic disposition, Goethe set out, but in the course of his journey south he was gradually overcome by another mood – by a longing for measure. Faced with the Italian art that confronted him there, he felt a kind of echo of Greek art. He writes to his Weimar friends: “I suspect that the Greeks created their works of art in accordance with the very laws by which nature proceeds.” Looking at the Saint Cecilia, at Raphael’s works, the essence of metre became clear to him; and this became an inner recitation. He no longer felt the form of his first Iphigeneia to be a personal truth: he forged his play anew, so that we now have a Nordic and a southern Iphigeneia. Any consideration of the Nordic Iphigeneia must treat of it in terms of declamatory art, where it is preeminently the vowels that hold sway and that give form in the sounding of speech. In the Roman Iphigeneia recitation must predominate: what is relevant here is the plastically formed presentation of experience in a speech-formation comparable to the presentation in Raphael’s work. In two short passages we shall now compare the two versions of Iphigeneia and have before us what goes on in a poet when he really lives in aesthetic form and has to recreate his artistic forms out of inner necessity. Recitation and declamation must strive to follow poetry such as this. In the first instance, therefore, we will present the Gothic-German Iphigeneia as Goethe originally conceived it – the Weimar Iphigeneia. [Note 21] [Blake’s earlier poetry was strongly influenced by Romantic interest in northern “Bardic” verse, and something of its powerful declamatory nature can still be felt in this “Introduction” to Songs of Experience:
And now Goethe wished to introduce into these verses something fundamentally alien to the north. These verses express what I have just claimed as emerging straight from the whole mood living in Goethe. It can be said, of course, that anyone who does not enter into the genuinely aesthetic will lack the deep sense of necessity that Goethe felt in Italyof forging his favourite subject, Iphigeneia, anew. Not only was he subject in Italyto impressions of what he regarded as Greek art, but the sun there has a different effect. A differently coloured heaven arches over us, and the plants struggle up from the earth in a different way. All this made its mark on Goethe, and we can trace how in every line he is again compelled to rewrite and adapt the substance of his Iphigeneia to a quite different mood. It was Hermann Grimm who first showed a really sensitive understanding for these matters. In his lectures on Goethe he stressed the radical difference between the German and the Roman Iphigeneia, demonstrating how Goethe transformed what at first lived in the dimension of depth, so to speak – where there is a tendency to make the tone too full, too bright, or too dull, in order to achieve a spiritual expression of the literal prose content; he showed how Goethe transformed this into something that lives in the plane of speech, as it were, in the metre, and how he tried to introduce into his Iphigeneia the symmetry he believed himself to have found in Greek art. In order to characterise what Goethe experienced in artistic speech, therefore, it becomes necessary to work from the declamatory into the recitative when producing his Roman Iphigeneia – the recitative which, as we have said, the Greeks brought to perfection. [Note 22] [To a much greater extent than Goethe, Blake consistently reworked his poetry into ever different forms as he matured and changed as a poet. By the time he came to write “Night the Ninth” of The Four Zoas he had extended his range to include a classically derived pastoral verse with a much more recitative quality. The visionary scene from the earlier “Introduction” appears again there – though after a more thorough metamorphosis than was the case with Goethe’s play. This is The Four Zoas ix, 386-409:
It may be that in the case of an artist like Goethe, we shall find what it is that flows over into form only if we can understand with full intensity how, when he himself spoke his Iphigeneia, tears would roll down his cheeks. Goethe found his way from the Dionysian – to use the Nietzschean expression – into the Apollonian, into metrical form. Because the Greeks in their soul-life stirred the will to this metrical formation, they achieved something in this Apollonian realm, and of this Nietzsche felt that here art is exalted above outer sense-reality. He felt that art could elevate us above the pessimism of a humanity confronting the tragic in the immediate reality of physical perception. What holds sway here as the inner, the essentially human – though conforming to measure and the Apollonian principle – this was what particularly attracted Goethe once he had entered this element, and induced him to attempt the creation of something in Greek metre, in an inwardly recitative-declamatory style rather than his former purely declamatory one. We will now give an example, from Goethe’s “Achilleis”, of the aesthetic form that Goethe conceived after he had sunk himself in the metrical, inwardly recitative style of the Greeks. [Note 23] [In their attempts to recapture the feeling of the original Greek some translators have been driven to adopt a hexameter verse, as in this rendering of Odyssey VI, 85ff:
With such poetry Goethe tried to find his way back to Hellenism. He believed himself, as he felt at a certain period of his life, nearer to the original source of poetry than he could ever have been had he not gone back to the Greeks. We have to look at Goethe’s instinctive artistic life, when he sought Greek metre and what the Greeks had formed plastically in inner recitation. As with the other art-forms, true poetry was to be sought where the fountain-head of art sprang more abundantly – in primitive humanity, in unaccommodated man and his inner experience, not yet shrouded by the thick veil of materialistic civilisation. In Greek, we can observe the measured flow of the hexameter; we observe how the dactyls are formed. What do we really have in this verse-measure? Now we must remember, speaking more theoretically, how something lives in man which strives inwardly toward a certain rhythm or harmony of rhythms. Let us take, on the one hand, the breathing-rhythm: in a normal person of average age, about 18 breaths per minute; while in the same space of time we have 72 pulse-beats, four beats coinciding with each breath. This is an inner harmonising of rhythms in human nature. Let us picture the four pulse-beats taking place in each breath and consider their ratio, their harmony with the breath. Let us bring the first two pulse-beats together into one long syllable, and the remaining two pulsebeats into two short syllables. We then have the verse-measure underlying the hexameter. We can also produce the hexameter for ourselves by examining the harmony of the four and the one: the first three feet and, as the fourth, the caesura – all being related to the one breath. What is formed in this way we derive from man’s own being: we create out of man’s being, embodying in speech an expression of human rhythms. Now the fourfold rhythm of the blood can, of course, struggle with the unitary breathing-rhythm, separating and reuniting as they strive toward harmony. They separate in this or that direction, and then flow together again. In this way are revealed the several forms of verse and prosody. But each time it is an overflowing of what lives in man himself into speech. In the formation of Greek metres man unfolds his own being; something of man’s most intimate morphology comes to his lips and forms itself into speech. Here then lies the mystery: the Greeks strove for vocal expression of the most intimate, even organic life of man’s rhythmic system. Goethe felt this. The Greeks by their very nature (and let us not misunderstand this) were striving after thought. Not for mere abstract thought, but something that led them away, through thought, into concrete speech-formation – the pictorial that is active in man. For what occurs in man through the confluence of the blood- and breathing-rhythms is transmitted to the brain and transformed into thought-content. The process is even vaguely recognisable in prose. This is really thought that has been stripped of everything that lay hidden in Greek recitative metre. The Greeks spoke of the music of Apollo’s lyre, meaning man himself as a work of art: a rhythmic being in the harmony of his breathing- and blood-rhythms. Here are uttered unfathomable cosmic mysteries which tell us more than any prose language can. Into all this sounds the will. As we turn to the north we meet once more with the declamatory. The general inclination of Nordic language, Nordic speech-formation, is to make the will predominant. It is mainly breathing which lives in Greek rhythm (being closer to thought than the blood-circulation), but the experience of blood-circulation was rightly regarded by ancient spiritual researchers as the immediate expression of human personality, the human ego. And this is what lives in the Nordic treatment of speech. Here we see how the blood-rhythm strikes in and the breathing rhythm recedes. We see in addition how the blood-rhythm is connected with the mobility of the entire man. Looking back, we see how in the Nibelungenlied Nordic man could sense the wave-beat of his blood, instigated by a will-impulse and then subsiding into thought: in this way alliteration comes into being. We begin with a will-impulse, which then strikes up against the form, like a wave building up and then subsiding again into the repose of rhythm. This was felt as something constituting the whole man. Whereas the Greeks wanted to penetrate inwards into the breathing-system, Nordic man was inclined towards depth of personality and the life of the blood-rhythm. Nordic-Germanic poetry is spiritualised human blood. Here the will lives and gives itself form. We must imagine the will-working of Wotan, moving on waves of air or welling up in man as blood and forming the human personality. [Note 24] The primal element of will, the human being as a whole, finds expression in Nordic-Germanic poetry. We can see this welling-up and surging in the epic Nibelungenlied. And even in more recent times, Wilhelm Jordan has tried to imitate the alliterative style, such as lived in Nordic declamation, and has tried in the speech-formation of his own epic to restore to life the things I have described. What lives in Jordan’s Nibelunge, therefore, we must not simply declaim by extracting and stressing the prose content. Rather, there must sound forth that wave-motion drawn from the inner nature of man. In Wilhelm Jordan’s alliteration, these Wotan-waves must sound forth as they did when he himself recited them. This he actually did; those who were still able to hear him will know how he tried, through a declamatory verse-technique, to draw out what is latent in alliteration. We shall conclude by giving an example from the beginning of the Nibelungenlied, where the Nordic element (as opposed to Greek metre) is in evidence. This will strike a contrast to what Goethe, particularly in his later years, received from Greek culture. From there he derived the finest quality that lived in him, while yet wishing to unite it, together with the Nordic, into a single whole. And finally, a short passage of alliterative verse from Wilhelm Jordan’s Nibelunge – his attempt at a re-creation of ancient German poetry.
[Langland’s Piers Plowman is among the masterpieces of the English “Alliterative Revival” of the fourteenth century. This extract is from the C-text version, Passus IX, 152-191:
[In the absence of any modern English attempt to restore alliteration in its full-blooded form, there may be a certain interest here in the following piece. The chiming effect of the alliterations serves in this instance rather to embellish and lend spice to the recitative flow of the verse, not aspiring to become the ordering principle of the poem:
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100. The Gospel of St. John (Basle): Lecture VI
21 Nov 1907, Basel Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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In the sixth age Christianity will unite humanity into a great bond of brotherhood, and Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy must be looked upon an the messenger of this coming age, for it is preparing the way for the spiritualising of humanity. |
The individual can do but little towards his own health, for he is part of the whole body of humanity and draws the substances for his maintenance from the source that is common to all men: One who sees into the laws of human evolution must observe with a bleeding heart how the individual suffers, and how his suffering is but the expression of the spiritual and mental aberration of the whole of humanity. It is the task of Anthroposophy not so much to help the individual but, rather, to give to the whole of humanity the upward swing into the spiritual, and thereby to work for the bodily health of humanity. |
100. The Gospel of St. John (Basle): Lecture VI
21 Nov 1907, Basel Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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One of the most significant mysteries in all occult schools, including that of Dionysius, is the Mystery of Number. None save those who can decipher the secret of Number can read an occult writing. There is always deep meaning behind it, wherever in religious documents numbers are mentioned. In the School of Pythagoras, also the Mystery of Number played an important part. Although it is true that the letter killeth, one must, nevertheless in explaining occult writings, attach a certain value to the letter, otherwise there is danger of explaining into the writing the spirit one wants to have in it. In St. John's Gospel we find various numbers which have a secret significance. In our last lecture we spoke of the three women who stood by the cross; the virgin mother Sophia, Mary, and Mary Magdalene. We will now consider another secret of number. In the course of His conversation with the woman of Samaria, Christ Jesus said to her: “Thou hast has five husbands; and he whom thou now has is not thy husband.” (John 4:18) And again, in the story of the healing of the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years, the five occurs: the pool of Bethesda had five porches. (John 5:2) We will now look somewhat more closely into the significance of this mystical number five. Let us consider the human being in connection with the evolution of humanity. As we saw in yesterday's lecture, man consists of nine parts, which may, from another point of view, be reduced to seven. These several principles of man gradually unfold in the course of the evolution of man. They are not all developed in the average man of the present day; he has only developed as far as to the Spiritual Soul. The Spirit Self is only just beginning to unfold. Let us go back to the period in human evolution when man learned to say “I” consciously to himself. Before that period there was the old Atlantean epoch, when men still possessed the old dim clairvoyant forces. In the parts of Atlantis corresponding to present-day Ireland there lived a people which had so progressed in evolution that the etheric head and the physical head coincided. This people was at that time the most advanced, and it was destined to become the bearer of the evolution of the future. A very advanced Being led this group towards the East, through present-day Russia to Central Asia, to the region of the present desert of Gobi. There a colony was founded, and from this centre colonists were sent forth in various directions who spread the culture fostered in this centre. This took place about the time when Atlantis was being gradually submerged; present-day Africa and Europe gradually emerged out of the waves. Another group of Atlanteans travelled towards the West and formed the original population of present-day America, where they were found by the Europeans when America was rediscovered. Another group wandered to the north of Europe. All these groups preserved their clairvoyant remembrances in old sagas, myths and legends. When these sagas and myths are rightly understood they throw light upon much that is still dark in the history of humanity. But we must not go to work pedantically in explaining these sagas and myths; we must know how clairvoyant experiences and the power of phantasy co-operated in a complicated manner to produce these old legends. During the period when the Ego first shone out in the personality, man lived to a much higher degree in his environment than he did later. He perceived the outlines of the objects and beings around him less clearly than he did their inner qualities and their attitude towards him,—whether they were useful or harmful, friendly or hostile. The more the ego became enclosed within the human personality the more did the clairvoyant capacities diminish while the forms in the outer world, appeared more and more clearly before the physical eyes. If we picture this fact clearly, we can easily comprehend that the entrance of the Ego produced a mighty change. Previously man had not seen his own body; he now began to describe it as his Ego. Towards the end of the Atlantean Epoch Atlantis was a land of cloud, it was covered with dense volumes of mist. There were no alternating periods or rain and sunshine, and there was no phenomenon such as the rainbow; this could only appear after the Atlantean Epoch, when the masses of mist dispersed. This event has remained alive in the folk consciousness as the legend of Wotan, who journeys over the bridge with his he-goats, and in the story of Noah and the Ark. The memory of the land of mist has been preserved in the northern name, Niffelheim, Nobelheim—home of cloud. And the northern peoples have also preserved the memory of the coming of the Ego into the human personality in the Saga of the Niebelungen. In that saga the Ego is represented by the symbol of gold. The gold was once dissolved in the water; then it condensed into the ring, the treasure of the Nibelungen. The Ego, which had hitherto been distributed over the whole world, condensed into the firm human form. In Wagner's version of this legend we can see very clearly the unconscious perception of the creative artist. Wagner was not fully conscious of what he created in his work, an unconscious knowledge guided him. For example, Wagner may have characterised the Ego awakened to consciousness, by the organ notes which sound throughout the whole overture of the opera, “Rheingold.” Over in the Far East the first post-Atlantean civilisation arose, a civilisation to which the ancient Vedas still bear witness. The first impulse for this civilisation was given towards the south in the old Indian Civilisation. The reports of this fact are preserved in the old Indian legends and in the religious records, and they can be read by one who is clairvoyant. Many statements that are apparently contradictory prove to contain the deepest truth. The men of this civilisation had preserved clear remembrances of the former old clairvoyance, and they still longed for it, for they looked upon it as a valuable possession which they had lost. They were still so filled with the reality of the spiritual world that they looked upon the physical as maya, illusion. Hence they sought to regain this lost treasure by turning away their gaze from all that is earthly and continually directing it to the spiritual. This is the origin of the Yoga exercises, which seek to lead the pupil into the spiritual world by diminishing the consciousness. They desired to return to the old dreamy state; they sought the path which would lead them back into the Paradise they had lost. Throughout the whole of the Atlantean Epoch man had only perceived the outer world in dim, unclear outlines; the Atlantean lived chiefly in the spiritual world. To the spiritual investigator the whole of the post-Atlantean Epoch signifies but a gradual conquest of the physical plane. The men of the first post-Atlantean civilisation, the Indian had little feeling for what was outside in physical nature; for the Initiates it was an absolute illusion, and they strove to get away from it and reach the only reality, the spiritual world. The second was the old Persian civilisation. The Persian was already closer to the outer world than was thg Indian. He learned to distinguish especially between good and evil, represented by the Gods Ormuzd and Ahriman; he strove to unite himself with the former in order to combat the latter. The Earth was for him a place for work, in order to embody the Spirit in physical existence. The third age of civilisation was the Egyptian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Babylonian, and here, again, man made a further step forward in the conquest of the physical plane. To the Persians the world was physically an undifferentiated field for work; in the Egyptian civilisation man began to apply his knowledge and make it useful. He applied his knowledge of Geometry and divided the land; he directed his gaze to the stars, and laid the foundations of Astronomy. The fourth was the Graeco-Latin age of civilisation. Hitherto man had occupied himself in applying his science to the things of the outer world; he now began to embody his own inner being, his specifically human nature, in matter. His own form reappeared in his works of art, and in his epics and dramas he described his own psychic qualities. The Romans developed the idea of citizenship, and so the State and Jurisprudence arose. In the fifth age of civilisation, in which we are now living, man has gone still further in the mastery of the outer world. In our age the Spirit has descended most deeply into matter. This descent had to come if humanity was to progress; only when the Spirit has descended fully into matter can its reascent begin. In our age we have a great development of science, and with its aid we can control the various forces of nature. In ancient times, when men ground their corn in a most primitive way between two stones, they did not need to expend much mental power to satisfy their simple needs, but things are quite different now. Think of the immense expenditure of mental effort necessary to satisfy the material needs of the modern man. We have locomotives, steamships, telephones, electric light. An immense amount of mental power has been embodied in matter in these things, but the spiritual interests of men here pass entirely into the background. Thus we see that the whole development of humanity in the post-Atlantean Epoch has signified a descent of the human spirit into matter. But the purpose of this descent is the conquest of matter, this great opponent of the Spirit; for after the deepest descent, an ascent to conscious, spiritual life must now begin. The course of human history in the post-Atlantean Epoch may be represented by the curved line in the following diagram.
It is the power of Christianity which is to bring about the ascent. The Star of Christianity appeared in the fourth age of civilization, long before the deepest point in the descending curve had been reached. Christ Jesus appeared as the great Personality Who brought to humanity the power which would enable it later to rise to the Spirit. All the former ages of civilisation can also be looked upon as a preparation for Christianity. In the fifth age of civilisation Christianity has to withstand the severest testing, for materialistic thought darkens and hides the spiritual truths of Christianity. In the sixth age Christianity will unite humanity into a great bond of brotherhood, and Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy must be looked upon an the messenger of this coming age, for it is preparing the way for the spiritualising of humanity. The teachings given to mankind in Christianity are so profound, so full of wisdom, that no religion of the future will be able to displace or supplant Christianity. It will be possible for Christianity to adapt itself to all the forms of civilisation in the future. We must now study another side of the evolution of humanity. The physical body underwent a special development in the Atlantean Epoch, and when Atlantis was submerged beneath the waves man possessed approximately the same form he now has. Then began the development of the more spiritual principles. In the Indian Age the etheric body was especially developed. In that first age of civilisation the Indians were very receptive to the spiritual life, and this was connected with a special development of the etheric body. We may remark that our present European civilisation is very different from the present Indian and also from the old Indian, and so it is comprehensible that the paths to be followed by the Indian and the European to the spiritual life must be different. The Yoga exercises that are suited to the Indian and helpful to him are unsuitable for the European. The methods of initiation arranged by the Masters are carefully adapted to the stage of development reached by humanity at a particular time, for a method which is excellent at a certain stage, may be positively harmful at another stage. It is not without reason that various religions have appeared in the course of time; although there is a kernel of truth that is common to them all, the various expressions of this truth are conditioned by the differences in the several ages of civilisation. A tree is, from root to flower, a complete whole, and yet the root requires a different food from that needed by the leaves and flowers; so also the humanity of the various ages of civilisation requires a different religion and method of initiation. In the Persian civilisation the astral body was specially developed. In the Egyptian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Babylonian civilisation the Sentient Soul was developed; in the Graeco-Latin civilisation the Intellectual Soul, and in our own age the Spiritual Soul. In the sixth age the Spirit Self, as yet is only in a germinal condition, will be developed. It needs the mighty power of the Christ Spirit to enable this germ to develop, and true Christianity will only be there when the Spirit Self has been developed. Then humanity prepares itself to receive the Life Spirit. At first but a number of human beings will unfold this force within them; they will, however achieve a wonderful spiritual life. Christianity is now only at the beginning of its development; those who are now preparing to develop the Spirit Self within them will in the next age make this deeper and more spiritual Christianity more and more accessible to humanity. We see how in the third age, a relatively small body of people, the Hebrews, prepared the conditions which made the appearance of Christ possible; how in the fourth age the power of Christ penetrated into the physical; how in the fifth age humanity sank most deeply into the physical world; now, after humanity has gained the mastery over this physical world, it will gain a still greater power and capacity in the sixth age to receive into itself the spiritual life which the Christ Spirit has brought. Christ appears as the firstborn, the man who is far ahead of his time, who has already reached the stage which the rest of humanity will only reach in the sixth age. The fifth is the most material age in the evolution of humanity. The Spiritual feelings form the basis of the conditions of the body, and a constitutional disease is the expression of some spiritual aberration. Leprosy, the terrible disease of the Middle Ages, was an expression in the physical of the fear of the Huns which possessed the people of Europe at that time. The Huns were decadent descendants of the Atlanteans. Their physical bodies were still healthy, but their astral bodies were already infected with the substances of decay. Fear and terror form an excellent fostering soil for the decaying substances of the astral plane, hence these decaying substances living in the degenerated descendants of the Atlantean peoples could take root in the astral bodies of the European peoples and from thence they produced leprosy in the physical bodies of later generations. Everything appears first of all in a spiritual way, and then it expresses itself later in the physical body. The nervousness of the people of the present day is the result of the materialistic frame of mind in our age. The wise Leaders of humanity know that if the high tide of materialism were to continue, great epidemics of nervous diseases would break out, and children would be born with quivering limbs. The Anthroposophical Movement was brought into the world to rescue humanity from the dangers of materialism. One who spreads materialistic thought and feeling among the people is preparing the way for these devastating diseases; and one who combats materialism is fighting for the health of the people In the sixth and seventh ages of civilisation the Spirit Self and the Life Spirit will develop through the power of Christ in those who rely upon Him, and at the same time these will gain healthy thought and feeling. Christianity brings health and healing, for the life force of Christ conquers all disease and death. The human body as a solid body has developed out of liquid substances. The five porches or halls which surround the pool of Bethesda signify the five ages which man has used to penetrate more and more deeply into the body, and in the end he has succumbed entirely to matter. Only after he has passed through these five ages can man be healed. One who has entered into these five halls cannot be healed unless the great Healer, the Christ, approaches him; but when this happens, there takes place what is described in the fifth chapter of St. John's Gospel. Thus the story of the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years is a prophetic announcement of what will take place in the sixth age, when man will no longer need any remedies, because he will be his own healer. At the beginning of the Post-Atlantean Epoch the power of blood relationship was still very strong. When Christ said: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple,”—these words refer to a stage of human evolution that will be reached in the sixth age. One common Spirit of humanity well then rule, in place of the nation and race spirits. Man will then no longer be the son of his tribe or nation, but the son of humanity, the “son of Man.” Here, again, Christ was the first to bear this name with right (John 3:13-14). He conducted Himself already at that time as men will conduct themselves when they are sons of Man. This is expressed by Christ going to the Samaritan woman, to one who had nothing to do with the Jews. The element in man which makes his development possible is feminine (passive), as compared with the Spirit, which represents the fertilising, the male (active) principle. The result of this continuous activity of the male element upon the feminine principle is first of all the unfolding of the etheric body, then the astral body, the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the spiritual soul. The Spirit Self then develops in the spiritual soul. This is indicated in Christ's conversation with the Samaritan woman in the words: “Thou has had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly.” (John 4:18.) The five husbands which the woman has had, are the five higher principles, which work upon the physical, and the sixth, the Spirit Self is no longer the husband in the old sense. The other five are lower passing stages of evolution, whereas the sixth, the Spirit Self, represents the Divine and Eternal. Thus, in His conversation with the Samaritan woman, we also see an announcement of the coming age by Christ Jesus. While the five principles need to be purified from outside, the Spirit Self will keep man himself pure. The body of Christ is already filled with purity. He will also purify humanity; for this reason He approaches and purifies the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the body of man, from the lower principles attaching to him, and makes him capable of receiving the Spirit. The explanations here given must not give rise to the idea that the descriptions in St. John's Gospel are to be looked upon as symbols only. In ancient times names were not given arbitrarily, they were strictly adapted to the person's character. It is true that the three women who stood by the cross of Jesus represented the three souls, the sentient soul the intellectual soul and the spiritual soul; but it is also true that these three persons stood there in the body at the foot of the cross. When we read St. John's. Gospel we look at the symbolical pictures of what will be realised on this Earth in the next age of civilisation; but we also see what actually took place at the beginning of our era. All the historical facts are presented by the wise powers that are guiding humanity as symbols of the future evolution of humanity. |
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: The Philosophy of Psychoanalysis as Illuminated by an Anthroposophical Understanding of the Human Being
16 Sep 1915, Dornach Tr. Catherine E. Creeger Rudolf Steiner |
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We must finally realize that we have to take anthroposophy seriously and give it the respect it deserves. That is, we must not incorporate previous subjective habits into things belonging to our spiritual scientific philosophy, but must rather let ourselves be guided by what that philosophy requires. |
It is really important for us to conduct the practical affairs of anthroposophy with the conscientious exactitude I just mentioned. We have seen an example of how we as members of a spiritual scientific society interact on an ordinary everyday basis; this example, although very mundane, is nonetheless indicative of what spiritual science requires of us. |
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: The Philosophy of Psychoanalysis as Illuminated by an Anthroposophical Understanding of the Human Being
16 Sep 1915, Dornach Tr. Catherine E. Creeger Rudolf Steiner |
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TODAY I am simply going to add to what we talked about yesterday, and if possible, I would like to take up a new topic tomorrow. In the fourth lecture in this series, I stressed that finding the right perspective is essential to understanding any subject, whether it is the world in general, an individual human being, social interactions, or any series of interrelated facts. The belief that the truth can be arrived at by proceeding to draw logical conclusions from some arbitrary point of departure is the source of a great many errors. If we really want to understand something, the first thing we have to do is to work out the right point of view from which to approach it. We must realize that finding the right perspective is essential to any studying we do; attempting to understand a subject by approaching it from an arbitrary starting point actually causes a lot of mistakes.
However, if people who are aware of the principle of first discovering the right perspective became acquainted with the psychoanalytic theory's point of departure and proceeded from there, the results would be quite different. They might incorporate certain materialistic affectations into psychoanalytic theory to begin with, but they would soon be forced to adopt purer and nobler means of understanding simply through having made the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. They would realize that dragging in points of view of the sort we mentioned before is not objective but a sign of arbitrary emotions belonging to subjective human nature. The most significant aspect of any true study is that it tends to lead us far beyond our original point of departure. Rather than incorporating our own subjective impulses into the subject, we are guided and spurred on by the subject itself. Eventually, every true student becomes aware of how truly necessary this principle is. It is indispensable in making any spiritual scientific world view into a reality and equally indispensable to the structure of a society in which such a world view is to be fostered. We must finally realize that we have to take anthroposophy seriously and give it the respect it deserves. That is, we must not incorporate previous subjective habits into things belonging to our spiritual scientific philosophy, but must rather let ourselves be guided by what that philosophy requires. For example, in everyday life someone may be in the habit of always arriving late instead of at the specified time. In ordinary bourgeois life, that habit may be merely unpleasant or less than advantageous for that person's advancement, but in our anthroposophical movement, the whole way we deal with spiritual scientific truths ought to make that kind of behavior an inner impossibility except in cases of dire necessity. In the past few days, we have talked a lot about dignity—not only the essential dignity of spiritual science itself, but also the dignity of our own interactions within the Society. We saw how important it is for us to spend time together as members among ourselves, with no one else present. Of course, making sure we arrive on time is a superficial thing, but in the past few days people have still been coming late, even though the lectures started at twenty past six. If we carry on like that, my friends, we will never even be able to begin to realize the ideal of our Society. In the somewhat attenuated circumstances that come about when we cannot be sure that members will not continue to arrive once we have begun, we will never be able to rule out the possibility of having uninvited guests in our midst. It is simply inconsiderate to come late to a Society function when the Society needs to make sure that everyone present is actually a member; that is, when some of us have to go to the extra effort of keeping an eye on the people entering until all members are present. When the people standing at the door have come in, we need to be able to shut the doors and know that everyone is here. It should certainly not be necessary to make a special point of talking about things like this, but in spiritual science we have to be guided by the concept of symptomatology, which simply means that any being tends to act the same way in important instances as it does in less significant ones. People who don't even manage to arrive on time for meetings will also not be able to act out of the requisite sense of responsibility when it comes to something important. A great deal of the damage that has become so blatantly evident lately has come about because people were not particular enough about certain things. It is really important for us to conduct the practical affairs of anthroposophy with the conscientious exactitude I just mentioned. We have seen an example of how we as members of a spiritual scientific society interact on an ordinary everyday basis; this example, although very mundane, is nonetheless indicative of what spiritual science requires of us. In our efforts to find the right perspective on what we have spoken about aphoristically so many times in the past few days, the main thing we have to keep in mind is that the structure and organization of the world as a whole consists of expressions and revelations of real spiritual entities. They are present behind the revealed world, which conceals them from our perception. As you know from many previous lectures, these beings are constantly in movement, constantly inwardly active. At the moment, I am not talking about any particular movement, but about their inner activity as a whole. We have to imagine a certain degree of complexity in this movement if we want to understand how the beings that stand behind certain phenomena relate to the phenomena themselves. The following example will be familiar to you from previous anthroposophical lectures. We know that our physical evolution began during the ancient Saturn period and that it continued during the Sun period, when etheric development set in, and so on. But what does our physical development on ancient Saturn mean in relation to the structure of the cosmos as a whole? It would be totally inaccurate to take our physical nature as it is now and assume that if we imagine it in a much more primitive and simplified form, that's what the physical human being would have looked like during the Saturn stage. Nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps it will help you understand this if I tell you that there is absolutely nothing in the present-day physical world, nothing on the physical plane as it exists now, that bears the slightest resemblance to human physical existence during the Saturn stage of evolution. In none of the forms and facts of the physical world as we know it now is there any trace of what human physical development was like during that evolutionary period. So if we want to understand this ancient form of our physical existence, we must make the effort to do so with a soul and spirit freed from the physical and etheric bodies. I will call the world in which we understand the makeup of our earliest potential for physical existence during the Saturn stage [writes on the chalkboard] the world of the perception of physical human nature on Saturn. For the time being, let me just say that we must leave the physical body and undergo a higher form of development in order to achieve an understanding of structures corresponding to physical human nature during the Saturn stage. Next, let us consider human physical existence during the Sun period, which represents a progression of physical evolution from the Saturn stage. It is impossible to understand our physical Sun nature with our present-day physical organs of perception. Once again, we must ascend into the spiritual world, but not as high as the level required for comprehending human physical nature during the Saturn period. In other words, we are able to investigate our physical Sun nature at a somewhat lower level. We can call this [writes on the board] the world of the perception of physical human nature on the Sun. For investigating physical human nature as it evolved during the Moon period, a still less elevated level of perception is required. As soon as we become capable of body-free perception, we are able to comprehend everything that corresponds to our physical Moon nature. Let us call this third stage in the relationship of the human being to objective fact [writes on the board] the world of the perception of physical human nature on the Moon. Continuing in the same vein, we come to our physical nature during the Earth stage of evolution. In order to understand this, we do not even need to leave the physical body; we can grasp it with our physical organs of perception. This level of cognition is the natural one for human beings during life on Earth, and we can call it [writes on the board] the world of the perception of physical human nature on Earth. So, my friends, we have looked at four different levels of the worlds of perception, levels that can also be called [writes on the board] physical plane, soul world or astral plane, spirit world or Devachan plane, and higher spirit world or higher Devachan plane. If you follow what I have been describing, you will know that we have to place the physical human being of the Saturn stage here, the physical Sun-human here, the Moon-human here, and the earthly physical human being here [small circles]. This in no way contradicts our usual concepts, but is indicated quite clearly in my book An Outline Of Occult Science, where I described at length how what we recognize as human physical nature at the Moon stage is not to be observed on the physical plane, but at a higher level, and so forth. [ Note 1 ] It's all explained there very clearly. Today we know that human beings have descended during the course of their physical evolution [line connecting the small circles]. The human being, to the extent that we are speaking of our present-day physical nature, is a descending spiritual being. This is one of the basic ancient principles of any spiritual science. Thus, when considering our physical body, we must realize that everything we can see of it at this Earth stage in evolution is that aspect of ourselves that has descended the furthest. However, there is also something concealed in the physical body. It conceals something that is actually Moon-like in nature, something more hidden that is Sun-like in nature, and something still more deeply hidden that is Saturn-like in nature. Thus, within the revealed physical body, inner character and inner essentiality are concealed. In a sense, we can actually perceive only a quarter of our physical body. The other three quarters are concealed behind the perceptible body and are nobler and more spiritual in nature than the aspect visible on the physical plane. Looking at any part of our physical body as it exists now on the physical plane, we have to realize that all our physical organs are in constant inner movement; they are constantly descending and evolving from the spiritual toward the physical. We must understand that as they are growing and developing into their proper form on the physical plane, all our organs are involved in a descending course of evolution. They are in the process of evolving downward from a more spiritual form of existence to a more material one. In assessing the nature and character of anything belonging to a human being, we must be guided by the rule of always finding the right point of view. We are led to the right perspective when we realize that from a certain point of view—the one I have been discussing today—physical human nature is in a process of descent. Therefore, when we look at human development from childhood to maturity, the childhood stage of evolution must be regarded as more spiritual and the mature stage as more material, since a descent from the spiritual to the material has taken place in between. We will not understand human physical development if we look at it from any other point of view. It is only possible to understand it if we are aware that a descent of the physical human being takes place during growth and development, that a growing human being allows something spiritual to descend deeper into matter. The same principle applies to the world as a whole. Thus, we also speak of cultural evolution. For instance, once upon a time there was an ancient Indian cultural epoch that evolved into the ancient Persian epoch, then into the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian epoch, then into the Greco-Latin epoch, and finally into our own cultural epoch. However, we also know that former cultural epochs continue to exist alongside more recent ones. I have showed you how this manifests in language. Applied to the human being, this can show us how physical organs that have proceeded further along the course of descent can exist side-by-side with others that are still at earlier stages. We will gradually come to see that according to this principle, we can distinguish two systems of organs within the human being, although for today, I will only point this out aphoristically. Let us first consider our senses and all the organs that allow us to have sensory perceptions. In terms of their physical structure, these sense organs are all at a certain level; the spiritual has streamed downward to a certain level in these organs. I'll make you a diagram of that [sketches on the board]. Now, we said that human nature in its entirety consists of a downward flow; it is moving in this direction [arrow]. The upper horizontal mark indicates the position of the senses within this downward flow, so we must think of all the organs of sensory perception as being at level A. Next, let's look at a different system of organs, for instance the respiratory system. In order to consider this, too, from the right point of view, we must find the level to which it has descended. Eventually, we will find that the respiratory system stopped at level B. While our sensory system descended to level A, our respiratory system continued to descend until it reached level B. As you might imagine, this process of descent can go on still further, so there could even be a system of organs that has descended still further, to level C. And in fact, our sexual organs have done just that. Eventually, our physical evolution reached its lowest point and a gradual re-ascent began. However, we will not be able to talk about that today. I will indicate the lowest point of descent with this curved shape at the bottom of the diagram. This is where the earthly process of descent stopped. You can tell from all this that our sensory organs are much more spiritualized than our respiratory organs and everything else. And, as we will come to understand ever more clearly, our sexual organs represent the lowest level of descent. Therefore, all other components of our physical human nature are more spiritual than that particular system of organs. That was easy enough to understand, wasn't it? However, the point I want to make is that psychoanalytic theory, that disgusting philosophy, has been incapable of becoming aware of this simple fact. Psychoanalysts claim that all of people's actions, including mystical experiences, are nothing more than transformed sexual energies. Psychoanalysts, or we might even say materialists in general, take sexuality as their starting point and explain all other human phenomena as metamorphoses of sexuality. I have already pointed out how in Freud's theory everything that happens in a person's life is explained in terms of transformed sexuality. For example, that babies suck on pacifiers is explained as an expression of infantile sexuality, and so forth. But what is the truth of the matter? In reality, my friends, any other human daily activity is more spiritual than sexual activity, and to arrive at the right perspective on this subject, we have to look at things the other way around. Any attempt to explain what people do by dragging in sexuality and eroticism is completely wrong. The right way of looking at things is to explain sexuality as the transformation of higher human activities into their lowest earthly form. Since I have been forced to mention the ghastly claims of the psychoanalysts because they are an unavoidable phenomenon of our times, let us take a look at one of the worst of them, namely their contention that the loving childhood relationship of a boy to his mother or a girl to her father is actually a sexual relationship. Psychoanalysts claim that a girl's feelings for her father and a boy's for his mother are sexual feelings, and that boys always view their father as a rival and are unconsciously jealous of him; girls, so they say, are similarly jealous of their mother. This is one of the most terrible of the distortions psychoanalysts have perpetrated. In their writings, as you know, they have even used this assumption as the basis for explaining certain literary works such as the story of Oedipus. [ Note 2 ] In looking for the right perspective on this subject, we need to ask how adult sexuality develops. As we have seen, it comes about through something spiritual sinking down into matter. Our adult sexuality comes about through the descent of something that was spiritual when we were children. The correct approach is to avoid getting anything not specifically sexual mixed up with sexuality, either consciously or unconsciously, and to realize that sexuality is not yet present in children. Only when we are fully aware of all the ramifications of this can we find the right perspective on the matter. This is an extremely important point with regard to the education of children, because all kinds of things can go wrong if childish mischief is automatically interpreted as premature sexuality. All kinds of things other than sexuality can be the reason for children misbehaving. Claiming that there is already a sexual side to a child's character is just about the same as insisting that tomorrow's rainy weather is already inherent in today. By now you will have realized what we are dealing with here—the perspective that has been applied is totally upside down and backward. Coming to such a distorted perspective does not happen naturally, but only by forcing the issue and arbitrarily dragging in our instincts. The whole psychoanalytic approach is tinged with the lowest human instincts; it turns the world upside down. Such an interpretation of the mother-daughter or father-son relationship can only come about if the researcher's subjective instincts get mixed up with the objective course of the investigation. Consequently, in this instance (providing we go about it with all due exactitude), it is perfectly all right to apply expressions usually reserved for subjective human actions. While it would be foolish to apply subjective expressions to a legitimate and objective science, it is possible to do so in this case without relinquishing the objectivity of our point of view. Just imagine someone believes that the hands of a clock are turned by little demons sitting inside—we would call that foolish, of course. Clocks are mechanical devices; there are no little devils inside. Reacting to it objectively, however, we would never say that the person who attributes the clock's functioning to demons is insulting the clock. But when psychoanalysts attribute this sort of sexuality to children, instinctual subjectivity invades their theory. Then it is justified to use subjective expressions and say that the psychoanalytic theory insults human nature. We must make an effort to be truthful and call a spade a spade. In our materialistic world, a number of people have made it their task to cultivate a theory that demeans not only individuals, but human nature in general, to the extent that their whole scientific theory is nothing more than a compilation of insults. When a sufficient number of people realize that this is happening, we will start to see psychoanalytic theory for exactly what it's worth. Then we won't be merely peddling with words any more, but will be able to see things as they are. That's how we can come to clarity on this issue. Only after we have completely understood everything we have discussed today can our understanding be allowed to lead to name-calling. When we call psychoanalysis a smutty theory, that obviously really is name-calling; however, our insight into the objective fact of the matter is what compels us to call it by this name. After all, it would not be right for the criticism to come from the same kind of subjective instincts as the theory itself. The unique thing about spiritual science, however, is that an apparently abstract theory is transformed into justified feelings and reactions. Those who have gone through a real struggle to understand what psychoanalysis actually is can freely call it a smutty theory without losing their objectivity. It is as objective to call psychoanalysis a smutty theory as it is to say that canvas is white and charcoal black. It is objective terminology derived from true insight into human nature in its totality. The purpose of our spiritual scientific philosophy is to deepen our concepts, and not only our concepts but our whole character, my friends. If we say that a Society intended as the vehicle for this philosophy must be a living organism, then we must also be able to see how the emotions expressed within the context of the Society also develop out of this spiritual scientific philosophy, so that even a radical expression such as “smutty theory” can only be applied when it is firmly rooted in spiritual science and when no personal instincts play a part in its use. I am sure we will soon find an opportunity for further discussion of related matters. |
21. The Riddles of the Soul: The Physical and Spiritual Dependencies of Man's Being
Tr. William Lindemann Rudolf Steiner |
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To the seeing consciousness the spiritually real being underlying the soul and attainable to Inspiration is his own spiritual being, transcending birth and death. This is the region where anthroposophy undertakes its spiritual-scientific investigations into the question of human immortality. Just as in the body, through the rhythmic function, the mortal part of man's feeling nature manifests itself, so, in the content of Inspiration of seeing consciousness, does the immortal spiritual core of our soul being manifest. |
And it is in the realm that comes into consideration here that anthroposophy approaches the questions of repeated earth lives and of destiny. As the body lives itself out in nerve activity, rhythmical function, and metabolic processes, so the spirit of man lives in what manifests itself in Imaginations, Inspirations, and Intuitions. |
21. The Riddles of the Soul: The Physical and Spiritual Dependencies of Man's Being
Tr. William Lindemann Rudolf Steiner |
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[ 1 ] I would also like now to sketch out what I have discovered about the relations of the soul element to the physical-bodily element. I can indeed state that I am describing here the results of a thirty-year-long spiritual-scientific investigation. Only in recent years has it become possible for me to grasp the pertinent elements in thoughts expressible in words in such a way that I could bring what I was striving for to a provisional conclusion. I would also like to allow myself to present the results of my investigation in the form of indications only. It is fully possible to substantiate these results with the scientific means available today. This would be the subject of a lengthy book, which circumstances do not allow me to write at this time. [ 2 ] If one is seeking the relation of the soul element to the bodily element, one cannot base oneself upon Brentano's division of our soul experiences—described on page 69ff. of this book—into mental picturing, judging, and the phenomena of loving and hating. In the search for the pertinent relations, this division leads to such a skewing of the relevant circumstances that one cannot obtain results that accord with the facts. In an investigation like ours, one must take one's start from the division rejected by Brentano: into mental picturing,1 feeling, and willing. If one now draws together all of the soul element that is experienced as mental picturing, and seeks the bodily processes with which this soul element is related, one finds the appropriate connection by being able to link up, to a considerable extent, with the results of today's physiological psychology. The bodily counterparts of the soul element of mental picturing are to be found in the processes of the nervous system, with its extensions into the sense organs on the one hand and into the internal organization of the body on the other. No matter how much, from the anthroposophical viewpoint, one will have to think many things differently than modern science does, this science does provide an excellent foundation. This is not the case when one wishes to determine the bodily counterparts of feeling and willing. With respect to them one must first pave the right path within the realm of the findings of today's physiology. If one has achieved the right path, one finds that just as one must relate mental picturing to nerve activity, so one must also relate feeling to that life rhythm which is centered in the breathing activity and is connected with it. In doing so one must bear in mind that, for our purposes, one must follow the breathing rhythm, with all that is connected with it, right into the most peripheral parts of our organization. In order to achieve concrete results in this region, the results of physiological research must be pursued in a direction that is still quite unusual today. Only when one accomplishes this will all those contradictions disappear which result at first when feeling and the breathing rhythm are brought together. What at first inspires contradiction turns out, upon deeper study, to be a proof of this relation. Let us just take one example from the extensive region that must be explored here. The experience of music is based on feeling. The content of musical configurations, however, lives in our mental picturing,2 which is transmitted through the perceptions of hearing. Through what does the musical feeling experience arise? The mental picture of the tone configuration, which is based on the organ of hearing and on a nerve process, is not yet this musical experience. This latter arises through the fact that in the brain the breathing rhythm—in its extension up into this organ—encounters what is accomplished by the ear and nervous system. And the soul lives then not merely in what is heard and pictured; it lives in the breathing rhythm; it experiences what is released in the breathing rhythm through the fact that what is occurring in the nervous system strikes upon this rhythmical life, so to speak. One need only see the physiology of the breathing rhythm in the right light and one will arrive at a comprehensive recognition of the statement: The soul has feeling experiences by basing itself upon the breathing rhythm in the same way it bases itself, in mental picturing, upon nerve processes. And relative to willing one finds that it is based, in a similar way, upon metabolic processes. Here again, one must include in one's study all the pertinent ramifications and extensions of the metabolic processes within the entire organism. Just as, when something is mentally pictured, a nerve process occurs upon which the soul becomes conscious of its mental picturing, and just as, when something is felt, a modification of the breathing rhythm takes place through which a feeling arises in the soul: so, when something is willed, a metabolic process happens, which is the bodily foundation for what is experienced in the soul as willing. Now, in the soul a fully conscious, wakeful experience is present only with respect to the mental picturing mediated by our nervous system. What is mediated by the breathing rhythm lives in ordinary consciousness with about the same intensity as dream pictures. To this belongs everything of a feeling nature: all emotions, passions, and so on. Our willing, which is based on metabolic processes, is experienced in a degree of consciousness no higher than that present in the completely dim consciousness of our sleeping state. A more detailed study of the pertinent facts will show that we experience our willing in a completely different way than our mental picturing. We experience the latter the way one sees a colored surface, as it were; we experience willing as a kind of black area upon a colored field. We see something within the area where no color is, in fact, because, in contrast with its surroundings from which color impressions go forth, no such impressions come to meet us: We can picture willing mentally because, within the soul's experiences of mental pictures, at certain places, a non-picturing inserts itself that places itself into our fully conscious experience the same way, in sleep, interruptions of consciousness place themselves into the conscious course of life. The manifoldness in our soul experience—in mental picturing, feeling, and willing—results from these different kinds of conscious experience. In his book Guidelines of Physiological Psychology, Theodor Ziehen is led to significant characterizations of feeling and willing. In many ways, this book is a prime example of today's natural-scientific way of regarding the connection between the physical and the psychic elements in man. Mental picturing, in all its different forms, is brought into the same connection with the nervous system that the anthroposophical viewpoint also must recognize. About feeling, however, Ziehen says:
So this way of thinking ascribes to feeling no independence in our soul life; it sees in feeling only a trait of mental picturing. The result is that it regards not only our life in mental picturing but also our feeling life as being founded upon nerve processes. For it, the nervous system is that part of the body to which the whole soul element is assigned. But this way of thinking, after all, is based on the fact that unconsciously it has already thought up in advance what it wants its findings to be. It grants the status of "soul element" only to what is related to nerve processes, and therefore must regard what cannot be assigned to the nervous system—feeling—as having no independent existence, as being a mere attribute of mental picturing. Anyone who does not set off in the wrong direction with his concepts in this manner and is unbiased in his soul observations will recognize the independence of our feeling life in the most definite way; and secondly, the unbiased evaluation of physiological knowledge will give the insight that feeling must be assigned to the breathing rhythm in the way described above. The natural-scientific way of thinking denies to will any independent being within our soul life. Will does not even have the status—as feeling does—of being an attribute of mental picturing. But this denial is also based only on the fact that one wants to assign everything of a real soul nature to nerve processes. Now one cannot, however, relate willing in its own particular nature to actual nerve processes. Precisely when one works this through with exemplary clarity as Theodore Ziehen does, can one be impelled to the view that the analysis of soul processes in their relation to the life of the body “offers no cause to assume any separate will capacity.” And yet: unbiased observation of the soul compels one to recognize an independent life of will; and a realistic insight into physiological findings shows that willing as such must not be brought into relation to nerve processes but rather to metabolic processes. If one wishes to create clear concepts in this realm, one must view physiological and psychological findings in the light demanded by reality; but not in the way this occurs in today's physiology and psychology, where light is shed from preconceptions, definitions, and even in fact from theoretical sympathies and antipathies. Above all, we must take a hard look at the interrelations of nerve activity, breathing rhythm, and metabolic activity. For, these forms of activity do not lie side by side; they lie in one another; they interpenetrate; they go over into each other. MetaboUc activity is present in the entire organism; it permeates the organs of rhythm and of nerve activity. But it is not the bodily foundation of feeling in rhythm; in nerve activity, it is not the basis of mental picturing; rather in both of them, the working will that permeates rhythm and nerves is to be assigned to the metabolic activity. Only a materialistic bias can make a connection between what exists in the nerve as metabolic activity and mental picturing. A study rooted in reality says something completely different. It must recognize that metabolism is present in the nerve insofar as will permeates it. Likewise, metabolism is present in the bodily apparatus of rhythm. The metabolic activity in this apparatus has to do with the will present in this organ. One must connect willing with metabolic activity and feeling with rhythmical occurrences, no matter which organ it is in which metabolism or rhythm appears. In the nerves, however, something completely different from metabolism and rhythm is occurring. The bodily processes in the nervous system that provide the basis of mental picturing are difficult to grasp physiologically. For, where nerve activity occurs, there the mental picturing of ordinary consciousness is present. The reverse is also true, however: where mental picturing is not being done, there no nerve activity is ever to be found, but only metabolic activity in the nerve and a nuance of rhythmical function. Physiology will never arrive at concepts that are in accordance with reality in the study of the nerves as long as it does not understand that true nerve activity absolutely cannot be an object of physiological sense observation. Anatomy and physiology must arrive at the knowledge that they can discover nerve activity only through a method of exclusion. What is not sense-perceptible in the life of the nerve, but whose presence—and even its characteristic way of working—-is proved necessary by what is sense-perceptible: that is nerve activity. One arrives at a positive picture of nerve activity if one looks into that material happening by which the purely soul-spiritual being of a living content of our mental picturing—as described in the first essay of this book—is lamed down into the lifeless mental picturing of ordinary consciousness. Without this concept, which one must introduce into physiology, there is no possibility in that science of stating what nerve activity is. Physiology has developed methods for itself that at present conceal rather than reveal this concept. And even psychology has blocked its own path in this region. Just look, for example, at how Herbartian psychology has worked in this direction. It has turned its gaze only upon the life of our mental picturing, and sees in feeling and willing only effects of our life in mental picturing. But these effects melt away before the approach of knowledge, if at the same time one does not direct one's gaze in an unbiased way upon the reality of feeling and willing. Through such melting away one cannot arrive at any realistic coordinating of feeling and willing with bodily processes. The body as a whole, not merely the nerve activity included in it, is the physical basis of our soul life. And just as for ordinary consciousness our soul life can be transcribed as mental picturing, feeling, and willing, so can our bodily life as nerve activity, rhythmical function, and metabolic processes. Immediately the question arises: How does our actual sense perception—which is only an extension of nerve activity— integrate itself into the organism, on the one hand; and on the other hand, how does our ability to move—to which willing leads—integrate itself? Unbiased observation shows that neither belong to the organism in the same sense as nerve activity, rhythmical function, and metabolic processes. What occurs in a sense organ is something that does not belong directly to the organism at all. With our senses we have the outer world stretching like gulfs into the being of the organism. While the soul is encompassing in a sense organ an outer happening, the soul is not taking part in an inner organic happening, but rather in the continuation of the outer happening into the organism. (I mentioned these inner connections epistemologically in a lecture to the Bologna Philosophy Conference in 1911.) 3 In a process of movement we also do not have to do physically with something whose essential being lies inside the organism, but rather with a working of the organism in relationships of balance and forces in which the organism is placed with respect to the outer world. Within the organism, the will is only assigned the role of a metabolic process; but the happening caused by this process is at the same time an actuality within the outer world's interrelation of balance and forces; and by being active in willing, the soul transcends the realm of the organism and participates with its deeds in the happenings of the outer world. The division of nerves into sensory and motor nerves has created terrible confusion in the study of all these things. No matter how deeply rooted this division may seem to be in today's physiological picture of things, it is not based on unbiased observation. What physiology presents on the basis of nerve severance or of pathological elimination of certain nerves does not prove what appears upon the foundation of experiment or outer experience; it proves something completely different. It proves that the difference is not there at all which one assumes to exist between sensory and motor nerves. On the contrary, both kinds of nerves are of the same nature. The so-called motor nerve does not serve movement in the sense assumed in the teachings of the division theory; rather, as the bearer of nerve activity it serves the inner perception of that metabolic process that underlies our willing, in just the same way as the sensory nerve serves the perception of what takes place in the sense organ. Until the study of the nerves works with clear concepts in this regard, a correct relation of our soul life to the life of the body will not come about. [ 3 ] In the same way that psycho-physiologically one can seek the relation to the body's life of the soul life that runs its course in mental picturing, feeling, and willing, so one can also strive anthroposophically for knowledge of the relation which the soul element of ordinary consciousness has to spiritual life. And there one discovers through the anthroposophical methods described in this and in my other books, that just as our mental picturing finds a bodily foundation in our nerve activity, so it also finds a basis in the spiritual realm. In the other direction—on the side turned away from the body—the soul stands in a relation to a spiritually real element that is the foundation for the mental picturing of ordinary consciousness. This spiritual element, however, can only be experienced by a seeing cognition. And it is experienced through its content being presented to seeing consciousness as differentiated Imaginations. Just as, toward the body, our mental picturing is based on nerve activity, so from the other side, it streams toward us out of a spiritually real element, revealing itself in Imaginations. This spiritually real element is what is called in my books the etheric or life body. (In speaking about the etheric body I always emphasize expressly that one should take exception neither to the word “body” nor to the word “etheric”; for, what I present shows clearly that one should not interpret the matter in a materialistic sense.) And this life body (in the fourth volume of the first year of the periodical, “Das Reich,” I also used the expression "body of formative forces") is the spiritual element from which our ordinary consciousness' life of mental picturing flows from birth (or conception, as it were) until death. The feeling in our ordinary consciousness is based, on the bodily side, upon the rhythmical function. From the spiritual side it flows from a spiritually real element that is discovered in anthroposophical research by methods that I call "Inspiration" in my writings. (Again, it should be noted that by this concept I mean only what I have paraphrased in my work; so one should not confuse this term with what lay people understand by this word.) To the seeing consciousness the spiritually real being underlying the soul and attainable to Inspiration is his own spiritual being, transcending birth and death. This is the region where anthroposophy undertakes its spiritual-scientific investigations into the question of human immortality. Just as in the body, through the rhythmic function, the mortal part of man's feeling nature manifests itself, so, in the content of Inspiration of seeing consciousness, does the immortal spiritual core of our soul being manifest. For seeing consciousness, our willing, which toward the body is based on metabolic processes, streams from the spirit through what in my writings I call “Intuition.” What manifests in the body through the—in a certain way—lowest activity of the metabolism corresponds in the spirit to the highest: what expresses itself through Intuitions. Therefore, mental picturing, which is based on nerve activity, comes almost to full expression in the body; willing shows only a weak reflection in the metabolic processes oriented toward it in the body. Our real mental picturing is the living one; the mental picturing determined by the body is the lamed one. The content is the same. Real willing, even that which realizes itself in the physical world, runs its course in regions accessible only to Intuitive vision; its bodily counterpart has almost nothing to do with this content. Within that spiritually real being that manifests itself to Intuition is contained what extends over from previous earth lives into the following ones. And it is in the realm that comes into consideration here that anthroposophy approaches the questions of repeated earth lives and of destiny. As the body lives itself out in nerve activity, rhythmical function, and metabolic processes, so the spirit of man lives in what manifests itself in Imaginations, Inspirations, and Intuitions. And as in its realm the body allows for an experience of the nature of its outer world in two directions—in sensory processes, namely, and in processes of movement— so the spirit also: in one direction through the fact that it experiences Imaginatively our mentally picturing soul life, even in ordinary consciousness, and in the other direction through the fact that in willing it unfolds Intuitive impulses that realize themselves in metabolic processes. If one looks toward the body, one finds the nerve activity that lives as the element of mental picturing; if one looks toward the spirit, one becomes aware of the spirit content of Imaginations that flows into this very element of mental picturing. Brentano feels at first the spiritual side of the mental picturing life of the soul; he therefore characterizes this life as a picture life (an imaginative happening). When not merely one's own inner soul life is experienced, however, but also—through judgment—an element of acceptance or rejection, then there is added to our mental picturing a soul experience, flowing from the spirit, whose content remains unconscious as long as we are dealing only with ordinary consciousness, because this content consists of Imaginations of a spiritually real element that underlies the physical object and that only adds to the mental picture the fact that its content exists. It is for this reason that in his classification Brentano splits our life of mental pictures into mere mental picturing, which only experiences imaginatively an inwardly existing element, and into judging, which experiences imaginatively something given from without, but which brings the experience to consciousness only as an acceptance or rejection. With respect to feeling, Brentano does not look at all at its bodily foundation, the rhythmical function; he only brings into the realm of his attention what arises from Inspirations (that remain unconscious) as loving and hating within the region of ordinary consciousness. Willing escapes his attention completely, however, because his attention wishes to direct itself only upon phenomena in the soul, whereas in willing there lies something that is not enclosed within the soul, something through which the soul experiences also an outer world. Brentano's classification of soul phenomena, therefore, is based on the fact that he divides them according to viewpoints that can be seen in their true light only when one turns one's gaze upon the spiritual core of the soul, and on the fact that he wants to apply his classification only to the phenomena of ordinary consciousness. With what is said here about Brentano I only wished to supplement what was said on this subject on page 74ff.
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108. The Rishis
13 Dec 1908, Stuttgart Tr. Hanna von Maltitz Rudolf Steiner |
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This lecture is from the lecture series entitled, Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy. It is lecture 12 of 19 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities throught Austria and Germany in the years 1908—1909. |
108. The Rishis
13 Dec 1908, Stuttgart Tr. Hanna von Maltitz Rudolf Steiner |
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Through our various embodiments we have different experiences. We discover different relationships with each incarnation and our own relationships develop accordingly between birth and death. Now the question can arise: are the experiences between death and a new birth always the same, even though the experiences in the physical are so varied? In other words, does life in Devachan at all times during physical development always remained the same? That there is also a possible history for the life on the Other Side, will be solved through the following. Let's remind ourselves of the state of consciousness of the old Atlanteans who still saw physical objects indistinctly, with misty outlines, in their clairvoyant condition during the day—like a lantern in fog—and during the night were comrades of the Gods; for night and day were not strictly separated as today. The most progressive Atlanteans who had largely lost their clairvoyant awareness and already saw physical things in sharp outlines, lived in the region of today's Ireland, under the high spiritual being called Manu. They moved about in separate troops, one of these under the direction of Manu, from west to east. Then the great Flood came and after that colonies were established from Central Asia. The first was the creation of the Indian culture. For the old Indians who still carried memories of Atlantean times, who were still comrades of the Gods, experienced everything confronting them in the earthly realm, even the starts, as illusion, Maya. Links with the spiritual world which the Indians longed for was held up by the holy Rishis. They proclaimed the existence of the spiritual worlds. There were seven Rishis; they were disciples of Manu. They could only learn during certain times when they found themselves in a particular condition. They were the entire comfort, the whole force of the then Indian world; they narrated about the wonders and laws of the spiritual worlds. When people died, they went through as the Rishis had described, but only up to a certain height of Devachan, because only the initiated, the Rishi, could experience the whole of Devachan. Yet these people were sent at that time to work in life on the Other Side. The initiates lived alternately in the physical and in the spiritual. Soon they taught the living, soon the dead, of the everlasting truth. People hadn't however grown fond of the physical plane: they saw the spiritual world as their real homeland and the holy Rishis hadn't told them much in yonder realms about life on earth. People on this side had no interest in the earthly. During the second post Atlantic culture, the Persian, the first to start with agriculture, grew fonder of the physical plane. To the same measure a darkening awareness of the Other Side grew. Devachan became darker. People chose to claim the earth more. As a result some Zarathustra scholars pointed out the spiritual world using stronger words; but from this side of the world they couldn't say anything about the Other Side. The third culture, the Egyptian, indicated an ever larger love for the physical plane. In the stars they studied the spiritual laws. Ever more they tried to impress things with spirit. The more skilled they became on earth, the more unskilled they were to cooperate spiritually on the Other Side. A culmination point in cultivation on the physical plane is found in the Greek-Latin culture. Here the marriage between spiritual and physical was achieved. The Greek temple is the expression of spiritual laws. The Greek loved life. This means the Greek culture, but there is also something else. When a clairvoyant looks at a Greek temple today, for example that of Paestum, he experiences something extraordinary during his observation in the temple: he feels the wonderful harmonies through which the spiritual world is revealed. Now shift the clairvoyant occupied with this physical observation during this very moment of the wonderful experience of harmony within the artworks, into the spiritual world, and nothing is left over, nothing, even while the Greek temple is a complete expression of the spiritual world. This is what the Greek souls experience in death: they long for the pure harmonious expressions and constructions of the physical plane. The Romans, who experienced themselves strongly in life at the summit of their I-consciousness, were as if lamed, when they reached the Other Side. “Rather a beggar this side, than a king in the realm of shadows.” So the awareness of the opposite world was darkened. When the lovely things of this world were spoken about in the Realm of Shadows, it made them even unhappier. In life on this side more experiences could be had of the spiritual world, than in the Realm of Shades. This fourth Cultural epoch was the time in which the upward striving impulse could be given towards the appearance of Christ. The meaning of the events of Golgotha we considered in August; now, for this “Other Side” we want to consider it today. In the very moment in which physical death took place on the Cross something happened in the Shadow World: Christ appeared before them. For the first time something could be reported over there, which was meaningful for the Other Side, that life in the spirit can defeat death. Like lightening the shadowed life was lit up in the other world. An enormous event took place on the Other Side: over here in life on earth something happened which also had meaning for the Other Side. What now—in contrast to the first four cultural epochs—was being experienced, for example in St John's Gospel, had not been solved, how a human being [is] resurrect[ed] in spirit. However, from then on human beings take everything they have experienced and acquired on the physical plane as spiritual experiences, to the Other Side. The more people deepen themselves with occult knowledge of the Bible, the more will be taken to the Other Side. Before the Fourth Epoch, light shone decreasingly from the Other Side into life on this side. Now it is the reverse:
On yonder side is an ascending development which is becoming ever brighter. The spiritual forces which are used today for inventions and discoveries, are used to generate external cultural means (Kulturmittel). It was different before: these forces used for research of the spiritual worlds had their laws. Today the spirit serves as a slave for material needs. All intelligence which has flowed into the steam engine and other inventions are building a hindrance for the spiritual world—an adverse balance! The opposite is the case with Anthroposophic work. That which is won here on earth serves to lighten up the world on the Other Side. Christ appeared during the fourth Cultural Epoch, hence the Greek name Christos. In order for the appearance of Christ not to go unprepared, Moses and the prophets appeared. The announcement of the I-God, Jahve, was necessary in order for mankind to have a goal on which to hold fast. The event of Golgotha could only be understood through the proclamation of image-free gods. More about this tomorrow. |
343. Foundation Course: Spiritual Discernment, Religious Feeling, Sacramental Action: Insights into the Mystery of Golgotha
01 Oct 1921, Dornach Tr. Hanna von Maltitz Rudolf Steiner |
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It has remained so, that it demands faith in preserved dogmas, which corresponds to a knowledge of an earlier soul constitution so that what is learnt about the Catholic Christ in the Church today is completely bound up with a dogmatic content which believes it presents a level of knowledge which mankind had actually reached at the end of the 14th century AD. What Anthroposophy wants to developed is regaining the supersensible substance of knowledge; the kind of supersensible knowledge which has died in dogma; Anthroposophy wants to enable the achievement of a new understanding for the Mystery of Golgotha, because the dogmas of the Catholic Church can no longer penetrate into an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. |
He saw how the intellect contained within itself the danger that man also strangulates his soul from the divine, how man succumbs to the death of the soul. That which is devoured by the intellect—in anthroposophy we call it "becoming Ahrimanic"—which totally enters into the intellect, becomes devoured, it is cut off from the divine. |
343. Foundation Course: Spiritual Discernment, Religious Feeling, Sacramental Action: Insights into the Mystery of Golgotha
01 Oct 1921, Dornach Tr. Hanna von Maltitz Rudolf Steiner |
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Prayers were said from various sides before the start of the lecture, and a particular wish was expressed to hear more closely about the battle of Luther's soul. Rudolf Steiner: Yes, my dear friends, if I want to continue exploring which what we started, in various directions, it is important that I firstly touch on what existed in ancient Christianity, and then what unfolded out of the various forces working from ancient Christianity leading to the rise of the Evangelical-Protestant experience. We must be quite clear that during the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, those people who would at least have a tendency to accept Christianity, were still of a totally different soul constitution, than what was later the case. The Mystery of Golgotha took place in the human evolution during a time in which it had basically nothing at all to do with, I could call it, pursuing the objective course of the world in a spiritual-scientific way. This is quite extraordinary. When you try to deepen yourself particularly into the objective course of the world, as it is presented in its totality, incorporating the physical, soul and spiritual, you have a strong impression regarding the development in the 8th century before Christ. Once again, you will get this strong impact—this can already be noticed in outer knowledge—regarding the time which I've often spoken about, in the 15th century. The time epoch stretching from the 8th century BC to 15th AD creates roundabout an epoch in which humanity's development, if you follow this development spiritual-scientifically, was unfolding and can be called the Mind- or Intellectual Soul; in other words, it was the epoch of the Mind- or Intellectual Soul development. In its purest form it comes out of the Greek people's evolution. I call it Mind Soul but ask you, please, not to connect an intellectual concept to this term. Should you want to study the Mind Soul today, as it had developed out of Greekdom, then you need to study such individuals who had in a certain sense some kind of clairvoyance, not schooled clairvoyance but an atavistic one; inherited clairvoyance which can still pop up in some people at present. You can see that the content of the world appears to such people as imaginative, made up of images. If you should ask them to describe their pictorial impressions—of course only if no physical deformation disorder is involved, but when the whole thing is pure—you discover an extraordinary amount of understanding in the images thus depicted. They describe some processes in the spiritual world in pictures. They receive the images, but they get the sense of them as well. They can't help it if they include understanding in the images they receive because they take place together. Up to the 15th Century the soul constitution of many people were still not as developed as the mind is today, but they were inspired by their minds, they could have revelations in the mind. Only after the 15th Century did intellectualism develop which means that the mind had to be actively laboured with inwardly in the soul. Logic had to be developed, it was something to be worked at; it was not, so to speak, just given to the soul. That is the essential difference in the soul constitution of more modern people in comparison with those in this earlier epoch. When you go still further back, to the evolutionary period of mankind, before the 8th century BC, then you arrive at an epoch where such pictorially filled imaginations initially developed as involuntary imaginations. You get to an epoch which reached back to the 3rd century and find that just this reading in the cosmos which I've described for you this morning, unfolded and appeared in the human soul as pictorial imaginations, still existed in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, in naive and simple mind natured people. By contrast we have an epoch since the 15th century in which human consciousness must veer to freedom, and this can only happen when people create their own thought forms, out of themselves. If we simply study world processes objectively, we initially have no reason to believe in the Mystery of Golgotha. We need to attain intuitive knowledge in the sense in which I've depicted in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its attainment," and then you get the idea that the Mystery of Golgotha can be seen as falling out of the entire remaining course of the world view. (Writes on the blackboard.) If I namely have 8 centuries BC before here, the 15th century, then we have a particular process which must be considered as flowing together, and now gives a particular impact in our years of one or zero. To a certain extent we can research from the oldest times the evolution of the earth and man, and we will reach a certain stage in the development, but we do not arrive at seeing the Mystery of Golgotha within this research. We definitely come through research of this evolution, if we do not look at the Mystery of Golgotha, to the feeling: we are moving to the end of the earth, as human beings we must find our grave in the earth.—This way we arrive at quite a decisive conclusion of the earth dying away. Then we can turn our gaze to the Mystery of Golgotha and so we will find that the earth was renewed, fructified by the Mystery of Golgotha, that a new seed from the expanse contained up to that moment evolutionary streams, and that this new seed, having arrived through the Mystery of Golgotha, forms the foundation for the renewal of the earth. This is primarily the meaning of the Gospel's words which I mentioned yesterday when I said: The spiritual beings who remained on the earth would have perished with the earth (if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place): The demons screamed when they saw the Christ, because he stripped them of their rulership. This is certainly a real process. You can be quite certain it isn't merely about accepting some or other event given in the Bible, but it is about a clear observation of the processes. The Mystery of Golgotha does not even fall in the middle of these time slots (between 8 BC and 15 AD), because the middle of this time is in about the middle of the 4th century. Therefore, this event doesn't even fall into the middle, so one could say: The event of Golgotha is something which took place in contrast to the world of necessity, taking place through divine freedom entering into the earth. It is a deed of freedom coming out of the divine worlds, it certainly was given to humanity from outside, as a gift from the divine world order. As a result, it can't be understood by those who want to observe the continuous historic processes, they may not be able to discover something within it like the Mystery of Golgotha. To suggest that, I often express it this way: If, let's say, a Mars inhabitant came down to earth, he would find much he can't understand, but he would be able to start understanding something when he looks at something like the painting of the last supper of Leonardo da Vinci. To this extraordinary image and what is intended with the Christ, he would be able to see something which would indicate the central point of earthly events to him. That is obvious only through comparison, but it is a comparison which I've often had to make to indicate what is important here. Particularly for those who had a strong feeling for the sense of the Mystery of Golgotha as fallen out of the ordinary earthly course, like all that the Roman Catholic Church has gradually become, still a kind of departure came about from the original meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. It has crystallized into an historic anecdote. When Leonardo da Vinci was appointed to paint the Last Supper, he worked slowly, for a long time. Actually, he needed more than ten years. Then a new Prior arrived and wanted this painting chap to finish off the thing at last. The painting had been completed up to the figure of Judas when the new Prior asked when it would at least be complete. Leonardo said that up to that point he had not been able to complete the painting because he had no model for Judas. Now however, he had in the Prior a model for Judas, and he could complete the painting. With this anecdote there is definitely a crystallization of the feeling which in the Roman Catholic Church had as a departure from the original sense of the Mystery of Golgotha, how one would far rather take a Prior and make a Judas out of him than anyone else. This attitude of mind can be studied up to the middle of the 4th century, and then again, how it prepares itself for intellectualism from the middle of the 4th century onwards. For example, you can already see, when you study the writing of Scotus Eriugena, how in the 10th century on the one hand, the tendency plays in towards intellectualism that would later fully emerge, and on the other hand in what one could call the gifts of understanding out of higher worlds. This appeared strongly in that time in which it prepared itself from the middle of the previous epoch up to the 15th century of our present epoch. It is conclusively quite different before the middle of 4 AD; it continues into the 5th century, the times are not so strictly separate. You always find strong experiences towards the Mystery of Golgotha present in the first centuries after the event, as the supersensible spiritual plays into the earthly. This permeation of outer spiritual into the earthly became ever more difficult for the ordinary state of mind. We are just seeing in the centre of this previously mentioned period, a personality wrestling with every possible thing, just to get along. It is with such a turn that the one side of the human state of mind really changed, and on the other side a new kind of understanding necessary for the Mystery of Golgotha. This personality, as you know, was Augustine. Within his soul, Augustine just couldn't come to terms completely with how the spiritual worked into matter. Augustine for instance sought amongst the Manichaeans for a possibility of how to recognise the spiritual in the material. He didn't manage; he actually only managed by withdrawing completely into himself, in order to depend on the self-assurance of his human I, which made him one of the precursors of the famous Descartes declaration: "Cogito, ergo sum." (I think, therefore I am.) This principle is found with Augustine already. However, on the other hand he was confronted with a certain doubt about the teaching, and this doubt was eating him up. One can certainly understand out of the configuration of the time, why Augustine felt this way. How the old heathen point of view of the church fathers, namely Clemens von Alexandria, was still completely accepted, so that in the oldest Christian times they were totally overtaken by the pagan in Christian teaching, and this Augustine could no longer accept, because in his human soul constitution it was no longer appropriate. The teaching content was also shaped in such a way that, essentially in the time of the Council of Nicaea, it had been brought as abstract dogmas which could then be absorbed by intellectualism. So the human soul in Augustine's time, I can mention, was already driven towards intellectualism. From then on Augustine could do nothing other than accept the dogmatic Catholic Church content, in order to find a teaching content. Through this, a great crack came about in the Catholic Church. What appeared from the ceremonial of course could not correspond to a soul content. Humanity didn't come in the same way to the undermining of the ceremonial content, as it came to the drying up of the soul content. So it happened in the Catholic Church that the soul content dried out dogmatically, while the ceremonial content actually sustained itself. This ceremonial content of the Catholic Church didn't come out of Christianity, but it came out of far older ceremonial processes. Out of such times it stirred, from a time in which people still had a living reading of the cosmos in which, as a sacrificial offering, it could be accomplished from the reading in the cosmos. What was drawn from the ancient ceremonies of the mysteries, was then Christianized. The Mass offering is also certainly taken from the ancient mystery ceremonies and Christianized. However, what remained as symbolic in the act of sacrifice, is what actually continued within the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was actually on this point always consequential, also when it became a worldly establishment under Constantine, as it went over into the political field. It was, one could say, really ironclad in its consequentiality. It has maintained its ceremonies in the most conservative way and in order not to go under, suffocated its soul content with dogmatism. No wonder that the ceremonial content became more and more strange as an experience, because people had no lively relationship to it anymore, and the dogmatic content was experienced as something obsolete—while it had been lively knowledge in olden times, knowledge experienced by a different soul constitution. The dogmatic content could not hold true compared with what came out of purely worldly knowledge. However, the Catholic Church had to remain absolutely consequential, and it has remained in its conserved state right up to the present. It has remained conservative by not participating in the state of mind/soul constitution residing in the present day. It has remained so, that it demands faith in preserved dogmas, which corresponds to a knowledge of an earlier soul constitution so that what is learnt about the Catholic Christ in the Church today is completely bound up with a dogmatic content which believes it presents a level of knowledge which mankind had actually reached at the end of the 14th century AD. What Anthroposophy wants to developed is regaining the supersensible substance of knowledge; the kind of supersensible knowledge which has died in dogma; Anthroposophy wants to enable the achievement of a new understanding for the Mystery of Golgotha, because the dogmas of the Catholic Church can no longer penetrate into an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is extraordinarily important, that the dogmas of the Catholic Church no longer can allow the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha to come through. The ritual of mass lets the souls penetrate to something different, to taking an interest in the symbols of the ritual. It is already so, that the Roman Catholic Church has remained in line with its ironclad consistency even into the 19th Century. Some things appear as quite strange if you examine the dogmas instituted by the Catholic Church before the 19th Century. I would like to give you an example so you can see what a kind of abyss exists, in order for you to reach an insight as to how such an abyss can once again be bridged over. Once I had a conversation with a very learned theologian regarding the Conceptio immaculate, the immaculate conception, which was only instituted in the 19th Century. You perhaps know that this doesn't deal with the immaculate reception of Jesus himself, but of the immaculate conception of Mary; that means St Anna conceived Mary in an immaculate conception. This is actually the dogma laid down in the 19th century. The other dogma—that of the immaculate conception of Jesus—had existed already for a long time. As a "singular grace" it can be seen by those who can even see the emergence of dogmas from the imaginative content, even if they can't approve of it at all because its content is deadened by it—but one can see it. So, in my conversation with this theologian, I said to him that it was impossible to reconcile the idea of the immaculate conception with modern conscious. I said to him, one isn't compelled to lead the modern consciousness over into dogma in relation to the individual case; one is not compelled to apply logic in an individual case because the singular also, according to scholastic opinion, evades follow-up. The moment you assume a series of facts, in other words a backward looking of a series of facts, where you rise up from the immaculate conception of Mary to the immaculate conception of St Anna, it is necessary to continue and then you, out of necessity, must accept an entire generation line of immaculate conceptions.—Now the theologian turned to me and said that is not correct, because then we come back to David—this is how he expressed it—and then the story would be quite disastrous, and that could not be allowed. You see, with today's consciousness this has a certain stroke of frivolity, but it certainly is something which can be made known, how within the Roman Catholic Church the entire relationship to the truth is something quite different. In this depiction of our conversation I wanted to firstly stress the kind of perception of truth we lived in during the middle of the 15th Century. The Catholic clergy was not experiencing the perception of truth like modern consciousness does, but a truth-conception corresponding to an earlier time epoch. They were not aware of the view of truth that reckons with the consequences of truth for the inner life of a human being. Quite a different attitude to the truth existed, and as it had changed from olden times, was not clearly understood. We need to look back at the evolution of humanity which means that the soul constitution essentially has changed. Basically, there is no incorrect expression other than that nature had made no leaps. Nature in fact makes continuous jumps. Take for example a green foliage leaf to the coloured flower petal—that is a jump. In the same way we have leaps in the course of time, apparently quite a sharp advancement from one soul state into another. However, people don't always grow in the same degree but allow old points of view to continue and as a result their souls atrophy, as we are able to notice if we look at the enormous leap which has come about in modern human soul constitutions and which has not been participated in by a large number of people. Now we must clearly see that such an inner kind of experience, as can be describe as an historical consciousness, which can be acquired, stands out particularly strongly in a person who, through a certain education in the Church, it can especially be applied, when we think of a case like Luther's. If you want to understand Luther's soul then you must be clear that be comes out of the after effects of Augustinism, and that it is precisely in his time, just a bit after the beginning of the intellectualist age, that he is confronted with one of the most serious soul conflicts imaginable. Why was this so? You must just imagine: Augustine had come to an agreement on the recognition of the Christian-Catholic dogma, but for him this was connected with his living within something which was still alive, and even more alive among the Manicheans with whom he had met. What was still full of life in his time was the observation of original sin, in general the consideration of higher processes taking place in relation to lower earthly processes. People still have trouble today to make such things comprehensible. If we position ourselves at the beginning of earth evolution, we can gradually enter into an imagination of the origins of what we today call a human being. There were higher beings who were in a certain way connected with earthly evolution. The Old Testament indicates one such higher being having become the snake, a being who we call Lucifer today. This higher being, so it is described in the Bible, actually initiated the original sin. In the beginning of earthly existence, this being was there and the original sin was actually due to the calculation of man's precursors of his ancestors, who then appeared as the serpent of paradise. What this pre-human being had begun by the seduction in paradise was transferred on to the human beings. During that time, what played into human thoughts, existed there as primal guilt, within which man got trapped and later dragged it along, because he originally had become entangled and then in fact he now transferred it from one generation to the next through the blood. As a result of this primal sin the Christ appeared on the earth—I am speaking in the consciousness of this time period—in order to gradually heal people from their dying through what Lucifer had done to them. That we outwardly know so little about the constitution of consciousness, is a result of the really innumerable things proclaimed by the Roman Catholic Church, which is based on this ancient tradition. Above all, everything Gnostic was eradicated and also later the reproduction of anything that still had an older soul constitution was made exceedingly difficult. You know the writing of Scotus Eriugena had been lost and only later rediscovered, and for centuries people knew nothing about Scotus Eriugena because all copies of his writing which one could get hold of, had been burned. It is certainly so that it deals with looking again at an event which took place in the supersensible world and into what human beings had become entangled. Among the impulses of such observations, I could say something worked behind human events, active through superhuman events of other beings who actually were also involved with human evolution, in order for Augustine's teaching regarding predestination, to develop. Augustine saw the incarnation of people on earth as something much rather, if it could be expressed it would be by saying: The human being is actually the result of the battle of superhuman beings.—This meant individuals had no intrinsic worth; that only happened in the middle of the 15th century. Augustine believed it quite possible to think of human development as beyond their will, accomplished by the destinies of superhuman beings. His teaching could only be alive in him if a part of the human being, not the sinful part, but a part, be destined for demise and another part of the human being destined for bliss, the teaching which is not usually presented in all its meaning, when it is to be experienced. Today this can't be experienced in devotion, which was possible for Augustine. Into this soul constitution something also played that one can call original sin, which is balanced out by the Mystery of Golgotha. People in Luther's time still expressed it in this way, but they lived in another time of a soul constitution as in the time of Augustine. It was quite impossible to find one's way into these ideas with all of one's soul. In this way Luther experienced the illumination through his soul, as an Augustine monk. Now I must speak to you about my conviction which is based—even though it is called a conviction—on knowledge. For me it certainly is knowledge. I am not in the position to speak in the same way about chance or coincidences like other people because coincidences also belong to an order of things which is usually ignored. I can't attach it to an actual incident in Luther's life, I can't be indifferent to a lightning strike in a tree beside him, but I can see it, according to my knowledge, only as the effect of a truly supersensible intrusion. You can think about it in any way you like, but if I speak sincerely and honestly, I certainly regard part of Luther's soul constitution as this pointing in, if I may call it so, of God's finger, not out of belief but out of recognition. Luther's state of mind or soul constitution became something quite different under the influence of such a deed; it happened so that certain inner sources were opened. These sources, or better said, the effectiveness of these sources, had already been prepared through the wrestling with misunderstood lore. It could not rise up, it was like a turning point in the soul itself, but it could not consciously show itself. Then it rose up into consciousness and became a turning point for only that which was happening. If I want to express myself roughly, the body has been softened, so to speak, and what had been prepared in Luther for a long time, permeated through a soft body. Now Luther gradually became aware of all the dangers in which modern man lives. It isn't easy to say in how far this went into Luther's clear consciousness, and it's also not that important. In any case this position of modern man played into Luther's soul on the one hand as a streaming from earlier times, and on the other hand, what man should be since the middle of the 15th century. The entire dangers of modern man flooded Luther's soul. What did this consist of? It consisted of—I'm speaking in a Christian way—man being afflicted with the deeds or the sequences of deeds of superhuman beings in which he had become entangled. Through what had been an entanglement of original sin in the lower human being as inherited traits, man entered into the next epoch in a different manner than he would have if there had been no original sin through the Fall. As a result, that which should appear in humanity as intellect came through in a far more abstract measure than how life used to be in former times, when it was afflicted with something subhuman through original sin. To a certain extent, what man was to experience intellectually became diluted, more abstract, which in earlier life had been more dense, more natural, than it should be for mankind. It was only now that man was basically condemned to fall away from God through his intellectualism. The whole danger of intellectualism which pushes too far to greater abstraction, lived itself out in Luther's soul, and Luther really experienced it with such vehemence as described in his vicious battle at Wartburg Castle. We have two opposite poles which can clearly be determined in the newer evolution of mankind. On the one hand is Luther, positioned in the great spiritual battle after the middle of the 15th century—of course a little later—and now as a result, while he wanted to loosen himself from intellectual dangers, first renounces the intellect and seeks justification outside the intellect which can lead him to the divine, as it were, beneath the intellect. The other pole is Faust. He took on the intellect with all his senses, resulting in his deteriorating into the dangers of the intellect, as he entered into all the individual dangers of the intellect. It is not for nothing that these personalities are a kind of landmark for modern mankind: on the one side Luther and what he connected to, and on the other side Faust, and what he associates with. It was truly no small deed of Goethe when he wanted to reshape Faust in such a way that he would not perish. Lessing already thought about it. If freedom is to be achieved for humanity, the intellect needs to be engaged with, but humanity should not be pushed away from the divine. The Faust fragment of Lessing ends with the words (of the angels to the devil): "You shall not prevail!" which Goethe remodelled. He said to himself there should be a possibility not to be separated from the divine when mankind engages with the intellect—but he needs it for the development of freedom. In this terrible battle Luther stood. He saw how the intellect contained within itself the danger that man also strangulates his soul from the divine, how man succumbs to the death of the soul. That which is devoured by the intellect—in anthroposophy we call it "becoming Ahrimanic"—which totally enters into the intellect, becomes devoured, it is cut off from the divine. This is what Luther felt for modern man. Historically it was so that on the one hand there was the Catholic Church where people were absolutely not within the intellect, it even wants to save people by preventing them from entering into the intellect, it wanted to preserve them from progress made in the 15th century onwards by conserving such dogmas like the one which claims infallibility, such as the dogma regarding the immaculate conception, as I've mentioned earlier. They couldn't manage consequently in the Roman Catholic sense without the infallibility dogma because they even deny its intellectual meaning, declaring it unfit for development and incapable of understanding the spiritual world. A reinforcement was needed for what people had to believe, indicating the sovereignty of the Papal Command for the Truth. There is nothing more untimely, but basically nothing greater than this determination of the dogma of infallibility, to completely contradict all consciousness of the time and all human desires for freedom. It is the last consequence of the secularization of Catholicism in an iron clad consequence of tremendous genius. One must say if you take, on the one hand, the ironclad consequence of the Roman clerics in their determination of the infallibility dogma, and on the other hand the kind of polemics of a Dollinger, the latter is of course philistine in the face of tremendous ingenuity—you could even call it devilish—something is carried out, because it was once the consequence to that which Rome has come to since the secularization of Christianity by Constantine. So it happened that in the bosom of the Roman Catholics, two souls could live next to one another. On the one hand was the submission to the rigid dogma, which no human being could touch save the infallible Pope—because the Council had lost its power since the determination of the infallibility dogma—and on the other hand the unhindered care of outer science as an external manipulation to which one is devoted and partake off, but don't attribute any meaning to the actual content of religious doctrine. Just consider from a modern consciousness, what the justification of the Roman Catholic doctrine looks like. I suggest you read for instance such writing as "The Principle of Catholicism and Science" by Hertling, the previous German Imperial Chancellor. Firstly, you'll discover that it was a world historic mistake for this man to have become the Imperial Chancellor but on the other hand you will learn something about the unusual thoughts modern people had and how these two souls could justifiably live in the same bosom. It is also remarkable that this writing on the principle of Catholicism appears in French. It is therefore extraordinarily interesting that the writer of this work, whose name doesn't come to my mind at the moment, has a perpetually logical conscience and therefore he has to make a differentiation between the Roman Catholic teaching material and what constitutes the content of outer science. That is why he proposes two concepts next to each other, the idea of truth and the idea of science, which he always sees as two disparate ideas. He says something can very well be scientific, but truth is something else; what is true does not need to be scientific. In some or other way he comes to the conclusion that science doesn't have anything to do with what one acknowledges directly as containing truth. So on the one hand things worthy of contemplation are mentioned, but are already beaten, on the other hand the most grotesque somersaults are being beaten in order for these two souls to become reconciled with one another. So, on the one hand we have the continuation of symbolism, the symbolism that led to the enormous upswing of art in the Renaissance period in central Europe. Art Historians need only dig deep enough to discover that without the Catholic symbolism the entire artistic development of Giotto, Cimabue, from Leonardo to Rafael and Michelangelo would have been impossible, because the artistic development is certainly a propagation of Christian artistic subjects and belongs so strongly in Christianity that people can't, for example, understand why the Sistine Madonna looks like she does. Look at the Sistine Madonna, she is magnificent. As far as one can see there are images of clouds which transform purely into angelic heads, and how the Madonna herself, with the Child, condenses out of the angles who reside in the clouds. It is as if the angelic forms have condensed out of the cloud images and have descended down to the earth, yet everything is wonderfully lifted into the spirit. Then the two curtains (he sketches on the blackboard) and below that a coquettish female figure and a terrible priestly figure, all things which absolutely do not belong to it. Why is this so? It is simply from the basis of Raphael having initially intended with this image, to give a soul experience with the picture of Mary on a certain feast day of Mary—now this is on the Feast of Corpus Christi—where people walk around in a procession with a picture of the virgin Mary that is carried under a canopy and comes to the altars where people kneel down. This is why there are these curtains (points to sketch on blackboard) with the kneeling female and male forms in a chapel, in front of the picture of Mary. Well, that is the kind of elementary school way of looking at what Raphael painted. What is actually meant here stands right in the Roman Catholic cult—absolutely right inside it. Basically, everything contained in this Roman Catholic ritual is what Luther saw in Rome. Isn't it tremendously symbolic, historically symbolic, historically symptomatic, that Luther saw only corruption in Rome, not being actually touched deeper by what flowed out into depictions in art, how he was not deepened inwardly by art, but that he only saw moral corruption? Here we see how the soul in fact was positioned through his particular development in the historical becoming of mankind, he was like a soul at war, thrown this way and that, searching for a way out. Despite all this, like the doom of Lutherism in particular, comes the big problem: How do we as human beings absorb intellectualism, so that we are not doomed but that we overcome the fear of becoming doomed, because it is necessary for human freedom to integrate us? Modern intellectualism presses strongly into our human consciousness. The evangelical church reckoned with it for centuries, the Catholic Church kept itself completely distanced from it. The evangelical church gradually withdrew back on to faith because with intellectualism, as it developed in the world, it didn't agree, so it increasingly withdrew from knowledge by depending on belief; it now rests within a faith in which the doctrine content is to be sought. The Catholic Church had doctrine content, but it was allowed to dry up. From the intellectual point of view the way to individuals can't be found, who see themselves isolated from those superhuman forces which could still be felt as being connected to Augustinism. Basically we in humanity stand right in this battle today, only, if I could put it that way, we have come to the cutting edge, so that we simply stand there and say: We need a pure concept of faith so that we have a religion opposite intellectualism, because we can't take up the old Catholic doctrine, for it has dried out.—With this dried out dogmatic content the evangelical church rejected the ritual in the most varied forms. This is what started with Luther, putting us today on the knife edge; we must become aware of the seriousness of this position. It is a struggle for the power of faith in the soul, who wants to save the faith at the cost of not having the existing doctrine content at all. However, without content we can't learn, and it appears impossible to simply rediscover a bridge to what Catholicism has secularised. Now my dear friends, I come to the question of how we should proceed. It is like this: you see, with all this there was also an evangelical consciousness introduced in the evolution of humanity, in the individual human development, because the earlier evangelical consciousness to a certain degree entangled man in the supernatural, superhuman processes and acts of superhuman beings. With Augustus it was expressed somewhat differently, that the progress of humanity was permeated with the superhuman element ... (gap in notes). People saw the superhuman battle raging as something like Christ fighting against the enemy who wants to lead him into the temptation of appearing super human; that the one who drew near to the Christ was one to whom original guilt was traced back to, and it is shown how Christ turns against the original sin. This understanding has now come to an end. Earlier, this understanding had been adhered to, for what was supersensible-divine permeated earthly matter, and there already has been an intention present for specialization to make a dividing border between the supernatural, and that part of man entangled in sensuality. This dividing border is done through consecration. Consecration is actually the separation of the human being, or that part of the human being, from being entangled in the earthly. The ordination of the priesthood is only one part because there are also implements and so on; everything possible is consecrated. Once during a war, the Pope consecrated the bullets but that is only due to the secularization of Catholicism. Do you see that consecration is really the dividing boundary between two worlds, and there is certainly the awareness in Catholicism—even if it is not present in individual priests—that a consecrated priest is active in another world when he does something, that he is also speaking from another world when he speaks of the Gospels, even though all his ordinary actions are in the earthly world. This differentiation could not be understood since the 15th century. In historic Catholicism, throughout, was this strong differentiation where, in circles of ordained priests, it was consciously stressed. Only now and then some bishop, by mistake, will bring something non-Catholic into Catholicism, namely modern consciousness, and that leads to absurdities. There was for example a pastoral letter written which claimed that the priest in the fulfilment of the sacrament at the altar would be more powerful than Christ Jesus, because he forces Christ Jesus to be present in the sacrament; Christ Jesus has to be present when the priests demands it; the result is that the priest is now more powerful than Christ.—This is the content of a pastoral letter of not long ago. You can come across such things when out of modern consciousness something is understood which should be understood in quite a different mood, namely that which lies beyond the earthly sphere and separated from it by the consecration. The principle of consecration comes from far, far back. It already existed in the oldest oriental religions and it was particularly developed on (the Greek island of) Samothrace. Catholicism took it over from ancient times but for the newer consciousness it was totally lost. Tomorrow I will try to add further elements to it, so that you can come to a full understanding of the principle of consecration, and also priest ordination, without which the apostolic succession won't be comprehensible |
141. Between Death and Rebirth: Lecture I
05 Nov 1912, Berlin Tr. Dorothy S. Osmond, E. H. Goddard Rudolf Steiner |
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It cannot be emphasised too often that the essence of Anthroposophy cannot be grasped with the help of a few simple concepts or a theory briefly propounded, let alone a programme. |
Someone might argue that he can hardly be expected to ally himself with an Anthroposophical Movement if he is immediately faced with a demand for self-development and told that he can only hope to penetrate slowly and gradually to the essence of Anthroposophy; he may ask how he can decide to join something for which he can prepare only slowly. The rejoinder to this would be that before a human being can reach the highest stage of development he already has in his heart and in his soul the sense of truth which has led mankind as a whole to strive for such development, and he need only devote himself open-mindedly to this sense of truth, with the will for truth which lies in the depths of his soul unless prejudices have led him astray. |
Connected with this is the fact that many people who would like to be anthroposophists find that the knowledge we are trying to promote here is too baffling for them. Many of them complain: in Anthroposophy one has to be always learning, always pondering, always busy! But without such efforts it is not possible to acquire any understanding of the spiritual worlds. |
141. Between Death and Rebirth: Lecture I
05 Nov 1912, Berlin Tr. Dorothy S. Osmond, E. H. Goddard Rudolf Steiner |
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I am very glad to be able to speak here again after a comparatively long absence. Those of you who were present at our meeting in Munich earlier this year1 or have heard something about my Mystery Play, The Guardian of the Threshold, will have realised what the attitude of the soul must be if an adequate conception is to be acquired of the content of Spiritual Science or, let us say, of Occultism. A great deal has been said previously about the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. The aim of The Guardian of the Threshold was to show that the essential nature of these beings can be revealed only by studying them very gradually and from many different aspects. It is not enough to form a simple concept or give an ordinary definition of these beings—popular as such definitions are. My purpose was to show from as many different sides as possible, the part played by these beings in the lives of men. The Play will also have helped you to realise that there must be complete truthfulness and deep seriousness when speaking of the spiritual worlds. This, after all, has been the keynote of the lectures I have given here. It must be emphasised all the more strongly at the present time because there is so little recognition of the seriousness and value of genuine anthroposophical endeavours. If there is one thing that I have tried to emphasise in the lectures given over the years, it is that you should embark upon all your anthroposophical efforts in this spirit of truthfulness and earnestness, and become thoroughly conscious of their significance in world-existence as a whole, in the evolutionary process of humanity and in the spiritual content of our present age. It cannot be emphasised too often that the essence of Anthroposophy cannot be grasped with the help of a few simple concepts or a theory briefly propounded, let alone a programme. The forces of the whole soul must be involved. But life itself is a process of Becoming, of development. Someone might argue that he can hardly be expected to ally himself with an Anthroposophical Movement if he is immediately faced with a demand for self-development and told that he can only hope to penetrate slowly and gradually to the essence of Anthroposophy; he may ask how he can decide to join something for which he can prepare only slowly. The rejoinder to this would be that before a human being can reach the highest stage of development he already has in his heart and in his soul the sense of truth which has led mankind as a whole to strive for such development, and he need only devote himself open-mindedly to this sense of truth, with the will for truth which lies in the depths of his soul unless prejudices have led him astray. He must avoid empty theories and high-sounding programmes. Man is able to sense truth where it genuinely exists. Honest criticism is therefore always possible, even if someone is only at the very beginning of the path of attainment. This, however, does not preclude him from attributing supreme importance to anthroposophical endeavour. In our present age there are many influences which divert men from the natural feeling for truth that is present in their souls. Over the years it has often been possible to indicate these misleading influences and I need not do it again today. My purpose is to emphasise how necessary it is—even if there is already some knowledge of occult science—to approach and study things again and again from constantly new sides. One example of what I mean is our study of the four Gospels. This autumn I brought these studies to a provisional conclusion with a course of lectures on the Gospel of St. Mark. These studies of the Gospels may be taken as a standard example of the way in which the great truths of existence must be approached from different sides. Each Gospel affords an opportunity to view the Mystery of Golgotha from a different angle, and indeed we cannot begin really to know anything essential about this Mystery until we have studied it from the four different viewpoints presented in the four Gospels. In what way have our studies over the last ten or twelve years demonstrated this? Those of you who want to be clear about this need only turn to my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, the content of which was first given in the form of lectures, before the foundation of the German Section of the Theosophical Society. Anyone who seriously studies this book will find that it already contained the gist of what I have since said in the course of years, about the Mystery of Golgotha and the four Gospels. Nothing, however, would be more unjustified than to believe that by knowing the contents of that book you would ipso facto have an adequate understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. All the lectures given since the book appeared have been the natural outcome of that original spiritual study; nowhere are they at variance with what was then said. It has furthermore been possible to open up new ways for contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, thus enabling us to penetrate more and more deeply into its significance. The attempt has been made to substitute direct experience of the spiritual facts for concepts, theories and abstract speculations. And if, in spite of it all, a feeling of a certain lack still exists, this lack is due to something that is inevitable on the physical plane, namely, the time factor. Hence I have always assumed that you would have patience and wait for matters to develop gradually. This is also an indication of how what I have to say to you during this coming winter should be understood. In the course of years we have spoken a great deal of the life between death and a new birth. The same subject will, however, be dealt with in the forthcoming lectures, the reason being that during this last summer and autumn it has been my task to undertake further spiritual research into this realm and to present an aspect of the subject which could not previously be dealt with. It is only now possible to consider certain matters which bring home the profound moral significance of the super-sensible truths pertaining to this realm. In addition to all other demands to which only very brief reference has been made, there is one which in this vain and arrogant age is a cause of offence to numbers of individuals. But we must not allow it to deter us from the earnestness and respect for truth that are due to our Movement. The demand will continue to be made that by dint of earnest, intimate efforts we shall learn to be receptive to knowledge brought from the spiritual world. For some years now the relationship of human beings living on the physical plane to the spiritual worlds has changed from what it was through almost the whole of the nineteenth century. Until the last third of that century men had little access to the spiritual worlds; it was necessary for evolution that only little of the content of those worlds should flow into the human soul. But now we are living in an age when the soul need only be receptive and duly prepared and revelations from the spiritual worlds will be able to flow into it. Individual souls will become more and more receptive and, being aware of their task in the present age, they will find this inflow of spiritual knowledge to be a reality. Hence the further demand is made that anthroposophists shall not turn deaf ears to what can make its way into the soul today from the spiritual worlds. Before entering into the main theme of these lectures I want to speak of two characteristics of the spiritual life to which special attention must be paid. Between death and the new birth a human being experiences the realities of the spiritual world in a very definite way. But he also experiences these realities through Initiation; he experiences them too if his soul is prepared during his life in the physical body in a way that enables him to participate in the spiritual worlds. Hence it is true to say that what takes place between death and the new birth—which is, in fact, existence in the spiritual world—can be revealed through Initiation. Attention must be paid to two points which emerge from what has often been said here; they are essential not only to experience of the spiritual worlds but also to the right understanding of communications received from these worlds. The difference between conditions in the spiritual world and the physical world has often been emphasised, also the fact that when the soul enters the spiritual world it finds itself in a sphere in which it is essential to become accustomed to a great deal that is the exact opposite of conditions in the physical world. Here is one example: If, on the physical plane, something is to be brought about by us, we have to be active, to use our hands, to move our physical body from one place to another. Activity on our part is necessary if we are to bring about something in the physical world. In the spiritual worlds exactly the opposite holds good. I am speaking always of the present epoch. If something is to happen through us in the spiritual worlds, it must be achieved through our inner calm, our inner tranquillity; in the spiritual worlds the capacity to await events with tranquillity corresponds to busy activity on the physical plane. The less we bestir ourselves on the physical plane, the less we can bring about; the more active we are, the more can happen. In the spiritual world, the calmer our soul can become, the more all inner restlessness can be avoided, the more we shall be able to achieve. It is therefore essential to regard whatever comes to pass as something bestowed upon us by grace, something that comes to us as a blessing because we have deserved it as the fruit of inner tranquillity. I have often said that anyone possessed of spiritual knowledge is aware that 1899 was a very significant year; it was the end of a period of 5,000 years in human history, the so-called Lesser Kali Yuga. Since that year it has become necessary to allow the spiritual to come to men in a way differing from what was previously usual. I will give you a concrete example. In the early twelfth century, a man named Norbert2 founded a religious Order in the West. Before the idea of founding the Order came to him, Norbert was a loose-living man, full of sensuality and worldly impulses. One day something very unusual happened to him; he was struck by lightning. This did not prove fatal, but his whole being was transformed. There are many such examples in history. The inner connection between Norbert's physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego was changed by the force contained in the lightning. It was then that he founded his Order, and although, as in so many other cases, it failed to fulfil the aims of its founder, in many respects it did good at the time. Such ‘chance’ events, as they are called nowadays, have been numerous. But this was not a chance happening; it was an event of world-karma. The man was chosen to perform a task of special importance and to make this possible, particular bodily conditions had to be created. An outer event, an external influence, was necessary. Since the year 1899 such influences on the souls of men must be purely inner influences, not exerted so definitely from outside. Not that there was an abrupt transition; but since the year 1899, influences exerted on the souls of men must more and more take effect inwardly. You may remember what I once said about Christian Rosenkreutz—that when he wishes to call a human soul to himself, it is a more inward call. Before 1899 such calls were made by means of outer events; since that year they have become more inward. Intercourse between human souls and the higher Hierarchies will become more and more dependent upon inner exertions, and men will have to apply the deepest, most intimate forces of their souls in order to maintain this intercourse with the Beings of the Hierarchies. What I have just described to you as an incisive point in life on the physical plane has its counterpart in the spiritual world—visibly for one who is a seer—in much that has taken place between the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. At this time there were certain tasks which it was incumbent upon the Beings of the Hierarchies to carry out among themselves, but one particular condition must be noted. The Beings whose task in the spiritual worlds was to bring about the ending of Kali Yuga, needed something from our Earth, something taking place on our Earth. It was necessary that in certain souls who were sufficiently mature there should be knowledge of this change, or at least that such souls should be able to envisage it. For just as man on the physical plane needs a brain in order to develop consciousness, so do the Beings of the Hierarchies need human thoughts in which their deeds are reflected. Thus the world of men is also necessary for the spiritual world; it co-operates with the spiritual world and is an essential factor—but it must co-operate in the right way. Those who were ready previously or are ready now to participate in this activity from the human side, would not have been right then, nor would they be right now, to agitate in the way that is customary on the physical plane for the furtherance of something that is to take place in the spiritual world. We do not help the Spirits of the higher Hierarchies by busy activity on the physical plane, but primarily by having some measure of understanding of what is to happen; then, in restfulness and concentration of soul, we should await a revelation of the spiritual world. What we can contribute is the inner quietude we can achieve, the attitude of soul we can induce in ourselves to await this bestowal of grace. Thus, paradoxical as it may seem, our activity in the higher worlds depends upon our own inner tranquillity; the calmer we can become, the more will the facts of the spiritual world be able to come to expression through us. Hence it is also necessary, if we are to participate effectively in a spiritual Movement, to be able to develop this mood of tranquillity. And in the Anthroposophical Movement it would be especially desirable for its adherents to endeavour to achieve this inner tranquillity, this consciousness of Grace in their attitude to the spiritual world. Among the various activities in which man is engaged on the physical plane it is really only in the domain of artistic creation, or where there is a genuine striving for knowledge or for the advancement of a spiritual Movement, that these conditions hold good. An artist will assuredly not create the best work of which his gifts are capable if he is perpetually active and is impatient to make progress. He will produce his best work if he can wait for the moment when Grace is vouchsafed to him and if he can abstain from activity when the spirit is not speaking. And quite certainly no higher knowledge will be attained by one who attempts to formulate it out of concepts already familiar to him. Higher knowledge can be attained only by one who is able to wait quietly, with complete resignation, when confronted by a problem or riddle of existence, and who says to himself: I must wait until the answer comes to me like a flash of light from the spiritual worlds. Again, someone who rushes from one person to another, trying to convince them that some particular spiritual Movement is the only genuine one, will certainly not be setting about this in the right way; he should wait until the souls he approaches have recognised the urge in themselves to seek the truths of the spiritual world. That is how we should respond to any illumination shining down into our physical world; but it is particularly true of everything that man can himself bring about in the spiritual world. It may truly be said that even the most practical accomplishments in that realm depend upon the establishment of a certain state of tranquillity. I want now to speak of so-called spiritual healing. Here again it is not the movements or manipulations carried out by the healer that are of prime importance; they are necessary, but only as preparation. The aim is to establish a condition of rest, of balance. Whatever is outwardly visible in a case of spiritual healing is only the preparation for what the healer is trying to do; it is the final result that is of importance. In such a case the situation is like weighing something on a pair of scales: first, we put in the one scale what we want to weigh; in the other scale we put a weight and this sets the beam moving to right and left. But it is only when equilibrium has been established that we can read the weight. Something similar is true of actions in the spiritual worlds. In respect of knowledge, of perception, however, there is a difference. How does perception come about in everyday life on the physical plane? Everyone is aware that with the exception of certain spheres of the physical plane, objects present themselves to us from morning until evening during the waking life of day; from minute to minute new impressions are made upon us. It is in exceptional circumstances only that we, on our side, seek for impressions and do with objects what otherwise they do to us. This, however, is already near to being a searcher for knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is a different matter. We ourselves must set before our soul whatever is to be presented to it. Whereas we must be absolutely quiescent if anything is to come about, to happen through us in the spiritual world, we must be uninterruptedly active if we really desire to understand something in the spiritual world. Connected with this is the fact that many people who would like to be anthroposophists find that the knowledge we are trying to promote here is too baffling for them. Many of them complain: in Anthroposophy one has to be always learning, always pondering, always busy! But without such efforts it is not possible to acquire any understanding of the spiritual worlds. The soul must make strenuous efforts and contemplate everything from many sides. Mental pictures and concepts of the higher worlds must be developed through steady, tranquil work. In the physical world, if we want to have, say, a table, we must acquire it by active effort. But in the spiritual world, if we want to acquire something, we must develop the necessary tranquillity. If anything is to happen, it emerges from the twilight. But when it is a matter of knowing something, we must exert every possible effort to create the necessary Inspirations. If we are to ‘know’ something, effort is essential; the soul must be inwardly active, move from one Imagination to another, one Inspiration to another, one Intuition to another. We must create the whole structure; nothing will come to us that we have not ourselves produced in our search for knowledge. Thus conditions in the spiritual world are exactly the opposite of what holds good in the physical world. I have had to give this introduction in order that we may agree together, firstly, as to how certain facts are discovered, but secondly, how they can be understood as more is said of them. In these lectures I shall deal less with the life immediately following death—known to us under the name of Kamaloka—the essential aspects of which are already familiar to you. We shall be more concerned to study from somewhat new points of view those periods in the life after death which follow the period of Kamaloka. First of all it is important to describe the general character of that life. The first stage of higher knowledge is what may be called the ‘Imaginative’ life, or life filled with true, genuine visions. Just as in physical life we are surrounded by the world of colours, sounds, scents, tastes, mental pictures which we form for ourselves by means of our intellect, so in the spiritual world we are surrounded by ‘Imaginations’—which can also be called ‘visions’. But we must realise that these Imaginations or visions, when they are true in the spiritual sense, are not the imagery of dream but realities. Let us take a definite case. When a human being has passed through the Gate of Death he comes into contact with those who died before him and with whom he was connected in some way during life. During the period between death and the new birth we are actually together with those who belong to us. Just as in the physical world we become aware of objects by seeing their colours, hearing their sounds and so on, in the same way we are surrounded after death, figuratively speaking, by a cloud of visions. Everything around us is vision; we ourselves are vision in that world just as here on Earth we are flesh and bone. But this vision is not a dream; we know that it is reality. When we encounter someone who is dead and with whom we previously had some connection, he too is ‘vision’; he is enveloped in a cloud of visions. But just as on the physical plane we know that the colour ‘red’ comes, let us say, from a red rose, on the spiritual plane we know that the ‘vision’ comes from the spiritual being of someone who passed through the gate of death before us. But here I must draw your attention to a particular aspect, especially as it is experienced by everyone who is living through this period after death. Here on the physical plane it may, for example, be the case that at least as far as we can judge, we ought to have loved some individual but have loved him too little; we have, in fact, deprived him of love or have hurt him in some way. In such circumstances, if we are not stony-hearted, the idea may occur to us that we must make reparation. When this idea comes to us it is possible to compensate for what has happened. On the physical plane we can modify the previously existing relationship but during the period immediately following Kamaloka, we cannot. From the very nature of the encounter we may well be aware that we have hurt the person in some way or deprived him of the love we ought to have shown him; we may also wish to make reparation, but we cannot. During this period all we can do is to continue the relationship which existed between us before death. We perceive what was amiss but for the time being we can do nothing to make amends. In this world of visions which envelops us like a cloud, we cannot alter anything. The relationship we had with an individual who died before us remains. This is often one of the more painful experiences also associated with Initiation. A person experiences much more deeply the significance of his relation to the physical plane than he was able to do with his eyes or his intellect, but for all that he cannot directly change anything. This, in fact, constitutes the pain and martyrdom of spiritual knowledge, in so far as it is self-knowledge and relates to our own life. After death, relationships between individuals remain and continue as they were during earthly life. When recently this fact presented itself to my spiritual sight with tremendous force, something further occurred to me. During my life I have devoted a great deal of study to the works of Homer and have tried to understand many things contained in these ancient epics. On this particular occasion I was reminded of a certain passage. Homer, by the way, was called by the Greeks the ‘blind’ Homer, thus indicating his spiritual seership. In speaking of the realm through which men journey after death, Homer calls it the ‘realm of the Shades in which no change is possible’. Here once again I realised that we can rightly understand much that is contained in the great masterpieces and revelations of mankind only by drawing upon the very depths of spiritual knowledge. Much of what will lead to an understanding of humanity as a whole must depend upon a new recognition by men of those great ancestors whose souls were radiant with spiritual light. Any sensitive soul will be moved by the recognition that this ancient seer was able to write as he did only because the truth of the spiritual world shone into his soul. Here begins the true reverence for the divine-spiritual forces which stream through the world and especially through the hearts and souls of men. This attitude makes it possible to realise how the progress and development of the world are furthered. A very great deal that is true in the deepest sense is contained in the works of men whose gifts were on a level with those of Homer. But this truth which was once directly revealed to an ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance, has now been lost and must be regained on the path leading to spiritual knowledge. In order to substantiate still further this example of what has been bestowed upon humanity by creative genius, I will now speak of something else as well. There was a certain truth which I strongly resisted when it first dawned upon me, which seemed to me to be paradoxical, but which through inner necessity I was eventually bound to recognise. The spiritual investigation on which I was engaged at that time was also connected with the study of certain works of art. Among them was one which I had previously seen and studied although a particular aspect of it had not struck me before. I am speaking now of the Medici tombs in the Chapel designed and built in Florence by Michelangelo. Two members of the Medici family, of whom no more need be said at present, were to be immortalised in statues. But Michelangelo added four so-called ‘allegorical’ figures, named at his suggestion, ‘Morning’ and ‘Evening’, ‘Day’ and ‘Night’. ‘Day’ and ‘Night’ were placed at the foot of one statue; ‘Morning’ and ‘Evening’ at the foot of the other. Even if you have no particularly good photographs of these allegorical figures, you will easily be able to verify what I have to say about them. We will begin with ‘Night’, the most famous of the four. In guide-books you can read that the postures of the limbs in the recumbent figure of ‘Night’ are unnatural, that no human being could sleep in that position and therefore the figure cannot be a good symbolic presentation of ‘Night’. But now let me say something else. Suppose we are looking at the allegorical figure of ‘Night’ with occult vision. We can then say to ourselves: when a human being is asleep, his Ego and astral body have left the physical and etheric bodies. It is conceivable that someone might visualise a particular posture which most accurately portrays that of the etheric body when the astral body and Ego have left. As we go about during the day our gestures and movements are conditioned by the fact that the astral body and Ego are within the physical and etheric bodies. But at night the astral body and Ego are outside and the etheric body alone is in the physical body. The etheric body then unfolds its own activity and mobility, and thus adopts a certain posture. The impression may well be that there is no more fitting portrayal of the free activity of the etheric body than that achieved by Michelangelo in this figure of ‘Night’. In point of fact, the movement is conveyed with such precision that no more appropriate presentation of the etheric body under such circumstances can be imagined. Now let us turn to the figure of ‘Day’. Suppose we could induce in a human being a condition in which his astral and etheric bodies were as quiescent as possible and the Ego especially active. No posture could be more fitting for the activity of the Ego than that portrayed by Michelangelo in the figure of ‘Day’. The postures are not allegorical but drawn directly and realistically from life. The artist has succeeded in capturing as it were for earthly eternity the postures which in the evolutionary process most aptly express the activity of the Ego and the activity of the etheric body. We come now to the other figures. First let us take that of ‘Evening’. If we think of how, in a healthily developed human being, the etheric body emerges and the physical body relaxes—as also happens drastically at death—but if we think, not of actual death but of the emergence of the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego from a man's physical body, we shall find that the posture then assumed by the physical body is accurately portrayed in the figure of ‘Evening’. Again, if we think of the activity of the astral body while there is diminished activity of the etheric body and Ego, we shall find the most precise representation in Michelangelo's figure of ‘Morning’. So on the one side we have the portrayals of the activity of the etheric body and of the Ego (in the figures of ‘Night’ and ‘Day’) and on the other side the portrayals of the physical and astral bodies (in the figures of ‘Evening’ and ‘Morning’). As already said, at first I resisted this conclusion, but the more carefully one investigates the more one is compelled to accept it. What I have wanted to indicate here is how the artist is inspired by the spiritual world. Admittedly, in the case of Michelangelo the process was more or less unconscious but in spite of that his creations could only have been produced by the radiance of the spiritual world shining into the physical. Occultism does not lead to the destruction of works of art but on the contrary to a much deeper understanding of them; as a result. a great deal of what passes for art today will in the future no longer do so. A number of people may be disappointed but truth will be the gainer! I could well understand the foundation of the legend that has grown up in connection with the most elaborate of these figures. The legend is to the effect that when Michelangelo was alone with the figure of ‘Night’ in the Medici Chapel in Florence, he could make the figure rise up and walk. I will not go further into this, but when we know that this figure gives expression to the ‘life-body’, the significance of the legend is obvious. The same applies in many cases—in that of Homer, for instance. Homer speaks of the spiritual realm, a realm of the Shades in which there can be no change or alteration. But when we study the conditions prevailing in the period of life following Kamaloka, we begin to have a new understanding of works of a divinely blessed man such as Homer. And a great deal will be similarly enriched through Spiritual Science. Useful as it may be to indicate these things, they are not of prime importance in actual life. Of prime importance is the fact that mutual relationships are continually being formed between one human being and another. A man's attitude towards another individual will be very different if he detects a spiritual quality in him or thinks of human beings as pictured by a materialistic view of life. The sacred riddle that every human being should be to us can only be this to our feelings and perceptions when we have within our own soul something that is able to throw spiritual light upon the other soul. By deepening our contemplation of cosmic secrets—with which the secrets of human existence are connected—we shall learn to understand the nature of the man standing before us; we shall learn to silence our preconceptions and to feel and recognise the true qualities of the individual in question. The most important light that Spiritual Science can give will be the light it throws upon the human soul. Thereby sound social feelings, also those feelings of love which ought to prevail between human beings, will make their way into the world as a fruit of true spiritual knowledge. We shall recognise that our grasp of spiritual knowledge alone can help this fruit to grow and thrive. When Schopenhauer said: “To preach morality is easy; to establish morality is difficult”, he was giving expression to true insight. After all, it is not so very difficult to discover moral principles, neither is it difficult to preach morality. But to quicken the human soul at the point where spiritual knowledge can germinate and develop into true morality capable of sustaining life—that is what matters. Our attitude to spiritual knowledge can also establish within us the seeds of a truly human morality of the future. The morality of the future will either be built on the foundations of spiritual knowledge—or it will not be built at all! Love of truth requires that we acknowledge these things; it requires us to deepen our anthroposophical life; and above all to bear in mind what has been said today as an introductory fact, namely, that whereas knowledge demands activity, action in the spiritual world demands of us inner tranquillity, in order that we may prove worthy of Grace. You will now be able to understand that during the period between death and the new birth, when we are confronting another being, we can realise through the activity we then unfold whether we have deprived him of love or done anything to him that we ought not to have done. But, as I have said, during this period we cannot induce the tranquillity of soul that is necessary if the wrong is to be righted. In the lectures this winter I shall be describing the period during which it is actually possible in the natural course of the life between death and the new birth, to establish conditions in which change can be made possible—in other words, when a person's karma can be influenced in a certain way. We must, however, carefully distinguish between the point of time we have just been considering and the later period between death and the new birth when the tasks are different. It remains to be said that there are certain conditions which will enable a human being to live through his existence after death in a favourable or an unfavourable way. It will be found that the mode of existence of two or more human beings after the period immediately following their life in Kamaloka depends largely upon their moral disposition on Earth. Human beings who displayed good moral qualities on Earth will enjoy favourable conditions during the period immediately following Kamaloka; those who displayed defective morality will experience bad conditions. I should like to sum up what I have been saying about the life after death in a kind of formula, although as our language is coined for the physical world and not for the spiritual world, it cannot be strictly exact. One can only try to make it as exact as possible. If, then, there has been a good moral quality in our soul, we shall become ‘sociable’ spirits and enjoy companionship with other spirits, with other human beings or with Spirits of the higher Hierarchies. The opposite is the case if a genuine moral quality has been lacking in us; we then become solitary spirits, spirits who find it extremely difficult to move away from the clouds of their visions. To feel thus isolated as a spiritual hermit is an essential cause of suffering after death. On the other hand it is characteristic of the companionship of which I have spoken, to be able to establish the connection with what is necessary for us. It takes a long time after death to live through this sphere which in occultism is called the Mercury-sphere. The moral tone of the soul is naturally still decisive in the next sphere, the Venus-sphere; but new conditions then begin. In this sphere it is the religious disposition of the soul that is decisive. Individuals with a religious inner life will become sociable beings in the Venus-sphere, quite irrespective of the creed to which they belonged. On the other hand, individuals without any religious feelings are condemned in this sphere to complete spiritual self-absorption. Paradoxical though it may seem, I can only say that individuals with predominantly materialistic views and who scorn religious life, inevitably become spiritual hermits, each one living as it were confined in his own cell. Far from being an ironical comparison, it is true to say: all those who are supporters of ‘monistic religion’—that is to say, the opposite of true religion—will find themselves firmly imprisoned and be quite unable to find one another. In this way the mistakes and errors committed by the soul in earthly life are corrected. On the physical plane errors are automatically corrected but in the life between death and the new birth, errors and mistakes on Earth. also our thoughts, become facts. In the process of Initiation too, thinking is a real fact and if we were able to perceive it, an erroneous thought would stand there before us, not only in all its ugliness but with all the destructive elements it contains. If people had no more than an inkling that many a thought signifies a destructive reality they would soon turn away from many of the thoughts circulating in Movements intent upon agitation. It is part of the martyrdom endured in the process of Initiation that thoughts gather around us and stand there like solidified, frozen masses, which we cannot in any way dislodge, as long as we are out of the body. If we have formed an erroneous thought and then pass out of the body, the thought is there and we cannot change it. To change it we must go back into the body. True, memory of it remains, but even an Initiate is only able to rectify it when he is in the physical body. Outside the body it stands there like a mountain. Only in this way can he become aware of the seriousness of the realities of life. This will help you to understand that for certain karmic adjustments a return into the physical body is essential. The mistakes do indeed confront us during the life between death and the new birth; but the errors have to be corrected while we are in the physical body. In this way compensation is made in the subsequent life for what happened in the previous life. But what must be recognised in all its strength and fallaciousness stands there, unchangeable to begin with, as in the case of things in the spiritual world according to Homer. Such knowledge of the spiritual world must penetrate into our souls and become perception and feelings, and as feelings they form the basis for a new conception of life. A monistic Sunday sermon may expound any number of moral principles but as time will show, they will produce very little change, because in the way they are presented the concepts can have a real effect only when we recognise that for a certain period after death whatever is a burden on our karma will confront us as a direct reality. We recognise the burden but it remains as it is; we cannot change it now; all we can do is to recognise and accept the burden fully and deepen our nature accordingly. The effect of such concepts upon our souls is that they enable us to have the true view of life. And then there will follow all that is necessary to further the progress of life along the paths laid down by those who are the spiritual leaders of mankind; we shall thus move forward towards the goals that are set before man and mankind.
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141. Between Death and Rebirth: Lecture II
20 Nov 1912, Berlin Tr. Dorothy S. Osmond, E. H. Goddard Rudolf Steiner |
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For certain as it is that a truth is right in an epoch possessed of a genuine sense of truth, it is also a fact that continually new impulses will make their way into the evolution of humanity. True indeed it is that what Anthroposophy has to give is right for a particular epoch, and humanity, having assimilated Anthroposophy, may bear it into later times as an inner impulse and through these forces also acquire the forces of the later epoch. |
Every individual can ask himself the question: In what measure must I co-operate with the spiritual world in order that the Earth shall not be peopled by sickly bodies only? Anthroposophy is not knowledge alone but a responsibility that brings us into connection with the whole nature of the Earth, and sustains that connection. |
141. Between Death and Rebirth: Lecture II
20 Nov 1912, Berlin Tr. Dorothy S. Osmond, E. H. Goddard Rudolf Steiner |
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It has already been announced that our studies in these Group Meetings during the winter are to be concerned with the life between death and the new birth. Obviously, what will be said from a comparatively new point of view will become thoroughly clear only when the whole course of lectures has been given. It must be taken for granted that a great deal will consist in the communication of findings of investigation carried out during recent months. It is only as our studies progress that understanding can become more complete. Let us, however, begin with a brief consideration of man's nature and constitution—a study that everyone can undertake for himself. The most important and most outstanding fact revealed by an unprejudiced observation of man's life is surely the existence of the human Ego, the ‘I’. A distinction must however be made between the ‘I’ itself and the ‘I’ consciousness. It must be clear to everyone that from the time a child is born the ‘I’ is already active. This is obvious long before the child has any ‘I’-consciousness, when in the language he uses he speaks of himself as if he were another person. At about the third year of life, although of course there are children in whom this happens at an earlier age, the child begins to have some consciousness of himself and to speak of himself in the first person. We know too that this year, although it varies in many individuals, marks the limit before which, in later life, a human being is unable to recall what his soul has experienced. There is thus a dividing line in the life of a human being: before it there is no possibility of any clear and distinct experience of himself as ‘I’. After that point he can experience himself as an Ego, as ‘I’; he finds himself so at home in his ‘I’ that he can again and again summon up from his memory what his ‘I’ has experienced. Now what does unprejudiced observation of life teach us about the reason why the child gradually passes from the stage when he has no experience of his ‘I’ to the stage when this experience comes to him? A clear observation of life can teach us that if from the earliest periods after birth a child were never to come into any sort of collision with the outer world, he could never become ‘I’-conscious. You can discover for yourselves how often you become conscious of your ‘I’ in later life. You have only to knock against the corner of a cupboard and you will certainly be made aware of your ‘I’. This collision with the outside world tells you that you are an ‘I’ and you will hardly fail to be aware of that ‘I’ when you have given yourself a hard bump! In the case of a child these collisions with the outside world need not always cause bruises but in essence their effect is similar—to some extent at least. When a child stretches out his little hand and touches something in the outside world, this amounts to a slight collision and the same holds good when a child opens his eyes and light falls upon them. It is actually by such contacts with the world outside that the child becomes aware of his own identity. Indeed his whole life during these early years consists in learning to distinguish himself from the world outside and thus becoming aware of the self, the ‘I’, within him. When there have been enough of these collisions with the outside world the child acquires self-consciousness and says ‘I’ of himself. Once ‘I’-consciousness has been acquired the child must therefore keep it alive and alert. The only possibility of this, however, is that collisions shall continue to take place. These collisions with the world outside have completed their essential function once the child has reached the stage where he says ‘I’ of himself, and there is nothing further to be learnt by this means as far as the development of consciousness is concerned. Unbiased observation, for instance, of the moment of waking will, however, help everyone to realise that this ‘I’-consciousness can be maintained only by means of ‘collisions’. We know that this ‘I’-consciousness, together with all the other experiences, including those of the astral body, vanishes during sleep and wakens again in the morning. This happens because as a being of soul-and-spirit, man returns into his physical and etheric bodies. Again collisions take place—now with the physical and etheric bodies. A person who is able—even without any occult knowledge—to observe the life of soul accurately, can have the following experience. When he wakes in the morning he will find that a great deal of what his memory has preserved rises again into his consciousness: mental pictures, feelings and other experiences rise up into consciousness from its own depths. If we investigate all this with exactitude—and that is possible without any occult knowledge provided only there is some capacity for observing what the soul experiences—we shall find that what rises up into consciousness has a certain impersonal character. We can observe too that this impersonal character becomes more marked the longer ago the events in question took place—which means, of course, the less we are participating in them with our immediate ‘I’-consciousness. We may remember events which took place very long ago in our life, and when memory recalls them we may feel that we have as little directly to do with them as we have with experiences in the outside world which do not particularly concern us. What is otherwise preserved in our memory tends continually to break loose from our ‘I’. The reason why, in spite of this, we find our ‘I’ returning each morning clearly into our consciousness is that we come back into the same body. Through the resulting collision our ‘I’-consciousness is awakened again each morning. Thus just as the child develops consciousness of his ‘I’ by colliding with the external world, we keep that consciousness alert by colliding each morning with our inner being. This takes place not only in the morning but throughout the day; our ‘I’-consciousness is kindled by the counter-pressure of our body. Our ‘I’ is implanted in the physical body, etheric body and astral body and is continually colliding with them. We can therefore say that we owe our ‘I’-consciousness to the fact that we press inwardly into our bodily constitution and experience the counter-pressure from it. We collide with our body. You will readily understand that this must have the consequence which always results from collisions, namely that damage or injury is caused, even if it is not at once noticed. Collisions of the ‘I’ with the bodily constitution cause slight injuries in the latter. This is indeed the case. Our ‘I’-consciousness could never develop if we were not perpetually colliding with our bodily make-up and thereby destroying it in some way. It is in fact the sum-total of these results of destruction that ultimately brings about death in the physical world. Our conclusion must therefore be that we owe the preservation of our ‘I’-consciousness to our own destructive activity, to the circumstance that we are able to destroy our organism perpetually. In this way we are destroyers of our astral, etheric and physical bodies. But because of this, our relation to those bodies is rather different from what it is to the ‘I’. Everyday life itself makes it obvious that we can also work destructively upon the ‘I’, and we will now try to be clear as to how this may happen. Our ‘I’ is something—never mind for the moment exactly what—that has a certain value in the world. Man feels the truth of this, but it is in his power to reduce that value. How do we reduce the value of our ‘I’? If we do harm to someone to whom we owe a debt of love, we shall actually at that moment have reduced the value of our ‘I’. This is a fact that every human being can recognise. At the same time he can realise that as a human being never fulfils his ideal value, his ‘I’ is really occupied throughout his life in reducing his own value, in bringing about his own destruction. However, as long as we remain poised in our own ‘I’, we have constant opportunity in life to annul the destruction we have caused. We are capable of this even though we do not always manage to do it. Before we pass through the gate of death we can make compensation in some form for undeserved suffering caused to another person. If you think about it you will realise that between birth and death it is possible for man to reduce the value of his ‘I’ but also ultimately to make good the destruction that has been brought about. But in the case of the astral, etheric and physical bodies there is no possibility of being able to do this at the present stage of man's evolution. He is unable to work consciously on these bodies as he can do in the case of his ‘I’, for the reason that he is not, in the real sense, conscious in these members of his being. The destruction for which a man is continually responsible remains in his astral, etheric and physical bodies but he is not in a position to repair it. And it is easy to understand that if we were to come into a new incarnation with the forces of the astral, etheric and physical bodies as they were at the end of our previous incarnation, those bodies would be useless. The content of the life of soul is always the source and the sum and substance of what comes to expression in the bodily constitution. The fact that at the end of a life we have a brittle organism is evidence that our soul then lacks the forces necessary to sustain its vigour. In order to maintain our consciousness and keep it alert we have been continually damaging our bodily sheath. With the forces that are still available at the end of one incarnation we could do nothing in the next. It is necessary for us to reacquire the forces that are able to restore freshness and health within certain limits to the astral, etheric and physical bodies, and to make them of use for a new incarnation. In earthly existence—as is evident even to external observation—it is possible for man to damage these bodies but not to restore them to health. Occult investigation reveals that in the life between death and the new birth we acquire from the extra-terrestrial conditions in which we are then living the forces able to restore our worn-out sheaths. Between death and the new birth we expand into the Universe, the Cosmos, and we have to acquire the forces which cannot be drawn from the sphere of the Earth from the heavenly bodies connected with the Earth. These heavenly bodies are the reservoirs of forces needed for our bodily sheaths. On the Earth man can acquire only the forces needed for the constant restoration of the ‘I’. For the other members of his being the forces must be drawn from other worlds. Let us consider the astral body first. After death the human being expands, quite literally expands, into all the planetary spheres. During the Kamaloka period, as a being of soul-and-spirit, man expands to the boundary demarcated by the orbit of the Moon around the Earth. Beings of various ranks are involved in the process. After that he expands until the Mercury sphere is reached—Mercury as understood in occultism. Thence he expands to the spheres of Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and finally Saturn. The being who has passed through the gate of death becomes in the real sense a Mercury dweller, a Venus dweller and so on, and in a certain sense he must have the faculty to become thoroughly acclimatised in these other planetary worlds. How does he succeed or fail in this respect? In the first place, when his Kamaloka period is over, a man must himself possess some quality that will enable him to establish a definite relationship with the forces in the Mercury sphere into which he then passes. If the lives of various human beings between death and the new birth are investigated, it will be found that they differ greatly in the Mercury sphere. A clear difference is evident according to whether an individual passes into the Mercury sphere with a moral disposition of soul, with the outcome of a moral or an immoral life. There are of course nuances of every possible degree. A man with a moral quality of soul, who bears within him the fruits of a moral life, is what may be called a spiritually ‘social’ being in the Mercury sphere; it is easy for him to establish relationships with other beings—either with people who died before him or also with beings who inhabit the Mercury sphere—and to share experiences with them. An immoral man becomes a hermit, feels excluded from the community of the other inhabitants of this sphere. Such is the consequence in the life between death and the new birth of a moral or immoral disposition of soul. It is important to understand that morality forges our connection and relationship with the beings living in this sphere and an immoral disposition of soul encloses us as it were in a prison. We know that the other beings are there but we seem to be within a shell and make no contact with them. This self-isolation is an outcome of an earthly life that was unsociable and lacking in morality. In the next sphere, which we will call the Venus sphere—in occultism it is always so named—a man's contact with it is mainly dependent upon a religious attitude of soul. Contact with the beings of this sphere can be established by individuals who during their life on Earth came to realise that everything transitory in physical things and in man himself is after all related in some way to immortality; thus they had a feeling that the attitude of soul in every individual should incline to divine-spiritual reality. On the other hand, anyone who is a materialist and cannot direct his soul to the Eternal, the Divine, the Immortal, is condemned in the Venus sphere to be imprisoned within his own being, in isolation. Particularly in connection with this sphere we can learn from occult investigation how in our astral body during life on Earth we create the conditions of existence as they will be in the Venus sphere. On the Earth we must already develop understanding of and inclination for what we hope to contact and experience in that sphere. Let us consider for a moment the fact that human beings living on the Earth during entirely different epochs—as was both inevitable and right—were connected with divine-spiritual life through the various religions and prevailing conceptions of the world. The only way in which human evolution could progress was that out of the one source—for example the religious life—at different times and for very different peoples, according to their natural traits and climatic and other conditions of existence, the varying religious principles were imparted by those destined for this mission. These religious principles stem from one source but are graduated according to the conditions prevailing among particular peoples. Humanity today is still divided into groups determined by their religious tenets and views of the world. But it is through what is thereby formed in our souls that we prepare our understanding of and possibility of contacts in the Venus sphere. The religions of the Hindu, of the Chinese, of the Mohammedan, of the Christian, prepare the soul in such a way that in the Venus sphere it will understand and be attracted to those individuals whose souls have been moulded by the same religious tenets. Occult investigation shows clearly that whereas nowadays men on Earth are divided by race, descent and so forth, and can be distinguished by these factors—although this will change in the future and has already begun to do so—in the Venus sphere in which we live together with other human beings there are no such divisions. The only division there depends upon their religious principles and conceptions of the world while they were on the Earth. It is true that to some extent a classification according to race is possible because this classification on Earth—even according to religion—is still, in a certain respect, a matter of racial relationships. All the same, it is not the element of race that is decisive, but what the soul experiences through its adherence to the principles of a particular religion. We spend certain periods after each death within these spheres; then our being expands and we pass on from the Venus sphere to the Sun sphere. In very truth we become, as souls, Sun dwellers between death and the new birth. Something more than was necessary in the Venus sphere is required for the Sun sphere. If we are to fare well in the Sun sphere between death and the new birth, it is essential to be able to understand not merely one particular group of human beings but to understand and find points of contact with all human souls. In the Sun sphere we feel isolated, like hermits, if the prejudices of one particular faith render us incapable of understanding a human being whose soul has been filled with the principles of a different faith. An individual who on the Earth regarded one particular religion only as valuable is incapable in the Sun sphere of understanding adherents of other religions. But the consequences of this lack of understanding are not the same as they are on Earth. On the Earth men may live side by side without any inner understanding of each other and then separate into different faiths and systems of thought. In the Sun sphere, however, since we interpenetrate one another, we are together and yet at the same time separated in our inner being; and in that sphere every separation and every lack of understanding are at once sources of terrible suffering. Every contact with an adherent of a different faith becomes a reproach which weighs upon us unceasingly and which we cannot escape because on Earth we did not educate ourselves in this respect. Taking the life between death and the new birth as a starting-point, what is now to be said will in a certain sense be easier to understand if reference is made to Initiation. What the Initiate experiences in the spiritual worlds is in a certain respect closely akin to experiences undergone in the life between death and rebirth. The Initiate has to make his way into the same spheres, and were he to maintain the prejudices resulting from a biased, one-sided view of the world, he would undergo similar suffering in the Sun sphere. It is therefore essential that Initiation should be preceded by thorough understanding of every religious faith spread over the Earth, also understanding of what is taking place in every individual soul regardless of the creed or system of thought to which it adheres. Otherwise, whatever has not been met with understanding becomes a source of suffering, as if towering mountains were threatening to crash down upon one, as if explosions were discharging their whole force upon one. Whatever lack of understanding due to one's own narrow prejudices has been shown to human beings on Earth, has this effect in the spiritual worlds. It was not always so. In pre-Christian times the process of evolution did not require men unconditionally to acquire this understanding of every human soul. Humanity was obliged to pass through the phase of a one-sided attitude. But those who were trained for some kind of leadership in the world were obliged to acquire, either consciously or less consciously, an understanding for every human being without distinction. Even when some individual was to be the leader of a particular people he would be required to develop a measure of understanding for every human soul. This is indicated magnificently in the Old Testament in the passage describing the meeting between Abraham and Melchizedek, the priest of the Most High. Those who understand this passage know that Abraham, who was destined to become the leader of his people, underwent an Initiation at this time—even if not in full consciousness as is the case in later Initiations. Abraham's Initiation was connected with realisation of the Divine element that can flow into all human souls. The passage which tells of the meeting of Abraham with Melchizedek contains a deep secret connected with the evolution of humanity. But men had gradually to be prepared to become more and more qualified for a fruitful existence in the Sun sphere. The first impulse in the evolution of our Earth towards a fruitful existence in the Sun sphere was given by the Mystery of Golgotha, after preparation for it had been made by the people of the Old Testament—about which there will be more to say. It is not essential at the moment to deal with the question as to whether Christianity in its development hitherto has achieved all its goals and possible fruits. Needless to say, in its various sects and denominations Christianity has produced only one-sided aspects of its essential principle; in certain of its tenets, and as a whole, it is not on the level of certain other faiths. What really matters, however, is its potentiality of development, what enrichment it can give to one who penetrates more and more deeply into its essential truth. We have already tried to indicate these possibilities of development. There is infinitely much to be said, but one matter only shall now be mentioned because it can throw light upon the point under consideration at the moment. If we have a genuine understanding of the different faiths we find one outstanding characteristic, namely that in the earlier periods of Earth evolution the individual religions were adapted to the particular races, tribal stocks or peoples. There is still evidence of this. Only one who has been born a Hindu can be an orthodox adherent of the Hindu religion today. In a certain respect the earlier religions are racial religions, folk-religions. Do not take this as disparagement but simply as characterisation. The different religions, although deriving from the primal source of a universal world-religion, were given to the peoples by the Initiates and adapted to the specific tribal stocks and races; hence in that sense there is something egoistic about them. Peoples have always loved the religion that has been determined by their own flesh and blood. In ancient times, when a religion stemming from a Mystery Centre had been established among a particular people, a bodily stranger who wanted to start another religion among them did not do so, but instead founded a second Mystery Centre. People were always given a leader from their own tribe or clan. In this respect true Christianity is very different. Christ Jesus, the Individuality to whom the Christians turn, was least active among the people and in the area on the Earth where He was born. In respect of religion, can conditions in the Western world be equated with those existing in India or China where folk-religions still survive? No, they cannot! The regions where we ourselves are living could be equated with India and China only if here, in Middle Europe, we were, for example, faithful followers of Wotan. We should then be at the same stage and the element of religious egoism would be in evidence here too. But in the West this aspect has disappeared, for the West accepted a religion that was not confined to any particular folk-community. This fact must be remembered. The influences which bound blood to blood and were a determining factor in the founding of the old religious communities, played no part in the spread of Christianity. The life of soul was the essential factor and in the West a religion unconnected with a single people or folk-community was adopted. Why has it been so? It is because in its deepest roots and from the very beginning Christianity was meant to be a religion for all men without distinction of belief, nationality, descent, race, and whatever separates human beings from one another. Christianity is rightly understood only when it is realised that it is concerned solely with the essentially human element in all men. The fact that in its early phases and also in our own times sects have arisen from Christianity should be no cause of apprehension; for Christianity makes possible the evolution of the “human universal”. It is also true that a great transformation will have to take place within the Christian world if the roots of Christianity are to be rightly understood. A distinction will have to be made between knowledge of Christian tenets and the reality of Christianity. St. Paul did in fact begin to make this distinction and those who understand his words can realise something of what they mean, although up to now understanding has been rare. When St. Paul made it clear that belief in Christ Jesus was not the prerogative of Judaism, and spoke the words, “Christ died not only for the Jews but also for the Gentiles”, this was an enormous contribution to the true conception of Christianity. It would be quite false to maintain that the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled only for those who call themselves Christians. The Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled for all men! This is indeed what St. Paul meant in the words just quoted. What passed over from the Mystery of Golgotha into earthly life has meaning and significance for all that life. Grotesque as it may still seem today to those who do not distinguish between knowledge and reality, it must nevertheless be said that he alone understands the roots of Christianity who can view an adherent of a different religion—no matter whether he calls himself Indian, or Chinese, or anything else—in such a way that he asks himself: To what extent is he Christ-like? The fact of knowing this is not what really matters; what does matter is that such a person knows the reality of Christianity—in the sense that it is not essential to know physiology provided that digestion takes place. A man whose religion has failed to bring about in him a conscious relationship to the Mystery of Golgotha has no understanding of it, but that does not entitle others to deny him the reality of Christianity. Not until Christians become so truly Christian that they seek for the Christ-like principle in all souls on Earth—not when they have implanted it in the souls of others by attempts at conversion—not until then will the root principles of Christianity have been understood. All this belongs to Christianity when rightly understood. Distinction must be made between the reality of Christianity and an understanding of it. To understand what has been present on the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha is a great ideal, the ideal of supremely important knowledge for the Earth—knowledge that men will gradually acquire. But the reality itself has come to pass; the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled. Our life in the Sun sphere after death depends upon what relationship we have established with the Mystery of Golgotha. The contact with all human souls that can be experienced in the Sun sphere is possible only if a relationship with the Mystery of Golgotha has been established in the way described. It is a relationship which ensures freedom from any still imperfect form of Christianity as practised in this or that sect. If we have no such relationship with the Mystery of Golgotha we condemn ourselves to becoming solitary individuals in the Sun sphere, unable to make contact with other human souls. There is a certain utterance which retains its power even in the Sun sphere. When in the Sun sphere we encounter another human soul we can become companions and not be thrust away from that soul, if these words have been preserved in our inner being: “When two or three are gathered together in my Name, there am I in the midst of them.” In the Sun sphere all human souls can be united with one another in a true recognition of Christ. And this union is of tremendous significance. For in the Sun sphere a man must make a decision; he must acquire a certain understanding. And what this means can best be explained by referring to an extraordinarily important fact which every human soul would be able to realise but does not always do so. One of the most beautiful sayings in the New Testament occurs when Christ Jesus is endeavouring to make men conscious of the divine-spiritual core of being within them, of the truth that God is present as the divine spark in every human soul, that every human being has divinity within him. Christ Jesus emphasises this, declaring with all power and intensity: “Ye are Gods!” The emphasis laid upon the words shows that He recognised this as a rightful claim when a man applies its implications to himself. But this utterance was also made by another Being. The Old Testament tells us in symbolic words at what point in evolution it was made. At the very beginning of man's evolution, Lucifer proclaimed: “Ye shall be as Gods!” This is something that must be noticed. A saying in identical terms is uttered by two Beings: by Lucifer and by Christ! “Ye shall be as Gods.” What does the Bible imply by giving emphasis to these two utterances? It implies that from Lucifer this utterance leads to a curse, from Christ to the highest blessing. Is there not a wonderful mystery here? The words hurled into humanity by Lucifer, the Tempter—when uttered by Christ to men are supreme wisdom. That what is really important is not the content of an utterance but from whom it comes—this fact is inscribed in letters of power into the biblical record. From an instance such as this let us feel that it behoves us to understand things in adequate depth and that we can learn a very great deal from what may lie openly before us. It is in the Sun sphere between death and the new birth that again and again we hear the words spoken to our soul with all their force: Thou art a God, be as a God! We know with all certainty when we arrive in the Sun sphere that Lucifer meets us again and impresses the meaning of this utterance forcibly upon us. From then onwards we can understand Lucifer very well, but Christ only if on Earth we have prepared ourselves to understand Him. Christ's utterance will have no meaning for us in the Sun sphere if by our relationship on Earth to the mystery of Golgotha we have not gained some understanding of it. Trivial as the following words may be, let me say this: In the Sun sphere we find two thrones. From the throne of Lucifer—which is always occupied—there sound the words of temptation, asserting our divinity. The second throne seems to us—or rather to many human beings—to be still empty, for on this other throne in the Sun sphere between death and the new birth, we have to discover what can be called the Akashic picture of Christ. If we can find the Akashic picture of Christ it will be for us a blessing—this will become evident in later lectures. But it has become possible to find that picture only because Christ came down from the Sun and has united Himself with the Earth and because we have been able to open our eyes of spirit here on Earth through understanding in some measure the Mystery of Golgotha. This will ensure that the throne of Christ in the Sun sphere does not appear empty to us but that the deeds He performed while His dwelling-place was still the Sun sphere become visible. As I said, I have to use trivial words in speaking of these two thrones; this sublime fact can only be spoken of figuratively. But anyone who acquires more and more understanding will realise that words coined on Earth are inadequate and that one is obliged to resort to imagery in order to be intelligible. Now we shall understand and find support for what we need in the Sun sphere only if on the Earth we have acquired something that plays not only into the astral forces but into the etheric forces as well. You will know from what I have previously said that the religions influence the etheric forces and the etheric body of man. A considerable spiritual heirloom is available for all of us inasmuch as forces from the Sun sphere are instilled into us if we have acquired understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For it is from the Sun sphere that we must draw the forces necessary for the renewal of our etheric body for the next incarnation; whereas the forces necessary for our astral body in the next incarnation must be drawn from the other planetary spheres. Let nobody believe that what I have been saying is unconnected with the whole course of evolution. I have told you that already in pre-Christian times a leader of humanity such as Abraham was able at his meeting with Melchizedek (or Malkezadek) to acquire the forces needed for the Sun sphere. I am making no intolerant statement implying that man can acquire the forces necessary for establishing a right relationship to the beings of the Sun sphere through orthodox Christianity alone. I am stating a fact of evolution; another fact is that the time when it was still possible, as in ancient days, to behold the Akashic picture of Christ as the result of different means is drawing nearer and nearer to a close as evolution proceeds. Abraham's spiritual eyes were fully open to the Akashic picture of Christ in the Sun sphere. You must not argue that the Mystery of Golgotha had not then taken place and that Christ was still in the Sun sphere; for during that period Christ was united with other planetary spheres. It is indeed a fact that at that time and even down to our own epoch, human beings were able to perceive what could be perceived in those spheres. And if we go still further back to those primeval ages when the Holy Rishis were the first Teachers of the people of ancient India, those Teachers certainly had knowledge of Christ who at that time was still in the Sun sphere, and they imparted this knowledge and understanding to their followers, although of course not using the later nomenclature. Although in those ancient times the Mystery of Golgotha was not yet within their ken, men were able, by drawing intimate truths from the depths of their being, to acquire from the Sun sphere what was needed for the renewal of their etheric bodies. But these possibilities ceased as evolution proceeded and this was necessary because new forces must perpetually be instilled into humanity. What has been said is meant to indicate a fact of evolution. We are moving towards a future when it will be less and less possible for men during the period between death and the new birth to live through their existence in the Sun sphere in the right way if they alienate themselves from the Christ Event. True it is that we must look for the Christ-like quality in each soul. If we are to understand the root of Christianity we must ask ourselves in the case of everyone we meet; how much in his nature is Christ-like? But it is also true that a man can sever himself from Christianity if he fails to become conscious of what it is in reality. And when we remind ourselves again of St. Paul's words, that Christ died not only for the Jews but also for the Gentiles, we must also add that if in the course of further progress men were more and more to deny the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha they would prevent what was done for their sake from reaching them. The Mystery of Golgotha was a deed of blessing for all mankind. Every human being is free to allow that event to influence him or not; but the effect of the influence will in future depend more and more upon the extent to which he is able to draw from the Sun sphere the forces required to ensure that his etheric body shall be rightly formed in his next incarnation. The immeasurable consequences of this for the whole future of the human race on Earth will be considered in the forthcoming lectures. Thus Christianity, admittedly little understood, yet always connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, is the first preparation if humanity is to regain the relationship to the Sun sphere. A second impulse would be the genuine anthroposophical understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. After a human being has adjusted himself to existence in the Sun sphere his life expands further outwards, into the Mars sphere, for example. What is essential is that he not only establishes the right relationship to the forces of the Sun sphere but maintains this relationship when his life expands into the Mars sphere. In order that his consciousness shall not become dim, shall not fade away altogether after the Sun sphere but that he can carry it over into the Mars sphere, it is necessary in the present cycle of human evolution that spiritual understanding of the gist of our religions and conceptions of the world shall take root in the souls of men. Hence the endeavours to understand the essence of religions and systems of thought. Spiritual-scientific understanding will eventually be replaced by another, quite different understanding of which men today cannot even dream. For certain as it is that a truth is right in an epoch possessed of a genuine sense of truth, it is also a fact that continually new impulses will make their way into the evolution of humanity. True indeed it is that what Anthroposophy has to give is right for a particular epoch, and humanity, having assimilated Anthroposophy, may bear it into later times as an inner impulse and through these forces also acquire the forces of the later epoch. Thus it has been possible to show the relationship of man’s life on Earth to the life between death and the new birth. Nobody can fail to realise that it is just as necessary for a human being to have knowledge, feeling and perceptiveness of the life between death and the new birth as of earthly life itself. For when he enters earthly life at birth, the confidence, strength and hopefulness connected with that life depend upon what forces he brings with him from the life between the last death and the present birth. But again, the forces we are able to acquire during that life depend upon our conduct in the earlier incarnation, upon our moral and religious disposition or the quality of our attitude of soul. We must realise that whether the future evolution of the human race will be furthered or impeded depends upon our active and creative co-operation with the super-sensible world in which we live between death and the new birth. If men failed to acquire the forces able to provide them with healthy astral bodies, the forces in their astral bodies would become ineffective and sterile and humanity would sink into moral and religious turpitude on the Earth. Similarly, if men failed to acquire the forces needed for their etheric bodies, as members of the human race they would wither away on the Earth. Every individual can ask himself the question: In what measure must I co-operate with the spiritual world in order that the Earth shall not be peopled by sickly bodies only? Anthroposophy is not knowledge alone but a responsibility that brings us into connection with the whole nature of the Earth, and sustains that connection. |