63. The Spiritual World and Spiritual Science. Views and Aims of the Present
30 Oct 1913, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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Humanity saw this science emerging, saw it entering in our technology, in our traffic, it saw it transforming the outer material world civilisation and conquering the social life of the nations. However, just because the modern spiritual science understands that, it draws the knowledge from that which natural sciences can perform. |
Thus, the biggest part of that what natural sciences have performed as great achievements is determined to go over to the technical, the social, and the traffic life, it is determined to fertilise the material civilisation and to develop the progress of humanity. |
I would like to draw your attention to something fundamental only. One can easily say the following. If the spiritual researcher has experienced his spiritual-mental in its independence and believes then to look back as in an enlarged memory at former lives on earth or at his last life on earth. |
63. The Spiritual World and Spiritual Science. Views and Aims of the Present
30 Oct 1913, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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As now already since a number of years, I will also try in this winter to hold some talks from the fields of spiritual science. I will also try in this winter to light up different fields of life and knowledge from this spiritual-scientific point of view. Hence, I may ask you today like during the past years again to consider the today's talk not so much as a single one, but to look at the whole cycle of these talks as a more or less unified whole, although I will possibly try to round any single talk, too. I would like to touch the fields of the spiritual, the moral, and the artistic life in this course of lectures to show how spiritual science can become an enlightening cultural factor for the most different questions that the soul of the present must realise justifiably. It is by no means an approved or popular viewpoint in the present from which I hold these talks. On the contrary, the viewpoint of spiritual science is treated in adversary way and is often misunderstood. Immediately from the start, I may say that about this view of spiritual-science someone is surprised least of all, who stands on this point of view. Since how much is brought forward from the mental pictures and the habitual ways of thinking of the present against this spiritual science—with supposed right—even today; someone understands that best of all who has penetrated just into this spiritual science thoroughly. Contradiction, opposition, and misunderstanding are quite comprehensible to me. One can find misunderstandings in different fields. There on side one believes that this spiritual science establishes on some old, Oriental or other confessions because one believes to recognise a certain resemblance of single points with that what such confessions have represented. The fact that it behaves with such resemblances quite different, one can recognise only in the course of spiritual science. However, I do this indication only. I want to say as a prologue that spiritual science has nothing to do with any traditions, but that it is based on immediate research results that one can attain without any tradition. From another side one misunderstands spiritual science in as much as one regards it as a kind of new confession, as a kind of sectarian religion. However, it is just as little a confession like any other science of the present. Just as little as one is allowed to say of the chemists that they are a sect of chemistry, one can call spiritual science a sectarian religion. However, the opposition against spiritual science comes from quite different requirements. The different denominations believe that they have to fear any new denomination that it endangers the religious life generally. One will convince himself gradually that the same applies to this spiritual science as it applied to the natural sciences when they began their modern development in the age of Copernicus. As one believed at that time that the Copernican worldview would endanger the religious life of humanity, as the different confessions exiled Copernicanism for centuries, which may also apply to spiritual science that has a similar task concerning the spirit as Copernicus had a particular task in natural sciences. In the end, one will realise that a similar relation exists between spiritual science and the religious science, like between Copernicanism and religious confessions. One will also realise that one cannot achieve anything against that what culture demands just as little in the fields of the spirit as one was able to do so in the fields of scientific knowledge. I want only to touch these matters at first and then expand on them in the course of the talks. However, another weighty objection comes from the side that should consider spiritual science as a kind of continuation of its own attempts, which believes to stand on the firm ground of scientific research and thinking. I want today to draw your attention only figuratively to the relation of the modern spiritual science to the current of scientific knowledge. Nobody can acknowledge the high value and great cultural power of the modern scientific way of thinking more than just someone who stands on the ground of spiritual science. Who could let a spiritual current flow in the civilisation that would oppose the scientific thinking? Such a man would not understand how deeply not only in the contents, but also in the whole way of the questions and riddles of knowledge the natural sciences have intervened. I will indeed argue nothing against the entitled demands of science in the course of these talks. Humanity saw this science emerging, saw it entering in our technology, in our traffic, it saw it transforming the outer material world civilisation and conquering the social life of the nations. However, just because the modern spiritual science understands that, it draws the knowledge from that which natural sciences can perform. If natural sciences are grasped vividly, not abstractly, not theoretically or dogmatically, something can result from natural sciences and their habitual ways of thinking that informs the human soul not only about the outer laws of the sensory world but also about the soul life. This encloses the questions of death and immortality and the whole extent of spiritual life. Since I want to emphasise this from the start that spiritual science (German: Geisteswissenschaft) is meant here not as a summary of various cultural sciences for which today one also often uses the name “Geisteswissenschaften” (humanities)—for history, sociology, art history, legal history and the like. However, that spiritual science is meant as knowledge of a real spiritual life which is as truthful as the physical life round us, and to which the human being belongs with his mind and soul. However, with it one stands straight away on a field where many spirits of the modern time cannot yet go along because for them the whole way how this spiritual science approaches the spirit and the riddles of life is something quite fantastic and dreamy as basically also the Copernican world view was fantastic and dreamy to the contemporaries. Nevertheless, natural sciences and spiritual science relate to each other possibly in the following way: if a farmer harvests his fruits in the autumn, the biggest part of these fruits is used as human food. However, a part of these fruits must be sowed again if life should go on. Thus, the biggest part of that what natural sciences have performed as great achievements is determined to go over to the technical, the social, and the traffic life, it is determined to fertilise the material civilisation and to develop the progress of humanity. But in it something is also included that can be handed over again to the human soul without going over to the material life that can be processed in this human soul in the way as I suggest it immediately later, and that appears then in the soul like the seminal grain that has been put in the earth. What the human soul can take up that way is transformed in it and becomes that clairvoyant force—far from any superstition—which can glance at the spiritual world. Since this distinguishes spiritual science from other branches of knowledge: the fact that it requires a development of the human soul beyond the viewpoint which counts, otherwise, in the modern scientificity. In this scientificity one takes the human being in such a way as he observes the world around us and the principles of nature—equipped with his power of cognition, with the sensory observation and his intellectuality—and forms science that way. One takes, I say, the human being as he is, and the human being takes himself, as he is to penetrate into this scientificity. This does not apply to spiritual science. The spiritual world is for the human being a concealed world at first, it does not exist for the senses and the usual reason. It lies behind the world of the senses, although that what the human being is in his deepest nature belongs to this supersensible world. The human being with his power of cognition if he understands himself in such a way, as he is, belongs to this sensory world and this world of reason. In the deeper sense, he belongs to the spiritual world; but he must develop this deeper sense first. To put it another way: as true it is that the human being takes himself for the usual science as he is, it is also true that he only must transform himself for spiritual science, for the knowledge of the spirit, so that he can penetrate into the spiritual world. One has to develop the cognitive forces for the spiritual world only; the human being must transform himself only, so that the slumbering cognitive faculties awake in him. However, these slumbering cognitive faculties are in him, and he can wake them. However, this is a viewpoint which is rather comfortable, but is incomprehensible in many a respect for the present. Since this present is inclined so much if it concerns questions of higher life to put the question first: what can the human being recognise?—And then some people who live in the habitual ways of thinking of the present rightly say: the human cognitive faculties are limited and he cannot penetrate into a spiritual world. On one side, there are many people saying that there may be such a spiritual world, but the human cognitive faculties are not able to penetrate into it. Others are more radical and say that a spiritual world appears to nobody, consequently, there is none. This is the view of materialism or as one calls it nobler today, of monism. One cannot argue about that at all that the human being, as well as he is, cannot penetrate into the spiritual world if he wants to grasp it scientifically if he does not only want to believe in it. However, such a mere belief is no longer sufficient for humanity today—and will be less and less adequate for it, because the scientific education has taken place during the last centuries. However, one has to develop the conditions by which the human being can penetrate into the spiritual world. One normally imagines if one assumes that such a thing is possible that particularly abnormal forces are necessary. These must be forces that are caused by abnormal conditions. This is a misunderstanding, too. What it concerns is that the knowledge, those soul forces by which the human being penetrates into the spiritual world exist in the human soul that they control the soul in our usual life. However, they are subconscious in our everyday life, they control subordinated fields of life, or if they control more important fields, they control them in such a way that one does not notice these forces and their influence. What always exists in the soul what is absent in no soul what exists, however, in the everyday life only to a minor degree must give—developed to a certain height and strength—cognitive forces for spiritual science. I want to draw your attention to a soul quality—because I want to talk not abstractly, but immediately concretely—to a quality that everybody knows that plays a role that gives, however, a basic strength for spiritual science, brought only from its low level to a certain intensity. Every human being knows what one calls directing the attention of the soul to something. We must turn our attention, our interest to the most various objects; since we need to make mental pictures of these most various objects that remain in our memory and influence our soul perpetually. Which role attention or interest play in the human life, someone will notice who has already reflected once about the good or bad memory. He knows that a good memory is a result of the possibility in many a respect to turn his attention to the things, to pursue them with interest. Something that we are intensively attentive to, something that we were involved with our full interest imprints itself in our soul; this you keep in your soul life. Who passes the things briefly has to complain of a bad memory. Still in other respect attention, interest is important in this human life. Since the inner integrity of our soul life depends on the fact that we keep the things as mental pictures with which we were once connected. Everybody knows that it is necessary for the healthy soul life that the human being keeps the coherence between the present and the experiences. Someone who would not know in a great measure how his self-consciousness, his ego has behaved during the past years, so that he, looking back, would not recognise that he has experienced it, for someone to whom the ego would always be a new experience would have no healthy soul life. In the end, our healthy soul life goes back to the fact that we are able to turn our attention to the things of life. This basic soul force plays a role in life that is always there. Somebody could say now: hence, you tell to us reporting about spiritual science somethingevery day and you assert that this attention must be further developed. Nevertheless, it is in such a way! This attention may be weak in life, may be weak compared with the intensity that it assumes with the spiritual researcher. Since the increase of attention is something that the spiritual researcher must practice over and over again that he must bring to such an intensity compared with which the level of attention is low in the usual life. One could say that it could be apparently easy to reach the ground of the spiritual-scientific research because it only concerns the development of something that always exists in the usual life. However, the words in Goethe's Faust(verse 4928) also apply: “it's easy, to be sure, but easy tasks take effort.” Many years' exercises spent in perseverance of the soul are necessary to develop the soul strength, and we call this increased life in attention concentration of the spiritual life in spiritual science. We call it concentration of the spiritual life because the human mind or the human soul, as well as they are, spread out their forces in the everyday life about a wide area, about an area that embraces everything that the outer sensory world offers and that the reason forms in this outer sensory perception. In the usual life, the soul forces spread about everything that the human being wants; briefly, the soul life is diffuse at first. What the spiritual researcher has to form as the spiritual-scientific apparatus he must prepare to himself in the spiritual area as the chemist prepares his apparatuses in the laboratory. It is necessary to collect these soul forces, otherwise dispersed, in one point as it were, to turn the attention to one point. To which point? To a self-chosen point in the inner experience of the soul. That means that: the spiritual researcher has to form any mental picture, any soul impulse, and to put it in the centre of his soul life. A mental picture that has to do nothing with any outside world at first is the best: an image, a symbol. I take a simple example: if we take a sentence, which has no outer truth at first, but it does not depend on that: I imagine light—light of a star, light of the sun—touching me. This light is wisdom flowing through the world. A symbol. Now I concentrate my complete attention to this symbol. Not that is the point that something true is in it, but that all soul forces are concentrated in this one point. Hence, it is necessary that you choose that as preparation what you can read in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? where the different methods are given. Here I want only to point to the principle. It is necessary for it that you develop the strong will to concentrate your whole soul life onto this one point. That means, however, that you are able to cause artificially what happens, otherwise, in sleep naturally. In sleep our senses grow tired; the world stops being sense-perceptible for us. Colours, tones, and smells stop making impressions on us. However, besides, at the same time our consciousness dwindles there. With the spiritual researcher, it must be just the consciousness that quietens all outer impressions arbitrarily, and, nevertheless, you have to keep it completely at the same time. In the same way, one has to stop what immediately stops after falling asleep: all intentions must become completely quiet. Everything that, otherwise, the human being spends to stand vigorously in the world must become completely quiet for the spiritual researcher. He must divert his consciousness from everything that it is otherwise directed to, and concentrate the whole soul only upon one point that he has chosen himself. Then just those soul forces gain strength that remain hidden, otherwise, in the everyday life, and now something happens gradually that I would like to compare with that what takes place in the area of the outer material life if the chemist investigates, for example, the composition of water. The spiritual researcher stands before the human being in the world, as the chemist stands before the water. The human being is for the spiritual researcher an intimate compound of mind and soul with the bodily as for the chemist the water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. Just as little the chemist could get the idea what the water is if he investigated the hydrogen only, just as little one can get an idea what the human being is in his mind or soul if one looks at the physical human life only. In this field the spiritual researcher must be frightened just as little to be considered as a dualist as the chemist may be frightened in his field, if he separates water in hydrogen and oxygen. One is not more right to call the spiritual researcher a dualist because he practices “spiritual chemistry” in his field than the chemist, because he does not accept that the water is a unity but consists of hydrogen and oxygen, and that he must separate the hydrogen from the oxygen to get to know the nature of water. The spiritual researcher works with the same means, only in his fields. What I have just indicated: the concentration, the increased attention wakes the forces slumbering in the human soul during the everyday life, but by which soul and spirit, which are, otherwise, in unseparated connection with the physical-bodily, are separated from this bodily as the material hydrogen is separated from the water with the chemical experiment. The spiritual researcher experiences this if he exercises this increase of attention vigorously, often for many years. It is fact for him that the mental-spiritual that one can easily doubt, otherwise, becomes an immediate experience. Therefore, he can say because of immediate experience, I experience myself independent of my body in the spiritual-mental; now I know only what the spiritual-mental is because I experience myself in the spiritual-mental!—It does not concern so much that the spiritual researcher would have to add knowledge of the same kind, as the scientific ones. However,, although his way of research is completely in accordance with the scientific spirit, his research method is, nevertheless, quite different; and just because it wants to remain loyal to the scientific laws, it must take on a form different from the scientific methods which are immediately directed to the material field. Thus, the spiritual researcher attains a consciousness of the following. In our present one will ask with a certain right: have natural sciences delivered even if not proofs, but the hypothetical authorisation of the view at least that the human thinking is a function or a result of the brain? Here in this point everything starts mostly that opponents of natural sciences or followers of spiritual science bring forward in a not quite modern sense, namely not in the sense that is meant here as the modern one. Many people say who would like to acknowledge the spirit and, hence, oppose such statements from the start: the human thinking is bound to the central nervous system; it is an outflow of the central nervous system. One polemicizesa lot against that what natural sciences have not proved, indeed, but have put up as a hypothesis that the human thinking is a function of the brain. Many people immediately consider spiritual science as threatened if one admits that the human thinking is bound to the brain that one cannot think without the central nervous system. In this point spiritual science has not even to contradict the justified requirements of natural sciences; since it is true that thinking, as we develop it in the usual life, is bound to the central nervous system and to the remaining nervous system. However, true spiritual science teaches us to recognise that that form of the brain, of the central nervous system that is necessary for thinking in the everyday life has flowed out of the spirit that the spirit builds up our body only in such a way that this body can become the tool of thinking. Spiritual science does not descend only in the thinking, it does not assert that thinking, as it appears in the everyday life, is everlasting and immortal, but it teaches us to recognise that our spirit and soul build up our mental apparatus, that what is behind our mental apparatus what generally lives behind our physical nature. The spiritual-scientific methods, as I have suggested them, lead to these active, creative forces that stand behind all material. Thus, the spiritual-scientific method advances, because it must be in the inside at the same time what it separates from the body, to another way of experience and to a soul condition different from the way of the experience and the mental condition of the usual life and the usual science. I would like to emphasise one thing from the start because I want to speak about concrete facts. What expresses itself, otherwise, in our thinking and imagining, and what is bound to the brain in the everyday life really separates from the bodily by concentration as I have indicated. The spiritual researcher experiences that he is strengthened that he is beyond his central nervous system and that he faces the own corporeality in this mental-spiritual experience. In other words, as you experience yourself in the usual life within your body, you experience yourself beyond your body if you apply the spiritual-scientific methods to yourself. You experience yourself beyond your brain if you apply these methods of concentration. You know only then how the cerebral tools are. Since I tell no fairy tales but something that the spiritual researcher experiences. He feels like in the vicinity of his brain. He knows what it means to think not in such a way as one thinks in the usual life, but to think only in the spiritual-mental element and to feel the brain beyond this element—nay, to feel it even like something that offers resistance against which one stumbles as one stumbles against an outer object. I have described this increase of such experiences to a more ample experience already here once; I have also described it in my little writing A Way to Human Self-knowledge. If the spiritual researcher continues his exercises and has the devotion to concentrate his whole soul life not upon one picture, but upon hundreds and hundreds of pictures, so that the forces increase more and more, then that experience takes place that I have called a stupefying event in the just mentioned writing. It takes place for the one in one form, for the other in another form; however, it has always something typical. It will appear to everybody as I describe it. The human being can advance so far, even in the middle of the everyday life if he has done exercises for a long time that he says to himself: what wants to reveal itself to you from the everyday imagination?—It is something that wants to penetrate you like something that ascends, otherwise, only from your own soul. However, it can also penetrate as for example a dream if you awake from sleep what is, however, again endlessly more than a dream about which you say to yourself: what happens now?—Something happens that appears possibly like a lightning striking in the space that you feel penetrating yourself. You can say to yourself, it is, as if your body drops from you and is destroyed. Now you know: you can be in yourself inside without being in your body! Then you know if you experience for the first time what the spiritual researchers have meant who said: someone who experiences the everlasting in the human being, the mental-spiritual must approach the gate of death. You experience the death in yourself pictorially. You experience in the real, not imagined Imagination what it means: the mental-spiritual separates from the body and continues existing if it separates when the human being goes through the gate of death. We still speak about that; today I want to indicate like in a preface only the nature of the spiritual life and the spiritual science connected with it. A sum of inner experiences appears that bring to mind at first what it means to do “spiritual chemistry,” to “separate the mental-spiritual from the bodily,” to investigate the destinies of the mental-spiritual and to know that there is a real separation of the spiritual from the bodily and an independent life of the spirit compared with the body. This is the fruit of the increased attention, the increased concentration. You already notice this on relatively elementary stages, this standing beyond the body, in particular concerning the central nervous system. If you feel thinking and imagining attracted by the spiritual world beyond your brain, beyond your body, you are urged repeatedly because you stand as an earthly human being in the usual life to return to the usual imagination and to think as you just think in the normal life. However, you experience the moment when you must say to yourself: now you were beyond your body. You must return in your body and you have to form what you have experienced beyond the body in such a way that you let your brain be grasped by the fact that the thoughts that you have had beyond the body become cerebral thoughts! This experience of entering the brain is connected with something that must be well prepared that can be well prepared if you have gone through the exercises which are described in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?. Then you know, while you immerse yourself with your thinking in the brain that the brain offers resistance, and that, indeed, the process of thinking in the usual life is a destruction of the central nervous system that sleep, however, repairs. However, if you advance in spiritual practising, you experience yourself immersing in a process of disintegration; and this expresses itself—if you have not developed the right feelings during the preparation—in the fact that you are frightened to submerge again in the organism. The human being stands now beyond his earthly body. He feels submerged in an abyss. Hence, you must do such exercises that give you serenity for that which may appear, otherwise, as fear. A certain soul condition expresses itself in that power of cognition, in those research methods for the higher worlds. One has to add something else if real revelation shall come from the spiritual worlds into the human soul. You have to increase another quality up to the highest intensity: devotion, love of that what meets you. You need this devotion up to a certain degree in the usual life. However, you have to increase this devotion so far that the human being learns to renounce completely down to his deepest organism, to suppress any activity. Practice gradually increased suppresses the voluntary movements that come from the egoity of the human being and causes that you are completely given away to the current of existence, so to speak. Not only this has to occur, but you have also to feel involuntary movements as something external up to a certain degree. Up to the vascular organs, the human being learns to feel himself with these exercises. Then he can say about the spiritual world: you experience it beyond your body; you experience it as a structured world in which beings appear as in nature physical beings appear. By concentration and meditation, that is by an increased devotion, the human being finds the way into the spiritual world as he finds the way into nature if he looks at it with the outer eyes and with his reason. However, if the human being has separated the mental-spiritual from the bodily by a process of spiritual chemistry, he grasps himself also in his infinity; then he grasps himself in the existence that lies beyond birth or conception and death. Then he recognises himself in this everlasting being in such a way that he grasps that idea of development about which I still speak in these talks. This idea corresponds in the area of the human spiritual life to that theory of evolution to which natural sciences owe so much in their fields. Then the human being grasps the idea of the repeated lives on earth, the fact that the complete human life consists of repeated earth-lives between which lives are in wholly spiritual worlds. The idea of reincarnation distinguishes the life in the body between birth and death and the life between death and new birth in a wholly spiritual existence. Those who believe to stand firmly in the scientific habitual ways of thinking very easily regard all these matters as daydreams and fantasies. One shows by the researches about dream, hypnosis, suggestion, autosuggestion and so on how from the depths of the subconscious soul life a number of things can appear that can cause a deceptive consciousness in the human being. You experience something that has significance beyond your bodily life. All these things are theoretical objections. Someone who penetrates deeper into spiritual science will no longer do them. Since we will make many objections in the course of these talks and will show how spiritual science has to position itself to them. I would like to draw your attention to something fundamental only. One can easily say the following. If the spiritual researcher has experienced his spiritual-mental in its independence and believes then to look back as in an enlarged memory at former lives on earth or at his last life on earth. This is nothing else than his transformed wishes that exist in the subconscious and shine from below into the day consciousness whereby he abandons himself to delusions, hallucinations and so on. It is comprehensible that the uneducated thinking speaks in such a case about self-formed wishes, illusions, and hallucinations and so on; but one does not know what it concerns. Someone who has separated his spiritual-mental life from the bodily by spiritual chemistry notices if he really experiences such a retrospect into a former life on earth that it is not a transformed wish or something that can appear from his sub-consciousness. Since one may say, what one experiences in the spiritual is usually very different from that what one would have dreamt. You can find a lot of nonsense in the field of spiritual science. In no other field charlatanism is so widespread as in the field of spiritual science; and one can hear someone speaking who has looked at spiritual science who has absorbed some of its teachings and is convinced that these teachings are true: this or that human being has experienced this or that in a former life. Now, one can experience a lot of nonsense in this field. Normally one can notice that the statements that are done in this field correspond to certain human wishes. Since what the people want to have been, this takes on mysterious shapes sometimes. Mostly these incarnations are rather famous, excellent persons whom one can get to know not by spiritual-scientific research but by history! However, to someone who penetrates into the spiritual worlds really the things are represented quite different. Hence, the following example: somebody casts a glance, after he has applied the spiritual-scientific methods to his soul, at a former life on earth, as it is possible and even natural if the spiritual-scientific methods have become effective up to a certain degree; then the picture of experiences of a former life on earth appear. However, one will notice that these experiences are in such a way that one has no use for them at the present moment when one sees them in the enlarged retrospect; except that they enrich the knowledge one has no use for them in the usual life. One realises that one had certain skills, certain knowledge and so on in a former life. Now they appear pictorially. However, one is too old in the present life to attain these skills and knowledge again. As a rule this will happen what one would not have dreamt what no imagination can invent; as a rule the real life is completely different from the fantastic picture which one imagines about a former life on earth. It can also be that one notices: in the past life, you had a relationship to this or that person. However, if one wants to draw the conclusions in the age when one discovers this for the present life, the living conditions do not permit it, and then one is urged to this what one calls the spiritual principle of causality. One recognises,—but one cannot apply the knowledge to the present life. You must also develop a devoted soul life and say to yourself, what you have developed once as relation to persons will enjoy life; but you must wait, until the spiritual connections bring the causes of former lives on earth to effect in the present one. What one wants to dream in spiritual field does not happen if the knowledge is a real one. If you look at that existence which passes between death and a new birth where you are in a wholly spiritual life, any conceptual thinking does not help to get mental pictures of your life in that time. What you have to consider as the next form of your life-tasks, of your interests at first of which kind your surroundings are in which you have grown up in the outer material world what you have developed as wishes, desires, and emotions which character your mindscape has, all this is mostly completely contrary to that what you have experienced in the spiritual world before you have descended to the present embodiment. What you have desired there does not correspond to the wishes in the earthly life. We take an example. In the earth-life, you can be affected very easily by a stroke of fate painfully. Then you may easily believe if you feel anything as painful and if this painful feeling does not correspond to any wish, not even in the sub-consciousness, that in the spiritual world where you were before your whole life of desires, your position to the spiritual world was similar as now your position is towards life. However, this is not the case. The feeling in the spiritual world before your embodiment is drastically different. Hence, you have to imagine that you yourself caused everything to experience this pain. What you do not want in the life on earth you get to know that you have wished it before your life on earth. Since you can attain perfection of your soul life experiencing and overcoming this pain. Since the fateful question becomes a question of perfection by the spiritual-scientific knowledge. If we imagine the spiritual life this way, indeed, a spiritual environment appears to the increased inner life as the natural environment appears to the senses and the reason. The spiritual researcher has to overcome many things to put as science what he can observe. Since you can imagine that the experiences which the spiritual researcher must have must be attained first. They are attained in such a way that they appear weak that the weakest memory pictures of the usual life are strong compared to these manifestations of the spiritual world, and that these pale recollections of the spiritual must be strengthened. They are strengthened only gradually while one settles down more and more in the spiritual conditions. This strengthening of the soul life is the basic condition of the spiritual research. Then, however, something else must be added. We see in the course of the talks that it is unfounded to say, what is attained by concentration and meditation this way does not differ at all from the illusions and hallucinations of a morbid soul life. One may say if one considers the matters externally that the experiences of the spiritual researcher do not differ from them. One may even say, if the spiritual researcher describes these matters, it is real in such a way, as if a dreamer describes his dreams. In the dreams, memories of the outer world express themselves. Hence, one can say in a certain sense, what the spiritual researcher separates as his mental-spiritual from the bodily and puts as beings of an imagery before his soul is taken from the qualities of the pictures of the beings of the outer world. Someone who reads my Occult Science. An Outline may say if he absolutely wants to do so: the matters which you describe and which are to be attained only in the supersensible worlds for spiritual science are matters that one also finds in the outer world, even if not arranged that way. One may say this in certain way, although the objections that are raised today from some side against what spiritual science says are somewhat naive. Somebody says, for example, what one can read in such a writing as Occult Science is arranged like by a kind of pressed inner experience, and it is such a representation, actually, speculative fiction and no reality. That just shows what kind of logic it is. Since if one dwells on it, one notices that it is the same logic, as if a child that has only seen a wooden lion up to now says if it sees a real lion: this is no real lion, because the real one is wooden. The opponents of spiritual science often do so. Because they know the matters not properly, they accuse the spiritual scientist that the matters are not in such a way, as they know them from the usual life. Nevertheless, one can object that the portrayals of the spiritual researcher's memories are from the usual life. However, this objection is as valuable as for example the objection of that child. What one attains and beholds so directly must not go over from the observation of the spiritual world to the sensory world; but it is necessary that you learn to read in that what you behold. Since that what you have beheld you have to read correctly. However, you learn this reading with the exercises at the same time by which you familiarise yourself with the spiritual world. If anybody regards the portrayals of spiritual science only as memories of the usual world and says: these are only concepts if there is spoken about former lives on earth, which are also found, otherwise, in life only not arranged that way, then such a human being resembles someone who looks at a letter and says to another: do you want to experience anything new from it? I already know everything that you can read in it; because there are only letters in it which I already know, there is nothing new at all! The same applies if one says: what the spiritual researcher describes, nevertheless, is only memories of the sensory world! But that is the point with these portrayals what is behind as something essential that reveals itself there. Hence,spiritual science is the result of the spiritual researcher's experience. It is hard that spiritual science complies so little with the life goals of today that the spiritual researcher must always be involved with that what becomes experience, observation for him that he does not put his body on the market, as it were, but his soul if he speaks about the conditions in the spiritual world. While the usual world separates the human being if he should recognise something “objective,” the spiritual-scientific researcher must submerge in that which his science refers to, must become one with it. However, one regards that as “subjective” experience only. One does not notice that the indicated methods make the mental-spiritual independent of everything that we experience subjectively. Since if we experience it ever so much, and if it is called “mysticism” ever so much: what we experience subjectively is experienced in the body. However, what the spiritual researcher experiences is experienced beyond the body, but can be understood in the body with the usual reason. Since also that objection is not justified that someone who wants to get knowledge of the spiritual worlds must be himself a spiritual researcher. In order to find and investigate the spiritual facts and beings one must be a spiritual researcher but not to understand the spiritual-scientific communications. It is sufficient that one absorbs them with common sense as one absorbs what the chemists or physicists find with their methods. If one considers spiritual research this way, it appears as that which natural sciences must lead into as it were. As natural sciences have shown material goals to humanity, spiritual science will transform the mental-spiritual experience of humanity in such a way, as it is commensurate to the goals of the present and of the future of humanity. About these goals, one may say what a man of the present said, namely what Wilson (Woodrow W., 1856-1924, The New Freedom (1912)), the president of the United States of America, said concerning something external that applies, however, to the goals of spiritual science generally. Wilson speaks in the book that recently appeared about the reforms that he has experienced. He says that the outer material life has changed completely that instead of the old patriarchal relation of employers and employees quite different relations have taken place. Trade unions of employees face the employers, and the former conditions have changed completely. The fact that it has happened that way is a result of modern life; this is, above all, for someone who realises the matter properly a result of the knowledge of nature of the present humanity. Now Wilson says, what one has as forms of the legitimate living together still often corresponds to that what one considered as right in former times when the single worker faced his employer in a patriarchal relation. Wilson now demands that one creates harmony between the legitimate living together of modern human beings and that what civilisation has created. Many things culminate in the exceptionally interesting literature of the American president. What he says about external conditions one can say about the complete mental human experience today. One would like to mention thinkers—if one considers such a thing in connection with the spiritual goals—who belonged to quite different times of human development: Archimedes, the founder of mechanics, and Plato, the great Greek philosopher. They were of the opinion that the application of science to the technology of life weakens the human mind. One can understand that excellent spirits of other times had this opinion; but according to such opinions, the course of the world complies just as little as with that what one believes today, indeed, less what, however, people believed when the first railway should be built in Germany. At that time, the Bavarian Medical Board had to deliver an expertise whether one should build railways or not. This board meant that one should not build railways, because if one built them, the nervous systems of persons who would drive in them would be injured very much. However, if railways were still built, one should build high wooden walls on the left and on the right at least, so that the persons living nearby would not be injured by the sight or noise of the trains. One may smile at this medical board. However, even if one smiles at it, one can find it still reasonable. Since one can oppose or stand up for it even if the Bavarian Medical Board very much exaggerated the issue, nevertheless, it has become true for someone who knows history not only externally, but internally what it had assumed. One can say that this board had a good view. However, one does not need to oppose it. Why not? Because history stands up for it! It is indifferent what the single human beings may think about the fact that the course of the global development goes on, and that the human being has to adapt himself to the course of development. This is also the demand that Wilson puts up: the course of development has brought certain cultural processes, and the human being has to adapt himself to them. If one extends this to the soul conditions, one can say that in that what the souls have received in the course of time, the goals came about which are infinitely more complex than those of the past times have been. For the outside world, one can imagine this reversal easily; but also that life has changed concerning the needs of the soul daily. Someone who would believe that one could do this with the soul forces in the same way even today that directed the human being into the spiritual worlds once does not regard what takes place in the world development. He does not regard that we have not only four centuries of natural sciences behind ourselves, but what is more important that we have four centuries of scientific education behind ourselves, and that it has become necessary today to bring the results of spiritual science to the hearts and souls. Even if it may also correspond to the details that the course of world history does not always permit this, nevertheless, one must say: If today anybody opposed anything against that what spiritual science wants to be, then it could be that he would resemble the Bavarian Medical Board that wanted to erect wooden walls beside the railways, so that people living nearby would not be injured: the course of worlddevelopment passes over him. However, the human being is must not position himself to the goals of the global development in such a way that he leaves it to its own devices, but he got the strength to contribute to the conditions. However, that what approaches the human soul as demands in the outer life and from the outer life what appears as outer goals demands inner goals of the soul. The inner goals of the soul are the goals of spiritual science; natural sciences have changed the outer worldview, the body of civilisation. However, civilisation needs a soul. This soul should be the creation of spiritual science. It is the goal of spiritual science to penetrate the body of civilisation with soul and spirit. Then one can easily realise that the spiritual researcher can calmly consider everything that spiritual science experiences as contradiction and misunderstanding. The living conditions demand such a kind of knowledge of the spiritual world in which the soul feels so strong that it attracts forces for its being not only from the sensory world but from that what a knowledge of the spiritual world can give. More and more one will recognise that the soul needs forces for the modern life that flow not only from the knowledge of the sensory existence, but also from the knowledge of the spiritual existence. With these strong forces, the soul will penetrate itself like with an elixir of life, will feel the sense of its being exceeding birth and death, experiences that quality in itself that one calls “immortality,” and will cope with the tasks that the present and future of human history must set to it. I wanted to outline the present and future of the human soul with some words only. I give all other explanations in the following talks. In this preface, I wanted to cause a feeling of that only what the spiritual researcher bears in himself. To speak from the spiritual-scientific point of view in such a way, as I like to do it in these talks, can happen only on two conditions. What the spiritual researcher has to inform of the real spiritual research differs at first from that what one often thinks and considers as correct, so that someone who asserts this spiritual-scientific is a charlatan, a blatherer or a frivolous human being—or that he can know in himself that truth is what he has to say. There may be the most different nuances of these two extremes; but intermediate stages do almost not exist. With the consciousness that one can be considered as the one or the other, one speaks anyway as a spiritual researcher. Someone who stands in this spiritual science can develop the consciousness and the strength to speak about this spiritual research only because he also knows how to estimate its power of cognition and its strength of truth and that he can withstand the misunderstandings and consciously wrong accusations because of this consciousness of truth and knowledge on one side. However, on the other side spiritual science also leads into the immediate spiritual life, as well as into the spiritual life of our time and teaches the spiritual researcher that the representation of spiritual science is a necessity now. Even if the contemporaries do not clearly express this necessity of spiritual knowledge, it exists as a dark need of spiritual knowledge. In the depths of the souls, one perceives the cry for spiritual knowledge, even if this cry itself is not often audible to the conscious thinking of our fellow men. Since our time needs the knowledge of the spirit. All other science that is commensurate with our time would lower this spirit, would extinguish it from the souls as it also works from other currents of the spiritual life if spiritual science does not stir up it. The spiritual researcher knows that the human soul needs the spirit, and, hence, he hopes that it will belong to the goals of human development in the future to maintain this spirit. We have realised that the human soul must transform itself if it wants to attain the spirit. From that, it is evident that it is more comfortable to leave the spirit where it is and not to care for it, than to enterprise in the soul what leads to the spirit. It is more comfortable, however, also with that what arises to common sense and to a healthy feeling of truth to realise the material connections of nature simply, than to develop a sharper reason and to use it to realise what spiritual science says. One lives more comfortable without spirit. Nevertheless, the spirit has the quality that it brings damage if one wants to live without it as it brings benefit if one wants to live with it. If one wants to live with it, it animates the soul; it penetrates it with all skills that we want for life. If one denies it, it withdraws and kills the soul life to the same degree, as this does not want to know anything of it. If one denies it, it takes much optimism gradually and gives desperation and timidity. Indeed, one can deny the spirit; however, one cannot destroy it. If one denies it, it appears in its counter-image inside the soul—and asks in the human soul for itself. The spiritual researcher who speaks of spiritual science as a goal of the present feels this. Therefore, he relies on it: it will settle down because humanity can close the eyes before the spirit, but it cannot prevent it. However, in the end this impact changes into the demand to look at this spirit. I would like to express that in the following way. One can deny the spirit, because it is more comfortable to understand the world and to live in it without spirit than with spirit. However, one cannot resist the demands of spirit denying it. Hence, that what spiritual science wants to incorporate as an elixir of life in the civilisation it incorporated by its own strength. Since the human soul often denies the spirit; however, it will demand it always out of its innermost nature, out of its deepest goals! |
109. The Principle of Spiritual Economy: More Intimate Aspects of Reincarnation
07 Mar 1909, Munich Tr. Peter Mollenhauer Rudolf Steiner |
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Every schoolboy today will read in the most elementary books of Galileo's law of inertia, of continuity, which indicates that a body in motion tends to continue its movement until it encounters an obstacle. |
I need only to remind you of how he discovered the law of the pendulum by observing the swinging lamp in the Cathedral at Pisa—a stroke of genius. Many people had walked past this lamp without noticing a thing, but when Galileo observed it, the fundamental laws of mechanics dawned on him. |
After the Mystery of Golgotha and as a result of the wonderful laws of spiritual economy, quite a few copies of the astral body and of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth were present as archetypes in the spiritual world. |
109. The Principle of Spiritual Economy: More Intimate Aspects of Reincarnation
07 Mar 1909, Munich Tr. Peter Mollenhauer Rudolf Steiner |
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Munich, March 7, 1909 It is now my task to speak to the various groups about the more intimate aspects of reincarnation and various matters related to it because deep inside we must become more and more familiar with this subject matter and allow it to penetrate our being. In this context, we will also have to say a few things about the significance of the topic for the life of all humanity. Although we will also little by little discuss relevant questions of importance to the present age, we shall have to take very ancient times as our starting point. This is necessary because the method of inquiry in Spiritual Science differs from that employed by other theories of life or by the disciplines studying social problems. We in Spiritual Science treat the facts of life first in a general way, and then we elaborate on the details. First of all, we express our world view in the most elementary sense through the statement that the human innermost core—an individual's divine ego—continues to develop from one life to another in successive incarnations. In the second instance, however, such a statement covers the question of reincarnation only in a very elementary way, and that is why we now want to speak about these things in greater detail and in a more intimate sense. Just saying that the ego of a human being hurries from one incarnation to another is not enough; there are many other phenomena connected with the subject of reincarnation, and only a discussion of how they are related to life itself will shed the right light on the issue. Let us begin to characterize reincarnation from this point of view by looking back into ancient times. We have often talked about the fact that humanity must consider its ancestors to have come from ancient Atlantis, a former geographical region situated between what is today Africa and Europe on the one hand and America on the other. All the souls that are present today had already been incarnated in Atlantis, but in bodies that were in part considerably different from the ones we are accustomed to seeing. The Atlantean humanity had its own special form of leadership, and the soul-forces—indeed all the faculties—of the Atlanteans differed greatly from those of human beings. Hence, leadership as we know it today was nonexistent. In Atlantis, for example, there were no churches, ceremonial centers, or schools in the modern sense, but there existed an intermediate institution between ceremonial center and school; that is what we call the mystery sanctuaries or centers. Leadership of the Atlanteans with respect to learning and the conditions of external life was vested in these sanctuaries, and one could say that the spiritual leaders were at the same time kings of the Atlantean tribes. Initiates, whose mission can be circumscribed by a word of later coinage, by the word oracle, imported knowledge and exercised leadership in the mysteries. We therefore designate the great centers of Atlantean culture as the “Atlantean Oracles.” We have to get a clear understanding of the function of these oracles. They had to impart knowledge to human beings about the spiritual world behind the physical world. Knowledge such as this is different from ordinary knowledge in many ways; to stress only one difference, spiritual knowledge is not confined to space as is our present knowledge of the physical world. Anyone who, for example, knows about the mysteries of Mars also knows a great deal about the spiritual mysteries of the entire universe. All the heavenly bodies of our solar system are interconnected, and as such they are the exterior expression of spiritual beings. The individual who knows these spiritual beings also knows the forces that are at work from one planet to another as well as in the spiritual world during the time between death and rebirth. And so it was the primary task of one oracle in Atlantis to transmit and proclaim to human beings the mysteries of Mars, whereas the primary task of another was to communicate the mysteries of Jupiter, and so on; and these compartmentalized insights made it possible to lead certain sections of the population. We shall speak about the reason for this at another occasion since our task today is a different one. The Atlanteans were divided into groups, and part of the whole developmental process was that one group of human beings had to be governed especially by the forces that could be acquired through the knowledge of Mars. Other groups had to be governed by the forces acquired through the knowledge of Venus, or Mercury, and so on. In ancient Atlantis there were actually human beings alive whom we could call “Jupiter People” or “Mars People,” and there were seven oracle centers because the populace in ancient Atlantis was divided into seven groups according to racial characteristics. The names applicable to these oracle centers corresponded to the names of the planets, but they were assigned to the oracles at a later time. The leadership of, and supreme sovereignty over, all other oracles was vested in what we may designate as the Atlantean Sun Oracle. Whatever oracles existed in the post-Atlantean periods—in Greece, Egypt, Asia, all were successors of the Sun Oracle in Atlantis. This is true also for the Apollo Oracle in Greece. The initiate who headed this Sun Oracle was the guardian of the deepest mysteries of our solar system. Together with his subordinates, he was called upon to investigate the nature of the spiritual life on the sun itself. His role was to proclaim to Atlantean humanity the secrets of the whole planetary system and to exercise supreme authority over the other oracle centers. A very special task devolved on the Initiate of the Sun Oracle. It was to guide humanity in such a way that when the great catastrophe culminating in the submergence of Atlantis was over, the human race would be able to propagate and establish what we have often discussed as the postAtlantean cultures. Specifically, the task of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle was to prepare human beings during the Atlantean time in such a way that they could enter the ancient Indian, Persian, Egypto-Babylonian-Hebraic, and Graeco-Roman cultures. To put it differently, the Great Initiate had to see to it that enough suitable soul material was available for these cultural epochs. We must now inform ourselves a little about the task of this Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. What were the essential features of Atlantean culture? Certainly it was quite different from later cultures. In ancient Atlantis, an individual belonging to the highest level of cultural life—the levels at which today's great leaders in, say, scholarship, art, industry, or commerce can be found—was one who possessed extraordinary clairvoyant faculties and who was especially skilled in the use of magical powers. The qualities usually attributed to a leader or to a scholar were nonexistent in those days, or they were known only in the most primitive form. But although modern arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were unknown to the Atlanteans, they did possess primitive clairvoyant faculties and powers with which they could pierce into the spiritual worlds. Without the modern ego-consciousness, the Atlanteans saw into the spiritual world, and those whose vision was the most penetrating became the pillars of Atlantean culture. We have already stressed that the Atlanteans were able to manipulate certain inner forces of nature, for example the seed forces of plants; they propelled their vehicles with them, just as we utilize coal to propel our vehicles. To repeat, the leaders of the Atlantean culture were not the people who tried, as the leaders of our time try, to unlock the secrets of the universe with their intellectual powers; rather, the leading individuals in Atlantis were those who excelled as clairvoyants and magicians. And those human beings who had the first rudimentary inkling about arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were in a certain sense despised because of their simplicity and were not considered as belonging to the aristocracy of cultural life. But it was precisely those human beings who possessed the very first rudimentary knowledge of the aforementioned skills and who were the most lacking in clairvoyant and magical powers whom the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle gathered from all regions. Yes, he assembled the most simple and, in a sense, the most despised people of ancient Atlantis—those who had first developed intellectual capacities. But those who were then at the highest level of cultural life and who were the acknowledged masters of a dimmed clairvoyance were not suitable material to be led through and beyond the great Atlantean catastrophe. No, the call of the Initiate went out to the simple people. Incidentally, it may be said that we are living in an epoch today when a similar call is once again going out to humanity. To be sure, this appeal is what is appropriate for today, a time when humanity sees only what is in the physical world. The call to humanity issues from unknown depths of the spirit, depths that humanity will gradually become acquainted with, asking that humanity prepare itself for a new culture of the future, which will be permeated with clairvoyant powers. As with Atlantis, a catastrophe will occur, and afterwards a new culture imbued with spiritual capacities will arise, and it will be linked to what we call the idea of the universal brotherhood of humanity. But today, as in Atlantean times, the call cannot go out to those who stand at the highest levels of cultural life because they will not understand. The Atlantean clairvoyants and magicians, who were in a way destined to die out with their culture, occupied a position similar to that of people in contemporary life who occupy the highest positions in the realms of scholarship and external industrial life—the great inventors and discoverers of our time. No matter how much the present leaders feel there is still to be done, they nevertheless occupy the same position as their Atlantean counterparts. Contemptuously they look down on those who are beginning to feel something of the spiritual life to come. The consciousness of this fact must be awakened in the soul of anyone whose cooperative efforts in the theosophical workshops are to be strengthened. When leading representatives of modern culture look contemptuously down at these small circles, those who are participating diligently in the preparation of future conditions must say to themselves that the intellectual giants of today cannot be counted on to lead the way in this task. It is precisely the people who are held in contempt because they are not considered to have reached the heights of contemporary erudition who are being assembled today, just as the leader of the Sun Oracle once gathered around him the simple of Atlantis. These disdained people are being assembled to prepare the dawn of a new culture whereas erudition of the modern form will bring about the twilight of our culture. This is mentioned in passing to fortify those who have to endure and hold their own against the attacks of the people who consider themselves to be on the cutting edge of contemporary culture. The Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle gathered his simple people in a region approximately to the west of present-day Ireland. Now we have to get a clear picture of the situation. It took Atlantis a long, long time to come to its end. Great masses of people were continually moving from the West toward the East. In the various regions of Asia, Europe, and Africa there were tribes who had arrived at different times and had intermingled. Then the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle took His small group of chosen people and made His way to Central Asia, where he established a colony from which the currents were to emanate that would later found the post-Atlantean cultures. However, in addition to His simple people, the Great Leader has taken something else with Him. And here we arrive at one of the chapters of human evolution, the truth of which we can comprehend only if we draw on the inner assurance gained by a steadfast engagement in Spiritual Science. The Great Leader inspected, as it were, the other oracle centers for the purpose of finding in them the most notable initiates. Now there is a certain method by means of which “spiritual economy,” as it may be called, can be put into practice. As you know, it is quite correct to say that the etheric body dissolves after a human being has died; what remains is an extract, and that is taken along. But the extract is only the elementary truth, which must be modified as one advances to higher levels of spiritual knowledge. It is not the case that the etheric bodies of all human beings are dissolved in the universal ether. Etheric bodies such as those possessed by the most notable initiates of the seven Atlantean Oracles are valuable. The spiritual achievements of these initiates were woven into their etheric bodies, and it would be against the principle of spiritual economy if the etheric bodies of the great initiates had simply been dissolved. They were to be preserved as prototypes for a later time, and it was incumbent upon the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to preserve the etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates for this purpose. While leading His small group of simple people to Asia, He carried the etheric bodies of the seven most significant initiates of Atlantis with Him. Such a thing is possible through the methods that had been developed in the mystery centers. You have to visualize this as purely a spiritual process and not in the way as if one could wrap up etheric bodies and put them into boxes for safekeeping. What is certain, however, is that etheric bodies can be preserved for later times. Over in Asia, the following happened. The simple people around the Leader propagated from one generation to another. Above all, these people had a tremendous devotion to and affection for their Great Leader. Their education was guided with wisdom and insight so that after many generations certain things occurred through one of the methods worked out in the mystery centers. Such methods are employed behind the scenes of external life, and we shall presently see how they take effect. Today's lecture will be the first in a series of several lectures designed to explain some of the details. When a human being is descending to a new incarnation, he must envelop himself again with a new etheric body. Now, through the methods alluded to above, it is perfectly possible to weave into this new etheric body an old one that was preserved. And so after a diligent educational process, when the time had come, there were to emerge from the immigrants and their descendants seven individuals whose souls at their birth were sufficiently prepared to have the preserved etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the Atlantean Oracles woven into their own etheric bodies. Thus, the preserved etheric body of the most important Saturn initiate was woven into that of one of the individuals gathered around the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle, the etheric body of the Mars initiate into another, the etheric body of the Jupiter initiate into a third, and so on. Hence the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle had seven individuals whose etheric bodies were interwoven with those of the most important initiates of the ancient Atlantean Oracles. If you had met these seven individuals somewhere in everyday life, you would have found them to be simple human beings, for they were not the reincarnated egos of the Atlantean initiates; they were merely simple human beings possessing the new faculties of the post-Atlantean era. Their egos were not much different from the egos of those who became the bearers of the first primitive and simple culture immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe. What made them different was that their etheric bodies contained the forces of the seven great Atlantean initiates, so we are dealing here not with a re-embodiment of the ego, but rather of the etheric bodies of these great initiates. Thus we see not only that the ego but also that the second member of the super-sensible constitution—the etheric body—is capable of reincarnation. The seven individuals from among the followers of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle were inspired human beings simply by the fact that they had received these etheric bodies containing the forces and powers of the Atlantean era. At certain times their etheric bodies were capable of letting the forces stream into themselves that unveiled the mysteries of the Sun, Mars, Saturn, and so forth. Hence they appeared to be inspired individuals, but their utterances certainly exceeded anything their astral bodies or egos were able to understand. What these seven inspired individuals taught from various parts of the world sounded like a wonderful harmonious choir, and after the seven had been united in the Lodge of the Seven Rishis, they were sent to India to inspire that country's ancient culture. Much that was profound in this culture has been preserved in a magnificent form in the Vedas,27 and just as many wonderful ideas that give testimony to the deeply scientific nature of Indian culture have been preserved in the Upanishads,28 in the Vedanta philosophy, and so on. However, the teachings of the ancient Holy Rishis, given in times when nothing was recorded, far exceed in beauty anything conveyed to us by the Indian scripts. What was written down in later times is at most a faint echo, for no records were kept of the primeval, sacred culture inspired by the Rishis; everything they taught was transmitted in a spiritual way through the mysteries. We are interested today in learning how etheric bodies can be reincarnated, how the legacies of the ancient Atlantean epoch were transmitted by the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle into the post-Atlantean era, and how they were then carried into the first culture of that era—into the resplendent Indian culture. The mysteries of the Sun Oracle itself could not be directly revealed in ancient India, and that is why the seven Rishis spoke of a Being beyond their cognitive reach. They spoke of a Being who is the Leader of the Sun and directs its forces to the earth; they spoke of Vishva-Karman as a Being beyond the range of their knowledge. Vishva-Karman is none other than the Christ who was to appear later and whose coming had already been proclaimed in the ancient Indian culture. The most important disciple of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to receive the secrets of the Sun's essence was Zarathustra, who was subsequently to establish the second post-Atlantean culture. He was not the Zarathustra history talks about however. It was customary in ancient times that the successor of a great teacher or humanity took the name of his esteemed predecessor. No document contains any reference to the Zarathustra of whom we are now speaking; only his last successor is mentioned in history books. Yet it was the original Zarathustra who founded the primordial Persian culture and who was the first to point out to his Persian peoples that the sun not only possesses physical energy but also spiritual power that streams down to earth. In his endeavor to awaken in his people a realization of this truth, Zarathustra's argument was as follows: If we direct our eyes to plants and everything else around us that contains life, we have to ask ourselves what we would be without sunlight. But together with the physical sunlight, a spiritual force also streams down to earth under the direction of a great sublime Being. Just as a human being has his or her physical body and an aura—we call it the small aura—so the sun has its physical body and its aura. Ahura Mazdao, the “great aura,” consists of the group of great sun beings and their leader. Zarathustra spoke of this Ahura Mazdao, or Aura Mazdao—the Great Aura—and proclaimed the power of the sun aura by which the flow of evolution was made possible. However, Zarathustra also proclaimed that the forces of Ahriman would oppose the Sun Being. This then is what can be said about the external teachings of Zarathustra, but there is more to be said about him. Zarathustra had some close disciples whom he initiated into the great mysteries of the world. We shall mention two of them in this context. To begin with the first, Zarathustra communicated to him all the wisdom necessary to bring about clairvoyance in the astral body, as well as the ability to perceive in one's present time frame simultaneously everything that is happening and all the mysteries spread out in both physical and spiritual space. To the second disciple Zarathustra transmitted what one might call the power to read the Akasha Chronicle, and this is nothing less than the clairvoyant power of the etheric body enabling the human being to perceive the successive phases of evolution in time. Thus, one disciple received the ability to perceive simultaneous events, and the other the vision of the Akasha Chronicle to perceive successive events that could lead to an understanding of the evolution of the earth and sun. By imparting these faculties to these disciples, Zarathustra had a profound effect on the continuation of culture in the postAtlantean era. The first disciple was reincarnated as the great individual who was to inspire and inaugurate the new currents of Egyptian culture, the being whom we know by the name of Hermes or Hermes Trismegistos. Through processes that are known, the astral body of Zarathustra was transmitted to Hermes so that he could proclaim the message of the higher worlds and their mysteries and incorporate them into Egyptian culture. Thus by processes we will gradually learn to understand, the astral body of Zarathustra was preserved and was transmitted to one disciple when he was born again as Hermes. Hermes wore Zarathustra's astral body as if it were a garment. The other disciple was also reincarnated, and in him everything was meant to be revealed that is presented to the earth in the Akasha Chronicle. Since the etheric body of Zarathustra was to be woven into that of a disciple, a very special event had to take place to make this possible. The forces of the new etheric body somehow had to be illuminated in the disciple for his awakening. The Biblical story relates to us in a beautiful and marvelous way what this special event was. Allow your souls to visualize how it had to unfold. You must first realize that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra possessed his own astral body and ego, and he was now to have the etheric body of Zarathustra woven into his soul. As a small child, he first had to feel how the forces of the etheric body of Zarathustra became active in him, and he had to feel this before the powers of judgment could be activated by his own astral body and before his own ego was able to interfere. So the special event that had to take place was some sort of initiation. The forces of Zarathustra's etheric body had to be awakened in this reborn disciple when he was a very small child, that is before his own individual development could come into play. For this reason, the child was placed into an ark of bulrushes that was then put into the water, so that he was completely cut off from the rest of the world and was unable to interact with it. That is when the forces of Zarathustra's etheric body that had been woven into him germinated and, as we said earlier, became illuminated. I am sure you know by now that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra was none other than Moses. The Biblical story about his abandonment is really a presentation of that profound mystery behind the scenes of the external world dealing with the preservation of Zarathustra's etheric body and its reawakening in Moses. And this is how Hermes and Moses were able to guide the post-Atlantean culture through its recorded stages. After hearing about these examples of the reincarnation of etheric bodies and of an astral body, we know it is insufficient to speak only of the reincarnation of the ego. Rather, the other members of the human constitution that we have become acquainted with—the etheric body and the astral body—can also be reincarnated. It is a principle of spiritual economy that what has once been gained cannot perish, but is preserved and transplanted on the spiritual soil of posterity. However, what we have described can be accomplished in another way. We shall see from an example that there are still other methods whereby the past is transported into the future. You will remember a personality mentioned in the Bible: Shem, a son of Noah and progenitor of the Semitic people. Occult research confirms that there is an individual behind Shem that must be regarded as the tribal individuality of all Semitic peoples. When a number of human beings are to descend from a particular progenitor, a special provision must be made for this in the spiritual world. In the case of Shem, the provision was that an etheric body was specially woven for him from the spiritual world, which he was to carry. This enabled him to bear in his own etheric body an especially exalted being from the spiritual world, a being who could not otherwise have incarnated on earth because it was incapable of descending into a compact physical body. This being was capable of incarnating only by virtue of the fact that it could now enter the etheric body of Shem. Since Shem had his own physical, etheric, and astral body, as well as his ego, he was first an individual in his own right. Beyond that, however, he was an individual whose etheric body was interwoven with the etheric body of another high being of the spiritual world, specially prepared for the purpose of founding a nation, as characterized above. If clairvoyant perception had confronted Shem, it would have seen Shem himself, but with a second entity extending out of him like a second being, yet still united with Shem's etheric body. This higher being was not Shem, but it incarnated in Shem—the human being—for a special mission. Unlike ordinary human beings, this higher being did not undergo various incarnations, but descended only once into a human body. Such a being is called an avatar. An avatar does not feel at home in the world as a human being would; he descends but once into this world for the sole purpose of carrying out a certain mission. The part of a human being that is indwelled by such an avatar being acquires a special character in that it is able to multiply. When a grain of seed is sown into the ground, the stalk grows from it, and the grain is multiplied into the ears of grain. In the same way, the etheric body of Shem multiplied into many copies, and these were woven into all his descendants. That's what happened, and thus the copies of the etheric body that had been specially prepared in Shem as the prototype were woven into the etheric bodies of his direct descendants. But this etheric body of Shem was later used in yet another way. How this was done can best be placed before our souls by the visualization of an analogy. You may be a highly cultured European, but if you want to acquaint the Hottentots with your culture, you simply must learn their language. By analogy, the exalted beings that descend to earth to guide humanity must weave into themselves the forces by which they will be put into a position to communicate with human beings on earth. Now in the later phase of the evolution of the Semitic people, it became necessary that a very exalted being descend to earth in order to communicate with them and provide an impetus to their culture. Such a being was the Melchizedek of Biblical history who, as it were, had to "put on" the preserved etheric body of Shem—the very etheric body that was still inhabited by an avatar being. Once it was woven into him, Melchizedek was able to transmit to Abraham the impulse necessary for the continued progress of Semitic culture. Here, then, we have become acquainted with another unique way in which an etheric body develops in a particular human being and is subsequently allotted to a specially selected individuality for the fulfillment of a mission. Such examples can be found up to the most recent times, and as we trace them, we gradually realize the truth of what occultism is able to say today about this subject matter. Occultism conveys to us that most human beings living at present no longer have etheric or astral bodies that were originally woven anew from the general fabric of the world Almost every human being has in his or her etheric and astral body a fragment that has been preserved from ancient times because the principle of spiritual economy is at work preserving useful elements for repeated utilization. Let us mention two more examples from the modern age that can illustrate to us how mysteries are at work from one epoch to another. The first example is related to the personality who is discussed in my book Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nicholas of Cusa. He called one of his writings De docta ignorantia, a Latin title that can be translated “Learned Ignorance”; yet it contains more erudition than many a book claiming to contain learned knowledge. There were certain reasons for the title. If you read other writings by Nicholas of Cusa, you will find that a prophetic presentation of the Copernican picture of the universe is woven into them in a curious way. Those who read carefully cannot fail to recognize it. Yet it was not until the time of Copernicus that the world was mature enough to accept this view of the universe in its actual form. Investigation into the connection reveals the following: One of the members of Cusa's super-sensible constitution contained an ancient individuality of the highest rank, and that made it possible for the astral body of Nicholas of Cusa to be preserved and then to be woven into the astral body of Nicholas Copernicus. The wisdom once possessed by Nicholas of Cusa could, as it were, be resurrected in Copernicus, and that is an example of how the astral body has reincarnated. The second example deals with Galileo, who has been immensely important for modern thought, as many of you who have thought about the matter know. Without him, there would have been no physics in the modern sense because the whole mode of thinking in terms of physics today must be attributed to Galileo. Every schoolboy today will read in the most elementary books of Galileo's law of inertia, of continuity, which indicates that a body in motion tends to continue its movement until it encounters an obstacle. Thus, if we throw some object, it will travel forward by its own momentum until it is stopped by an obstacle or outer force. This is how we think today, and this is what children in school learn from their textbooks. However, people living before Galileo thought in a different manner. They thought that if a stone were thrown, its flight could not continue unless the air drove or pushed it from behind. So we see that the laws of falling bodies, of the pendulum, and of simple machines are all derived from Galileo. Galileo received his insights through a certain inspiration. I need only to remind you of how he discovered the law of the pendulum by observing the swinging lamp in the Cathedral at Pisa—a stroke of genius. Many people had walked past this lamp without noticing a thing, but when Galileo observed it, the fundamental laws of mechanics dawned on him. A human being who can be inspired in such a profound way has an etheric body of enormous richness; to allow it to perish would contradict the law of spiritual economy. It is for this reason that Galileo's etheric body too was preserved and reappeared after a comparatively short period of time in an individual whose achievements were also to be of great significance. It was woven into a personality who grew up in a remote peasant village in Russia, ran away from his parents, and journeyed to Moscow. The great talent of this young man became apparent very soon, and he rapidly absorbed the knowledge of his day in the schools of Russia and Germany, so that he had soon encompassed the total of the general knowledge available in the culture of his time. All he had to do was to accumulate the knowledge developed on earth since he had died—in his etheric body—as Galileo. And then this very same person became, so to speak, the founder of the whole classical literature movement in Russia, creating lasting literary treasures practically out of the void. But more than that, he also provided important stimuli to every scientific discipline related to physics and chemistry, and particularly to all areas of mechanics. This individual was none other than Michail Lomonosov, whose achievements and reforms were possible only because the etheric body of Galileo had been woven into him. Galileo died in the middle of the seventeenth century, and Michail Lomonosov was born early in the eighteenth century with Galileo's etheric body, representing one of those intimate reincarnations where a member of the super-sensible constitution of the human being other than the ego is reincarnated. Such things lead us toward a deep understanding of the entire evolutionary process and of many other factors that have developed in the course of time, leading to the conditions prevailing at present. The greatest avatar on earth was Christ Himself, who lived for three years in the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. Because Christ lived in the three bodies of the super-sensible constitution of Jesus of Nazareth, it was possible for the latter's etheric and astral bodies, and of the ego too in a lesser degree, to multiply in the same way as we have discussed it before. After the Mystery of Golgotha and as a result of the wonderful laws of spiritual economy, quite a few copies of the astral body and of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth were present as archetypes in the spiritual world. If an avatar enters a human sheath, the essence of the host is dispersed into many replicas. In contrast to the copies of Shem's etheric body, the copies of the astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth had another special characteristic. The copies of Shem's etheric body could be implanted only into his own descendants whereas the copies of the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted into all human beings of the most diverse peoples and races. A copy of the archetypal astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted in anyone who through his or her personal development had become ready for this transfer, no matter what race such an individual belonged to. And we see how in this subsequent evolution of Christendom, strange developments take place behind the external historical facade, and only such developments can render the external course of events intelligible. Now, how did Christianity spread? We can say that in the first few centuries the dissemination of the idea of Christianity depended on what happened on the physical plane. In this era we see that Christianity is decidedly propagated through everything that lives on the physical plane. The Apostles stressed the fact that the propagation of Christianity was based on direct physical perception of eyewitnesses. "We have laid our hands into His wounds" was a statement of proof that the Christ had walked on earth in a human body. In other words, the stress was put on anything on the physical plane that could serve as documentation for the development of Christianity. Time and again during those first few centuries, it was asserted that those who had been disciples of the Apostles themselves were responsible for the continuing propagation of Christianity, and it was emphasized that they had known the immediate followers of the Lord Himself. So we see that people in this era relied, as it were, on eyewitness reports, and this continues in a still deeper sense up to the time of St. Augustine, who said: “I would not believe in the truth of the Gospels if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel me to do so.” Why, then, did he believe? Because it was his conviction that the visible Church has propagated the Gospel on the physical plane from one decade and from one century to another. However, in the following centuries, from the fifth to the tenth, Christianity was propagated in a different way. Why and how? It is instructive to learn the answer to this question if we are interested in following the spiritual progress of human evolution. You can visualize the method of propagation in this next period by considering, for example, the Old Saxon gospel epic entitled Heliand. In this work, a kind of initiate presents his readers with his version of the Christ idea and with his perception of the Christ-Being. The Heliand, the Savior, presented by this Saxon initiate is a super-sensible being. Yet, He is portrayed not within the context of the events in Palestine, but rather as a prince of a Germanic tribe. The disciples are individuals from Germanic lands, and the whole of Christianity is clothed in Central European imagery. Why was this done? It was done because the initiate who wrote the Heliand at the suggestion of Louis the Pious had clairvoyant faculties, so that he was able to see Christ in a way similar to Paul's perception of Christ at Damascus. Through the event at Golgotha the Christ-Being had united Himself with the astral body of the earth, thereby infusing His power into the aura of the earth; and when Paul became clairvoyant, he could clearly perceive: The Christ is present! Paul did not allow himself to become a believer merely on the strength of what was reported to have happened in Palestine. Only after he had seen the being that was woven into the earth with his own eyes did he change from Saul to Paul. In a similar vision, the Risen Christ, the eternal Christ living in the spiritual world after Golgotha, was revealed to the writer of the Heliand, and He was more important to him than was the historical Christ of Palestine. And so he presents Him in another setting because the spiritual Christ was more important to him than was the external image of the Christ. You may want to ask why the author of the Heliand was able to communicate such an image from clairvoyant perception. He was able to do this because a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own etheric body. This was the case because during these centuries—starting with the fifth or sixth and ending with the ninth or tenth century—the etheric bodies of those who were destined to do something for the advancement of Christianity were interwoven with a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, and one of these special individuals was the writer of the Heliand. Since there were many others who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric body, we can readily see that human beings in these centuries lived in imaginations that were closely related to the events in Golgotha. All those who created the original artistic portrayals of the Savior on the cross and of Mary with the Jesus Child had been inspired to do pictorial representations of anything connected with the event in Golgotha by one and the same thing: a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into the etheric body of each of these individuals. If the paintings of the events in Golgotha seemed like representations of a type, this points to the fact that all the artists were clairvoyant; what they created was then transmitted to posterity by the forces of tradition. In these early centuries, not all the inspired individuals destined to propagate the idea of Christianity were, of course, artists. Take, for example, John Scotus Erigena,29 the scholastic philosopher, who in the days of Charles the Bald wrote the famous De Division Naturae. He, too, had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus woven into his own etheric body. If human beings were born during the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric bodies, human beings living in the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries received copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth rather than copies of His etheric body. Only by considering this fact do we fully understand some of the important personalities of that time. How will a personality whose own astral body is interwoven with a copy of the astral body of Jesus appear to the outside world? After all, the ego of Jesus is not incarnated in such an individual; each personality retains his or her own ego. Ego judgment can cause many an error to creep into the life of such an individual; but because the copy of the great prototype has been woven into his or her astral body, devotion, all the feelings, everything in short that permeates and weaves through this astral body will come to the fore as the intrinsic essence of the astral body, even though it may perhaps be at variance with the ego itself. Think of Francis of Assisi. There you have a personality into whose astral body a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven. You may have found many extremes in the biography of Francis of Assisi, and if you did, you should consider that they were caused by his ego, which was not on the same level with his astral body. But the moment you study his soul under the assumption that his ego was not always capable of making the right judgments about the wonderful feelings and the humility contained in the astral body, then you will understand him. A copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was reincarnated in Francis of Assisi, and this was the case with many individuals of that time—Franciscans, Dominicans, and all other personalities of that time who will be intelligible only when studied in the light of this knowledge. For example, one of those personalities was the renowned St. Elisabeth of Thüringen. And so what has happened in the external life of our existence becomes fully intelligible only when we see how spiritual impulses are conveyed in each era and how they are propagated in the course of time. When Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, something like an imprint of the ego was made in the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. When the Christ-Being entered the astral body, we can easily conceive that something like a replica of the ego could be produced in the surrounding parts of the astral body. This copy of the ego of Christ Jesus produced many duplicates that were preserved, so to speak, in the spiritual world. In the case of a few individuals who were to be prophets for their own age, something was woven into their ego. Among them were the German mystics who proclaimed the inner Christ with such fervor because something like a copy of the ego of Christ was incarnated in them—only a copy or image of Christ's ego, of course. Only human beings who prepare themselves gradually for a full understanding of the Christ and who understand through their knowledge of the spiritual worlds what the Christ really is, as He surfaces time and again in ever changing forms during the course of human evolution—only those human beings will also gradually gain the maturity necessary to experience Christ in themselves. They will be ready to absorb, so to speak, the waiting replicas of the Christ-Ego, ready to absorb the ego that the Christ imprinted in the body of Jesus. Part of the inner mission of the universal stream of spirituality is to prepare human beings to become so mature in soul that an ever-increasing number of them will be able to absorb a copy of the Ego-Being of Christ Jesus. For this is the course of Christian evolution: first, propagation on the physical plane, then through etheric bodies, and then through astral bodies that, by and large, were reincarnated astral bodies of Jesus. Now the time is at hand when the ego-nature of Christ Jesus will increasingly light up in human beings as the innermost essence of their souls. Yes, these imprinted copies of the Christ Jesus individuality are waiting to be taken in by human souls—they are waiting! And now you see from what depths the universal stream of Spiritual Science flows into our souls. Spiritual Science is not a theory, not the sum total of concepts given merely for the intellectual enlightenment of human beings; it is a reality, and it intends to offer realities to the human soul. Those who wish to gain a spiritual understanding of Christianity and experience it within themselves will strive to make a personal contribution so that either in the present or in a later incarnation a copy of the Christ Jesus individuality can be woven into their own egos. A person who understands the true, inmost essence—the actuality—of the universal stream of Spiritual Science will prepare himself or herself not just for knowledge, but rather for an encounter with actual reality. You must develop a feeling that we in our world movement are not concerned with the mere communication of theories, but rather with preparing human beings to accept facts. We are also concerned that human beings receive what is waiting in the spiritual world and what they have the power to receive, provided they prepare themselves for this task in the right way.
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165. The Conceptual World and Its Relationship to Reality: Lecture Two
16 Jan 1916, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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It is unfounded and without result as soon as it goes beyond the finite. It cannot begin with the laws that it has within itself when it goes out of the finite into the infinite. But you must think of this infinity not only in terms of the very large or the very small, but also within the world of qualities. |
But it is spiritual in so far as it now represents a spiritual essence, but must gradually be realized in human coexistence in the social structure that is emerging during the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan period, where the Holy Spirit is embodied, not now in an individual human being, but in all humanity, in the configuration of society. |
What matters is the inner aspect, especially the way in which he inseparably regards the external social order of the church in relation to what is taught and is cult. This is entirely out of the nature of the Holy Spirit. |
165. The Conceptual World and Its Relationship to Reality: Lecture Two
16 Jan 1916, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday we tried to place ourselves in the position of the developing process of conceptualization and idealization, of the development of concepts about the world and of ideas, and we saw that a certain development can be observed here as well: that, so to speak, from a kind of clairvoyant experience of the concepts, what the Platonic ideas were arises, and that gradually developed that abstract way of thinking which still extends into our own day; but that time is pressing, so that, as it were in a conscious way, living life in concepts is to be achieved again, in order to enter into living spirituality in general, so that what was left behind as dream-like clairvoyance in concepts may be achieved again in a conscious way. Now we have to look more closely at how, in a very different way, all the highest matters of world existence can be grasped in a time when there was still something of the resonance of the old, clairvoyantly grasped concepts, and how quite differently the highest matters of humanity had to be grasped when conceptual thinking had already become intellectual-rational and abstract. For the questions we spoke of again yesterday, which arose so significantly in medieval scholasticism, these questions could actually only develop naturally in an age in which one was uncertain about the relationship between the world of concepts and the true world of reality. In a time that had preceded Greek philosophy, something like what we have considered the doctrine of universals in re, post rem, ante rem could not have been conceived at all, because the vividly possessed concept leads into reality. One knows that one stands in reality with it, and then one cannot raise the questions that were discussed yesterday. They do not arise at all as riddle questions. Now, in the early days of Christian development, there was still something of an echo of the old clairvoyant conceptual world, and one can say: when the Mystery of Golgotha went through the development of European and Near Eastern humanity , there were still many people who were really able to absorb the things that relate to the Mystery of Golgotha in echoes of clairvoyantly grasped concepts, which can actually only be understood spiritually. Only in this way can we understand that much of what was developed in the first centuries of Christianity to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha must have been incomprehensible in later times. When the older Christian teachers still used the echoes of the old clairvoyant concepts to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha, then, of course, these clairvoyant concepts remained incomprehensible to the later centuries in their actual essence. Basically, what is called gnosis is usually nothing more than the echo of old clairvoyant concepts. They tried to understand the Mystery of Golgotha with old clairvoyant concepts, and clairvoyant concepts were no longer understood later, only abstract concepts. Therefore, what Gnosis actually wanted was misunderstood. However, it would be very one-sided to simply say: There was a Gnosis that still had old clairvoyant concepts that went back to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, and then came the unwise people who were unable to understand the Gnostics. It would be very one-sided to think in such a way. To work in a certain perfect sense with clairvoyant concepts belongs to a much older time than the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, to a much older time. And these clairvoyantly grasped concepts were already infected with Lucifer, that is to say, the old clairvoyant-conceptual grasping was already permeated with Lucifer, and this Luciferic permeation of the old clairvoyant conceptual system is Gnosticism. Therefore, a kind of reaction against Gnosticism had to arise, because Gnosticism was the dying old clairvoyant conceptual world, the old clairvoyant conceptual world already infected by Lucifer. This must also be borne in mind. Now I will start with a man who, in the first centuries of Christianity, tried to stem the currents that came from Gnosticism, which had become Luciferian, and wanted to understand the Mystery of Golgotha from this point of view. That is Tertullian. He came from North Africa, was well-versed in the wisdom of the pagans. Towards the end of the second century, after the Mystery of Golgotha, he converted to Christianity and became one of the most learned theologians of his time. It is particularly interesting to take a closer look at him, because, on the one hand, he still had some inner understanding of the old clairvoyant conceptual world from his study of ancient pagan wisdom, and, on the other hand, because, as his conversion story shows, he had the full Christian impulse within him and wanted to unite both in such a way that Christianity could fully exist. To do this, he had to suppress what he perceived as the Gnosticism with a touch of Luciferism in Basilides, Marcion and others. And now certain questions arose for him. These questions arose for Tertullian for a very specific reason. You see, when we begin with spiritual science today, we very often speak of the structure of human nature, of the way in which man first has his dense physical body, which the eyes can see and the hands can grasp; then how there is an etheric body, how there is an astral body, a sentient soul and so on. That is to say, we seek above all to recognize the constitution of human nature. But if you follow the historical development of spiritual life in the centuries since the Mystery of Golgotha, you will find nowhere that the human constitution has been observed in such a way as we do today. This was lost and had already been lost when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. Those who were touched by the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha no longer knew anything about this structure of the human being. But this presented a very definite difficulty for them. In order to recognize this difficulty, my dear friends, try to connect with your own heart, with your own soul, in order to ask yourself a question. You know that we have tried in many different ways to make clear to you the way in which the Christ, through Jesus, has intervened in the evolution of the earth. But try to understand how the Christ has penetrated the members in Jesus, if you knew nothing of the whole constitution, of the essence of man! Only this made it possible to understand how the Christ, as a kind of cosmic ego, permeates the bodies, so that you first knew something about these bodies. For those who in the future will seek an understanding of the Christ, knowledge of the structure of the human being must be the essential preparation. In ancient times, when there were still dream-like, clairvoyant concepts, something was known about the structure of the human being; and something had been handed down to the Gnostics, even if it was distorted. Therefore, these Gnostics had tried to penetrate the coming of the Christ into Jesus of Nazareth with the last remnants of the concepts of the human constitution. But the others, to whom Christianity was now to come, and who were taught by their church teachers, knew nothing of this structure of the human being, nor did their church teachers. And so the big, extensive question arose: What is the actual situation regarding the interaction of the Christ nature and the Jesus nature? How is it possible that this Christ, as a divine being, takes hold in Jesus, as a human being? And it is this question that occupies people like Tertullian. Because they lack the prerequisite for understanding the matter, the problem arises for them again posthumously, as it were — but in the case of Christ Jesus it makes them wonder: how are the spiritual, physical and soul actually connected? They did not know how they are connected in people in general, but they had to find out something about how they were connected in the case of Christ Jesus. Because the Gnosticism of that time had a Luciferian bent, it naturally did not arrive at the right answer either. If you recall certain lectures that I have given here recently, you will find that I said that people, on the one hand, come to materialism and, on the other hand, to a one-sided spiritualism. One-sided materialism is Ahrimanic, one-sided spiritualism has a Luciferic touch. The materialists do not come to the spirit, and the Luciferic spiritists do not come to matter. This was the case with the Gnostics: they did not come to physical existence, to material existence. And if you now look at a person like Marcion, you see: for him there is a clear, a more or less clear concept of Christ, but he is absolutely unable to grasp how this Christ was contained in Jesus. Therefore, the whole process became etherealized for him. He managed to grasp the Christ as a spirit, as an ethereal being that seemingly took on a body. But he could not grasp the correct way in which the Christ was in Jesus. Marcion came to say, in the end, that Christ did indeed descend to earth, but that everything that Jesus experienced was only seemingly experienced; the physical events are only seemingly experienced; the Christ did not actually participate, but was only there like an ethereal entity, which, however, remained quite separate. That is why Tertullian had to turn against Marcion and against the others who thought similarly, Basilides for example. And for him the great riddle arose: How was the divine nature of Christ connected with the human nature of Jesus? What exactly was the God-man? What was the Son of God? What was the Son of Man? — Above all, he sought to clarify these concepts. And so he first formed a concept that was very important and is still important today, which one must understand if one wants to see how manifold the possibilities of error are for man. Tertullian developed a certain way of thinking. He had to break out of the old, clairvoyant way of thinking and come to a clear understanding of concepts and their relationship to realities, including higher, spiritual realities. I would like to insert an episode here that will help you to see not what Tertullian became aware of, but what dominated his thinking. I will insert a purely intellectual episode, but I ask you to take it very much to heart. I do the following. I write the number 1 and then its double 2, 2 - 4, 3 - 6, etc. And now imagine: I do not stop at all, I keep writing, that is, I write to infinity. How many such numbers would I have written then? Infinitely many, aren't they! But how many have I written here? Have I written a number on the right for every number on the left? Without a doubt, I have written exactly as many numbers on the right as I have written on the left, and if I continue into infinity, there would always be a number on the right for every number on the left. But now imagine: every number on the right is also on the left. But that means nothing other than: I have as many numbers on the right as I have on the left, but at the same time I have only half as many numbers on the right as on the left. Because it is quite obvious that there must always be one in between two numbers that are double, I must have only half as many numbers on the right as on the left. One is always left out, that is obvious, so I can only have half as many on the right as on the left. That is obvious. But consider that one is always missing, that 1, 3, 5, 7 and so on are missing, so half the numbers are missing on the right! So I only have half as many on the right as on the left. Nevertheless, I have exactly the same number of numbers as on the left. That is to say: as soon as I enter infinity, half is equal to the whole. That is quite clear: as soon as I enter infinity, half is equal to the whole – you cannot escape it. As soon as you enter infinity with your concepts from the finite, something like that comes out by itself, that half is equal to the whole. You can write all the numbers on the left and all the square numbers on the right: 1 - 1, 2 - 4, 3 - 9, 4 - 16, 5 - 25. Certainly there is a square number for every number, but as true as many numbers are missing here, it can only be a part. Think about it: after all, it is always only the square numbers. You can visualize the same thing in another way: I draw two parallel lines here – I have shown this before. How large is the space between these two parallel lines? Infinitely, of course! In mathematics, as you know, this is indicated by this sign: 00. But if I now draw a perpendicular to it, and a parallel at exactly the same distance, then the current space is exactly twice as large as the previous one, but still infinite. That is, the new infinity is twice the previous infinity. You can see this very clearly here: you can see here, by the simplest means of thought, that thinking is only valid in the finite. It is unfounded and without result as soon as it goes beyond the finite. It cannot begin with the laws that it has within itself when it goes out of the finite into the infinite. But you must think of this infinity not only in terms of the very large or the very small, but also within the world of qualities. This is a triangle, this is a square, this is a pentagon (see drawing), I could make a hexagon, heptagon, octagon and so on, and if I keep going, it will become more and more similar to a circle. If I then draw a circle, how many corners does it have? It has an infinite number of corners. But if I draw a circle that is twice as large, it also has an infinite number of corners, but twice as many corners! So even in the finite, the concepts of infinity are everywhere, so that our thinking can fail everywhere, even where it can encounter the finite, because of infinity, because of the intense infinity. This means that thinking must always realize that it is at a loss and without support when it wants to go out of the finite sphere, which is given to it first, into the infinite. We must draw a practical conclusion from this. We must really draw the practical conclusion that we must not simply think in this way, that we can go terribly wrong if we think in this way. And among the many negative achievements that can be attributed to Kant, the positive one is that he once gave people a good rap on the knuckles with regard to this nonsense: thinking in this way, going at everything. If you think about it, you can prove that space must have a boundary somewhere, that the world is finite; but equally that it is infinite, because thought becomes unfounded as soon as you go beyond a certain sphere. And so Kant put together the so-called antinomies: how one can prove one thing just as well as the opposite, because thinking is unstable, has only a relative value. One can think quite correctly with regard to one point; but if one is not able to extend it to the other, which is perhaps next to it, one goes wrong if one simply thinks or even just observes at random. In this area, one can really see how little people are aware that one cannot just lash out, neither with thinking nor with observing and with some taking in of what is out there. Apparently, I am now linking something very metaphysical and epistemological with something very mundane. But it is exactly the same puzzle; it's just a shame that we don't have the time to discuss epistemologically how it is the same puzzle. Mr. Bauer drew my attention to something very beautiful in this direction a few days ago. You know that Pastor R., in his lecture in which he killed off our spiritual science, pointed out that if someone were to go up to our building after it, they would be reminded of old Matthias Claudius by all the incomprehensible people depicted there. And Pastor R. wanted to say that the good old Claudius would have to stand there and say: “Up there, these anthroposophists rule and want to recognize that which can never be recognized!” It is simply not recognizable to people. — And then he quoted Matthias Claudius:
So there we are, because old Matthias Claudius tells us that all people are poor sinners and should not turn their gaze to the incomprehensible and inscrutable. Well, and then good old Matthias Claudius also says, in a nutshell, that Pastor R. is such an intelligent person that he knows that people are poor sinners and know nothing of that which cannot be seen with the outer eye. Mr. Bauer, who was not content with simply listening to these words from Pastor R., opened Matthias Claudius and read the “Evening Song” by Matthias Claudius, which goes like this:
And so, poor sinner, Pastor R. is the one who is getting further and further away from the goal! He has simply forgotten that the fourth verse is connected to the third! As you can see, it is important to try to be comprehensive in your thinking. Of course, if the fourth verse refers to Pastor R. – if Pastor R. identifies with all humble human beings – then the exact opposite can be concluded than if the third verse is added. This latter, trivial example is not completely unrelated to the more metaphysical-theoretical example I have given. It is necessary for people to realize that if they look at something and then think about what they have seen, they may come to the exact opposite of what is really true. And that is what particularly comes to the fore when the transition is to be made from the finite to the infinite or from the material to the spiritual or the like. Now, someone like Marcion, from his Lucifer-infected gnosis, said: A god cannot undergo the process of becoming human and so forth that takes place here on earth, because a god must be subject to different laws that belong to the spiritual world. He did not find the connection between the spiritual and the material, the sensual. Now there was a debate about this, which no longer existed – Marcion is only externally, physically, recognizable from his opponents, for example from Tertullian – that the whole external physical story of Jesus of Nazareth would not be appropriate for the divine world order; how God could be on earth, that could only be appearance, that could all be without meaning. The Christ would have to be understood purely spiritually. Tertullian said: “You are right, Marcion” — this is now in Tertullian's writings — “you are right when you make your concepts as you make them; these are quite understandable, transparent concepts, but then you must also apply them only to the finite, to the things that happen in nature; you must not apply them to the divine. For the divine, one must have other concepts. And what is the rule, the law, for the workings of the divine, may appear absurd to the finite mind. Tertullian was thus confronted, not consciously, I will not say, but intuitively and unconsciously, with the great riddle of how far thinking, which is adapted to nature, to natural phenomena, applies. And he countered Marcion: If one applies only that thinking which appears plausible to man, then one can assert what Marcion says. But with the Mystery of Golgotha, something has entered into world evolution to which this thinking is not applicable, for which one needs other concepts. — Hence he formed the word: These higher concepts, which refer to the divine, compel us to believe what is absurd for the finite. In order not to do injustice to Tertullian, one must not just quote the sentence: “I believe what is absurd, what cannot be proved” – but one must quote this sentence in the context in which it appears and which I wanted to make somewhat understandable. That was the main problem that now occupied Tertullian: How is the divine nature of Christ connected with the human nature of Jesus? And here he was clear about one thing: human concepts are not suitable for grasping what happened with the mystery of Golgotha. Human concepts always lead to the inability to connect the spiritual that one has grasped from the Christ with what one must grasp as earthly history in relation to Jesus. But, as I said, Tertullian lacked the possibility of grasping the problem from the constitution of man, as we are trying to understand it again today. As a result, he initially only managed, for the first time, to find, I would say, the surrogate for the concept that we develop when we want to clarify something in a particular place in our spiritual scientific knowledge. Do you remember a place in our spiritual knowledge that you can find, for example, in my 'Theosophy'? There you will see: first there is the physical body, etheric body, astral body, then: sentient soul, mind or feeling soul, consciousness soul, and finally the individual connections with the spirit self. There are various discussions about how the spirit self works its way into the consciousness soul. But this is exactly the point to consider if you want to look into the abiding of Christ in the man Jesus, if you want to understand this. It is a prerequisite to know how the spirit self enters the consciousness soul in general humanity; it is a prerequisite to understand how the nature of Christ, as a special cosmic spirit self, entered the consciousness soul nature of Jesus of Nazareth. Tertullian only found a substitute for this, and what he formulated as a concept can be understood as saying today: According to Tertullian, there is no mixing between the Christ, corresponding to the spirit self, and the Jesus, corresponding to the consciousness soul and all the lower aspects of being that belong to it. And humanity will only get to know such a connection when the spirit self is properly present. Now we live in the age of the consciousness soul. Each person will have a much looser connection when the spirit self is regularly developed in the sixth post-Atlantic period. Then people will also better understand how differently, for example, the Christ nature was bound to the Jesus nature than, let us say, the consciousness soul was bound to the mind soul. The consciousness soul is, of course, always mixed with the mind soul. But the spirit soul is connected to the consciousness soul, not mixed with it. And this is the concept that Tertullian really developed. He says: Christ is not mixed with Jesus, but connected. The one God-man, Christ Jesus, presented Himself to him in order to illustrate to him once again in the age in which this old conceptual clairvoyance was no longer present how the divine and the physical soul were connected in human nature. The Christ appears before Tertullian as the representative of all humanity. Through the Christ, he studied the constitution of man in order to understand Christ Jesus. The Christ became the center of his entire thinking, which could no longer be applied to the one human nature. And because Tertullian had realized that Christ is not mixed with Jesus, but connected - he could not say as we would say: like the spirit self with the consciousness soul - but he said: not mixed, but connected - through this it emerged for him, that he said: everything that Christ has connected with, also comes from the spirit of the world; that is the father principle in the world. For Tertullian, the Father principle became that which, so to speak, belonged to the earthly manifestation of Jesus. There lies the father principle, the creative principle in nature, that which brings forth everything in nature. The Christ principle united with this, the son principle. Thus it became for Tertullian, and through the father and the son, through the purification of the external, the natural, through the Christ, the spirit arises again, which he calls the Holy Spirit. Thus, in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, that which stands as the Christ Jesus, as Jesus emerging from the Father-Principle, as everything in the world emerges from the Father-Principle. Thus, this Christ Jesus, by virtue of the fact that he carried the Christ within him, was the Son emerging from the Father-Principle, who had simply come later, the Bringer of the Spirit — the Spirit, which then in turn comes from him. Thus Tertullian sought to find the way out from the individual human being to the cosmos: to the principles of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Now the great difficulty arose for him in making it understandable how three could be one and one three. In ancient times, when there were still clairvoyant concepts, it was not particularly difficult to imagine this. But for the time when everything falls apart through concepts and nothing can be properly connected anymore, the difficulty arose. Tertullian used a nice comparison to make it clear how one can be three and three one. He said: Take the source. From the source comes the brook, from the brook comes the river. If we ask about the river, we say: It comes from the spring through the brook; from the spring through the brook. Or take, he said, for comparison the roots, the shoots, the fruit: the fruit comes from the root through the shoot. — Tertullian needed a third comparison, saying: The little flame of light comes from the sun, carried through the cosmos. Thus, he said, one must imagine that the Spirit comes from the Father through the Son. And just as this trinity – source, brook, river – does not contradict the unity that the river is in reality, so the fact that the Spirit comes from the Father through the Son does not contradict the unified development of Father, Son and Spirit. So he tried to make clear to himself how the three can be one: like roots, shoots and fruit, like source, stream and river. And he also tried to arrive at a certain formula. By thinking in terms of the father principle – that is, in terms of that which is always the source from which the spirit principle comes through the son principle: the natural, the externally created, the externally revealed; in terms of the son principle, that which permeates the penetrates the externally revealed; and with the spirit principle, that which is brought about for earthly development by both together, he formed a doctrine for himself, but which was basically only a single symptomatic expression of what was developing in general in these first centuries of Christianity among people who, on the one hand, still had something of Gnosticism in them, and at the same time were suffering all the pains and afflictions because Gnosticism was bound to be lost. These people were now trying to come to terms with what Christ Jesus was, and what He had to be in order to fulfill the goal of the Mystery of Golgotha. Tertullian is only one particularly ingenious representative of those who, in the early days of Christianity, tried to penetrate spiritually to what had happened. Then, out of Christianity, there emerged what you know as the Credo, as the Apostolicum, which was established in the third and fourth centuries and was then also established by the councils. If you study this, as it was in those days, then you will find out: it is basically a defense against Gnosticism, a rejection of Gnosticism, because one sensed the Luciferic factor in Gnosticism. Gnosis tends towards Lucifer, that is, towards a one-sided spiritual conception. It cannot, therefore, come to the Father Principle at all, cannot properly appreciate it. It regards the material world with contempt, as something it cannot use. It must be stated: I believe in God the Father, the Almighty Father – the first part of the Creed. This first part of the Creed is formulated against the contempt for the material, so that even the external, that which is seen with the eyes, is also understood as a divine, and precisely a divine, that emerges from the Father principle. The second thing was to declare, in opposition to Gnosticism, that there was not only an ethereal Christ in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, but that this Christ was really connected, not mixed, with the man Jesus of Nazareth. It had therefore to be established on the one hand that the Christ was connected with the spiritual, and on the other hand that the Christ was connected with Jesus of Nazareth, the natural evolution on earth, and that when suffering, dying, rising and all that death, resurrection and all that has yet to take place in imitation of the Mystery of Golgotha, is not something in which the Christ does not participate, but that He really suffers in the flesh. The Gnostics had to deny that the Christ suffered in the body because He was not connected to the body; for the Gnostics, at least for certain Gnostics, it was only an apparent suffering. In contrast to this, it should be stated that the Christ was really connected to the body in such a way that He suffered in the body. So all the events that had taken place on the external physical plane were to be connected with the Christ. Therefore: I believe in Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, born of the Holy Ghost and Mary the Virgin, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, died, rose again on the third day, and ascended into heaven – that is, became spiritual again – and is seated at the right hand of the Father, judging the living and the dead. One can now say: The Gnostics came closest to the spirit, which is to be regarded as a mere spiritual. But it is spiritual in so far as it now represents a spiritual essence, but must gradually be realized in human coexistence in the social structure that is emerging during the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan period, where the Holy Spirit is embodied, not now in an individual human being, but in all humanity, in the configuration of society. But it is only at the beginning. However, the Gnostics were the ones who could best understand that something that is only spiritual does not intervene in the material. Therefore, the God of the Gnostics was basically the closest thing to the Holy Spirit. But this Christianity, which wanted to be transferred to earth, which did not want the spirit to be lost to Lucifer, to be seen only as something spiritual in it, this Christianity now also had to define faith in the spirit as something that was connected to the material: I believe in the Holy Spirit, in the Holy Church. — That is now in the Apostolicum, that is, the church as a great physical body of the Holy Spirit. This Christianity was not allowed to regard life in the spirit as something merely inward either, but had to have realized the spirit outwardly through the remission of sins, in that the Church itself took over the ministry of the remission of sins and, in addition, the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh: “I believe in the Holy Ghost, in the Holy Church, in the remission of sins, in the resurrection of the flesh. So the Credo is in about the 4th century. So there were nothing but barricades against Gnosticism, and the way these three parts of the Apostolicum are formulated is closely related, as is something like this: the river has arisen from the source through the stream, or: the fruit has arisen from the root through the sprout. During that time there was an enormous striving to grasp how the spirit is connected to the material that spreads throughout the world, how one can think the spiritual together with the material, how one can think the Trinity together with that which spreads outwardly in the material. That is what is sought; it is sought intensively. But when one considers all that lives in the Apostolicum, which today has become completely incomprehensible, one must say: the echo of the old clairvoyant concepts still lives in it, only to die away, and therefore the not the old living forms that it could have gained if one had been able to understand the Trinity and the Apostolicum with earlier clairvoyant concepts, but it is a beginning to grasp the material and the spiritual at the same time. Today there are very many people who say: Why concern oneself with this old dogmatics? There people have only ruminated with all sorts of crazy ideas, but no one can make sense of it, it is all vain dreaming. If we look more closely, however, we find that behind this vain dreaming there is a tremendous struggle to grasp what had just become relevant for the world through the Mystery of Golgotha on the one hand, and through the loss of the old clairvoyant knowledge, the gradual fading away of the old clairvoyant knowledge, on the other. Now the development continues, and something similar is happening as has already happened in older times, when out of the one root of the mysteries, where art and religion and science were still one, the three have developed out of each other. Now again that which is in that common root, which one tried to grasp through the Apostolicum, strives apart into the trinity. I will now attempt to describe this further development in such a way as can be presented today without causing too much offence. For if I were to communicate what needs to be said without further ado, many a head would be turned by it. What started out as a unity developed within Western culture in three separate currents. That is to say, one current was particularly suited to grasp the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, one current more the Son, the Christ, and one current more the Father. And the curious thing is that more and more in separate courses of development the Holy Spirit current, the Christ current, and the Father current are emerging, but one-sidedly. For naturally, it can only be penetrated in its entirety when all three are present. If one develops what is to be understood as a trinity so one-sidedly, then difficulties of development arise; then some things are left out, and others degenerate. Now the following developed: The common development gradually separated in such a way that one developmental stream clearly continued, which was directed primarily towards the Holy Spirit – not as the first in time; the first in time is, of course, the coming together – and this is the one that is still essentially embodied today in the Russian Orthodox Church. However strange it may seem, the essential feature of the Russian Orthodox Church is that it primarily honors only the Holy Spirit. And you will recognize from the way, for example, Solowjew speaks about Christ, that he is primarily well-versed in grasping Christianity from the side of the Holy Spirit. It does not depend on whether he consciously speaks about Christ or not, but on which spirit rules in him, which meaning he connects with the things. What matters is the inner aspect, especially the way in which he inseparably regards the external social order of the church in relation to what is taught and is cult. This is entirely out of the nature of the Holy Spirit. The early Church, however, wanted to avoid this mere knowledge of the Holy Spirit by setting up the Trinity in the Creed and adding the Christ and the Father to the Holy Spirit. But these three must – which is also Solowjew's ideal – come together again in a kind of synthesis. The second current was the one that was more oriented towards cultivating the Christ; it may have taught all kinds of things about the Holy Spirit, but essentially it cultivates the Christ. It is the church that spread from Rome in the Occident and had the tendency to cultivate the Christ. Think of it: in all areas where this church was active, it basically wanted to cultivate the Christ; wherever you look, there is the Christ. Wherever you look, this church is significant in the one-sided cultivation of the middle article of faith in the Creed. Only in recent times has this church tried to penetrate the Father principle as well. But because they do not know the actual inner connection, they cannot establish the right relationship between Christ and the Father. And this incorrect recognition of the relationship between Christ and the Father is what causes all the discussions in modern Protestantism. It pushes from Christ towards the Father. This can be observed again in our time. The sad events of the present have also brought about the fact that individual souls, rather numerous souls, have been imbued with religious consciousness by these events; this can be proven. But Christ reigns very little in this manifestation of the new religious consciousness; much more the father principle, the general principle of God, by which is meant the father principle. Anyone who is able to observe correctly in the world can see this everywhere. I would like to describe just one small symptom to you. During our last stay in Berlin, a dear member died and was cremated in Berlin. I set the condition – due to the prevailing circumstances it was necessary – that a minister speak. He was a very dear man and very much in agreement with me speaking afterwards. But lo and behold, he now gave a truly soul-stirring speech, and one had the feeling, as he spoke of God the Father, that he spoke deeply inwardly from the soul. And the whole time I listened to him and realized: This is actually a confirmation of what spiritual science in general must show: The Christ has been cultivated, now people have gone astray; when one speaks of religious life, one only comes to the father principle. — Many letters that come from the field, whose writers have deepened religiously, speak little of Christ, everywhere of the principle that must be seen as the father principle. — Anyone who studies this can see this. And then, at the end, because Christmas was just around the corner, the pastor mentioned Christ. This was so far-fetched because, as a Christian, he now thought it might be advisable to speak of Christ. You couldn't find any appeal or meaning in it. — And such phenomena are now increasing every moment. There is also a third current that cultivates the Father principle one-sidedly. And now you can imagine: the two fundamental pillars that were erected against the one-sided cultivation of the Father principle by the Apostolicum, the Christ and the Holy Spirit, must be left out if only the Father principle is cultivated one-sidedly. On the other hand, the father principle was introduced into the Apostolicum to indicate that the material world is also a divine one. The one-sided father principle is cultivated in the school of thought that ties in with Darwin, Haeckel and so on. That is the one-sided development of the father principle. And no matter how much Haeckel may have resisted it, he was born out of religion. He was born out of religion through the one-sided development of the Father principle, just as other religious currents were born through the one-sided development of the Holy Spirit or the Christ principle. And basically, it seems rather superficial when people say that the first councils only dealt with dogmatic concepts. These dogmatic terms are not just dogmatic terms, but they are the outward symbol for deep contradictions that live in European humanity, for those contradictions that live in those who are predisposed as Holy Spirit people, predisposed as Christ people, predisposed as Father people. This differentiation is also deeply rooted in the nature of the European world. And to the extent that in the first centuries of the Christian proclamation, people looked at the whole of Europe, they established a creed that encompasses the Trinity. Of course, each one-sidedness can bring the other side with it, but it does not have to. But humanity must pass through many trials, must pass through many one-sidedness in order to find its way out of one-sidedness to totality, to wholeness. And then one must also have the good will to study things in their deeper content, in their deeper essence. If we study the three layers, the three currents of European intellectual life, which can be characterized as I have just done, in their deeper essence, then we will see that the differentiation has gone deep into the very fiber of people's souls, and we will learn to understand much that, if we do not understand, can only stand before us like a painful enigma. One would like to say: just as unity was presented in the Trinity before Tertullian, so three main European human needs lived in the way the One expressed itself symptomatically in Three, insofar as they were guided by religious life, and something like the formation of the schism between the Western Roman and the Eastern Roman Church, the Roman and the Greek, the Orthodox Church, is only the outer expression of the necessity that lies in the impulse that must branch out in different directions. In this sense, spiritual science will make many things in human life understandable. In this way, by trying to shine ever deeper light into human interrelationships, into the interrelationships within the whole development of humanity, it is of course quite misunderstood today. For more and more clearly, the time is emerging in the outer world that wants nothing to do with spiritual science, a time in which a deeper understanding of history is no longer sought; in which everyone pursues only what they want to believe to be true according to their subjective beliefs, their personal sympathies or antipathies. Of course, spiritual science is needed precisely in such a time, because the pendulum of development must swing in the other direction. But it is equally obvious that spiritual science will be misunderstood in such a time. And we really must be clear about how much of our time lives in such a way that man does not seek objectivity, the overview, but judges rashly out of his inclinations. It is really the case that, on the one hand, there is a profound necessity to say an extraordinary amount from the spiritual world, but that it is extraordinarily difficult to make oneself understood in our immediate present. Never as strongly as in our immediate present did people live, so to speak, in the general aura, of which they are not even aware. I am deeply convinced, if I may say so, that much in our time must remain unsaid. Many will find it self-evident that they are now suited to hear, perhaps in a smaller circle, what otherwise cannot be said. But this opinion is quite erroneous. Many people may indeed long to hear now something that can perhaps only be said to humanity in years to come. But we must realize that we are living in a time when the judgment is not made only when a word with its meaning approaches our soul, but when the judgment has already been made before the word approaches our soul. In our time, the way in which the word is received is already largely determined by the time the word reaches the ear, and has not yet been received by the soul. There is no longer time to ask about the meaning, so stirred up are people's passions and emotions by the oppressive events we have been plunged into, and many a word could only be tolerated by being spoken in our presence. We can do nothing else in our presence than to make this clear to ourselves again and again, that it is essential that a number of people are found who stand firmly on the ground of what we have already attained; who stand firmly and faithfully on this ground and can cherish the hope that this firm and loyal standing on the ground of spiritual science can become important and essential for the development of humanity in a certain period of time. The time will surely come when — since many passions have already been stirred up — something like a great question will permeate the atmosphere in which our spiritual-scientific movement lives. This question will not be clearly heard, but perhaps the effects will be clear. Nor will the answers be given clearly in words, but in relation to external events they will perhaps be very clear. Something will be whispered through the spiritual-scientific current without being expressed in words, such as: Should I go with them or should I not go with them? And the answer will also speak of what has driven people out of sensationalism, out of sympathy with the general feelings that arise from spiritual science. It will arise from many secondary feelings, which will push towards an answer that will not be clearly formulated, that will not simply express itself by saying: I liked spiritual science, now other feelings have mixed in, now I no longer like it. Instead, people will appear in masks and seek all kinds of reasons, which they may discuss from many sides. The essential thing will be that one used to like spiritual science, but no longer likes it, which has a lot to do with enthusiasm, sensation, all kinds of sensual lustful feelings and so on. In a sense, precisely out of the emotions of the present, something will arise more and more, such as: I go with - and: I do not go with. - Alone in the inner being, our spiritual science is invincible, completely invincible. And what we have to look for is that at least some are found in whose hearts it is firmly anchored, but anchored not out of sympathy and preference, out of favor and sensation, out of vanity and enthusiasm, but because the soul is connected with it as with its truth, and because the soul does not shy away from difficulties in entering the core of truth in the world. Much will fall away completely; but perhaps what remains afterwards will be all the more significant and certain. This must be borne in mind when it is necessary to emphasize again and again that, until more peaceful times come to our civilized countries, we must renounce much that might be very useful precisely for understanding our present time, but which, because of the nature of our time, really cannot be brought before humanity at this time. I would like to say these words to explain why some things have only been hinted at, especially in the last lectures. But I would like to add one more thing. Precisely when it is true – and it is true – that we live in a time when the word has already led to judgment before it has even reached the soul, then many can learn a great deal from the events of the present with the tools of what spiritual science already gives them. Much can be learned from what is happening around us, if we look at it more deeply, if we see how today outer humanity has almost completely lost the ability to judge according to any kind of objectivity, how judgments flow only from the emotions, permeating everything in the cultural world. And if you look for the reason why this is so, if you see this reason buzzing in the human aura of the present and then know how the word is already a judgment before it enters the soul, then you can also learn a lot from the events of the present with the instrument of spiritual science. And we should learn if we are to be able to become a tool in reality - as a society for this spiritual science. The example that was given today, how a person who wants to meet our society quotes a fourth verse and omits the third, yes, my dear friends, when you look for the reasons for the opposition that arises against us: they can be found everywhere. They must be sought everywhere in superficiality, in the most enormous superficiality. Everywhere, so to speak, a fourth verse has been seen and a third verse overlooked, figuratively speaking. Only many of us still do not believe that. Many of us still believe that they are doing well when they go to this or that person and tell him: I have become so spiritual through our spiritual science that I even read to my husband fighting out there in the field, and I know that it helps him. – Then, of course, people come and use that against us. Or when people are told what we had to hear, what was passed on as the 'Nathanael story' and so on. That such things should happen at all, that these things should really be passed on from our midst, seems at first to be done with the best of intentions, but with a good will that is connected with a certain naivety, but a naivety that is boundlessly arrogant because it does not recognize and does not want to recognize, but takes himself as a person so seriously that he considers it the most necessary thing in the world to want to convert this or that person – whom, if he were not so naive, he would know cannot be converted. This is so infinitely important that one can understand how, at times, naivety can feel endowed with boundless arrogance and a sense of mission. And as a rule, no one resents the naive person more than the naive person himself, who believes he is doing the very best when, out of a certain enthusiasm, he does the absurd. And it is indeed necessary, if you take the matter, that we at least gain from spiritual science the ability to think modestly. If thinking can really go so wrong, as I have tried to make clear today, why should we always, when we have drilled this or that into our brains, why should we believe that it is an incontrovertible truth? And why should we then immediately trumpet it out into the world as if we were on a mission? Why shouldn't we decide to learn something real first and to get a certain inner impulse of aliveness from spiritual science, rather than just the one we get when we sip at it? Therefore, the seriousness, the deep seriousness that must permeate us cannot be emphasized enough, and it must always tell us: And no matter how much you believe in your judgment in any given direction, you have to test it, because it could be wrong. If we take all this into account, along with many other things (not everything can be said after all), then, little by little, we will truly be a number of people in whose inner lives what is so impersonal lives, just as the most important impulses must be impersonal in the present, if they are to prevail against the purely personal impulses that permeate and have permeated the world today. I wanted to speak to you about your souls, since we will not meet for a few weeks now. I wanted to give you a broader perspective in the last hours before these weeks when we cannot speak to each other, by unrolling a page in the original development of Christianity and in its divergence into different currents. I am convinced that no matter how much you study the development of Christianity in past centuries, what has been said today will provide you with a thread that will clarify an infinite number of things for you in outward appearances. And in the outward appearances, if you really look at them seriously, you will find confirmation everywhere of what I could only hint at today. It would be good if we could use something like meditation material that could present us with problems and puzzles for our souls, the solution of which we could each try according to our ability. Of course, some will only be able to do this with fleeting thoughts, for a few minutes, while others will be more inclined to familiarize themselves with something that can provide enlightenment about what has been hinted at. But everyone can be stimulated if they try to develop, as I would say, the surging thoughts that go back through the centuries and yet are essentially involved in what is happening in the present, so that there is a need to understand it. I know that in reality no one understands our painful present without becoming familiar with all the contradictions that have arisen in a completely natural way in the course of European development. But when one compares what is being judged today about the world situation with what is objectively correct and can only be recognized if one knows all the forces that have intervened in the development, and which only the study of history can reveal, including in a spiritual sense, when one compares today's judgments with what leads to real judgment, then one is deeply, deeply pained. Not only do we feel pain, my dear friends, at what is happening today, but also at the difficulties that arise in order to get beyond what is happening today. And we must get out of it! And the better you will realize that a deep spiritual-scientific understanding of the developmental forces of humanity is necessary in all areas, without letting our personal emotions interfere, the more such an understanding of the developmental impulses through spiritual science is striven for, the more you recognize how important it is to recognize these impulses through spiritual science and to awaken them in your soul, the better you will be among those souls who can stand firm on the ground on which one must stand today if what is actually necessary according to the inner demands of human development is to be achieved. I would like to speak to you about your feelings and emotions, so that spiritual science may enter into them and become firmly anchored in them, and so that there may be people, as there should be and as there must be, if we want to make progress in the evolution of humanity. In all modesty we must think this, but in this modesty we must do it, because it is not suitable to educate us to megalomania, but only to create in us the need to apply as much strength and as much intensity as possible to penetrating what wants to realize itself spiritually in the developmental history of humanity. |
187. How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again?: The Evolution of Christianity from the Mysteries of pre-Christian Times
27 Dec 1918, Dornach Tr. Alan P. Shepherd, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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Natural science does not do this; its aim is limited to finding laws, the so-called natural laws, which are nothing but abstractions. If you acquaint yourselves a little with current literature, which cloaks the natural-scientific concepts in a sort of little philosopher's mantle—I might also say, puts a philosopher's little hat on them—if you make yourselves acquainted with this literature, you will see that the people who talk about these things are quite unable to relate their natural laws to reality. They reach natural laws, but these remain abstract concepts, abstract ideas. Such an individual as Goethe tried to push beyond natural laws. And what is significant in Goethe and Goetheanism is something little understood: namely, that Goethe tried to penetrate beyond the laws of nature to the forms of nature, to nature formation. Hence, he originated a morphology on a higher level, a spiritual morphology. |
187. How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again?: The Evolution of Christianity from the Mysteries of pre-Christian Times
27 Dec 1918, Dornach Tr. Alan P. Shepherd, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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We tried two days ago to point to the impulses from which Christianity developed. We could see how the real Ego of Christianity, the essence of Christianity, embodied itself, as it were (one cannot say that, of course, except by way of comparison)—embodied itself in three elements: the ancient Hebrew soul, the Greek spirit, and the Roman body. In order to be able to apply these thoughts to the immediate present, today we will carry them a little further, and try to gain a few more glimpses of this inner being of Christianity. If we wish to trace the development of Christianity, we must show to what extent it has evolved from the Mysteries of pre-Christian times. (You will have found this already in my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact.) Today it is not easy to speak of the general nature of the Mysteries, because in the course of human evolution, happening as it did in conformity to cosmic law, the epoch arrived—in a sense we are still in it—in which the Mysteries declined. They could no longer play the role they had played at the time when Christianity was evolving out of them—as also out of other things. There is good reason for the decadence of the Mysteries in our time; we will be able to go into this in our discussion today and the following days. We will also be able to see in what way the Mysteries are to be established anew. I shall speak first, then, of pre-Christian times, let us say to begin with, of pre-Christian Greek and pre-Christian Egypto-Chaldean epochs. What impelled people to seek out the Mysteries in those ancient times was this: their world conception forced them to believe that the world they saw spread out around them was not in itself the true world, but that they must find the means of penetrating to the true world. They had a strong sense for a certain fact when they faced any riddles of knowledge: they knew that however one tries to discover the true nature of the world by external means, it is impossible to do so. For one to realize the full importance of this knowledge that people possessed in ancient times, one must remember that we are speaking of an era in which most human beings still had a completely objective view of elementary spiritual facts. Conditions then were entirely different from those of today: people in those days not only received the impressions of their outer senses; they also still perceived spiritual realities within the phenomena of nature. They perceived activities that were by no means limited to what we today call processes of nature. Nevertheless, although they spoke generally of the manifestation of elemental spirits in nature, they had a deep knowledge that these observations of the external world, however clairvoyant, did not lead to the true being of the world, that this true being of the world must be sought by special paths. These special paths were beautifully summed up in the Greek world conception in the words, “Know thou thyself.” If we look for the real meaning of the words “Know thou thyself”, we will find something like the following: their power comes from the insight that to whatever extent we may survey the external world or penetrate into it, we will not only fail to find the being of this outer world but we will also fail to find the being of man. Expressing it simply, in the sense of our present-day world view, we could say: those ancient people believed that a conception of nature could give no explanation of the being of man. On the contrary, they were convinced that the being of man is connected with the whole of nature spread out in the world; therefore, if a man succeeded in penetrating into his own being, he would then be able through knowledge of his own being to gain an understanding of the being of the world as well. Therefore, “Know thou thyself in order to know the world!”: that was the impulse, one might say; and that impulse formed the basis of—well, let us say, of the Egypto-Chaldean initiation. All initiation proceeds by stages; we have become accustomed to call them degrees. Now, we may characterize the first stage, the first degree, of the Egypto-Chaldean initiation in this way: the neophyte must first pass through the “gate of man.” That means, the human being himself was to be the gate of knowledge. First the human being must be understood, because if we learn to know the being of man through man himself, then we can penetrate into the being of the world indirectly through man. Hence, “Know thou thyself!” is synonymous with entrance into the being of the world through the “gate of man.” It is not my intention to speak in detail today about the stages of Egypto-Chaldean initiation; I would like to point out what is essential for the understanding of Christianity. Therefore, do not regard what I shall say as an exhaustive presentation. I wish simply to mention single characteristics of those stages, which could and did have a particular preparatory influence upon the development of the being of Christianity. What the neophyte at the “gate of man” was to learn to know, therefore, was the being of man himself. That was something he could not find in what the outer world revealed to him, however far and carefully he sought. In the Mysteries it was known that some of the secrets of existence had remained in human nature and could be discovered by human means, secrets that could not be found by searching the outer world. Those ancient people were convinced of this. If one directs his attention to the outer world, he finds, of course, first of all the earthly substances and forces surrounding him. But these earthly substances and forces, so far as man understands them, are only a kind of veil. Whatever natural science may now have to say about external nature as it presents itself, is such that it throws no light whatever upon it. In earlier times the human being could look up from external nature that he saw around him on earth to the world of the stars; and in those ancient times he did that much more intensively than he does today. There he saw many things, and he well knew in those times that man is related to them just as he is related to the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms on earth. This is a knowledge that has disappeared from the outer world today. Ancient man knew that just as he is born out of the kingdoms of nature on earth, something in him is also born out of the extra-tellurian, extra-earthly cosmos. Indeed, it was this connection of the human being to the cosmos beyond the earth that became known to him when he passed through the “gate of man.” He bore within him, one might say, remnants of the relationship that he had discarded in his transition from Moon-nature to Earth-nature. He bore within him the remnants of his relationship to the cosmos beyond the earth. So he was led to the “gate of man,” where he was to become acquainted with man himself. He came to know in himself what externally he could only gaze at, especially in the world of the stars. In himself he learned that as a true human being not only is he organized in an earthly body gathered from the kingdoms of earthly nature, but also something coming from beyond the earth, coming from the whole world of the stars, has flowed into his entire human entity. A man discovered the nature of the starry sky, one might say, through knowledge of himself. He came to know how he had descended step by step, descended from heaven to heaven, so to say, before he reached the earth and incarnated in an earthly body. And through the “gate of man” he was to ascend these steps again—eight of them were usually specified. During his initiation he was to set out on the return, through the stages by which he had descended to his birth in a physical body. Such insight could not be gained without man's whole nature being profoundly affected. (I am speaking now always of the pre-Christian Mystery knowledge.) The man of today does not even like to form an idea of the preparation that the neophyte had to go through in those times, because these ideas irritate him. (I am choosing my words so as to express the facts as exactly as possible.) A modern person would like to undergo initiation, if possible, as something to be done casually somewhere along his life-path, something to be done incidentally. He would like to inquire—as people say today—into what leads to knowledge; but in any case, he would not like to experience what the people of old seeking initiation had to experience. To be deeply affected in his whole being by the preparation for knowledge, to become a different man—that he would not like. Those ancient people had to decide to become different human beings. The descriptions you very often find of the ancient Mysteries give you only a dim picture; they create the impression that the ancient initiations were conferred upon individuals just as casually as are, let us say, the so-called initiations of modern Freemasonry. But that was not the case. Where ancient initiations are imitated today, we have to do merely with all sorts of counterfeits of what was really lived through in those ancient times—imitations that can be performed now as superficially as the modern person may wish. But the essential preparation for the man of old was this: he had to go through an inner soul-condition that, if characterized by one word, must be called fear. He had to experience to a most intense degree the fear that is always felt by someone who is brought face to face with something wholly unknown to him. In the ancient initiations that was the essential condition: that an individual should have the most intense feeling of facing something that would not be met with anywhere in external life. Given all the soul-forces the man of today expends upon his external life, this soul-condition would today still never be reached. With the soul-forces he likes to use he can eat and drink, he can conform to the social customs of the various classes of society recognized today, he can carry on a business, play the bureaucrat, even become a professor or a scientist—all that: but with these capacities actually he can know nothing whatever that is real. The condition of soul in which an individual sought enlightenment in those ancient times—remember that I am speaking now steadily about that ancient time—the condition of soul was essentially different. It could have nothing in common with the soul-forces that are serviceable for external life; it had to be derived from entirely different regions of the human being. These regions are always present in man, but he has a terrible fear of using them in any way. In the neophyte they were brought into activity in a direct and purposeful way. They are that very part of a human being that is avoided by modern man—by the ordinary, secular man of ancient times too—in which modern man does not want to become involved, and concerning which he likes to have illusions or to be indifferent. One must understand the inner significance of what can be described outwardly as the cause of a series of fear-conditions that had to be undergone. Only what lies in the realm of the soul that man fears in his ordinary external life: only this could be used to attain the desired knowledge. This condition of soul was really experienced in those times, and bravely gone through—a condition in which all the individual felt was fear: fear of something unknown. This fear was to lead him to knowledge. Only through this soul- condition was he then brought face to face with what I have just characterized as the descent of the human being through the regions of heaven, that is, of the spiritual world, to which he was led up again through the eight stages. Naturally, these are only imitated today, as they must be because of the customs of our time; but in those days a man was actually brought to this experience. Especially important for us is what resulted for the individual who was brought to this “gate of man.” When he had grasped the full meaning of being placed there, he no longer considered himself the animal-on-two-legs—pardon the expression—that is, a synthesis of the rest of the kingdoms of nature here on earth. He began to feel himself as belonging to the heavens one can see and also to those one cannot see. He began to consider himself a citizen of the whole world, to feel himself really as microcosm, not merely a little earth, but a little world. He felt his connection with the planets and fixed stars, that he had been born out of the universe. He felt that his being did not end with his fingertips, the tips of his ears, the tips of his toes, but that it extended beyond his body taken from the earth, that his being extended through endless spaces and on through these endless spaces into the realms of spirit. That was the result. Do not try to form too abstract a concept of this result! To say that man is a microcosm, a little world, and then to have nothing but the abstract idea is not worth much; it is only a delusion, a deception. The matter of importance in those ancient Mysteries was the direct experience. The neophyte really experienced at the “gate of man” his relationship to Mercury, Mars, the Sun, Jupiter, the Moon. He really experienced the connection between his own existence and those hieroglyphs standing in cosmic space through which the sun takes its course (“apparently”—as we say today), the pictures of the zodiac. Only this concrete knowledge based on his immediate experience determined what I am now pointing to as result. When these things are changed today into abstract concepts, the result is not the same. When ancient experiences are converted today into such concepts as: this star has this influence, that star has that influence, and so on, they are nothing but abstract ideas. In those ancient times the thing that mattered was the immediate experience, the actual ascent through the various stages by which a man had descended to birth. Only when the neophyte had this living consciousness, only when he experienced that he was a microcosm, was he considered ready to ascend to a second stage, a second degree, which at that time was the real stage of self-knowledge. Then he could experience what he himself was. Thus what I have characterized as Being, as also the Being of the World, was to be found by a person of that time only in himself; if he wished to find his way into the universe, he had to go through the “gate of man.” In the second stage, everything that had been learnt in the first as experienced knowledge began to take on motion. It is difficult today to give any idea of this coming-into-motion of one's experiences. In this second stage the neophyte not only knew that he belongs to the macrocosm, but he was woven into the whole movement of the macrocosm. He went with the sun through the zodiac, as it were, and from this journey through the whole zodiac he came to know the full effect of any outer impression upon man himself. When you confront the external world with only the ordinary means of knowledge, you perceive merely the beginning of a very detailed process. You see a color; you form an image of it; perhaps you retain this image in your memory—and it goes no further. These are three steps. If we were to consider this complete, it would be precisely as if we considered the course of the day, which is twelve hours of sunlight, as consisting only of three hours. For the outer impressions a person receives and follows up, at most, as far as the memory-image, continue within him by a further process beyond the memory-image through nine more steps. The man then becomes a mobile being, inwardly permeated, as it were, by a living, turning wheel, just as the sun describes its heavenly circle (“apparently,” according to our present-day concepts). In this way the neophyte came to know himself, and thereby to know also the mysteries of the great world. As he learned in the first stage how he stands within the world, so he learned in the second stage how he moves within the world. Without this knowledge as life-knowledge, no neophyte in ancient times could reach what he then had to experience at the third stage of initiation. We live now in an epoch in which it is natural for people to disavow completely everything three-membered—speaking in the sense of the Mysteries—to erase utterly from human consciousness everything of a three-membered nature. Whether they admit it or not, the people of our time really presuppose that the entire universe is enclosed in space and time. You will find that even very thoughtful people hold this opinion. You need only recall, for example, how the idea of human immortality was conceived in that part of the nineteenth century when materialism, theoretical materialism, had reached its height. Very clever people in the middle and the second half of the nineteenth century were insisting that if men's souls were to separate from them at death, there would finally be no room; the world would be so filled with souls that there would be no space for them. Very clever people said this, because they assumed that after death a man's soul would have to be taken care of in some way that could only be thought of with space concepts. Or take another example: There was—and it is said to exist still—a Theosophical Society in which all sorts of things were taught about the higher members of man's nature. I do not say that the enlightened leaders fell into this error; but a large proportion of the members imagined the astral body as quite spatial—of course, very tenuous, like a cloud, but nevertheless like a spatial cloud, and they indulged in speculation as to the whereabouts of this cloud in space when someone goes to sleep and the cloud goes out of him spatially. It was difficult to suggest to many of these members that such spatial concepts are unsuitable for spiritual ideas. It is exceedingly difficult for anyone in our time to imagine that at a certain point on the path of knowledge one does not merely enter into a different dimension of space and time from that of everyday consciousness, but one actually goes out of space and time. The truly supersensible does not really begin until one has abandoned not only sense impressions and their time processes, but space and time themselves. One enters into conditions of existence entirely different from those that have to do with space and time. If you would apply this to yourselves, you might find it difficult to answer the question: What must I do in order to leave space and time with my thinking? Yet that was the real achievement resulting from the completion of the first two stages of the Mysteries. If a clear consciousness of the secrets of the third stage had still existed in this age of materialism, nothing so grotesque could have developed as the theory of spiritism. (I speak now of the basic theory, not of external experimentation.) Anyone who tries to find spirits, wanting to bring them into space as rarefied bodies, does not realize that the procedure is utterly devoid of spirit; that is, he is seeking a world that does not contain spirits but contains something else. Had spiritism had any idea that to find spirits it is necessary to go out of space and time, such grotesque concepts could never have arisen as that of the need for spatial arrangements, so that the spirits can announce themselves by external acts within space and time! Well, briefly, this is what had to be achieved in the first two stages: the ability to get out of space and time. The preparation for it was the striding through the “gate of man,” and then through the second stage. The third stage was designated by an expression which perhaps we can translate into these words: the neophyte passed through the “gate of death.” That means, he knew that now he was really outside space—in which human life is spent between birth and death, and outside time—in which this human life takes its course. He knew how to move beyond space and time, in duration. He came to know something that extends into the sense world, as I have often emphasized, but that cannot be comprehended in the sense world through what it brings, because what it brings, what it contains is spiritual. He learnt about death and all that is connected with it. That was the essential content of this third stage. However we may regard the Mystery rites, varying as they did among the different peoples, however they may be represented, their fundamental concern was with death. Everywhere the starting-point for the third stage had to be the possibility of a man experiencing within the life of the body all that normally he can only experience when death takes him out of the body. (I have to use a paradoxical expression for lack of something better.) This was connected with the possibility of considering the human being as he normally exists between birth and death as something different, something apart from the being whom the neophyte had now become in the third stage. The neophyte had now learnt in connection with the phrase “to be outside the body” to conceive of the “outside” not as spatial, but as super-spatial. He had learnt to connect with these words a concept that could be experienced. It was at this point also that the neophyte laid aside his connection to the ordinary secular religion of his people. Most of all, he laid aside at the “gate of death” the idea that he stood here upon earth while his God or his Gods were somewhere outside him. He knew himself at this moment to be one with his God; he no longer differentiated himself from his God, but knew that he was completely united with Him. It was really the experiencing of immortality that this third stage gave to man, in the experience that a man could cast off his mortal part, could separate himself from his mortal part. But, dear friends, in contemplating the result, let us not forget the entire path, which consisted in the human being coming to know himself. That is the central feature of this pre-Christian initiation, that the human being turned inward in order to find in himself something that he could then take with him into the outer world. This appeared to him then in the right light only after he had separated himself from himself, so that he felt united with the being of the outer world. He turned inward in order to go out of himself. He turned inward to find what he could only find within himself: the being of the world. He could not first have found it outside; now he could really experience it. He went through the “gate of man,” the “gate of self-knowledge,” and the “gate of death” in order to enter into the world which was, of course, outside him, into the ordinary world of nature—it is also, of course, outside us—but he knew with certainty that he could only find what he sought in it by turning inward. After, then, he had passed through the extraordinarily difficult third stage, he was at once ready for the fourth. And one may say that simply through having practiced living at the third stage for a certain time, he was prepared for the fourth in a way that would hardly apply to a man of the present day. For the man of today, simply because of the epoch of time, does not become fully mature in the third stage. He does not easily get away from conceptions of space and time except through certain ideas of force—and these too have to be sought by different methods from those of ancient times. (I will speak about this in coming lectures.) By what the neophyte had now carried into the world from out of himself, he was raised to the consciousness of the fourth stage: he became what was expressed, when carried over and translated into later languages, by the word Christophorus, or Christ-bearer. That was fundamentally the goal of this Mvstery-initiation: to make the human being a Christ-bearer. Naturally, only a few selected individuals became Christ-bearers. Moreover, they could only become such by first seeking in themselves what was not to be found in the outer world, by then taking back into the outer world what they had found within, and then by uniting themselves with their God. This is the way they became Christ-bearers. They knew that they had united themselves in the universe with what is called in the Gospel of Saint John the Logos, or the Word (this is not said in an historical sense, but in anticipation); they had united themselves with That out of which all things were made, and without which not anything was made that was made. Thus in those ancient times the Christ Mystery was separated from man, as it were, by an abyss; and man crossed the abyss by becoming able, through self-knowledge, to go out of himself and to unite himself with his God—to become a bearer of his God. Let us suppose now hypothetically, in order to help us forward, that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place on earth, that the earth evolution had continued to the present time without the Event of Golgotha ever having taken place. Only by means of such contra-hypotheses is it possible to grasp the significance of such an event as the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore, let us suppose that this Event had not occurred up to our present day. What would have taken the place of that content which individuals found within themselves as a result of the ancient Mysteries? The man of today would be able to understand the Greek apollonian maxim, “Know thou thyself!” he could intend to live up to it. He could try—because, after all, the traditions have been preserved—to go through the same method of initiation as, let us say, the Egypto-Chaldean initiation of a king: that is, he could try to rise through the four stages, just as they were gone through in those pre-Christian times, to become a Christophorus. But in that case the human being would now have a very definite experience. If he followed the maxim, Know thou thyself!” and tried to turn inward, even to pass through the conditions of fear that were suffered in that ancient time; if then he went through the experience of transformation, the setting into motion of what had first been known in a state of rest: he would now have the experience of finding nothing in himself, of now not finding the being of Man in himself. That is the essential fact. Certainly the maxim “Know thou thyself!” is valid for a man of our time, but self-knowledge no longer leads him to knowledge of the world. What a human being with the ancient soul-constitution still had within himself, connecting him with the Being of the world; what he could not find in the outer world but had to seek as self-knowledge, in order then to have it as knowledge of the world—that inner core of the human being, which he could then take back with him into the outer world in order to become a Christ-bearer: this the human being does not find in himself today. It is no longer there. It is important to keep this in mind. People with the foolish notions encouraged by the so-called science of our time have the idea that man is Man. A contemporary Englishman or Frenchman or German is Man just as the ancient Egyptian was. But in the light of real knowledge, that is nonsense, absolute nonsense. For when the ancient Egyptian turned inward in obedience to the rules of initiation, he found something there that a contemporary man cannot find—because it has vanished. What could still be found in the soul-constitution of pre-Christian times, and even- more or less—in the Greek soul of the Christian era, has fallen away from man and been lost. It has vanished from the being of Man. The human organism is a different one today from that of ancient times. Using other words, we might say: When the human being turned inward in ancient times, he found his ego; even though dimly sensed and not in fully conscious concepts, still he found his ego. That does not contradict the statement that, in a certain sense, the ego was first born with Christianity. Therefore I say: Even though obscurely and not in fully conscious concepts, man nevertheless found his ego. As active consciousness it was indeed first born through Christianity. Nevertheless, the man of old did find his ego. For something of this ego, of the real, true ego, remained in him after he was born. You will ask: Then does the man of today not also find his ego? No, my dear friends, he does not find it. For when we are born the true ego comes to a stop. What we experience of our ego is only a reflection. It is only something that reflects our pre-natal ego in us. We actually experience only a reflection of our real ego; only quite indirectly do we experience something of the real ego. What the psychologists, the soul-experts, speak of as ego is only a reflection that is related to the real ego as the image you see of yourself in the mirror is related to you. The real ego, which could be found in the time of atavistic clairvoyance, and even down into the early Christian era, is not to be found today by looking into man's own being—insofar as this being is united with the body. Only indirectly does the human being experience something of his ego: namely, when he comes into relation with other people and his karma comes into play. When we meet another person and something connected with our karma takes place between us, then some impulse of our true ego enters into us. But what in us we call our ego, what we designate by that word, is only a reflection. And through the very fact of experiencing this ego merely as a reflection in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, we are being made ready to experience the ego in a new form in the sixth epoch. It is characteristic of this age of the consciousness soul that the human being has his ego only as reflection, so that he may enter the coming age of the Spirit-Self and be able to experience the ego in a new form, a different form. But he will experience it in a manner that now in our time would be unpleasant. Today he would call it anything but “ego,” what is going to appear to him as his ego in the coming sixth post-Atlantean epoch! People in the future will seldom have those mystical inclinations that are still experienced by some individuals today, to commune with themselves in order to find their true ego—which they even call the Divine Ego. They will have to accustom themselves to seeing their ego only in the outer world. The strange situation will come about that every person we meet who has some connection with us will have more to do with our ego than anything enclosed in our own skin will have to do with it. We are heading toward a future age in which a person will say to himself: My self is out there in all those whom I meet; it is least of all within me. While I live as a physical human being between birth and death, I receive my self from all sorts of things, but not from what is enclosed in my skin. This seeming paradox is already being indirectly prepared by the fact that people begin to feel how little they themselves really are in the reflection which they call their ego. I remarked recently that anyone can discover the truth about himself by reviewing his own biography—factually—and asking himself what he owes since birth to this person or that. In this way he will gradually resolve himself into influences coming from others; and he will find extraordinarily little in what he usually considers his real ego (but which is really only its reflection, as has been said). Speaking somewhat grotesquely, we may say: At the time that the Mystery of Golgotha took place, the human being was hollowed out; he became hollow. And it is important that we learn to recognize the Mystery of Golgotha as an Impulse that has a reciprocal relation to this hollowed-out condition of man. If we speak truly, we must make it clear that the hollow space in man, which indeed could be found still earlier—let us say, in the Egypto-Chaldean royal Mysteries—had to be filled up in some way. In that ancient time it had been partly filled by the real ego; but this now comes to a stop at birth—or at latest, in early childhood; there is some evidence of its presence in the first years of childhood. This hollow space has been filled by the Christ Impulse. There you have the true process. Let us say, here on the left are human beings before the Mystery of Golgotha; in the middle, the Mystery of Golgotha; on the right, human beings after that Event. Before the Mystery of Golgotha a human being had something in him that was found through initiation, as has been said, (red) Since that time it is no longer there; he is hollowed out, as it were, (blue) The Christ Impulse descends (lilac) and fills the empty space. The Christ Impulse is not to be conceived of, therefore, as a mere doctrine, a theory, but must be comprehended in accordance with facts. Only one who really understands the possibility of this descent in the sense of ancient Mystery initiation, will grasp the inner significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. A man cannot today become a Christ-bearer forthwith, as he could in the ancient Egyptian royal initiation; but in any event he becomes a Christ-bearer in that the Christ descends into the hollow space within him. Therefore, the fact that the principles of the ancient Mysteries lost their significance reveals why the Christ Mystery is of such profound importance. You will find that I have spoken of this in my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact. I said that what formerly was experienced in the depths of the Mysteries, what made a man a Christophorus, has been brought out on the great stage of world history and has been accomplished as external fact. That is the truth. You will see from this also that since those ancient times the principle of initiation itself has had to undergo a transformation; for what the ancient Mysteries upheld as the thing to be sought in man cannot be found there today. People of our time have no reason to be proud that our natural science views the modern Englishman, Frenchman, German precisely as it would view the ancient Egyptian if it could. It fails completely to consider what is the essential being of man. Even the exterior human form has changed somewhat since those ancient times. But the essential change has to be understood as we have described it today. You can see from my description the necessity for change in the principle of initiation. What would a man strive toward today if he wished to obey the injunction “Know thou thyself!” in the ancient sense? What would he attain if he knew all the ceremonies and processes of initiation of the ancient Egyptians and applied them now to himself? He would no longer find what was found in the ancient Mysteries. What a neophyte in those days became at the fourth stage, present-day man would accomplish unconsciously, but would not be able to understand it. Even were he to go through all the initiation ceremonies, were he to tread all the paths that at that time led to Christophorus, he could not now approach the Christ in that way with any understanding. The man of old, when he was initiated, really became a Christophorus. But in the course of earth evolution man lost the possibility of finding within himself that Being Who became the Light-of-the-World Being. When a man of our time seeks in the same way, he finds within himself a hollow space. However, this is not without significance in the world- process. When man loses something, he is changed because of it. Now we go through the world as human beings having that emptiness in us, but that in turn gives us special faculties. Certain ancient faculties have been lost, but through their loss new ones have been gained that now can be developed as the ancient faculties were developed for the ancient need. In other words, the path that was followed from the “gate of man” to the “gate of death” must be travelled differently today. This is connected with what I said previously: that the Spirits of Personality (the Archai) have taken on a new character, and the new initiation holds a particular relation to this new character. In the first place, initiation came to a kind of pause in the evolution of humanity. In the nineteenth century especially, human beings were far removed from it. Only at the end of the century was it again possible to approach a real, living initiation. This real, living initiation is now being prepared, but its procedure will be entirely different from that of earlier times. I have described this earlier initiation today from a certain point of view, in order to prepare you for a deeper understanding of Christianity. What was quite impossible in earlier times—namely, to find any reality in the external world—is now a possibility through the very circumstance of our having become inwardly hollow. And this possibility will increase. It already exists to a certain extent, and may now be attained by the paths described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. What is possible today is this: to acquire in a certain way a deeper view of the outer world, using the same soul-faculties (if we use them properly) with which we now view it. Natural science does not do this; its aim is limited to finding laws, the so-called natural laws, which are nothing but abstractions. If you acquaint yourselves a little with current literature, which cloaks the natural-scientific concepts in a sort of little philosopher's mantle—I might also say, puts a philosopher's little hat on them—if you make yourselves acquainted with this literature, you will see that the people who talk about these things are quite unable to relate their natural laws to reality. They reach natural laws, but these remain abstract concepts, abstract ideas. Such an individual as Goethe tried to push beyond natural laws. And what is significant in Goethe and Goetheanism is something little understood: namely, that Goethe tried to penetrate beyond the laws of nature to the forms of nature, to nature formation. Hence, he originated a morphology on a higher level, a spiritual morphology. He tried to capture not what the outer senses yield, but the processes of formation: what is not to be discovered by the senses, but is hidden in the forms. Thus, we can really speak today of something that corresponds to the “gate of man. We can speak of the “gate of nature-forms.” I might say that there were already signs of this dawning, though still dim, when out of the chaotic mysticism of the Middle Ages such a man as Jacob Boehme12 spoke of “the seven forms of nature. This was in his own language, and neither very clear nor very comprehensive. Nevertheless, these forms are what modern initiation must come to more and more, forms that reveal themselves within the external physical forms but extending out beyond space and time. I have often referred to that famous conversation between Goethe and Schiller as they came from a lecture by the scientist Batsch. Schiller said to Goethe that Batsch certainly had a very splintered way of observing the world. In their day it was still far from being as splintered as that of present-day physical scientists; but nevertheless Schiller felt that it was very prosaic. Goethe remarked that of course a different method of observation could be employed, and in a few characteristic strokes he sketched his idea of the primordial plant and the metamorphosis of plants. Schiller could not grasp that and said: “That is not a matter of experience” (he meant, that is something not existing in the external world), “it is an idea.” Schiller stayed with the abstraction. Whereupon Goethe replied: “If it is an idea, I am satisfied; for then I see my ideas with my eyes.” He meant that what he had described was not just an idea that he only created inwardly, but that it really existed for him even though it could not be seen with one's eyes as one sees colors. That is real forming, supersensible forming (Gestaltung) in the senses. To be sure, Goethe did not develop it very far. I have told you in some of our lectures that a straight continuation of this metamorphosis of the plant and animal world—which Goethe developed only in an elementary way—brings us to a true perception of repeated earth- lives. Goethe saw the colored petal as a transformed leaf, the skull bones as transformed dorsal vertebrae. That was a beginning. If someone continues with the same mode of observation, he reaches only forms, it is true, but it is the “gate of nature-forms” that he reaches; it is imaginative insight into those forms. And then he really begins to observe, not merely the skull bones that are transformed vertebrae, but the whole human cranium. He discovers that the human head is the whole human form metamorphosed from the previous incarnation, except only the former head. Of course the physical matter passes over into the earth; but the body that you carry around with you today, except just your head, the supersensible part of that form persists and becomes your head in the next incarnation. There you have metamorphosis at its highest level of development. But you must not be deceived by appearances in precisely the modern fashion. If you deal with that kind of appearances, you will be like people who point to the passage in Shakespeare where Hamlet says in his despair, that the earthly dust of Julius Caesar must still exist; that perhaps the remains, the atoms, that once constituted the Roman emperor are now in some dog. My dear friends, people who think in such a manner simply do not investigate the course taken by the physical organism, whether it is buried in the earth or burnt. The metamorphosis that actually takes place is the following: only the head disappears, vanishes from the earth, for it goes out into the universe; but your present body in this incarnation, except the head, is transformed, and you will find it as your head in your next incarnation. You cannot escape it. You need not consider the material substance at all. Even now you do not have the same matter in your body that you had seven years ago. You need only think of the transformation of the form. It is just as much a first stage as the “gate of man” was in the ancient sense: it is the “gate of forms.” And when a man has fully comprehended this “gate of forms,” he can then enter into the “gate of life,” where he has no longer to do with forms, but with stages of life, elements of life. This corresponds to what I described earlier as the second stage in the ancient Egyptian royal initiation. The third stage is equivalent to entrance into the “gate of death”: it is initiation into different states of consciousness. Between birth and death, of course, man knows only one; but this is one out of seven, and one must know all the various states of consciousness if one really wishes to understand the world. Remember that you have an account of these three successive conditions in my Occult Science, an Outline, where they refer to cosmic evolution. You have there the seven different forms of consciousness, Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, and so on. In each of these stages of consciousness, Saturn, Sun, etc., there are seven life-stages; and in each life-stage, seven stages of form. What we describe as our epochs of culture—ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin, and our present epoch—are also forms. In these we are at the “gate of forms,” corresponding to the “gate of man”; out of the world of forms we can shape conceptions about the successive cultural epochs. There are seven of them in each life-stage; and when we speak of life- stages, we mean the seven successive stages of which our present post-Atlantean age is one. We are now in the fifth life-stage; the Atlantean was the previous one, the Lemurian still earlier. The purpose of these life-stages has been that man might attain the consciousness he has today. This consciousness developed out of Old Moon consciousness; that, out of Old Sun consciousness. Man's final, most perfect consciousness, he will acquire during the Vulcan evolution. Thus you see how man gains a survey of the cosmos through the three successive Mystery stages. Then from this knowledge of the cosmos he acquires knowledge of man. Also from this knowledge of the cosmos he now has the possibility of bringing understanding to the Mystery of Golgotha. Toward this understanding, today we have received, I might say, just a few incomplete ideas. But at least we have been able to grasp why, for example, the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the fourth culture-form (the Greco- Latin) of the fifth (the post-Atlantean) life-stage, and why it occurred on earth. If you read the Leipzig cycle13 you will see how preparation was made on this earth for the Mystery of Golgotha. But all that is needed to understand the Mystery of Golgotha can be learnt from the principles of modern initiation. Thus, ancient initiation proceeded essentially from knowledge of man to knowledge of the world; modern initiation proceeds from knowledge of the world to knowledge of man. This has been said, however, from the standpoint of initiation. You stand on one side, as it were, and on the other side you see the reflection of it. To acquire this knowledge of the world, you must start from a modern knowledge of man. I spoke recently about that. And the way we speak of ancient times must be entirely different from the way we speak of modern times. Ancient times reached knowledge of the world through knowledge of man. Speaking theoretically, we might say that what man went through as a life-process was, when completed, knowledge of the world; and with knowledge of the world in his consciousness, he could work back to man. If today you pass through forms, life, and consciousness of this world, what you really reach in this way is knowledge of man. (Look this up in my Occult Science.) Everything else in the knowledge of nature vanishes, and man becomes comprehensible. In the same way, from having gained knowledge of the world, man becomes comprehensible as a three-membered being (as I have shown you)—nerve-sense being, rhythmic being, and metabolic being. From man we can then pass again to knowledge of the world. These are not contradictions. You will find such apparent contradictions at every step if you intend to enter the world of truth! If you want dogmatism, you will not be able to accept the contradictions, for they make you uncomfortable. you want dogmatism, you can find it in one place or another, but it will never give you an understanding of reality, only something to swear by when you need it. If you want to understand reality, then you must realize that it has to be presented from various sides. From the standpoint of life, the man of old had to proceed from the world to man; modern man must go from man to the world. From the standpoint of knowledge, ancient man went from man to the world; modern man must go from the world to man. That is a matter of necessity. It is also uncomfortable for a man of modern times, but everyone must now make his way through a state of instability, a state of uncertainty. Remember how in the second stage of the Egyptian royal initiation a man came into a state of mobility, of rotation. In our time, if a man really strives to reach life through forms, he must be able to say to himself: Even if I hold concepts ever so beautiful from this or that traditional religious confession, they may be quite fine, but I still do not attain reality by means of them unless I can also set the opposite concept before me. I have called your attention to the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha itself makes it necessary to have the two opposite concepts, so that you may say to yourself: It was truly an evil deed when men murdered the God Who was embodied in a man; but in reality that very deed was the starting- point of Christianity. For if the murder on Golgotha had not occurred, Christianity in its reality would not exist. This paradox relating to a supersensible fact may be an example of many paradoxes with which you must come to terms if you really want to attain a comprehension of the supersensible world. For it cannot be otherwise. Earlier, fear was required. Now, it is necessary to cross the abyss that gives us the feeling of standing in the universe without any center of gravity. But this must be gone through, so that concepts may no longer be something to swear by, but may be regarded as something that illuminates things from various sides—like pictures taken of a tree from various sides. The dogmatist, the scientist, the theologian believe that they can grasp the whole of reality by means of dogmas of some sort. Someone who stands within reality knows that any assertion coming from dogmas may be likened to a photograph taken from one side, giving only one aspect of reality. He knows that he must have at least the opposite aspect, so that by seeing the two together he may approach the reality of the subject. More of this tomorrow.
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343. Foundation Course: Spiritual Discernment, Religious Feeling, Sacramental Action: Gnostics and Montanists
02 Oct 1921, Dornach Tr. Hanna von Maltitz Rudolf Steiner |
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Christ is not essentially the Father, said the Gnostics, the Father essentially stood lower than the Son; the Son as Christ stood higher. This is the fundamental feeling permeating the Gnosis: however, it has been completely obstructed by what later occurred in the Roman Catholic continuation. |
By allowing the powers of Romanism to be preserved by the peoples who lived in this Romanism—the Roman written language, the Latin language had long been active—by our preservation of Roman Law, in our conservation of the outer forms of the Roman State, by our even uprooting the northern regions which contained the most elementary Germanic feelings experienced out of quite a different social community, in the Roman State outstripping all that is from the north, we live right up to our present days in a Roman world of decay because in Christendom, as it was considered in the vicinity of Christ Jesus himself, no other site could be found. |
Already with Augustinus this question emerged: How do we save the morality in the face of outward forces of law? How can we save morality, the divinely permeated morality? Into Romanism it can't spread.—This is the striving for internalization we find in the commitments and confessions of Augustinus, if we penetrate them correctly. |
343. Foundation Course: Spiritual Discernment, Religious Feeling, Sacramental Action: Gnostics and Montanists
02 Oct 1921, Dornach Tr. Hanna von Maltitz Rudolf Steiner |
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My dear friends! Yesterday we started by addressing a wish which licentiate Bock had expressed at the beginning of our course and we find that what we need to build on to what I said yesterday afternoon about sacramentalism relevant to today, can be discovered if we link the possible reflections, which are necessary, to the 13th chapter of the Gospel of St Mark. It is important for us to certainly try again, in all seriousness, to derive specific meaning from what is expressed in living words. To me it is impossible that pastoral care can be developed in the future, without yourself developing the application of living words and even experiencing living words. However, it is impossible for current mankind which is so strongly gripped by materialism, to be able to handle the living Word in itself, without a historical deepening. It is simply so, that in dealing with intellectualistic concepts and ideas we are only dealing with dead words, with the corpse of the Logos. We will only deal with the living Word when we penetrate through the layer in which man lives today, only, and alone, by penetrating through the layer of the dead, the corpse-like words. My dear friends, the Catholic Church has to a certain degree understood very well how to misplace and obstruct access to these living words for those who, in their opinion, should be the true believers. In pastoral care the Catholic Church in a certain sense considers these enlivening words already, but in an outward sense. All these things will only become understood when we take what I presented yesterday and think them through deeply, and, if we can still penetrate them further, to yield clarity. I'm saying that the Catholic Church understood very clearly in this regard, to exterminate the life of the Word, because it belonged to one of the most significant epochs of all human development, and which had contributed briefly before and some three centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, just to the civilized part of humanity. When we ask our contemporaries about the essence of the Gnosis, for example the essence of the Montanistic heresy, then with the current soul constitution you basically can't understand anything correctly relating to it. That which would outwardly be informative in the becoming church has been carefully eradicated and the things that archaeologists, philosophers, researchers of antiquity discover from this characterised epoch, will indeed be deciphered word for word, but the decipherment does not mean reaching an understanding. All of this must actually be read differently, in order to enter the real soul content of olden times. It is for instance possible for modern humanity, to take the Deussen translation, which has exterminated all real meaning of the Orient, and, while thinking these translations are great, while mankind can't eradicate all understanding for what Deussen translated, devote yourself to such a Deussen translation. In order to understand, you need to penetrate the meaning of the first Christian centuries, more specifically the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha happened. I would like to give you access, somewhat in the way I have out of Anthroposophy, by means of a presentation, which you can visualise as symptomatic of what history brings. One of the most extinct things belonging in the first Christian centuries was referred to as the Pistis, placed in contrast to the Gnosis. The Gnosis can't be understood if one doesn't know that in that time epoch, in which, let's say, you appeared in the form of a Basilides or Valentinus, people who lived in the spirituality of that time, were fighting a very terrible battle, which can be characterised by them asking a question: What do we poor people have to do on the one hand with the spirit that juts in our souls, and on the other hand our physical body into which our soul likewise juts into? In a terrifying manner this question played out in the soul battle among religious people. The two opposite poles, to a certain extent, of this battle was the Gnosis and Montanism sect. The Gnosis was, for people who wanted to become Gnostics, being aware that within a person, where the soul resides, the spirit can only be reached through knowledge, through clear, lucid, light-filled knowledge. However, it was already during a time in which intellectualism was being prepared in the dark, in a time when intellectualism was regarded as the enemy of the human soul's relation to the spirit. To a certain extent people prophetically saw how intellectualism would push in, in the future; this arrival of intellectualism was seen as stripping the world of spirituality, wanting to completely make the world void of the Divine, like I have characterised for you yesterday. People saw this and people experienced intellectualism as a danger. People wanted to hold on to something spiritual which didn't come from intellectualism. That's roughly the soul battle Basilides fought, the Gnostic who wanted to stick to what was revealed in the course of the year. He said to himself: When a person submits himself to his forthcoming intellect, then he separates himself from the Divine spirituality of the cosmos; he must connect to what lies in his environment, which has come into being through the Divine spiritual cosmos; he must adhere to that which has the venerable image of cosmic creation in the circling of the world and thus the Divine process in matter; he must adhere to the course of the year.—Basilides did the following: He looked up - but with him it was actually still only tradition, so no longer an inner imaginative perception as in older times, which I characterised as the reading of the movement of the stars—he looked up and said: Last but not least, the spiritual gaze is lost; when we feel, that when we become aware the spiritual gaze is lost, then we talk about the unknown God, the God who can't be grasped in words and concepts, from whom the fist aeon this unknown God manifests himself, revealing himself—this concept of manifestation which later unified things as with Basilides, will be totally misunderstood if compared with what we understand today under "manifestation"; one should not say "it manifests itself" but "it is formed out of," it is individually shaped—out of the unknown God is formed the Nous, which also appeared with Anaxagoras as the first creation of the unknown God. That is the first principle, which exists in people as a copy, when the human mind, not the intellectual mind but the lively mind I've characterised for you during these days, still existed within Greek philosophy (up to Plato), and which then appeared in a weaker form still in Aristotle. What comes next is the Logos, in which from the Nous we descend further down. In human beings it is expressed by perceiving sound and tone. In the neck area we find five other principles which we need not characterise in detail now. With this we have what was first called the holy days of the year, which gives people, when they read the cosmos, an understanding of the human body, leading to the human head organisation. Besides these principles we find others in the human organization, 364 in total, which gives 364 + 1=365, the outer symbol which is expressed as the 365 days of the year. The word Day (Tag) originally was inwardly connected to God, so what Basilides, by speaking about 365 days, spoke about 365 gods which all partake in the creation of the human organism. As the last one of the gods—i.e. if you take one plus 364, and then take the last day of the year as a symbol for one God—Basilides saw the God who was worshipped by the Jews in the Old Testament. You see, this is what is extraordinary in the Gnosis, that it is in such a relationship to Jahve, the Jewish God, that he is not the unknown God connected to the Nous and Logos but with the Jewish God as the 365, as the last day of the year. By understanding the Gnosis in this way, the experience of the soul was to be permeated spiritually. If I were to give you a characteristic aspect of the Gnosis, in relation to inner human experience it is this: that the Gnostic aspired in everything to penetrate the Highest with knowledge, so that his gaze rose above the Logos up to the Nous. The Gnostic says: In Christ and in the Mystery of Golgotha the Nous is embodied in the human being; not the Logos, the Nous is embodied. This, my dear friends, if it is grasped in a lively way, has a distinct result for our inner soul life. If you consider these things abstractly, as is in our intellectual time presented to many people, well, then it is heard that people in olden times didn't speak about the Logos in which Jesus became flesh, but of the Nous, which became the flesh of Jesus. That's the thing then, if you have pegged such a term. For a person who spiritually lives within a lively experience of concepts, he would not be able to do otherwise, than to grasp such a soul's content, as to imagine sculpturally what the Nous becoming flesh is. The Nous having become flesh however, can't speak; this can't be the Christ, can't go through death and resurrection. The Christ of the Gnostic, which is actually the Nous, could only come as far as being embodied in people; it could not die or accomplish resurrection. For Basilides, this darkened his observation. His gaze becomes clouded the moment he approaches the last acts of the Mystery of Golgotha with his inner gaze; it clouds his gaze when it comes to dying and resurrection. His gaze is drawn to the route towards Crucifixion, the route to Golgotha of Jesus Christ, but he couldn't accomplish, out of a lively imagination, that the Christ carried the cross to Golgotha, was killed on the cross and resurrected. He regards it in such a way that Simon of Cyrene took the cross from the Christ, that he carried it up to Golgotha, and instead of Christ, that Simon of Cyrene is crucified. This is the Christ imagination of the Gnostic in as far as the image of Basilides appears and is basically the historical expression of the Gnosis. So we see how the Christ in his final deed, is omitted by the Gnostic, how the Gnostic can't grasp the final result of Golgotha, how in their imagination the Christ is merely accomplished through the Nous, how it ends at the moment the Christ gives the cross away to Simon of Cyrene. On the one hand we have Gnosis, which is so strongly afraid of intellectualism that it did not let the legitimate power of intellectualism into human vision and as a result could not enter into the last act of the Mystery of Golgotha. What did the Gnosis do? It stood in quite a lively way, I could say, in relation to the most extraordinary and powerful question of that current age: How does one penetrate the supersensible spirit from which the soul originated?—The Gnostic pointed away from that which somehow wanted to flow in from intellectualism and result in the image of Christ up to the point when he hands the cross to Simon of Cyrene. This is the one side of the human battle which at the time had the result of creating the influence of the great question, which I have set before you. What comes forth from this wrestling? From all this wrestling another great question arises which became the crux for the Christian Gnostics. My dear friends, because the Gnostics regarded 365 as the Divine god of the Jews, they experienced the Fatherly and the Divine at the end of this row. When the Jews worshiped their god, they experienced it as Fatherly, while what later appeared as the Holy Ghost, they experienced the opposite pole, in the Nous. As a result, the Gnostics gave an answer to the primordial question in the first Christian centuries, an answer which is no longer valid today. Their answer was: The Christ is a far higher creation than the Father; the Christ is essentially equal to the Father. The Father, who finds his most outward, extreme expression in the Jewish god, is the creator of the world, but as the world creator he has, out of its foundations allowed things to be created simultaneously, the good and evil, the good and bad, simultaneously health and illness, the divine and the devilish. This world, which was not made out of love, because it contains evil, the Gnostics contrasted with the more elevated divine nature of the Christ who came from above, downward, carrying the Nous within, who can redeem this world that the creator had to leave un-liberated. Christ is not essentially the Father, said the Gnostics, the Father essentially stood lower than the Son; the Son as Christ stood higher. This is the fundamental feeling permeating the Gnosis: however, it has been completely obstructed by what later occurred in the Roman Catholic continuation. Basically, we can't look back at what the big question was: How does one relate to the greater Christ in contrast to the less perfect Father? The Gnostic actually saw things in such a way that the Father of the worlds was still imperfect, and only by bringing forth his Son, he created perfection; that through the propagation of his Son, the act of procreation of his Son, He would complete the development of the world. In all these things you see exactly what lived in the Gnosis. If we now look at the opposite side, which comes into the strongest expression with Monatunus, already weaker but still clearly with Tertullian, then we look over to those who said to themselves: If we want to reach into the Gnosis, everything disappears; we can't through the outer world, not through the contemplation of the seasons, not through reading the stars, reach the divine, we must enter into man, we must immerse ourselves in man.— While the Gnosis directed its gaze to the macrocosm, so Mantanismus dived into the microcosm, in the human being himself. Intellectualistic concepts were at that time only in its infancy and could not yet be fully expressed; theology in today's sense did not arise in this way. What existed in all the exercises, in particular those prescribed by Mantanus for his students, were inner stories, something which was enlivened within the students as visions. These atavistic visions for the Montanists were particularly indigenous. All those who were to separate themselves from belonging to the mere pastoral care of the Montanists were allowed to practice, and all of them were allowed to practice to the extent that they could answer the question: how does the soul-spiritual in man, in the microcosm, relate to the physical-bodily aspect? During ancient times, long before the Mystery of Golgotha, what I've just said was something obvious; had a self-evident answer. For those who lived in the time epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha, such an obvious answer didn't exist. People first had to dive into physicality. Because a fear existed of bringing intellectualism into this physicality, one entered the corporality with the power of the imagination and we get to know the descriptions of the forming of Montanist visions, which have also disappeared. In descriptions of Montanist visions—and this is characteristic—we always find the repetitive idea of the Christ soon returning in a physical body to the earth. One can't think of Montanism without thinking of the imminent return of the Christ to earthly corporeality. While the Montanist was familiar with the idea of finding the returning Christ, he strongly set before his soul what happened at the cross, what was accomplished through the death on the cross, what is involved in dying, what is involved in resurrection. The re-descent of the Christ, the physical-bodily immersion that takes place, was tinged by materialistic feelings in this view of the Montanists; they lived in the idea that Christ would come again and live in time and space. This was pronounced and those who believed this in the schools were only those who responded to the belief of the imminent coming of Christ Jesus to the earth, where he would stride along as if he is in a physical body. This is in contrast to the Gnosis, this is the other pole: it had a different danger, the danger that all historic development of humanity is to be imagined in space and time. The urge to imagine such an idea of the world is what Augustinus for instance experienced in his exchange with the Bishop Faustus. Through Faustus a method of imagination is introduced which is completely tinged with the senses as images presented to Augustinus, and this became a materialistic experience of the world for Augustinus, from where he approached the world. Augustinus' words are gripping: I search for God in the stars, and do not find Him. I search for God in the sun, in the moon, and don't find Him. I search for God in all the plants, in all the animals, and don't find Him. I search for God on the mountains, in the rivers; I don't find Him.— He means that in all the images there is no inner experience of the Divine, as it is with the Montanists. Through this Augustinus learnt, as it happened in his exchange with Faustus, to recognise materialism. This created his soul battle, which he overcomes by turning to himself, to faith, towards believing what he doesn't know. We must let this rise out of history because the important things do not happen in a way, we can control it, by taking a document in hand which has lain in the archives, or by looking at the entire history of these fore-mentioned men from outside—that is an outer assessment of history. The most important part of history takes place in the human soul, in human hearts. We need to look into the soul of Basilides, into the soul of Montanus, into the soul of Faustus, into the soul of Augustinus, if we want to look into what really happened in the historic fields which one then can develop into what actually became a covering of Christianity in the Church of Constantine. The Constantine Church took on the outer life of worldly realms in which the spiritual no longer lived—in the sense of the 13th Chapter of the Mark Gospel—depicted as an already un-deified earth, a perished earth, into which the divine kingdom must again live as brought by him in its real spiritual soul form. You see, in the course of both these viewpoints, one on the side the Gnosis which only came up to the Nous, and on the other side Montanism, which remained stuck in a materialistic conception, you see, how in these contrasts present during the first Christian century, the writer of the St John Gospel was situated. He looked on one side to the Gnosis, which he recognised from his view as an error, because it said: In the primordial beginnings was the Nous and the Nous was with God, and God was the Nous, and the Nous became flesh and lived among us; and Simon of Cyrene took the cross from Christ and thus accomplished a human image of what happened on Golgotha, after Christ only went up to carrying the cross and then disappeared from the earthly plane.—For the gaze of the Gnostic Christ disappeared the moment Simon of Cyrene took over the cross. That was a mistake. Where do you arrive if you succumb to all thought being human and having nothing to do with the spirit? No, this is not the way the writer of John's Gospel experienced it. It was not the Nous which was at the primordial beginnings, not the Nous with God and a veil covering everything which is related to the Christian Mystery, but: In the primordial beginnings was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and a God was the Logos and the Logos became flesh and lived among us.—So the first actions are connected to the final actions: a unity comes about when we understand it with the spirit. We wish for something which doesn't lift us above human heights, to where we must find the Nous, because that is only one perspective of the spiritual. Just as much spirit is needed for the spiritual orientation to let people form the idea that Jesus and the Christ God is one, so much spirituality exists in the Logos. When we hold on to the Nous, we only reach Christ; when we hold on to a Montanistic vision we only reach Jesus who in an unbelievable way returns as Christ, but then again only as a physical Jesus. No, we should not turn ourselves to the Nous coming from humanity, we must turn to the Logos, in which the Christ became man and walked among us. The origin of the St John Gospel has really come about through an immense spiritual time context. I can't do otherwise, my dear friends, than to make a personal remark here, that I need to experience it as the greatest tragedy of our time, that theologians do not experience the majesty of the John Gospel at all, that out of a deep struggle preceding it, out of a struggle, the big question arose: How can mankind manage to, on the one hand, find a way to his soul-spiritual in the spiritual-supersensible where his own soul-spiritual nature originated from? On the other hand, how can mankind reach an understanding for how his soul is within the physical-bodily nature? On the one hand the question could be answered by the Gnosis, and on the other hand it could be answered by an imagination towards the Pistis, which then came to Montanism in a visionary manner. The writer of the St John's Gospel was continuously placed in the middle, between these two, and we feel every word, every sentence only intimately if we do it in such a way as it flowed out of the course of the times, and in such a way that you feel the course of time during the Mystery of Golgotha as if it can be experienced forever in the human soul. With an anthroposophic gaze we can look back at the turning point in time, to the most important turning point in the earth, when one wanted to have this experience of adoration of the St John's Gospel. The day before yesterday I said to you, one has, and must, have an experience when one reads the Gospels with an anthroposophical approach, by reading them time and time again. This admiration of the reader is always renewed with each reading by the conviction that one can never learn everything from the Gospels because they go into immeasurable depths. In Gnosis, my dear friends, you can learn everything because it adheres to outer nature and cosmic symbols. In Montanism one can learn all about it because everyone who is familiar with such things knows what a tremendous suggestive persuasiveness all this has, that can be experienced through microcosmic visions, stronger than any outer impression. You must first learn, my dear friends, in order to be able to talk someone out of a vision, you first need to learn how to do it. You could, if you want to convince a person religiously, rather talk him out of what he has experienced with his outer senses, than anything he has experienced as visions, as atavistic clairvoyance, because atavistic visions are far deeper in a person. By allowing atavistic visions into a person, he is far more connected to them than to his sense impressions. It is far easier to determine an error in sense impressions than an error related to visions. Visions are deeply imbedded in the microcosm. Out of such depths everything originated which the writer of John's Gospel saw from the other side, the side of the Montanists. Montanism was the side of the Charybdis while the Gnosis was the side of the Scylla. He had to get past them both. I feel it at once, as our current tragedy, that our time has been forced—really out of the very superficial honesty, which prevail in such areas—that the Gospel of St John has been completely eliminated and only the Synoptics accepted. If you experience the Gospels through ever greater wonderment at each renewed reading, and when you manage to delve ever deeper and deeper into the Gospels, then it gives you a harmony of the Gospels. You only reach the harmony of the Gospels when you have penetrated St John's Gospel because all together, they don't form a threefold but a fourfold harmony. You won't accomplish, my dear friends, what you have chosen to do in these meetings for the renewal of religion in present time, if you haven't managed to experience the entire depths, the immeasurable depths of the St John's Gospel. Out of the harmony of John's Gospel with the so-called synoptic Gospels something else must come about as had been established by theology. What can really be experienced inwardly as a harmony in the four Gospels must come about in a living way, as the living truth and therefore just life itself. Out of the experience, out of every experience which is deepened and warmed by the history of the origin of Christianity, out of this experience must flow the religious renewal. It can't be a result out of the intellect, nor theoretical exchanges about belief and knowledge, but only from the deepening of the felt, sensed, content which is able to be deepened in such a way as it was able to truly live in the souls of the first Christians. Then, my dear friends, we see how Christianity was submerged by all that Christ experienced in Romanism—as I've presented to you—in the downfall of the world. Those who still understand Christ today will have to feel that the downfall is contained in all that is held by the powers of Romanism. By allowing the powers of Romanism to be preserved by the peoples who lived in this Romanism—the Roman written language, the Latin language had long been active—by our preservation of Roman Law, in our conservation of the outer forms of the Roman State, by our even uprooting the northern regions which contained the most elementary Germanic feelings experienced out of quite a different social community, in the Roman State outstripping all that is from the north, we live right up to our present days in a Roman world of decay because in Christendom, as it was considered in the vicinity of Christ Jesus himself, no other site could be found. This is because the Christianity of Constantine, which found such a meaningful symbol in the crowning of Constantine the Great in Rome, was a Christianity which expressed itself in outer worldliness, in Roman legalities. Augustinus already experienced, as I characterised yesterday and today, the feeling in his soul: Oh, what will it be then, if that gets a grip on the world, that which streams out of godless intellectualism, out of godless Romanism into the world? The principle of civil government will become something terrible; the Civitas of people will be opposed by the Civitas Dei, the God State.—So we notice the rise—earlier the indications had already been there, my dear friends—we see an interest emerging that was just seized in the following times in its fullest power in religious fields, that a light is cast on all later religious battles in the soul, which has just felt these religious battles most deeply. Already with Augustinus this question emerged: How do we save the morality in the face of outward forces of law? How can we save morality, the divinely permeated morality? Into Romanism it can't spread.—This is the striving for internalization we find in the commitments and confessions of Augustinus, if we penetrate them correctly. This occurs in the later striving in the most diverse forms. It appears in the tendency towards outer moral stateliness, which had to be developed according to Roman forms of the Roman Papal church, develop through the coronation of the kings becoming Roman emperors, in which the kings were accepted as instruments of the Roman Papal church, which itself was only fashioned out of ungodly Romanism. I speak in the Christian sense, in the sense of the first Christianity, which experienced Romanism as an enemy. How could one escape this which was being prepared? The first way one could get out was to not allow the internalised Christ to submit to the nationalization of morality, as it had evolved in the Roman Papal church. The nationalization, the outer national administration of morality was what Augustinus still accepted on the one hand, while, however, in the depths of his soul there were forces which he rebelled against. We see in this rebellion, one could call it, the tendency of morality to withdraw within, at least to save the divinity within morality, according to what one had lost in outer worldliness. We see this morality being turned inward, being searched for as the "little spark" mentioned by Meister Eckhard, by Tauler, by Suso and so on, and how in particular it profoundly, intimately appears in the booklet Theologia Deutch. This, my dear friends is the battle for the moral, which now came to the fore, not to be lost within the divine spirituality, when it has already been lost in outer world knowledge and administration of the world. However, for a long time one was not ready to use such force like Suso regarding morality and seize the divine to penetrate the moral. At first it was a question of arranging the whole in a kind of vague form, always envisioning the side of the outside world, for there had to be someone like a Carolus Magnus, who on the one hand was a worldly administrator, and who could transfer the state administration of morality to the crown of the emperor as an outward gesture, while the church worked in the background. It was imagined in such a way, I could say, that it became a kind of moral dilemma, a conscience that has become historical. This started in the 9th, 10th centuries and this inner conscience steered towards people looking at the world, and that man, because he stood in the middle of the search for the divine in the moral, didn't manage it in the world and searched for the enemies in the world which he felt within. Man looked in the world to find enemies. This resulted in the danger of Christians looking for enemies in the outer world, this led, my dear friends, to the mood of the crusades. The crusade mood stands in the middle of the quests for internalization, yet people still didn't reach that place within themselves where the divine was grasped through the moral. The crusade mood lived in two forms; it lived above all in the moral impact of Godfrey of Bouillon and his comrades. From them the call went out against Rome: Jerusalem against Rome! To Jerusalem! We want to replace Rome with Jerusalem because in Rome we have become acquainted with outwardness, and in Jerusalem we will perhaps find inwardness, when we relive the Mystery of Golgotha in its holy places.—This is how the imagination came to Godfrey of Bouillon who we may think of as finding the enemy inwardly, even though he still looked for it outwardly, looking for it in the Turks. The striving to turn more inward and there find the ruler of the world, but at the same time to crown a king of Jerusalem, all this expressed itself in the historic mood of the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries. All this lived in the people. For once try to place yourself, in both the worldly and the spiritual reasons of the crusades and you will discover this historical mood everywhere. Rome saw this. Rome felt it indeed, something was happening in the north: Jerusalem against Rome. In Rome one felt the externalization, but Rome was careful. Rome already had its prophets; it was careful and looked into the future, seeing what people wanted: Jerusalem against Rome. So it did something which often happens in such cases, it introduced in its own way what the others first wanted, and the Pope allowed his creatures, Peter of Amiens and his supporters, to preach about the crusade in order to carry out from Rome what actually went against it. Study the history with understanding; take it as an impulse and you will see that already the first steps of the crusades took place in what Rome had anticipated and that which Godfrey of Bouillon and his supporters strived for. So we see in the historic mood how outer actions were searching for what lay within. I could say we can understand this historic mood in a spiritual way when we see how the Order of the Temple has grown out of the crusades, orders which are already further in their turning within. As a result of the crusades it brought an inwardness with it. It only takes things in such a way that it knows that one does not actually internalize them if one does not penetrate the exterior at the same time, when one doesn't, in order to save the moral, see it as an enemy in an exterior way. As paradoxical as this might appear, my dear friends, what Godfrey of Bouillon saw outwardly in the realm of the Turks, this is like Luther's battle at Wartburg Castle with its devils as an inner power. The struggle is directed inward. If you now look at all of this, what appears in programs about such people as Johannes Valentin Andrea, Comenius, what lives in the Bohemian brothers, then you will understand how in the later centuries of the crusades the pursuit of internalization has gone. I must at least mention the most symptomatic picture seemed to me always to be in a single place when I looked at this lonely thinker who lived in Bohemia, the contemporary of Leibniz, Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz. For the first time, in all clarity—we don't only know this today—he stripped morality of legality. Everywhere in the early days of writing in the Roman spirit, the legal was bound to the moral. What lived in a religious way in most people, lived in a philosophic way in the contemporaries of Leibniz. He wanted the moral element to be purely philosophic. Just like Luther wanted to get the inner justification, because in his time it was no longer possible to get justification in the outer world, so Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz as a lonely thinker, saw the task: How do I save, purely conceptually, morality from the encirclement and transformation of legality, with those poor philosophic concepts? How do I save the purely human-moral?—He didn't deepen the question religiously. The question was not one-sidedly, intellectually posed by Hoditz—Wolframitz. However, just because it is put philosophically, one notices how he struggles philosophically in the pure shaping of the substantial moral content living in the consciousness. In order to understand these times which after all form the foundation of ours, in which the feelings of our contemporaries live—without knowing it—you should, my dear friends, always look back at the deep soul battles experienced in the past, also when a modern person feels that he has "brought it so delightfully far"; by looking back at this time of the most terrible human soul battles, only one period of superstition is seen. So, I could say, the historic development of the struggle for morality came about. What was being experienced in this struggle shows up right into our present day, and it can be imposed on the spiritual search into religion, for religious behaviour, even into aberrations. Still, no balance has been found between Pistis and Sophia, between Pistis and Gnosis. This abyss is still gaping in contrast to the writer of the Gospel of St John who had infinite courage to stand above it and find the truth in between it all. This summoning of strength in the search for the moral, in the will to save the divine, by applying it only to the moral, was felt in their simple, deep but imperfect way by those southern German religious people who are regarded as sectarians today, the Theosophists, who we find on the one hand in Bengel, and on the other, in Oetinger, but who are far more numerous than only in these two. They use all their might to strive, in complete earnestness, for attaining the divine in the moral, yet by trying to attain the divine in morality they realise: We need an eschatology, we need a prophecy, we need foresight into the course of the world's unfolding. This is still the unfulfilled striving of the Theosophists in the first half of the 19th century, started at the end of the 18th century when we must see the dawn of that which was completely buried at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and which must, from all those who experience the necessity for religious renewal, be seen. For this reason, my answers to your wishes which are in pursuit of such religious renewal, can't turn out in any other way than they do. I would quite like to give you what I must believe you are actually looking for. |
258. The Anthroposophic Movement (1993): The Community Body and the Ego-Consciousness of the Theosophical Society. The Blavatsky Phenomenon
11 Jun 1923, Dornach Tr. Christoph von Arnim Rudolf Steiner |
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It was really what might be described as a reflection of the kind of social behaviour one might find in daily life. In the consciousness of those people it was particularly noticeable that there were highly conflicting forces at play. |
First, there is logical necessity; second, the equivalence of concepts; third, the combination of concepts; fourth, the differentiation of concepts; and fifth, the law of contradiction, that something can only be itself or something else. That is the sum total of the things which human beings can know when they draw on their soul and spirit. |
The name, however, was very well chosen. And I took on the name when, for fundamental reasons which will become clear in the course of these lectures, I had to start dealing with particular subjects, starting with the spiritual fact—a certainty for everyone with access to the spiritual world—of repeated lives on earth. |
258. The Anthroposophic Movement (1993): The Community Body and the Ego-Consciousness of the Theosophical Society. The Blavatsky Phenomenon
11 Jun 1923, Dornach Tr. Christoph von Arnim Rudolf Steiner |
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When we discuss the history and position of anthroposophy in relation to the Anthroposophical Society, any such reflections have to take into account two questions. First, why was it necessary to link the anthroposophical movement to the theosophical movement in the way they were connected? And second, why is it that malicious opponents still equate the Anthroposophical Society with the Theosophical Society? The answers to these questions will only become clear from a historical perspective. Yesterday I said that when we talk about the Anthroposophical Society, the first thing of relevance is that of the people who feel the need to pursue their path through an anthroposophical movement. I have tried to describe the sense in which the souls who come into contact with anthroposophy in order to satisfy their spiritual yearning are homeless souls in a certain respect. There were more of them about than is normally suspected, because there were many people who in one way or another tried by various means to develop their more profound human qualities. Quite apart from the reaction to modern materialism, which subsequently led to various forms of spiritualism, many souls sought to fulfil certain inner needs by reading the work of people like1 and similar writers. They tried, one might say, to compensate for something missing in their human nature; something which they wanted to feel and experience inwardly, but which they could not find on the well-trodden paths of modern civilization: neither in the popular literature or art of a secular age, nor in the traditional religious faiths. Today, then, I will place before you a number of facts, and will have to leave it to the following lectures to create the links between them. Those who were engaged in such a search also included human beings who joined the various branches of the Theosophical Society. And if we ask whether there was something which distinguished those who joined the Theosophical Society from others, the answer has to be yes. There was what I might call a special sort of endeavour present. We know from the way in which the Theosophical Society developed that it was not unreasonable to assume that the something which people were looking for at the start of our century as anthroposophy was most likely to be understood within the circles then united by theosophy. But we will only be able to throw some light on that if the facts are properly presented. I would like to draw a pen picture of what the Theosophical Society, which found its most potent expression in the English Theosophical Society, represented at the time. Indeed, the latter was then joined by what emerged immediately as anthroposophy. If we look at the character of the English Theosophical Society as expressed in its members, we have to to look into their souls in order to understand their thinking. After all, they gave expression to their consciousness in the way they went about things. They assembled, held meetings, lectures and discussions. They also met and talked a great deal in smaller groups: at general meetings, for instance, there was always time to have a meal together, or a cup of tea and so on. People even found time to change dress in the intervals. It was really what might be described as a reflection of the kind of social behaviour one might find in daily life. In the consciousness of those people it was particularly noticeable that there were highly conflicting forces at play. To anyone who was not a dyed-in-the-wool theosophist it was evident that they sought to have two conceptions of every person. The first one was the direct impression on meeting someone. But the other was the conception which everyone else had of each individual. This was based on very generalized ideas about the nature of human beings, about universal human love, about being advanced—as they called it—or not, about the seriousness of one's inclinations in order to prove worthy of receiving the doctrines of theosophy, and so on. These were pretty theoretical considerations. And everyone thought that something of all this had to be present in people walking around in flesh and blood. The naive impressions of individuals, were not really alive in the members, but each one had an image of all the others which was based on theoretical ideas about human beings and human behaviour. In fact no one saw anyone else as they really were, but rather as a kind of spectre. And thus it was necessary on meeting Mr Smith, for example, and forming a naive impression of him, to form a spectral idea of him by visualizing what someone else thought of Mr Smith. Thus it was necessary to have two images of each person. However, most of the members dispensed with the image of the real person and merely absorbed the image of the spectre, so that in reality members always perceived one another in spectral form. The consciousness of the members was filled with spectres. An interest in psychology was necessary to understand this. Real interest required a certain generosity and lack of preconception. It was, after all, very interesting to be involved in what existed there as a kind of spectral society. Its leaders were perceived by the others in a very peculiar manner. Reference might be made to a leading individual—let us call him X. During the night his astral form went from house to house—only members' houses, of course—as an invisible helper. All kinds of things emanated from him. The spectral ideas about leading individuals were in part extraordinarily beautiful. Often, it was a considerable contrast to meet these leading personalities in the flesh. But the general ethos then ensured that as far as possible only the spectral conception was allowed to exist and the real conception was not permitted to intrude. A certain view of things, a doctrine, was definitely required for this. Since not everyone was clairvoyant, although there were many people at the time who at least pretended to be, certain theories were necessary to give form to these spectres. These theories had something exceedingly archaic about them. It was hard to avoid the impression that these spectral human constructs were assembled according to old, rehashed theories. In many cases it was easy to find the ancient writings which provided the source material. Thus on top of their ghostly nature these human spectres were not of the present time. They were from earlier incarnations; they gave the impression of having clambered out of Egyptian, Persian or ancient Indian graves. In a certain sense any feeling of the here and now had been lost. These ancient doctrines were difficult to understand, even when clothed in relatively modern terminology. The etheric body was borrowed from medieval concepts, as was perhaps the astral body. But then we move on to manas, kama manas and suchlike, which everybody talked about but no one really understood. How could they, when they approached them with very modern, materialistic ideas? These teachings were meant to be seen in a cosmic context; they contained cosmic concepts and ideas which made it easy to feel that souls were talking in a language not of centuries, but of millennia past. This process spread far and wide. Books were written in such an idiom. But there was another side to all this. It had its beautiful aspect, because despite the superficial use of words, despite the lack of understanding, something did rub off on people. One might almost say that, even if it did not enter their souls, an extraordinary amount adhered to the outer garment of their souls. They went about not exactly with an awareness of the etheric body or kama manas, but they had an awareness that they were enveloped in layers of coats: one of them the etheric body, another kama manas and so on. They were proud of these coats, of this dressing of the soul, and that provided a strong element of cohesion among them. This was something which forged the Theosophical Society into a single entity in an exceptionally intense manner, which created a tremendous communal spirit in which every single person felt himself to be a representative of the Theosophical Society. Beyond each individual member, the Society itself had what might be described as an awareness of itself. This identity was so strong that even when the absurdities of its leaders eventually came to light in a rather bizarre manner, the members held together with an iron grip because they felt it was akin to treachery if people did not stick together, even when the Society's leaders had committed grave mistakes. Anyone who has gained an insight into the struggles which later went on within certain members of the Theosophical Society long after the Anthroposophical Society had separated itself, when people repeatedly realized the terrible things their leaders were doing but failed to see that as a sufficient reason to leave—anyone who saw the struggle will have developed a certain respect for this self-awareness of the Society as a whole. And that leads us to ask whether the conditions which surrounded the birth of the Anthroposophical Society might not allow a similar self-awareness to develop. From the beginning the Anthroposophical Society2 had to manage without the often very questionable means by which the Theosophical Society established its strong cohesion and self-awareness. The Anthroposophical Society had to be guided by the ideal: wisdom can only be found in truth.3 But this is something which has remained little more than an ideal. In this area in particular the Anthroposophical Society leaves a lot to be desired, having barely begun to address the development of a communal spirit, an identity of its own. The Anthroposophical Society is a collection of people who strive very hard as individual human beings. But as a society it hardly exists, precisely because this feeling of a common bond is not there, as only the smallest number of members of the Anthroposophical Society feel themselves to be representatives of the Society. Everyone feels that he is an individual, and forgets altogether that there is supposed to be an Anthroposophical Society as well. Having characterized the people attracted to anthroposophy, what has been the response of anthroposophy to their endeavours? Anyone with sufficient interest can find the principles of anthroposophy in my The Philosophy of Freedom.4 I wish to emphasize that this refers with inner logic to a spiritual realm which is, for example, the source of our moral impulses. The existence of a spiritual realm takes concrete form when human beings develop an awareness that their innermost being is not connected to the sensory world but to the spiritual world. These are the two basic points made in The Philosophy of Freedom: first, that there is a spiritual realm and, second, that the innermost part of a person's being is connected to this spiritual realm. Inevitably the question arose as to whether it is possible to make public in this way what was to be revealed to contemporary mankind as a kind of message about the spiritual world. After all, one could not simply stand up and and talk into the void—which, incidentally, does not exclude a number of odd proposals having been put to me recently. When I was in Vienna in 1918, for instance, I was summoned, by telegram no less, to go to the Rax Alp on the northern boundary of Styria, stand up on that mountain and there deliver a lecture for the Alps! I need hardly add that I did not respond to it. One must create a link with something which already exists in contemporary civilization. And basically there were few opportunities like that around, even at the turn of the century. At that time peoples' search led them to the Theosophical Society, and they, finally, were the ones to whom one could talk about such things. But a feeling of responsibility towards the people whom we were addressing was not enough; a feeling of responsibility towards the spiritual world was also required, and in particular towards the form in which it appeared at that time. And here I might draw attention to the way in which what was to become anthroposophy gradually emerged from those endeavours which I did not yet publicly call anthroposophy. In the 1880s I could see, above all, a kind of mirage; something which looked quite natural in the physical world but which, nevertheless, took on a deeper significance in a certain sense, even when taken as an insubstantial mirage, a play of the light. If one opened oneself in a contemporary way to the world views of that time, one was liable to encounter something very peculiar. If we think about Central Europe, in the first instance, the philosophy of Idealism from the first half of the nineteenth century presented a world-shattering philosophy whose aim was to provide a complete metaphysical conception of the world. In the 1880s there were echoes of, let us say, Fichte, Hegel and Solgers philosophies,5 which meant as much to some of their adherents as anthroposophy can ever mean to people today. But they were basically a sum of abstract concepts. Take a look at the first of the three parts of Hegel's Encyclopedia of Philosophy6 and you will find a series of concepts which are developed one from the other: the concepts of being, not-being, becoming and existence, ending with the idea of purpose. It consists only of abstract thoughts and ideas. And yet this abstraction is what Hegel describes as God before the creation of the world. So if one asks what God was before the Creation, the answer lies in a system of abstract concepts and abstract ideas. Now when I was young there lived in Vienna a Herbartian philosopher called Robert Zimmermann.7 He said we should no longer be permitted to think in the Hegelian mode, or that of Solger or similar philosophers. According to Zimmermann these men thought as if they themselves were God. That was almost as if someone from the Theosophical Society had spoken, for there was a leading member of the Theosophical Society, Franz Hartmann,8 who said in all his lectures something to the effect that you had to become aware of the God within yourself, and when that God began to speak you were speaking theosophy. But Hegel, when in Zimmermann's view he allowed the God within himself to speak, said: Being, negation of being, becoming, existence; and then the world was first of all logically put in a state of turbulence, whereupon it flipped over into its otherness, and nature was there. Robert Zimmermann, however, said: We must not allow the God in human beings to speak, for that leads to a theocentric perspective. Such a view is not possible unless one behaves rather like Icarus. And you know what happened to him: you slip up somewhere in the cosmos and take a fall! You have to remain firmly grounded in the human perspective. And thus Robert Zimmermann wrote his Anthroposophy to counter the theosophy of Hegel, Schelling, Solger and others, whom he also treats as theosophists in his History of Aesthetics.9 It is from the title of this book, Anthroposophy, that I later took the name. I found it exceedingly interesting then as a phenomenon of the time. The trouble is that it consists of the most horribly abstract concepts. You see, human beings want a philosophical framework which will satisfy their inner selves, which will give them the ability to say that they are connected with a divine-spiritual realm, that they possess something which is eternal. Zimmermann was seeking an answer to the question: When human beings go beyond mere sensory existence, when they become truly aware of their spiritual nature, what can they know? They know logical ideas. According to Zimmermann, if it is not God in human beings who is thinking, but human beings themselves, then five logical ideas emerge. First, there is logical necessity; second, the equivalence of concepts; third, the combination of concepts; fourth, the differentiation of concepts; and fifth, the law of contradiction, that something can only be itself or something else. That is the sum total of the things which human beings can know when they draw on their soul and spirit. If this anthroposophy were the only thing available, the unavoidable conclusion would be that everything connected with the various religions, with religious practice and so on, is a thing of the past, Christianity is a thing of the past, because these are things which require a historical basis. When a person thinks only of what he can know as anthropos, what he can know when he makes his soul independent of sensory impressions, of worldly history, it is the following: I know that I am subject to logical necessity, to the equivalence of concepts, the combination of concepts, differentiation, and the law of contradiction. That, whatever name it is given, is all there is. It can then be supplemented by aesthetic ideas. Five ideas once again, including perfection, consonance and harmony, conflict and reconciliation. Third, five ethical ideas—ethical perfection, benevolence, justice, antagonism and the resolution of antagonism—form the basis for human action. As you can see, that has all been put in an exceedingly abstract form. And it is preceded by the title: Anthroposophy—An Outline. The dedication shows clearly that this was intended to be a major project. You can see that it was very remarkable, in the way that a mirage is. Zimmermann transformed theosophy into anthroposophy, as he understood the word. But I do not believe that if I had lectured on his kind of anthroposophy we would ever have had an anthroposophical movement. The name, however, was very well chosen. And I took on the name when, for fundamental reasons which will become clear in the course of these lectures, I had to start dealing with particular subjects, starting with the spiritual fact—a certainty for everyone with access to the spiritual world—of repeated lives on earth. But if I wanted to deal with such things with a degree of spiritual responsibility, they had to be put in a context. It is no exaggeration to say that it was not easy at the turn of the century to put the idea of repeated lives on earth into a context which would have been understood. But there were points where such a link could be established. And before going any further I want to tell you how I myself sought to make use of such points of contact. Topinard10 wrote a very interesting synopsis of anthropological facts, facts which lead to the conclusion, acceptable of course to everyone who subscribed to modern thinking at that time, that all animal species had evolved one from the other. Topinard quotes his facts and writes, after having presented, I think, twenty-two points, that the twenty-third point is what he argues to be the transformation of animal species. But then we face the problem of the human being. He does not provide an answer to this. So what happens there? Now, by taking the biological theory of evolution seriously, it is possible to build on such an author. If we continue, and add point twenty-three we reach the conclusion that the animal species always repeat themselves at a higher level. In the human being we progress to the individual. When the individual begins to be repeated we have reincarnation. As you can see, I tried to make use of what was available to me, and in that form attempted to make something comprehensible which is, in any case, present before the soul as a spiritual fact. But in order to provide a point of access for people in general, something had to be used which was already in existence but which did not come to an end with a full stop, but with a dash. I simply continued beyond the dash where natural science left off. I delivered that lecture11 to the group which I mentioned yesterday. It was not well received because it was not felt necessary to reflect on the issues raised by the sciences, and of course it seemed superfluous to that group that the things in which they believed should, in any case, need to be supported by evidence. The second thing is that at the beginning of the century I delivered a lecture cycle entitled “From Buddha to Christ” to a group which called itself Die Kommenden.12 In these lectures I tried to depict the line of development from Buddha to Christ and to present Christ as the culmination of what had existed previously. The lecture cycle concluded with the interpretation of the Gospel of St. John which starts with the raising of Lazarus. Thus the Lazarus issue, as represented in my Christianity As Mystical Fact,13 forms the conclusion of the lecture cycle “From Buddha to Christ”. This coincided roughly with the lectures published in my book Eleven European Mystics and the task of addressing theosophists on matters which I both needed and wanted to speak about. That occurred at the same time as the endeavour to establish a German Section of the Theosophical Society.14 And before I had even become a member, or indeed shown the slightest inclination to become a member, I was called upon to become the General Secretary of this German Section of the Theosophical Society. At the inauguration of the German Section I delivered a cycle of lectures which were attended by, I think, only two or three theosophists, and otherwise by members of the circle to which I had addressed the lectures “From Buddha to Christ”.15 To give the lecture cycle its full title: “Anthroposophy or the evolution of mankind as exemplified by world conceptions from ancient oriental times to the present.” This lecture cycle—I have to keep mentioning this—was given by me at the same time as the German Section of the Theosophical Society was being established. I even left the meeting, and while everyone else was continuing their discussion and talking about theosophy I was delivering my lecture cycle on anthroposophy. One of the theosophists who later became a good anthroposophist said to me afterwards that what I had said did not accord at all with what Mrs Besant was saying and what Blavatsky was saying. I replied that this is how it was. In other words, someone with a good knowledge of all the dogmas of theosophy had discovered correctly that something was wrong. Even at that time it was possible to say that it was wrong, that something else applied. I now want to put to you another apparently completely unconnected fact which I referred to yesterday. Consider Blavastky's books: Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. There really was no reason to be terribly enthusiastic about the kind of people who took what was written in these books as holy dogma. But one could see Blavatsky herself as an exceedingly interesting phenomenon, if only from a deeper psychological point of view. Why? Well, there is a tremendous difference between the two books. This difference will become most clearly apparent to you if I tell you how those familiar with similar things judged them. Traditions have been preserved which have their origins in the most ancient Mysteries and which were then safeguarded by a number of so-called secret societies. Certain secret societies also bestowed degrees on their members, who advanced from the first degree to the second and the third and so on. As they did so they were told certain things on the basis of those traditions. At the lower degrees people did not understand this knowledge but accepted it as holy dogma. In fact they did not understand it at the higher degrees either, but the members of the lower degrees firmly believed that the members of the higher degrees understood everything. Nevertheless, a pure form of knowledge had been preserved. A great deal was known if we simply take the texts. You need do no more than pick up things which have been printed, and revitalize it with what you know from anthroposophy—for you cannot revitalize it in any other way—and you will see that these traditions contain great, ancient and majestic knowledge. Sometimes the words sound completely wrong, but everyone who has any insight is aware that they have their origin in ancient wisdom. But the real distinguishing mark of the activity in these secret societies was that people had a general feeling that there were human beings in earlier times who were initiates, and who were able to speak about the world, the cosmos and the spiritual realm on the basis of an ancient wisdom. There were many people who knew how to string a sentence together and who were able to expound on what was handed down. Then Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled appeared. The people who were particularly shocked by its publication were those who held traditional knowledge through their attainment of lower or higher degrees in the secret societies. They usually justified their reaction by saying that the time was not yet ripe to make available through publication to mankind in general the things which were being kept hidden in the secret societies. It was, furthermore, their honest opinion. But there were a number of people who had another reason. And this reason can really be understood only if I draw your attention to another set of facts. In the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, specifically in the nineteenth century, all knowledge was transformed into abstract concepts and ideas. In Central Europe one of those who began with such abstract ideas was the philosopher Schelling.16 At a time when these ideas could still enthuse others because they contained inner human emotional force, Schelling was among those who taught them. A few years later Schelling no longer found any satisfaction in this mode of thought and began to immerse himself in mysticism, specifically in Jakob Boehme,17 allowing himself to be influenced by Boehme's thinking and extracting from it something which immediately took on a more real quality. But what he said was no longer really understood, for no one could make sense of what Schelling wrote. In the 1820s, following a lengthy reclusive period, Schelling began to speak in a curious manner. There is a small booklet by him, called Die Weltalter. You may feel that it is still rather nebulous and abstract, but a curious feeling remains: Why is it that Schelling does not advance to the stage where he can talk about what was later discussed on an anthroposophical basis as the truths about Atlantis, for instance, but only reaches the point at which he almost, rather clumsily, hints at them? It is quite interesting. In 1841 he was appointed by to teach at the University in Berlin. That is when Schelling began to lecture on his Philosophy of Revelation. Even that is still terribly abstract. He talks about three potentialities A1, A2, A3. But he follows this line until he achieves some kind of grasp of the old Mysteries, until he achieves some kind of grasp of Christianity. Nevertheless, his is not really the appropriate way to come to terms with the ideas which he briefly puts forward here. Schelling was never properly understood, but that is not really surprising because his method was a dubious one. All the same, there was something in the general awareness of the time and we can take the above as evidence for this, too which led people like Schelling to conclude that a spiritual world needed to be investigated. This feeling took a different form in England. It is exceedingly interesting to read the writings of Lawrence Oliphant.18 Of course Oliphant presents his conclusions about the primeval periods of human development on earth in quite a different way, because the English approach is quite distinct from the German one; it is much more physical, down-to-earth, material. The two approaches are in a certain sense, taking into account differing national characteristics, parallel phenomena: Schelling in the early part of the nineteenth century with his idealism, Oliphant with his realism, both of them displaying a strong drive to understand the world which is revealed by the spirit. These two men grew into the culture of their time; they did not stop until they had taken the philosophical ideas of their time about human beings, the cosmos and so on to their ultimate conclusion. Now, you know from my anthroposophical explanations that human beings develop in early life in a way which makes physical development concomitant with soul development. That ceases later on. As I told you, the Greeks continued to develop into their thirties in a way which involved real parallel development of the physical and spiritual. With Schelling and Oliphant something different happened from the average person of today. One may work on a concept and develop it further, but Schelling and Oliphant went beyond this, and as they grew older their souls suddenly became filled with the vitality of previous lives on earth; they began to remember ancient things from earlier incarnations. Distant memories, unclear memories, arose in a natural way. Suddenly that struck people like a flash. Both Oliphant and Schelling are now suddenly seen in a different light. Both establish themselves and begin by becoming ordinary philosophers, each in their own country. Then in their later years they begin to recall knowledge which they have known in earlier lives on earth, only now it is like a misty memory. At this point Schelling and Oliphant begin to speak about the spiritual world. Even if these are unclear memories they are, nevertheless, something to be feared by those who have only been through the old style, traditional development of the societies, to the extent that they might spread and gain the upper hand. These people lived in terrible fear that human beings could be born with the facility to remember what they had experienced in the past and speak about it. Furthermore, it also called into question all their principles of secrecy. Here we are, they thought, making members of the first, second, third grades and so on swear holy oaths of secrecy, but what remains of our secrecy if human beings are now being born who can recall personally what we have preserved and kept under lock and key? Then Isis Unveiled appeared! The notable thing about it was that it brought openly on to the book-market a whole lot of things which were being kept hidden in secret societies. The great problem with which the societies had to come to terms was how Blavatsky obtained the knowledge which they had kept locked away and for which people had sworn holy oaths. It was those who were particularly shocked by this who paid a great deal of attention to Isis Unveiled. Then The Secret Doctrine appeared. That only made things worse. The Secret Doctrine presented a whole category of knowledge which was the preserve of the highest grades in the secret societies. Those who were shocked by the first book, and even more so by the second one, used all kinds of expressions to describe them both, because Blavatsky as a phenomenon had a terribly unsettling effect, particularly on the so-called initiates. Isis Unveiled was less frightening because Blavatsky was a chaotic personality who continuously interspersed material which contained deep wisdom with all kinds of stuff and nonsense. So the frightened, so-called initiates could still say about Isis Unveiled that in it what was true was not new and what was new was not true! The disagreeable fact for them was that things had been revealed. After all, the book was called Isis Unveiled. They reassured themselves by saying that the event was an infringement of their rights. But when The Secret Doctrine appeared, containing a whole lot of material which even the highest grades did not know, they could no longer say: What is true is not new and what is new is not true. For it contained a large body of knowledge which had not been preserved by tradition. Thus in a rather strange and, indeed, confusing way, this woman represented what had been feared since Schelling and Oliphant. That is why I said that her personality is psychologically even more interesting than her books. Blavatsky was an important and notable phenomenon of the spiritual life of the late nineteenth century. This is the extent to which I wanted to present the facts.
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69e. The Humanities and the Future of Humanity: The Tasks of Spiritual Research for the Future
25 Sep 1912, Basel Rudolf Steiner |
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It is basically quite easy to understand that today people carry around many popular beliefs and ideas that they have constructed for themselves in order to build a world view; but they object when spiritual research wants to enter into the spiritual life of the present day and assert that, in addition to what human understanding can comprehend, in addition to what the ordinary mind, which finds its fulfillment in the comprehension of scientific research, can comprehend, that in addition to all this, there is something in man that is designated by names that are so horrible for many, such as “etheric body,” “astral body,” and “ego carrier,” so that man does not only consists of the substances of the external world, but that he should also carry within himself supersensible elements, such as the supersensible etheric body, or the astral body, which is completely supersensible and underlies the physical organization, and the carrier of the actual ego, the deepest fundamental essence of man. It is just as easy to scoff, just as easy to construct apparent refutations from popular concepts against such knowledge; and when, in addition, spiritual scientific research wants to use its methods to explore the conditions of life and existence of human nature, wants to show that it wants to reach beyond birth and death, beyond what the senses and ordinary science can explore, then such an assertion seems to contradict everything we are accustomed to reading or hearing today. |
If today natural science must rely on that which is based on the external, then one need only say: Even before Copernicus, before Kepler, before Galileo, people directed their minds out into space and found the law of the world just as it took place outside their external senses; and he - Giordano Bruno - replaces the external law with his inner vision. |
This book was written by a “practitioner of life” who sees this mechanization everywhere in scientific and intellectual life with the naked eye and who, especially in the first chapters of this book, presents a magnificent account of how human concepts have become mechanical, how social life has become mechanical. He presents all this with the stylus of the man of sense, of the man who looks at reality. |
69e. The Humanities and the Future of Humanity: The Tasks of Spiritual Research for the Future
25 Sep 1912, Basel Rudolf Steiner |
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When spiritual science is discussed today in the sense in which it is meant here, one can often experience that people not only express opposing views on this or that conceptual point, but also turn against it in an almost passionate way, as if it were something that would arise from the arbitrariness of this or that person and should only be brought into the world through this arbitrariness. Anyone who has a little overview of intellectual life as it has developed up to the present day, as it has been preparing for a long time, will very soon be able to see that this spiritual science or spiritual research is not just about something that merely needs to arise from the arbitrary intentions of some mind, but something that wants to meet the urge, the longing of the time. And anyone who is perhaps able to look a little deeper into this urge, this longing of the time, will also be able to perceive, with some attention, how those impulses that lead, indeterminately and still today as if instinctively, , will in the future become ever more definite and definite, ever more significant and ever more intense; so that spiritual research, in the way it is meant here, corresponds to an urge of the times. It is the task of today's and tomorrow's lectures, which I have the honor of giving to you, to present this. It is basically quite easy to understand that today people carry around many popular beliefs and ideas that they have constructed for themselves in order to build a world view; but they object when spiritual research wants to enter into the spiritual life of the present day and assert that, in addition to what human understanding can comprehend, in addition to what the ordinary mind, which finds its fulfillment in the comprehension of scientific research, can comprehend, that in addition to all this, there is something in man that is designated by names that are so horrible for many, such as “etheric body,” “astral body,” and “ego carrier,” so that man does not only consists of the substances of the external world, but that he should also carry within himself supersensible elements, such as the supersensible etheric body, or the astral body, which is completely supersensible and underlies the physical organization, and the carrier of the actual ego, the deepest fundamental essence of man. It is just as easy to scoff, just as easy to construct apparent refutations from popular concepts against such knowledge; and when, in addition, spiritual scientific research wants to use its methods to explore the conditions of life and existence of human nature, wants to show that it wants to reach beyond birth and death, beyond what the senses and ordinary science can explore, then such an assertion seems to contradict everything we are accustomed to reading or hearing today. And yet, through this spiritual research, attention must be paid to what Lessing has already more or less externally incorporated into our spiritual life; and it must be enlivened by spiritual research. This spiritual research must show man that in his supersensible members there are powers to be found that extend beyond this earth-life; so that one has to speak not only of one, but of repeated earth-lives, so that man man, in his entire existence, has to survey his being through spiritual science: forward beyond birth, initially into his spiritual existence; then into earlier earth lives, and again into the future, into later earth lives. For spiritual science, the entire existence of a person can be broken down into successive earthly lives, which are separated from one another by that which lies between death and a new birth: by a purely spiritual existence in supersensible worlds. At first, modern man may have many objections to this penetration into the spiritual world; it seems quite fantastic to him. And precisely those who know the conditions and foundations of spiritual science will find it understandable that much resistance can arise in the modern soul against such assertions. And so we find among the objections the assertion: We overlook existence, and what first presents itself to our senses shows us that we have a closed world in sense existence, which can be known from within ourselves. That was the endeavor of a number of great, serious thinkers in the second half of the nineteenth century: to exert all the powers of thought to explain from within what presents itself to the intellect of man! Much has been done in the course of the nineteenth century to establish such a worldview, to give it moral supports, moral goals, and also to give comfort to the human soul from it. And it is not the worst souls that have striven for a materialistic, positivistic worldview. This is one of the types of resistance that one encounters when talking about spiritual research or spiritual science. The second is something that one finds in people who have a different conviction, namely that behind this sensual world lies a supersensible world, people who recognize such a supersensible world but who cannot admit that the powers of human knowledge and the possibilities of human research are suitable for penetrating into the supersensible existence. Whether they are doubts or objections from the philosophical side, esteemed attendees, the great philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte said everything necessary against all these objections many years ago, a century ago, , when he, in the way that one could say it at the time, gave lectures at the newly founded University of Berlin in 1811 and 1813 and clothed in words that which can be seen through the spirit. Right at the beginning, Johann Gottlieb Fichte said to his audience: Imagine a crowd of people who were born blind and still live as blind people, and one of them would be a seer who speaks of light and colors. Then these people would say: He is talking about something fantastic that does not exist. From their point of view, they are right, because what can be known about a world depends on whether the person has the organ to perceive it. A supernatural world can only be admitted by someone who, as Goethe put it, has the spiritual eye to see this world as a reality. Now, the way in which this spiritual science or spiritual research is presented in modern literature is not limited to merely presenting the results, or what has just been indicated in a few words. The literature not only presents the results of the research, but you can also find, for example, in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline,” how the human soul comes to truly develop within itself the organ to look into the spiritual world. And this organ is accessible to everyone if they only go the right way. If someone is born blind, it can be said that he may be denied the ability to recognize light and colors for life. With the spiritual eye, however, it is possible for everyone to awaken it; there are powers within everyone that are dormant. Since today we are to speak about the “task of spiritual science for the future”, we can only briefly touch on what the goals and nature of this spiritual science itself are. Something of what is pushing towards this spiritual science is, so to speak, everywhere [decided], wherever you look, especially in the best minds of the preparing new time, the preparing spiritual future. Among the many things that could be mentioned, let me just quote the well-known saying of Goethe, where he says, based on a long life of experience, through a penetrating observation of the reality of existence – you can find the passage in “Conversations with Eckermann” – he said: “One may have gone through many things in life, may have faced existence in many ways – in old age one will become a mystic. And because Goethe held this view, he also had his Faust end as a mystic at the end of the second part of “Faust”, even though he also portrayed him as a practical soul. What does Goethe actually mean when he says that people become mystics in old age? Basically, anyone can experience this by comparing the whole mood, the whole state of their soul, in their youth and then when they reach a certain age: you have gone through life, formed a certain view, certain inner views, to which you develop a very specific relationship, an emotional and sensory position. In youth, [goals and] ideals, worldviews can gush forth – views of the world gush forth; one can have the feeling: they are there, raised up out of you. And when one looks back to childhood in particular, one can see how one cannot yet speak of how the soul and the body give rise to activity and expressiveness. What the human being can observe in himself in youth emerges from the indeterminate foundations of the soul life. Later on, we can see that what we have achieved within ourselves emerges from the soul. But then comes the time when more and more of what is unfolding in the world around us is consciously reflected in the soul, and we know that what we have experienced is now drawing together in our soul in such a way that it can shed light on other things. You become richer inside. How fresh you feel inside in old age indicates what kind of views you projected out of yourself in your youth. In old age, you become much more independent of the physical. One has an inner experience that every human being can have, even without spiritual science: the experience of becoming independent of one's soul, of one's physicality, of one's personality. And this inwardness, Goethe sensed it when he said that one becomes a mystic in old age. He meant: one has a spiritual form from which one can shed light on the outside world. And if you examine, I would say, the intention of this Goethean soul, especially at this point, you can say: He felt it, as in youth, so to speak in the earlier human ages, one lives in harmony with what one is also externally, physically. The body grows, becomes stronger and stronger; all the individual functions become stronger. This happens in every life. Every human being reaches what can be called a peak in life, and every human being reaches what can be called a decline. We all feel the decline of life. But it is precisely during the decline of physical life that we feel more and more this inner richness, as we are allowed to ascribe more inner judgment to the world; we feel the inner independence from the outer decline. If we have developed healthily, we feel that we become fuller, richer in content, when we describe the descent of life. That is where the question comes from, independently of all things, the question of what comes after death, after we have passed through the gate of death - after we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world? The objective, independent of the personal, is precisely that you say to yourself: You accumulate a wealth in your entire life that is ever increasing. And when life has become richer and richer, more and more full of content, then it loses the body. Does what one has collected go through one's whole life, does it go into nothingness? That is the question - not the one that is caused by the fear of death, or by some subjective feeling, but when such forces become ever richer and richer, then the question arises: should they disappear into nothingness when a person walks through the gate of death? No. We can perceive in ourselves how, basically, something within us, which is our inner soul core, works on our outer, physical existence throughout our entire life. We can best recognize this when we observe the changing states between waking and sleeping and ask ourselves what occurs there. An external, experimental science cannot answer this. But how does spiritual science answer it? We enter the human being as he falls asleep, and he feels how he becomes more and more alienated from the forces through which he moves his limbs; he feels himself escaping from the earthly-bodily. But at the moment this happens, consciousness is extinguished. Spiritual research says: something very special is happening: the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed; but what we call the astral body and the ego carrier withdraw from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up. Only the inner forces of these are not awakened; that is why the darkness of unconsciousness then spreads around the person. Spiritual research shows that the forces in this astral body and this I-bearer of the human being, which are so weak in ordinary everyday life that the person cannot be aware of them during sleep, can be kindled. This is done by means of real spiritual methods. It is done through what is called meditation and concentration. If a person brings it upon themselves to make themselves an instrument for the truths of the spiritual world, they can do so through meditation and concentration. Much is needed for this. Only one example will be given here. Imagine that you have a glass that is empty and one that is a quarter full of water, and you pour water from the full glass into the empty glass, and you now imagine that that this happening does not bring about what usually happens, namely that the glass from which he pours becomes emptier, but that by pouring into the other glass, the glass from which he pours becomes fuller and fuller! We have to form such allegorical ideas ourselves, without claiming that they are real. If a person always remains within his reason and is aware that his idea is allegorical, he can have a certain feeling about it. This can then express a higher truth, for example about human love. Love is a concept that is virtually impossible to penetrate. But you can express individual qualities of love in symbols. He who pours the mild powers of his love into a heart in need of love will notice that he loses none of his power of love, but that through this giving his power becomes greater and greater. He will be able to use the symbol of the glass for this love, which does not become emptier by pouring into another, but fuller. And when man then draws together all his thoughts, concentrating them on such a symbol, when man has the patience to concentrate his soul forces again and again on such an inner life of thought, then he evokes the slumbering forces from his soul and attains a state in which he becomes a true instrument for beholding the world behind sense perception. In this state, the human being then comes to truly experience, outside of his body, that in which he otherwise only exists in sleep; and he can bring about states that are not sleep but are similar to sleep in that he is outside of himself, having moved out of himself with the astral body and the ego. Then he is in the spiritual world. The spiritual world then reveals itself to him. The self-experiment is then also proof that he lives in the supersensible reality. And then the person realizes that he is that which does not depend on the instrument of the body, but rather forms this very form of the body. And when this spiritual eye opens, then he notices, as the child enters the world through birth, this supersensible working and forming in man. Only then are the things that external research brings to light explained, when we are able to notice how the more and more distinct physiognomy of the child develops out of the more and more distinct physiognomy of the child, how speech develops, how the brain develops more and more, how the upright gait is achieved. The spiritual researcher shows who is actually the real worker in the whole process of human development. The spiritual does not develop out of the physical, [not out of a single germ] at birth or conception, but the spiritual researcher can observe how the spiritual emerges from the spiritual world and how it first creates the physical body. In this way, one follows the human being beyond the bounds of life, as one does in nature, as one does with plants, where one follows the germ from one year to the next; one follows the end and connects it to the beginning. One follows the germ as it develops into the plant. The spiritual researcher does not merely follow the supersensible human being in its life between birth and death, but follows it beyond the gate of death. What Goethe says, the mystical, is followed by the person who knows that what reproduces itself is the spiritual. And he sees how it becomes more and more independent and independent when the body decays. Just as the seed remains when everything else withers and then develops into a new plant, so it is with the spirit. And while more and more of our physical shell is lost with age, this spiritual part becomes stronger and stronger, and in such a way that it has become rich through all its experiences, and is now able to do what it could not do at the beginning of life. At the beginning of life, it has built a [certain] body. During life, one experiences that one can no longer use this in death. But in the inner soul, there are the seeds for building a new life. And by passing through the gateway of death, we can see how the forces for building a new life have grown stronger. And so, through spiritual research, we can see how man is ready to build a new body by gathering strength between birth and death to build a new body for himself. The spiritual researcher applies exactly the same methods that are used to observe nature externally; only he applies them in such a way that the person who wants to apply them must develop the organs for supersensible vision. Then what he explains becomes comprehensible to those who cannot yet see into the spiritual world, comprehensible from everything that is in harmony with the phenomena of external life. Thus it becomes comprehensible that this teaching of the return of man, of the creative soul that lives in him and is not limited by birth and death, may at first seem fantastic. Then, from today, man reaches a certain point in his view of the world, to that point that is like the dawn in which Giordano Bruno stood. How did he stand there - Giordano Bruno - when he made his knowledge independent of science? If today natural science must rely on that which is based on the external, then one need only say: Even before Copernicus, before Kepler, before Galileo, people directed their minds out into space and found the law of the world just as it took place outside their external senses; and he - Giordano Bruno - replaces the external law with his inner vision. They stopped at the sensory view, those who observed the spreading of the wide celestial spheres and saw the blue vault of heaven as resting on a disk. What did Giordano Bruno say against this view? He said: What you see as the blue vault of heaven is only through the limitation of your eye. From every point, the eye looks into an infinite world! He said that on the basis of Copernicus. And Copernicus had not prepared a system based on sensory experience, but what Copernicus gave in his system, he had through thinking, through the inner power of the human soul. Thus the soul must not rely on what science presents as knowledge. And on the basis of the inner powers, Giordano Bruno was able to say: What you perceive with your senses, this outer vault of heaven, is nothing more than the boundary of your vision! The spiritual researcher says: the boundary of birth and death, and that we believe that human beings are enclosed within these boundaries, can certainly be compared with the “borders” in the sky that were assumed on the basis of sensory perception before the Copernican worldview. And just as Giordano Bruno does, spiritual science points out into the infinite vastness of the human soul. And just as the blue vault of heaven comes from the fact that the senses do not see further, so the belief that life is limited by death comes from the fact that limited vision does not see further than physical death. Many today stand with spiritual science at the same point where natural science stood three centuries ago; and the longing of the present time, of our time, pushes against these processes. Whoever follows the course of thought in recent times sees how natural science and thinking have progressed from triumph to triumph - thinking that is linked to natural science and to external perception. Anyone who follows this path will certainly be an admirer of natural science when it comes to the development of the scientific, and nowhere is the spiritual science concerned with struggling against the wonderful successes of natural science. But when this natural science comes before your soul, then something else comes before the human being in relation to human life. I do not want to theorize here; let us consider a specific case. It was in February 1901 when a star suddenly appeared in the sky, only to disappear the very next day. After appearing brightly lit, the next day it had hardly any perceptible light left. No matter how right the scientific hypothesis may be, how does the scientific mind view this star? It imagines that there is a double star, that one star will collide with the other and spray and dissolve into a nebula. A bright flare-up from the collision, then a brightening, a dimming from the spraying. And how does the scientific mind approach this strange mystery? If we think entirely in the stream of thought that has been woven through Giordano Bruno and Copernicus, then two world bodies collide. Giordano Bruno describes the view into the infinite vastness, the sun with its planets, on which beings live. Worlds collide there. Millions of creatures may perish in such a collision. All this life is founded in what is a flicker and in the spraying and is destroyed. What does science possibly tell us about what is going on up there in the external mechanical collision? There, cosmic bodies disintegrate into nebulae, and from this nebula a new solar system will form, plants will develop, later animals, human forms - until such a collision occurs again. Such knowledge is available to the thinking that is linked to science. - One should not say anything against the greatness of this thinking. How can one not admire this thinking — what has been achieved in the nineteenth century through spectral analysis, through the advances in biology. But in addition to this, which we have just placed before our souls, there is something else that can show us how powerless all thinking is, which has just formed itself on this flashing and dispersing star event. When we see a mother living with her child, we see her experiencing how the soul of the child works its way up; we see this mother connected with the first stages of maturation, the attempts at speaking and walking; we see her united with the child in love; we then see this mother at the child's deathbed, seeing the child die. We see the mother's grief and feel the question arise within us: Why was it born? And what is it about the soul that entered into the birth, that gave me such intimate joy, that has now disappeared into nothingness? There we have the question of life. And we know, my dear attendees, that we encounter such questions at every turn, questions that cannot be answered by the outer senses, but that can be seen living in a corner of the soul. And now let us look beyond what natural science can tell us about the entire world system, and we feel powerless in the face of the questions concerning the human soul. Such things cannot be dispelled by impassive staring; such things are what life repeatedly presents to our soul. When millions of living beings are dead, perish through a collision - what science can tell us about all this coming into being and passing away of beings and what they are, it does not come close to what a human heart asks when it sits at the deathbed of a loved one and wonders about the fate of life! If we observe the thinking and activity of the time, today, in relation to these things, a great change presents itself to us in comparison to the past. We need only go back to the time of Goethe to see how even the most enlightened researchers - apart from the French moralists - affirm something similar to the history of creation and say: It was simply the life of what is presented today as knowledge. What was in the Mosaic creation story then? Man is in the spiritual world, and only later is the material added. This world view gave man a picture of the world in which man was already in it, and it was such that it said to this human soul: What so wonderfully enters into life belongs to the first substance of the earth - and you yourself belong to it. And more and more, a world view is emerging in its place that only sees mechanical world events. You see a star formation disintegrate and imagine that a new world is forming, just as you imagine that a new planetary system is forming. I have often used the image of what happens when you take a certain substance, an oily substance that forms drops, cut a sheet of paper in half and push it through the large droplet as an equatorial plane, then stick a needle into the sheet of paper, start turning it, and then see how small droplets actually separate. And in this way you actually see something like a planetary system unfolding on a small scale, as it unfolds on a large scale outside. And who wouldn't believe in it? It has only one fault: when showing something, one must not forget the most important things, one must not forget that nothing would come into being if the teacher were not there and turning! So one does not fully represent it if one forgets the main factor: the driving force! So even theoretically this “world system” has a hole. But then it becomes completely inexplicable how this world soul can tie itself to what is developing, so that it may one day step out of its nothingness onto this scene. And more and more, this view has developed that only the mechanical is called upon to explain the world. From ancient times until our own, it has become more and more a kind of belief that all phenomena need only be explained mechanically. The whole of human life itself has gradually become mechanical. And so it has come about that the time has come when the soul, with its questions, stands incomprehensibly before what modern thinking is able to see, and knows of no bridge to what science says. And while the soul wonders – spiritual science has an answer! There was a time in the nineteenth century when it was seriously believed that thoughts arise from the brain, when one spoke of thoughts as brain vibrations. How could it ever come about that movements in the brain could be directly related to thoughts? Where did all this mechanical science come from in the first place? And so it came about that in more recent times, due to the necessary conditions of this time, the ability of the old times to look into the spiritual was lost. People did not recognize the essence of thoughts; they did not know how to look at a thought. And so one could believe that in the physical body, where the soul is embedded, alone the essence of man lies. But even if one disputes this soul away, it is still there, and it presents itself in the modern progress of the world. - Therefore, in the course of time, the urge had asserted itself to consult other effective beings than the mechanical ones. How did an important historian and art connoisseur, Herman Grimm, face life in his time? He knew nothing of spiritual science, but he had set himself a great task, which he shared with those who wanted to listen to him. He once explained this plan to me; everything he gave us in detail was only to be part of a larger plan. He wanted to work on a great work in which he wanted to explain that it is not mechanical forces that are at work in the whole of the existence of the world, but “creative imagination”! That which is creative imagination in man is creative power outside of him - so he said. And there was a philosopher in the nineteenth century: Jakob Frohschammer, in Munich, who sought to present this human imagination as the most essential thing. When he shows that not only the forces in which the microscopist believes today are formed in the embryo, but also suspects creative imagination as a formative force, this corresponds to the urge at that time to also find something spiritual, to turn one's gaze to the active, the creating spirit, which shows itself as going beyond arising and ceasing, in the midst of the triumphs of science. For arising and passing away is tied to the appearance of nature; while the creative spirit is that which remains. And in our time we see how serious people feel that, although one must proceed in accordance with modern science wherever natural phenomena are concerned, the soul cannot but rise up into the spiritual that lives and permeates the world. Today, one can observe an interesting phenomenon. In every train station bookstore, you can now get a strange book: This book, despite containing many inaccuracies, is an important phenomenon of the time; it is called: “On the criticism of time,” by Walter Rathenau. This book was written by a “practitioner of life” who sees this mechanization everywhere in scientific and intellectual life with the naked eye and who, especially in the first chapters of this book, presents a magnificent account of how human concepts have become mechanical, how social life has become mechanical. He presents all this with the stylus of the man of sense, of the man who looks at reality. But it is precisely such a practitioner of life, who is seized by the living essence of the soul, who shows us the urge and yearning for the spiritual in our time. There you will find, for example, meaningful passages. The soul calls out for what is spiritual:
It is looking for its soul, the time - so he thinks,
—ours—
to understand the truths.
to penetrate
So a “life practitioner” speaks of the soul's yearning and longing. Much in the book is wrong; but one thing is true: those who feel this way feel that the truth of the soul is no longer spoken of in our time. Religious founders are rejected. He feels that even an exoteric teaching is no longer accepted. But the striving of the time itself is to reconnect the soul to the spiritual. And this longing is met by what spiritual science has to offer. Spiritual research shows that man can find within himself such an unfolding of the forces slumbering in his soul that he can directly immerse himself in what surrounds us supernaturally. And then the gaze into these vastness conquers the material. We look out and feel not only the human body embedded in physical existence, but through it the soul embedded in spiritual existence. We expand our view beyond birth and death. Just as natural science has broadened our view beyond the blue vault of heaven – just as natural science says: this limit that man has set for himself must be broadened, so spiritual science says: what the mechanical science, what the mechanical worldview — which only comes from limited human knowledge itself —, expanded human knowledge will go beyond that, will go beyond this boundary, just as natural science went beyond the boundary of the blue vault of heaven. Just as spiritual science sees the urge and yearning for its soul in our time, just as “time seeks its soul”, so it will continue to develop the life of this soul, will strive for a further development of it. A world view built on fantasy cannot endure; Herman Grimm's problem could never have been solved. But we see how, in those who have retained the freshness of this yearning of the soul, the desire arises to look out into the spiritual and soul that is outside in the world. And we know that we are part of it, just as our body is part of the material. Spiritual science wants to give people what the soul desires. And if we ask: What will spiritual science have to do in the future? When all people who feel a longing in themselves for the soul's origin and destiny ask questions, we will point not to abstract concepts, but to the hungry souls, and seek to give these hungry souls what they clearly show they desire. Spiritual science does not speak of vague brotherly love, but of standing by people in such a way that it wants to give what is longed for by the human soul. Then one may hear this or that objection, ridicule and worse – one will find it understandable precisely as a spiritual researcher, will be able to understand the people who, from their point of view, cannot do otherwise today than the opponents of natural science did centuries ago: holding heresy trials. Of course, they do not build bonfires anymore, but they act according to the fashions of the time: they treat people who are striving for the truth as fantasists and seek to vilify them through ridicule and blasphemy. But that does not bother those people, because for them, the only thing that matters about the truth is that it - the truth - shows itself to the soul as justified through its own essence, and that it can indeed promote, fertilize, and elevate this life, and endure before life. That the latter can happen will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture, which will in a sense be a continuation of today's. With regard to the truth, it can be said that the one who presents the truth as has just been discussed can say to himself: Of course, all human striving has always been subject to error, and much of it will easily be able to creep into what the spiritual researcher seeks, even for him, as an error. He is well aware that error can creep in more easily than in the external world of the senses. But no matter — if only the mind is there to seek the truth, then even the smallest thing that happens in this field can be compared with the great things that have happened in the service of science. Whether people ridicule the truth or not is not important. For only two things are possible: either what is being spread is error – then it will be eradicated by the striving, truth-seeking mind, by the truth-seeking mind of man, for the truth-seeking human will not tolerate error – or if it is the truth, then no ridicule, no unjustified personal objections, nothing at all will be able to stop this truth, which has the power to triumph! In world history, it is also the case that [it sometimes happens that] things [and] beings can be proclaimed. But with regard to the truth, it may be said: No matter which way you turn your back on it, no matter where people may oppose it, and however deeply the truth may be buried in the deepest shafts, all this will be overcome! For the truth has always found a way to penetrate back into humanity and be useful and beneficial and continue its triumphal march through the development of the human spirit. |
18. The Riddles of Philosophy: The World Conception of the Greek Thinkers
Tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln Rudolf Steiner |
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The events of nature that result from the combined actions of these fundamental entities are what the senses perceive after the texture of imagery has vanished from nature. These fundamental entities are called homoiomeries. |
Before this war the individual member of Greek society had been firmly enclosed by his social connections. Commonwealth and tradition provided the measuring stick for his actions and thinking. |
[ 55 ] Plato, like Aristotle, lets his conception of the soul shed its light on his entire world conception. In both thinkers we describe the fundamental constitution of their philosophy as a whole if we succeed in determining the basic characteristics of their soul conceptions. |
18. The Riddles of Philosophy: The World Conception of the Greek Thinkers
Tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln Rudolf Steiner |
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[ 1 ] With Pherekydes of Syros, who lived in the sixth century B.C., a personality appears in the Greek intellectual-spiritual life in whom one can observe the birth of what will be called in the following presentation, “a world and life conception.” What he has to say about the problems of the world is, on the one hand, still like the mythical symbolic accounts of a time that lies before the striving for a scientific world conception; on the other hand, his imagination penetrates through the picture, through the myth, to a form of reflection that wants to pierce the problems of man's existence and of his position in the world by means of thoughts. He still imagines the earth in the picture of a winged oak around which Zeus wraps the surface land, oceans, rivers, etc., like a woven texture. He thinks of the world as permeated by spiritual beings of which Greek mythology speaks. But Pherekydes also speaks of three principles of the world: Of Chronos, of Zeus and of Chthon. [ 2 ] Throughout the history of philosophy there has been much discussion as to what is to be understood by these three principles. As the historical sources on the question of what Pherekydes meant to say in his work, Heptamychos, are contradictory, it is quite understandable that present-day opinions also do not agree. If we reflect on the traditional accounts of Pherekydes, we get the impression that we can really observe in him the beginning of philosophical thought but that this observation is difficult because his words have to be taken in a sense that is remote from the thought habits of the present time; its real meaning is yet to be determined. [ 4 ] Pherekydes arrives at his world picture in a different way from that of his predecessors. The significant fact is that he feels man to be a living soul in a way different from earlier times. For the earlier world view, the word, “soul,” did not yet have the meaning that it acquired in later conceptions of life, nor did Pherekydes have the idea of the soul in the sense of later thinkers. He simply feels the soul-element of man, whereas the later thinkers want to speak clearly about it (in the form of thought) and they attempt to characterize it in intellectual terms. Men of earlier times do not as yet separate their own soul experience from the life of nature. They do not feel that they stand as a special entity beside nature. They experience themselves in nature as they experience lightning and thunder in it, the drifting of the clouds, the course of the stars or the growth of plants. What moves man's hand on his own body, what places his foot on the ground and makes him walk, for the prehistoric man, belongs to the same sphere of world forces that also causes lightning, cloud formations and all other external events. What he at this stage feels, can be expressed by saying, “Something causes lightning, thunder, rain, moves my hand, makes my foot step, moves the air of my breath within me, turns my head.” If one expresses what is in this way experienced, one has to use words that at first hearing seem to be exaggerated. But only through these exaggerations will it be possible to understand what is intended to be conveyed. A man who holds a world picture as it is meant here, experiences in the rain that falls to the ground the action of a force that we at the present time must call “spiritual” and that he feels to be of the same kind as the force he experiences when he is about to exert a personal activity of some kind or other. It should be of interest that this view can be found again in Goethe in his younger years, naturally in a shade of thought that it must assume in a personality of the eighteenth century. We can read in Goethe's essay, Nature:
[ 5 ] To speak as Goethe speaks here is only then possible if one feels one's own being imbedded in nature as a whole and then expresses this feeling in thoughtful reflection. As Goethe thought, so man of an earlier time felt without transforming his soul experience into the element of thought. He did not as yet experience thought; instead of thought there unfolded within his soul a symbolic image. The observation of the evolution of mankind leads back to a time in which thought-like experiences had not yet come into being but in which the symbolic picture rose in the soul of man when he contemplated the events of the world. Thought life is born in man at a definite time. It causes the extinction of the previous form of consciousness in which the world is experienced in pictures. [ 6 ] For the thought habits of our time it seems acceptable to imagine that man in archaic times had observed natural elements—wind and weather, the growth of seeds, the course of the stars—and then poetically invented spiritual beings as the active creators of these events. It is, however, far from the contemporary mode of thinking to recognize the possibility that man in older times experienced those pictures as he later experienced thought, that is, as an inner reality of his soul life. [ 7 ] One will gradually come to recognize that in the course of the evolution of mankind a transformation of the human organization has taken place. There was a time when the subtle organs of human nature, which make possible the development of an independent thought life, had not yet been formed. In this time man had, instead, organs, that represented for him what he experienced in the world of pictures. [ 8 ] As this gradually comes to be understood, a new light will fall on the significance of mythology on the one hand, and that of poetic production and thought life on the other. When the independent inner thought experience began, it brought the picture-consciousness to extinction. Thought emerged as the tool of truth. This is only one branch of what survived of the old picture-consciousness that had found its expression in the ancient myth. In another branch the extinguished picture-consciousness continued to live, if only as a pale shadow of its former existence, in the creations of fantasy and poetic imagination. Poetic fantasy and the intellectual view of the world are the two children of the one mother, the old picture-consciousness that must not be confused with the consciousness of poetic imagination. [ 9 ] The essential process that is to be understood is the transformation of the more delicate organization of man. It causes the beginning of thought life. In art and poetry thought as such naturally does not have an effect. Here the picture continues to exert its influence, but it has now a different relation to the human soul from the one it had when it also served in a cognitive function. As thought itself, the new form of consciousness appears only in the newly emerging philosophy. The other branches of human life are correspondingly transformed in a different way when thought begins to rule in the field of human knowledge. [ 10 ] The progress in human evolution that is characterized by this process is connected with the fact that man from the beginning of thought experience had to feel himself in a much more pronounced way than before, as a separated entity, as a “soul.” In myth the picture was experienced in such a way that one felt it to be in the external world as a reality. One experienced this reality at the same time, and one was united with it. With thought, as well as with the poetic picture, man felt himself separated from nature. Engaged in thought experience, man felt himself as an entity that could not experience nature with the same intimacy as he felt when at one with thought. More and more, the definite feeling of the contrast of nature and soul came into being. [ 11 ] In the civilizations of the different peoples this transition from the old picture-consciousness to the consciousness of thought experience took place at different times. In Greece we can intimately observe this transition if we focus our attention on the personality of Pherekydes of Syros. He lived in a world in which picture-consciousness and thought experience still had an equal share. His three principal ideas—Zeus, Chronos and Chthon—can only be understood in such a way that the soul, in experiencing them, feels itself as belonging to the events of the external world. We are dealing here with three inwardly experienced pictures and we find access to them only when we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by anything that the thought habits of our time are likely to imagine as their meaning. [ 12 ] Chronos is not time as we think of it today. Chronos is a being that in contemporary language can be called “spiritual” if one keeps in mind that one does not thereby exhaust its meaning. Chronos is alive and its activity is the devouring, the consumption of the life of another being, Chthon. Chronos rules in nature; Chronos rules in man; in nature and man Chronos consumes Chthon. It is of no importance whether one considers the consumption of Chthon through Chronos as inwardly experienced or as external events, for in both realms the same process goes on. Zeus is connected with these two beings. In the meaning of Pherekydes one must no more think of Zeus as a deity in the sense of our present day conception of mythology, than as of mere “space” in its present sense, although he is the being through whom the events that go on between Chronos and Chthon are transformed into spatial, extended form. [ 13 ] The cooperation of Chronos, Chthon and Zeus is felt directly as a picture content in the sense of Pherekydes, just as much as one is aware of the idea that one is eating, but it is also experienced as something in the external world, like the conception of the colors blue or red. This experience can be imagined in the following way. We turn our attention to fire as it consumes its fuel. Chronos lives in the activity of fire, of warmth. Whoever regards fire in its activity and keeps himself under the effect, not of independent thought but of image content, looks at Chronos. In the activity of fire, not in the sensually perceived fire, he experiences time simultaneously. Another conception of time does not exist before the birth of thought. What is called “time” in our present age is an idea that has been developed only in the age of intellectual world conception. If we turn our attention to water, not as it is as water but as it changes into air or vapor, or to clouds that are in the process of dissolving, we experience as an image content the force of Zeus, the spatially active “spreader.” One could also say, the force of centrifugal extension. If we look on water as it becomes solid, or on the solid as it changes into fluid, we are watching Chthon. Chthon is something that later in the age of thought-ruled world conception becomes “matter,” the stuff “things are made of”; Zeus has become “ether” or “space,” Chronos changes into “time.” [ 14 ] In the view of Pherekydes the world is constituted through the cooperation of these three principles. Through the combination of their action the material world of sense perception—fire, air, water and earth—come into being on the one hand, and on the other, a certain number of invisible supersensible spirit beings who animate the four material worlds. Zeus, Chronos and Chthon could be referred to as “spirit, soul and matter,” but their significance is only approximated by these terms. It is only through the fusion of these three original beings that the more material realms of the world of fire, air, water and earth, and the more soul-like and spirit-like (supersensible) beings come into existence. Using expressions of later world conceptions, one can call Zeus, space-ether; Chronos, time-creator; Chthon, matter-producer—the three “mothers of the world's origin.” We can still catch a glimpse of them in Goethe's Faust, in the scene of the second part where Faust sets out on his journey to the “mothers.” [ 15 ] As these three primordial entities appear in Pherekydes, they remind us of conceptions of predecessors of this personality, the so-called Orphics. They represent a mode of conception that still lives completely in the old form of picture consciousness. In them we also find three original beings: Zeus, Chronos and Chaos. Compared to these “primeval mothers,” those of Pherekydes are somewhat less picture-like. This is so because Pherekydes attempts to seize, through the exertion of thought, what his Orphic predecessors still held completely as image-experience. For this reason we can say that he appears as a personality in whom the “birth of thought life” takes place. This is expressed not so much in the more thought-like conception of the Orphic ideas of Pherekydes, as in a certain dominating mood of his soul, which we later find again in several of his philosophizing successors in Greece. For Pherekydes feels that he is forced to see the origin of things in the “good” (Arizon). He could not combine this concept with the “world of mythological deities” of ancient times. The beings of this world had soul qualities that were not in agreement with this concept. Into his three “original causes” Pherekydes could only think the concept of the “good,” the perfect. [ 16 ] Connected with this circumstance is the fact that the birth of thought life brought with it a shattering of the foundations of the inner feelings of the soul. This inner experience should not be overlooked in a consideration of the time when the intellectual world conception began. One could not have felt this beginning as progress if one had not believed that with thought one took possession of something that was more perfect than the old form of image experience. Of course, at this stage of thought development, this feeling was not clearly expressed. But what one now, in retrospect, can clearly state with regard to the ancient Greek thinkers was then merely felt. They felt that the pictures that were experienced by our immediate ancestors did not lead to the highest, most perfect, original causes. In these pictures only the less perfect causes were revealed; we must raise our thoughts to still higher causes from which the content of those pictures is merely derived. [ 17 ] Through progress into thought life, the world was now conceived as divided into a more natural and a more spiritual sphere. In this more spiritual sphere, which was only now felt as such, one had to conceive what was formerly experienced in the form of pictures. To this was added the conception of a higher principle, something thought of as superior to the older, spiritual world and to nature. It was to this sublime element that thought wanted to penetrate, and it is in this region that Pherekydes meant to find his three “Primordial Mothers.” A look at the world as it appears illustrates what kind of conceptions took hold of a personality like Pherekydes. Man finds a harmony in his surroundings that lies at the bottom of all phenomena and is manifested in the motions of the stars, in the course of the seasons with their blessings of thriving plant-life, etc. In this beneficial course of things, harmful, destructive powers intervene, as expressed in the pernicious effects of the weather, earthquakes, etc. In observing all this one can be lead to a realization of a dualism in the ruling powers, but the human soul must assume an underlying unity. It naturally feels that, in the last analysis, the ravaging hail, the destructive earthquake, must spring from the same source as the beneficial cycle of the seasons. In this fashion man looks through good and evil and sees behind it an original good. The same good force rules in the earthquake as in the blessed rain of spring. In the scorching, devastating heat of the sun the same element is at work that ripens the seed. The “good Mothers of all origin” are, then, in the pernicious events also. When man experiences this feeling, a powerful world riddle emerges before his soul. To find the solution, Pherekydes turns toward his Ophioneus. As Pherekydes leans on the old picture conception, Ophioneus appears to him as a kind of “world serpent.” It is in reality a spirit being, which, like all other beings of the world, belongs to the children of Chronos, Zeus and Chthon, but that has later so changed that its effects are directed against those of the “good mother of origin.” Thus, the world is divided into three parts. The first part consists of the “Mothers,” which are presented as good, as perfect; the second part contains the beneficial world events; the third part, the destructive or the only imperfect world processes that, as Ophioneus, are intertwined in the beneficial effects. [ 18 ] For Pherekydes, Ophioneus is not merely a symbolic idea for the detrimental destructive world forces. Pherekydes stands with his conceptive imagination at the borderline between picture and thought. He does not think that there are devastating powers that he conceives in the pictures of Ophioneus, nor does such a thought process develop in him as an activity of fantasy. Rather, he looks on the detrimental forces, and immediately Ophioneus stands before his soul as the red color stands before our souls when we look at a rose. [ 19 ] Whoever sees the world only as it presents itself to image perception does not, at first, distinguish in his thought between the events of the “good mothers” and those of Ophioneus. At the borderline of a thought-formed world conception, the necessity of this distinction is felt, for only at this stage of progress does the soul feel itself to be a separate, independent entity. It feels the necessity to ask what its origin is. It must find its origin in the depths of the world where Chronos, Zeus and Chthon had not as yet found their antagonists. But the soul also feels that it cannot know anything of its own origin at first, because it sees itself in the midst of a world in which the “Mothers” work in conjunction with Ophioneus. It feels itself in a world in which the perfect and the imperfect are joined together. Ophioneus is twisted into the soul's own being. [ 20 ] We can feel what went on in the souls of individual personalities of the sixth century B.C. if we allow the feelings described here to make a sufficient impression on us. With the ancient mythical deities such souls felt themselves woven into the imperfect world. The deities belonged to the same imperfect world as they did themselves. The spiritual brotherhood, which was founded by Pythagoras of Samos between the years 549 and 500 B.C. in Kroton in Magna Graecia, grew out of such a mood. Pythagoras intended to lead his followers back to the experience of the “Primordial Mothers” in which the origin of their souls was to be seen. It can be said in this respect that he and his disciples meant to serve “other gods” than those of the people. With this fact something was given that must appear as a break between spirits like Pythagoras and the people, who were satisfied with their gods. Pythagoras considered these gods as belonging to the realm of the imperfect. In this difference we also find the reason for the “secret” that is often referred to in connection with Pythagoras and that was not to be betrayed to the uninitiated. It consisted in the fact that Pythagoras had to attribute to the human soul an origin different from that of the gods of the popular religion. In the last analysis, the numerous attacks that Pythagoras experienced must be traced to this “secret.” How was he to explain to others than those who carefully prepared themselves for such a knowledge that, in a certain sense, they, “as souls,” could consider themselves as standing even higher than the gods of the popular religion? In what other form than in a brotherhood with a strictly regulated mode of life could the souls become aware of their lofty origin and still find themselves deeply bound up with imperfection? It was just through this feeling of deficiency that the effort was to be made to arrange life in such a way that through the process of self-perfection it would be led back to its origin. That legends and myths were likely to be formed about such aspirations of Pythagoras is comprehensible. It is also understandable that scarcely anything has come down to us historically about the true significance of this personality. Whoever observes the legends and mythical traditions of antiquity about Pythagoras in an all-encompassing picture will nevertheless recognize in it the characterization that was just given. [ 21 ] In the picture of Pythagoras, present-day thinking also feels the idea of the so-called “transmigration of souls” as a disturbing factor. It is even felt to be naive that Pythagoras is reported to have said that he knew that he had already been on earth in an earlier time as another human being. It may be recalled that that great representative of modern enlightenment, Lessing, in his Education of the Human Race, renewed this idea of man's repeated lives on earth out of a mode of thinking that was entirely different from that of Pythagoras. Lessing could conceive of the progress of the human race only in such a way that the human souls participated repeatedly in the life of the successive great phases of history. A soul brought into its life in a later time as a potential ability what it had gained from experience in an earlier era. Lessing found it natural that the soul had often been on earth in an earthly body, and that it would often return in the future. In this way, it struggles from life to life toward the perfection that it finds possible to obtain. He pointed out that the idea of repeated lives on earth ought not to be considered incredible because it existed in ancient times, and “because it occurred to the human mind before academic sophistry had distracted and weakened it.” [ 22 ] The idea of reincarnation is present in Pythagoras, but it would be erroneous to believe that he—along with Pherekydes, who is mentioned as his teacher in antiquity—had yielded to this idea because he had by means of a logical conclusion arrived at the thought that the path of development indicated above could only be reached in repeated earthly lives. To attribute such an intellectual mode of thinking to Pythagoras would be to misjudge him. We are told of his extensive journeys. We hear that he met together with wise men who had preserved traditions of oldest human insight. When we observe the oldest human conceptions that have come down to us through posterity, we arrive at the view that the idea of repeated lives on earth was widespread in remote antiquity. Pythagoras took up the thread from the oldest teachings of humanity. The mythical teachings in picture form appeared to him as deteriorated conceptions that had their origin in older and superior insights. These picture doctrines were to change in his time into a thought-formed world conception, but this intellectual world conception appeared to him as only a part of the soul's life. This part had to be developed to greater depths. It could then lead the soul to its origins. By penetrating in this direction, however, the soul discovers in its inner experience the repeated lives on earth as a soul perception. It does not reach its origins unless it finds its way through the repeated terrestrial lives. As a wanderer walking to a distant place naturally passes through other places on his path, so the soul on its path to the “mothers” passes the preceding lives through which it has gone during its descent from its former existence in perfection, to its present life in imperfection. If one considers everything that is pertinent in this problem, the inference is inescapable that the view of repeated earth lives is to be attributed to Pythagoras in this sense as his inner perception, not as something that was arrived at through a process of conceptual conclusion. Now the view that is spoken of as especially characteristic of the followers of Pythagoras is that all things are based on numbers. When this statement is made, one must consider that the school of Pythagoras was continued into later times after his death. Philolaus, Archytas and others are mentioned as later Pythagoreans. It was about them especially that one in antiquity knew they “considered things as numbers.” We can assume that this view goes back to Pythagoras even if historical documentation does not appear possible. We shall, however, have to suppose that this view was deeply and organically rooted in his whole mode of conception, and that it took on a more superficial form with his successors. Let us think of Pythagoras as standing before the beginning of intellectual world conception. He saw how thought took its origin in the soul that had, starting from the “mothers,” descended through its successive lives to its state of imperfection; Because he felt this he could not mean to ascend to the origins through mere thought. He had to seek the highest knowledge in a sphere in which thought was not yet at home. There he found a life of the soul that was beyond thought life. As the soul experiences proportional numbers in the sound of music, so Pythagoras developed a soul life in which he knew himself as living in a connection with the world that can be intellectually expressed in terms of numbers. But for what is thus experienced, these numbers have no other significance than the physicist's proportional tone numbers have for the experience of music. For Pythagoras the mythical gods must be replaced by thought. At the same time, he develops an appropriate deepening of the soul life; the soul, which through thought has separated itself from the world, finds itself at one with the world again. It experiences itself as not separated from the world. This does not take place in a region in which the world-participating experience turns into a mythical picture, but in a region in which the soul reverberates with the invisible, sensually imperceptible cosmic harmonies. It brings into awareness, not its own thought intentions, but what cosmic powers exert as their will, thus allowing it to become conception in the soul of man. [ 23 ] In Pherekydes and Pythagoras the process of how thought-experienced world conception originates in the human soul is revealed. Working themselves free from the older forms of conception, these men arrive at an inwardly independent conception of the “soul” distinct from external “nature.” What is clearly apparent in these two personalities—the process in which the soul wrests its way out of the old picture conceptions—takes place more in the undercurrents of the souls of the other thinkers with whom it is customary to begin the account of the development of Greek philosophy. The thinkers who are ordinarily mentioned first are Thales of Miletos (640–550 B.C.), Anaximander (born 610 B.C.), Anaximenes (flourished 600 B.C.) and Heraclitus (born 500 B.C. at Ephesus). [ 24 ] Whoever acknowledges the preceding arguments to be justified will also find a presentation of these men admissible that must differ from the usual historical accounts of philosophy. Such accounts are, after all, always based on the unexpressed presupposition that these men had arrived at their traditionally reported statements through an imperfect observation of nature. Thus the statement is made that the fundamental and original being of all things was to be found in “water,” according to Thales; in the “infinite,” according to Anaximander; in “air,” according to Anaximenes; in “fire,” in the opinion of Heraclitus. [ 25 ] What is not considered in this treatment is the fact that these men are still really living in the process of the genesis of intellectual world conception. To be sure, they feel the independence of the human soul in a higher degree than Pherekydes, but they have not yet completed the strict separation of the life of the soul from the process of nature. One will, for instance, most certainly construct an erroneous picture of Thales's way of thinking if it is imagined that he, as a merchant, mathematician and astronomer, thought about natural events and then, in an imperfect yet similar way to that of a modern scientist, had summed up his results in the sentence, “Everything originates from water.” To be a mathematician or an astronomer, etc., in those ancient times meant to deal in a practical way with the things of these professions, much in the way a craftsman makes use of technical skills rather than intellectual and scientific knowledge. [ 26 ] What must be presumed for a man like Thales is that he still experienced the external processes of nature as similar to inner soul processes. What presented itself to him like a natural event, as did the process and nature of “water” (the fluid, mudlike, earth-formative element), he experienced in a way that was similar to what he felt within himself in soul and body. He then experienced in himself and outside in nature the effect of water, although to a lesser degree than man of earlier times did. Both effects were for him the manifestation of one power. It may be pointed out that at a still later age the external effects in nature were thought of as being akin to the inner processes in a way that did not provide for a “soul” in the present sense as distinct from the body. Even in the time of intellectual world conception, the idea of the temperaments still preserves this point of view as a reminiscence of earlier times. One called the melancholic temperament, the earthy; the phlegmatic, the watery; the sanguinic, the airy; the choleric, the fiery. These are not merely allegorical expressions. One did not feel a completely separated soul element, but experienced in oneself a soul-body entity as a unity. In this unity was felt the stream of forces that go, for instance, through a phlegmatic soul, to be like the forces in external nature that are experienced in the effects of water. One saw these external water effects to be the same as what the soul experienced in a phlegmatic mood. The thought habits of today must attempt an empathy with the old modes of conception if they want to penetrate into the soul life of earlier times. [ 27 ] In this way one will find in the world conception of Thales an expression of what his soul life, which was akin to the phlegmatic temperament, caused him to experience inwardly. He experienced in himself what appeared to him to be the world mystery of water. The allusion to the phlegmatic temperament of a person is likely to be associated with a derogatory meaning of the term. Justified as this may be in many cases, it is nevertheless also true that the phlegmatic temperament, when it is combined with an energetic, objective imagination, makes a sage out of a man because of its calmness, collectedness and freedom from passion. Such a disposition in Thales probably caused him to be celebrated by the Greeks as one of their wise men. [ 28 ] For Anaximenes, the world picture formed itself in another way. He experienced in himself the sanguine temperament. A word of his has been handed down to us that immediately shows how he felt the air element as an expression of the world mystery. “As our soul, which is a breath, holds us together, so air and breath envelop the universe.” [ 29 ] The world conception of Heraclitus will, in an unbiased contemplation, be felt directly as a manifestation of his choleric inner life. A member of one of the most noble families of Ephesus, he became a violent antagonist of the democratic party because he had arrived at certain views, the truth of which was apparent to him in his immediate inner experience. The views of those around him, compared with his own, seemed to him to prove directly in a most natural way, the foolishness of his environment. Thus, he got into such conflicts that he left his native city and led a solitary life at the Temple of Artemis. Consider these few of his sayings that have come down to us. “It would be good if the Ephesians hanged themselves as soon as they grew up and surrendered their city to those under age.” Or the one about men, “Fools in their lack of understanding, even if they hear the truth, are like the deaf: of them does the saying bear witness that they are absent when present.” The feeling that is expressed in such a choleric temperament finds itself akin to the consuming activity of fire. It does not live in the restful calm of “being.” It feels itself as one with eternal “becoming.” Such a soul feels stationary existence to be an absurdity. “Everything flows,” is, therefore, a famous saying of Heraclitus. It is only apparently so if somewhere an unchanging being seems to be given. We are lending expression to a feeling of Heraclitus if we say, “The rock seems to represent an absolute unchanging state of being, but this is only appearance; it is inwardly in the wildest commotion; all its parts act upon one another.” The mode of thinking of Heraclitus is usually characterized by his saying, “One cannot twice enter the same stream, for the second time the water is not the same.” A disciple of Heraclitus, Cratylus, goes still further by saying that one could not even enter the same stream once. Thus it is with all things. While we look at what is apparently unchanging, it has already turned into something else in the general stream of existence. [ 30 ] We do not consider a world conception in its full significance if we accept only its thought content. Its essential element lies in the mood it communicates to the soul, that is, in the vital force that grows out of it. One must realize how Heraclitus feels himself with his own soul in the stream of becoming. The world soul pulsates in his own human soul and communicates to it of its own life as long as the human soul knows itself as living in it. Out of such a feeling of union with the world soul, the thought originates in Heraclitus, “Whatever lives has death in itself through the stream of becoming that is running through everything, but death again has life in itself. Life and death are in our living and dying. Everything has everything else in itself; only thus can eternal becoming flow through everything.” “The ocean is the purest and impurest water, drinkable and wholesome to fishes, to men undrinkable and pernicious.” “Life and death are the same, waking and sleeping, young and old; the first changes into the second and again into the first.” “Good and evil are one.” “The straight path and the crooked . . . are one.” [ 31 ] Anaximander is freer from the inner life, more surrendered to the element of thought itself. He sees the origin of things in a kind of world ether, an indefinite formless basic entity that has no limits. Take the Zeus of Pherekydes, deprive him of every image content that he still possesses and you have the original principle of Anaximander: Zeus turned into thought. A personality appears in Anaximander in whom thought life is borne out of the mood of soul that still has, in the preceding thinkers, the color of temperament. Such a personality feels united as a soul with the life of thought, and thereby is not so intimately interwoven with nature as the soul that does not yet experience thought as an independent element. It feels itself connected with a world order that lies above the events of nature. When Anaximander says that men lived first as fishes in the moist element and then developed through land animal forms, he means that the spirit germ, which man recognizes through thinking as his true being, has gone through the other forms only as through preliminary stages, with the aim of giving itself eventually the shape that has been appropriate for him from the beginning. [ 32 ] The thinkers mentioned so far are succeeded historically by Xenophanes of Kolophon (born 570 B.C.); Parmenides (460 B.C., living as a teacher in Athens), younger and inwardly related to Xenophanes; Zenon of Elea (who reached his peak around 500 B.C.); Melissos of Samos (about 450 B.C.). [ 33 ] The thought element is already alive to such a degree in these thinkers that they demand a world conception in which the life of thought is fully satisfied; they recognize truth only in this form. How must the world ground be constituted so that it can be fully absorbed within thinking? This is their question. Xenophanes finds that the popular gods cannot stand the test of thought; therefore, he rejects them. His god must be capable of being thought. What the senses perceive is changeable, is burdened with qualities not appropriate to thought, whose function it is to seek what is permanent. Therefore, God is the unchangeable, eternal unity of all things to be seized in thought. Parmenides sees the Untrue, the Deceiving, in sense-perceived, external nature. He sees what alone is true in the Unity, the Imperishable that is seized by thought. Zeno tries to come to terms with, and do justice to, the thought experience by pointing out the contradictions that result from a world view that sees truth in the change of things, in the process of becoming, in the multiplicity that is shown by the external world. One of the contradictions pointed out by Zeno is that the fastest runner (Achilles) could not catch up with a turtle, for no matter how slowly it moved, the moment Achilles arrived at the point it had just occupied, it would have moved on a little. Through such contradictions Zeno intimates how a conceptual imagination that leans on the external world is caught in self-contradiction. He points to the difficulty such thought meets when it attempts to find the truth. One will recognize the significance of this world conception, which is called the “eleatic view” (Parmenides and Zeno are from Elea), if one considers that those who hold this view have advanced with the development of thought experience to the point of having transformed it into a special art, the so-called dialectic. In the “art of thought” the soul learns to feel itself in its self-dependence and its inward self-sufficiency. With this step, the reality of the soul is felt to be what it is through its own being. It experiences itself through the fact that it no longer, as in earlier times, follows the general world experience with its life, but unfolds independent thought experience within itself. This experience is rooted in itself and through it, it can feel itself planted into a pure spiritual ground of the world. At first, this feeling is not expressed as a distinctly formulated thought but, in the esteem it enjoyed, it can be sensed vividly as a feeling in this age. According to a Dialogue of Plato, the young Socrates is told by Parmenides that he should learn the “art of thought” from Zeno; otherwise, truth would be unattainable for him. This “art of thought” was felt to be a necessity for the human soul intending to approach the spiritual fundamental grounds of existence. [ 34 ] Whoever does not see how, in the progress of human development toward the stage of thought experience, real experiences—the picture experiences—came to an end with the beginning of this thought life, will not see the special quality of the Greek thinkers from the sixth to the fourth pre-Christian centuries in the light in which they must appear in this presentation. Thought formed a wall around the human soul, so to speak. The soul had formerly felt as if it were within the phenomena of nature. What it experienced in these natural phenomena, like the activities of its own body, presents itself to the soul in the form of images that appeared in vivid reality. Through the power of thought this entire panorama was now extinguished. Where previously images saturated in content prevailed, thought now expanded through the external world. The soul could experience itself in the surroundings of space and time only if it united itself with thought. One senses such a mood of soul in Anaxagoras of Clazomenae in Asia Minor (born 500 B.C.). He found himself deeply bound up in his soul with thought life. His thought life encompassed what is extended in space and time. Expanded like this, it appears as the nous, the world reason. It penetrates the whole of nature as an entity. Nature, however, presents itself as composed only of little basic entities. The events of nature that result from the combined actions of these fundamental entities are what the senses perceive after the texture of imagery has vanished from nature. These fundamental entities are called homoiomeries. The soul experiences in thought the connection with the world reason (the nous) inside its wall. Through the windows of the senses it watches what the world reason causes to come into being through the action of the homoiomeries on each other. [ 35 ] Empedocles (born 490 B.C. in Agrigent) was a personality in whose soul the old and the new modes of conception clash as in a violent antagonism. He still feels something of the old mode of being in which the soul was more closely interwoven with external existence. Hatred and love, antipathy and sympathy live in the human soul. They also live outside the wall that encloses it. The life of the soul is thus homogeneously extended beyond its boundaries and it appears in forces that separate and connect the elements of external nature—air, fire, water and earth—thereby causing what the senses perceive in the outer world. [ 36 ] Empedocles is, as it were, confronted with nature, which appears to the senses to be deprived of life and soul, and he develops a soul mood that revolts against this extirpation of nature's animation. His soul cannot believe that nature really is what thought wants to make of it. Least of all can it admit that it should stand in such a relation to nature as it appears according to the intellectual world conception. We must imagine what goes on in a soul that senses such a discord in all its harshness, suffering from it. We shall then be capable of entering into the experience of how, in this soul of Empedocles, the old mode of conception is resurrected as the power of intimate feeling but is unwilling to raise this fact into full consciousness. It thus seeks a form of existence in a shade of experience hovering between thought and picture that is reechoed in the sayings of Empedocles. These lose their strangeness if they are understood in this way. The following aphorism is attributed to him. “Farewell. A mortal no longer, but an immortal god I wander about . . . and as soon as I come into the flourishing cities I am worshipped by men and women. They follow me by the thousands, seeking the path of their salvation with me, some expecting prophecies, others, curative charms for many diseases.” In such a way, a soul that is haunted by an old form of consciousness through which it feels its own existence as that of a banished god who is cast out of another form of existence into the soul-deprived world of the senses, is dazed. He therefore feels the earth to be an “unaccustomed place” into which he is cast as in punishment. There are certainly other sentiments also to be found in the soul of Empedocles because significant flashes of wisdom shine in his aphorisms. His feeling with respect to the “birth of the intellectual world conception” is characterized, however, by the thought mood mentioned above. [ 37 ] The thinkers who are called the atomists regarded what nature had become for the soul of man through the birth of thought in a different way. The most important among them is Democritus (born 460 B.C. in Abdera). Leucippus is a kind of forerunner to him. [ 38 ] With Democritus, the homoiomeries of Anaxagoras have become, to a considerable degree, more material. In Anaxagoras, one can still compare the entities of the basic parts with living germs. With Democritus, they become dead indivisible particles of matter, which in their different combinations make up the things of the outer world. They mix freely as they move to and fro; thus, the events of nature come to pass. The world reason (nous) of Anaxagoras, which has the world processes grow out of the combined action of the homoiomeries like a spiritual (incorporeal) consciousness, with Democritus, turns into the unconscious law of nature (ananke). The soul is ready to recognize only what it can grasp as the result of simple thought combinations. Nature is now completely deprived of life and soul; thought has paled as a soul experience into the inner shadow of inanimate nature. In this way, with Democritus, the intellectual prototype of all more or less materialistically colored world conceptions of later times has made its appearance. [ 39 ] The atom world of Democritus represents an external world, a nature in which no trace of soul life can be found. The thought experiences in the soul, through which the soul has become aware of itself, are mere shadow experiences in Democritus. Thus, a part of the fate of thought experiences is characterized. They bring the human soul to the consciousness of its own being, but they fill it at the same time with uncertainty about itself. The soul experiences itself in itself through thought, but it can at the same time feel that it lost its anchorage in the independent spiritual world power that used to lend it security and inner stability. This emancipation of the soul was felt by the group of men in Greek intellectual life known as “Sophists.” The most important among them is Protagoras of Abdera (480–410 B.C.). Also to be noted besides him are Gorgias, Critias, Hippias, Thrasymachus and Prodicus. The sophists are often presented as men who superficially played with their thinking. Much has been contributed to this opinion by the manner in which Aristophanes, the playwright of comedies, treated them, but there are many things that can lead to a better appreciation of the sophists. It is noteworthy that even Socrates, who to a certain limited extent thought of himself as a pupil of Prodicus, is said to have described him as a man who had done much for the refinement of the speech and thinking of his disciples. [ 40 ] Protagoras's view is expressed in the famous statement, “Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are; of those that are not, that they are not.” In the sentiment underlying this statement the thought experience feels itself sovereign. It does not sense any connection with an objective world power. If Parmenides is of the opinion that the senses supply man with a world of deception, one could go further and add, “Why should not thinking, although one experiences it, also deceive?” Protagoras, however, would reply to this, “Why should it be man's concern if the world outside him is not as he perceives and thinks it? Does he imagine it for anyone else but himself? No matter how it may be for another being, this should be of no concern to man. The contents of his mind are only to serve him; with their aid he is to find his way through the world. Once he achieves complete clarity about himself, he cannot wish for any thought contents about the world except those that serve him.” Protagoras means to be able to build on thinking. For this purpose he intends to have it rest exclusively on its own sovereign power. With this step, however, Protagoras places himself in contradiction to the spirit that lives in the depths of Greek life. This spirit is distinctly perceptible in the Greek character. It manifests itself in the inscription, “Know Thyself,” at the temple of Delphi. This ancient oracle wisdom speaks as if it contained the challenge for the progress of world conceptions that advances from the conception in images to the form of consciousness in which the secrets of the world are seized through thought. Through this challenge man is directed to his own soul. He is told that he can hear the language in his soul through which the world expresses its essence. He is thereby also directed toward something that produces uncertainties and insecurities for itself in its experience. The leading spirits of Greek civilization were to conquer the dangers of this self-supporting soul life. Thus, they were to develop thought in the soul into a world conception. In the course of this development the sophists navigated in dangerous straits. In them the Greek spirit places itself at an abyss; it means to produce the strength of equilibrium through its own power. One should, as has been pointed out, consider the gravity and boldness of this attempt, rather than lightly condemn it even though condemnation is certainly justified for many of the sophists. This attempt of the sophists takes place at a natural turning point of Greek life. Protagoras lived from 480 to 410 B.C. The Peloponnesian War, which occurred at this turning point of Greek civilization, lasted from 431 to 404 B.C. Before this war the individual member of Greek society had been firmly enclosed by his social connections. Commonwealth and tradition provided the measuring stick for his actions and thinking. The individual person had value and significance only as a member of the total structure. Under such circumstances the question, “What is the value of the individual human being?” could not be asked. The sophists, however, do ask this question, and in so doing introduce the era of Greek Enlightenment. Fundamentally, it is the question of how man arranges his life after he has become aware of his awakened thought life. [ 41 ] From Pherekydes (or Thales) to the sophists, one can observe how emaciated thought in Greece, which had already been born before these men, gradually finds its place in the stream of philosophical development. The effect thought has when it is placed in the service of world conception becomes apparent in them. The birth of thought, however, is to be observed in the entire Greek life. One could show much the same kind of development in the fields of art, poetry, public life, the various crafts and trades, and one would see everywhere how human activity changes under the influence of the form of human organization that introduces thought into the world conception. It is not correct to say that philosophy “discovers” thought. It comes into existence through the fact that the newly born thought life is used for the construction of a world picture that formerly had been formed out of experiences of a different kind. [ 42 ] While the sophists led the spirit of Greece, expressed in the motto, “Know Thyself,” to the edge of a dangerous cliff, Socrates, who was born in Athens about 470 and was condemned to death through poison in 399 B.C., expressed this spirit with a high degree of perfection. [ 43 ] Historically, the picture of Socrates has come down to us through two channels of tradition. In one, we have the figure that his great disciple, Plato (427–347 B.C.), has drawn of him. Plato presents his philosophy in dialogue form, and Socrates appears in these dialogues as a teacher. He is shown as the “sage” who leads the persons around him through intellectual guidance to high stages of insight. A second picture has been drawn by Xenophon in his Memorabilia of Socrates. At first sight it seems as if Plato had idealized the character of Socrates and as if Xenophon had portrayed him more directly as he had been. But a more intimate inspection would likely show that both Plato and Xenophon each drew a picture of Socrates as they saw him from a special point of view. One is justified, therefore, in considering the question as to how these pictures supplement and illuminate each other. [ 44 ] The first thing that must appear significant here is that Socrates' philosophy has come down to posterity entirely as an expression of his personality, of the fundamental character of his soul life. Both Plato and Xenophon present Socrates in such a way that in him his personal opinion speaks everywhere. This personality carries in itself the awareness that, whoever expresses his personal opinion out of the true ground of the soul, expresses something that is more than just human opinion, something that is a manifestation of the purposes of the world order through human thinking. By those who think they know him, Socrates is taken as the living proof for the conviction that truth is revealed in the human soul through thinking if, as was the case with Socrates, this soul is grounded in its own substance. Looking on Socrates, Plato does not teach a doctrine that is asserted by contemplative thought, but the thought has a rightly developed human being speak, who then observes what he produces as truth. Thus, the manner in which Plato behaves toward Socrates becomes an expression for what man is in his relation to the world. What Plato has advanced about Socrates is significant and also the way in which he, in his activity as a writer, has placed Socrates in the world of Greek spiritual life. [ 45 ] With the birth of thought man was directed toward his “soul.” The question now arises as to what this soul says when it begins to speak, expressing what the world forces have laid into it. Through the attitude Plato takes with respect to Socrates, the resulting answer is that in the human soul the reason of the world speaks what it intends to reveal to man. The foundation is laid with this step for the confidence expressed in the revelations of the human soul insofar as it develops thought in itself. The figure of Socrates appears in the sign of this confidence. [ 46 ] In ancient times the Greek consulted the oracles in the most important questions of life. He asked for prophecy, the revelation of the will and the opinion of the spiritual powers. Such an arrangement is in accord with the soul experience in images. Through the image man feels himself bound to the powers holding sway over the world. The oracle, then, is the institution by means of which somebody who is especially gifted in that direction finds his way to the spiritual powers better than other people. As long as one did not experience one's soul as separated from the outer world, the feeling was natural that this external world was able to express more through a special institution than through everyday experience. The picture spoke from without. Why should the outer world not be capable of speaking distinctly at a special place? Thought speaks to the inner soul. With thought, therefore, the soul is left to its own resources; it cannot feel united with another soul as with the revelations of a priestly oracle. To thought, one had to lend one's own soul. One felt of thought that it was a common possession of all men. [ 47 ] World reason shines into thought life without especially established institutions. Socrates felt that the force lives in the thinking soul that used to be sought in the oracles. He experienced the “daimonion” in himself, the spiritual force that leads the soul. Thought has brought the soul to the consciousness of itself. With his conception of the daimonion speaking in him that, always leading him, told him what to do, Socrates meant to say, “The soul that has found its way to the thought life is justified to feel as if it communicated in itself with the world reason. It is an expression of the high valuation of what the soul possesses in its thought experience.” [ 48 ] “Virtue,” under the influence of this view, is placed in a special light. Because Socrates values thought, he must presuppose that true virtue in human life reveals itself in the life of thought. True virtue must be found in thought life because it is from thought life that man derives his value. “Virtue is teachable.” In this way is Socrates' conception most frequently expressed. It is teachable because whoever really seizes thought life must be in its possession. What Xenophon says about Socrates is significant in this respect. Socrates teaches a disciple about virtue and the following dialogue develops.
Socrates attempts to make clear to the disciple that what matters is to have the right thoughts about virtue. So also what Socrates says about virtue aims at the establishment of confidence in a soul that knows itself through thought experience. The right thoughts about virtue are to be trusted more than all other motivations. Virtue makes man more valuable when he experiences it in thought. [ 49 ] Thus, what the pre-Socratic age strove for becomes manifest in Socrates, that is, the appreciation of what humanity has been given through the awakened thought life. Socrates' method of teaching is under the influence of this conception. He approaches man with the presupposition that thought in life is in him; it only needs to be awakened. It is for this reason that he arranges his questions in such a way that the questioned person is stimulated to awaken his own thought life. This is the substance of the Socratic method. [ 50 ] Plato, who was born in Athens in 427 B.C., felt, as a disciple of Socrates, that his master had helped him to consolidate his confidence in the life of thought. What the entire previous development tended to bring into appearance reaches a climax in Plato. This is the conception that in thought life the world spirit reveals itself. The awareness of this conception sheds, to begin with, its light over all of Plato's soul life. Nothing that man knows through the senses or otherwise has any value as long as the soul has not exposed it to the light of thought. Philosophy becomes for Plato the science of ideas as the world of true being, and the idea is the manifestation of the world spirit through the revelation of thought. The light of the world spirit shines into the soul of man and reveals itself there in the form of ideas; the human soul, in seizing the idea, unites itself with the force of the world spirit. The world that is spread in space and time is like the mass of the ocean water in which the stars are reflected, but what is real is only reflected as idea. Thus, for Plato, the whole world changes into ideas that act upon each other. Their effect in the world is produced through the fact that the ideas are reflected in hyle, the original matter. What we see as the many individual things and events comes to pass through this reflection. We need not extend knowledge to hyle, the original matter, however, for in it is no truth. We reach truth only if we strip the world picture of everything that is not idea. [ 51 ] For Plato, the human soul is living in the idea, but this life is so constituted that the soul is not a manifestation of its life in the ideas in all its utterances. Insofar as it is submerged in the life of ideas, it appears as the "rational soul” (thought-bearing soul), and as such, the soul appears to itself when it becomes aware of itself in thought perception. It must also manifest itself in such a way that it appears as the "non-rational soul” (not-thought-bearing soul), As such, it again appears in a twofold way as courage-developing, and as appetitive soul. Thus, Plato seems to distinguish three members or parts in the human soul: The rational soul, the courage-like (or will-exertive) soul and the appetitive soul. We shall, however, describe the spirit of his conceptional approach better if we express it in a different way. According to its nature, the soul is a member of the world of ideas, but it acts in such a way that it adds an activity to its life in reason through its courage life and its appetitive life. In this threefold mode of utterance it appears as earthbound soul. It descends as a rational soul through physical birth into a terrestrial existence, and with death again enters the world of ideas. Insofar as it is rational soul, it is immortal, for as such it shares with its life the eternal existence of the world of ideas. [ 52 ] Plato's doctrine of the soul emerges as a significant fact in the age of thought perception. The awakened thought directed man's attention toward the soul. A perception of the soul develops in Plato that is entirely the result of thought perception. Thought in Plato has become bold enough not only to point toward the soul but to express what the soul is, as it were, to describe it. What thought has to say about the soul gives it the force to know itself in the eternal. Indeed, thought in the soul even sheds light on the nature of the temporal by expanding its own being beyond this temporal existence. The soul perceives thought. As the soul appears in its terrestrial life, it could not produce in itself the pure form of thought. Where does the thought experience come from if it cannot be developed in the life on earth? It represents a reminiscence of a pre-terrestrial, purely spiritual state of being. Thought has seized the soul in such a way that it is not satisfied by the soul's terrestrial form of existence. It has been revealed to the soul in an earlier state of being (preexistence) in the spirit world (world of ideas) and the soul recalls it during its terrestrial existence through the reminiscence of the life it has spent in the spirit. [ 53 ] What Plato has to say about the moral life follows from this soul conception. The soul is moral if it so arranges life that it exerts itself to the largest possible measure as rational soul. Wisdom is the virtue that stems from the rational soul; it ennobles human life. Fortitude is the virtue of the will-exertive soul; Temperance is that of the appetitive soul. These virtues come to pass when the rational soul becomes the ruler over the other manifestations of the soul. When all three virtues harmoniously act together, there emerges what Plato calls, Justice, the direction toward the Good, Dikaiosyne. [ 54 ] Plato's disciple, Aristotle (born 384 B.C. in Stageira, Thracia, died 321 B.C.), together with his teacher, represents a climax in Greek thinking. With him the process of the absorption of thought life into the world conception has been completed and come to rest. Thought takes its rightful possession of its function to comprehend, out of its own resources, the being and events of the world. Plato still uses his conceptual imagination to bring thought to its rightful authority and to lead it into the world of ideas. With Aristotle, this authority has become a matter of course. It is now a question of confirming it everywhere in the various fields of knowledge. Aristotle understands how to use thought as a tool that penetrates into the essence of things. For Plato, it had been the task to overcome the thing or being of the external world. When it has been overcome, the soul carries in itself the idea of which the external being had only been overshadowed, but which had been foreign to it, hovering over it in a spiritual world of truth. Aristotle intends to submerge into the beings and events, and what the soul finds in this submersion, it accepts as the essence of the thing itself. The soul feels as if it had only lifted this essence out of the thing and as if it had brought this essence for its own consumption into the thought form in order to be able to carry it in itself as a reminder of the thing. To Aristotle's mind, the ideas are in the things and events. They are the side of the things through which these things have a foundation of their own in the underlying material, matter (hyle). [ 55 ] Plato, like Aristotle, lets his conception of the soul shed its light on his entire world conception. In both thinkers we describe the fundamental constitution of their philosophy as a whole if we succeed in determining the basic characteristics of their soul conceptions. To be sure, for both of them many detailed studies would have to be considered that cannot be attempted in this sketch. But the direction their mode of conception took is, for both, indicated in their soul conceptions. [ 56 ] Plato is concerned with what lives in the soul and, as such, shares in the spirit world. What is important for Aristotle is the question of how the soul presents itself for man in his own knowledge. As it does with other things, the soul must also submerge into itself in order to find what constitutes its own essence. The idea, which, according to Aristotle, man finds in a thing outside his soul, is the essence of the thing, but the soul has brought this essence into the form of an idea in order to have it for itself. The idea does not have its reality in the cognitive soul but in the external thing in connection with its material (hyle). If the soul submerges into itself, however, it finds the idea as such in reality. The soul in this sense is idea, but active idea, an entity exerting action, and it behaves also in the life of man as such an active entity. In the process of germination of man it lays hold upon material existence. While idea and matter constitute an inseparable unity in an external thing, this is not the case with the human soul and its body. Here the independent human soul seizes upon the corporeal part, renders the idea ineffective that has been active in the body before and inserts itself in its place. In Aristotle's view, a soul-like principle is active already in the bodily element with which the human soul unites itself, for he sees also in the bodies of the plants and of animals, soul-like entities of a subordinate kind at work. A body that carries in itself the soul elements of the plant and animal is, as it were, fructified by the human soul. Thus, for the terrestrial man, a body-soul entity is linked up with a spirit-soul entity. The spirit-soul entity suppresses the independent activity of the body-soul element during the earth life of man and uses the body-soul entity as an instrument. Five soul manifestations come into being through this process. These, in Aristotle, appear as five members of the soul: The plant-like soul (threptikon), the sentient soul (aisthetikon), the desire-developing soul (orektikon), the will-exerting soul (kinetikon) and the spirit-soul (dianoetikon). Man is spiritual soul through what belongs to the spiritual world and what, in the process of germination, links itself up with the body-soul entity. The other members of the soul come into being as the spiritual soul unfolds itself in the body and thereby leads its earth life. With Aristotle's focus on a spiritual soul the perspective toward a spiritual world in general is naturally given. The world picture of Aristotle stands before our contemplative eye in such a way that we see below the life of things and events, thus presenting matter and idea; the higher we lift our eye, the more we see vanish whatever bears a material character. Pure spiritual essence appears, representing itself to man as idea, that is, the sphere of the world in which deity as pure spirituality that moves everything has its being. The spiritual soul of man belongs to this world sphere; before it is united with a body-soul entity, it does not exist as an individual being but only as a part of the world spirit. Through this connection it acquires its individual existence separated from the world spirit and continues to live after the separation from the body as a spiritual being. Thus, the individual soul entity has its beginning with the human earthly life and then lives on as immortal. A preexistence of the soul before earth life is assumed by Plato but not by Aristotle. The denial of the soul's preexistence is as natural to Aristotle, who has the idea exist in the thing, as the opposite view is natural to Plato, who conceives of the idea as hovering over the thing. Aristotle finds the idea in the thing, and the soul acquires in its body what it is to be in the spirit world as an individuality. [ 57 ] Aristotle is the thinker who has brought thought to the point where it unfolds to a world conception through its contact with the essence of the world. The age before Aristotle led to the experience of thought; Aristotle seizes the thoughts and applies them to whatever he finds in the world. The natural way, peculiar to Aristotle, in which he lives in thought as a matter of course, leads him also to investigate logic, the laws of thought itself. Such a science could only come into being after the awakened thought had reached a stage of great maturity and of such a harmonious relationship to the things of the outer world as we find it in Aristotle. [ 58 ] Compared with Aristotle, the other thinkers of antiquity who appear as his contemporaries or as his successors seem to be of much less significance. They give the impression that their abilities lack a certain energy that prevents them from attaining the stage of insight Aristotle had reached. One gets the feeling that they disagree with him because they are stating opinions about things they do not understand as well as he. One is inclined to explain their views by pointing to the deficiency that led them to utter opinions that have already been disproved essentially in Aristotle's work. [ 59 ] To begin with, one can receive such an impression from the Stoics and the Epicureans. Zeno of Kition (342–270 B.C.), Kleanthes (born 200 B.C.), Chrysippus (282– 209 B.C.), and others belong to the Stoics, whose name was derived from the Hall of Columns in Athens, the Stoa. They accept what appears reasonable to them in earlier world conceptions, but they are mainly concerned with finding out what man's position is in the world by contemplation of it. They want to base on this, their decision as to how to arrange life in such a way that it is in agreement with the world order, and also in such a way that man can unfold his life in this world order according to his own nature. According to them, man dulls his natural being through desire, passion and covetousness. Through equanimity and freedom from desire, he feels best what he is meant to be and what he can be. The ideal man is the “sage” who does not hamper the process of the inner development of the human being by any vice. [ 60 ] As the thinkers before Aristotle were striving to obtain the knowledge that, after him, becomes accessible to man through the ability to perceive thoughts in the full consciousness of his soul, with the Stoics, reflection concentrates on the question as to what man is to do in order to express his nature as a human being in the best way. [ 61 ] Epicurus (born 324 B.C., died 270 B.C.) developed in his own way the elements that had already been latent in the earlier atomistic thinkers. He builds a view of life on this foundation that can be considered to be an answer to the question: As the human soul emerges as the blossom of world processes, how is it to live in order to shape its separate existence, its self-dependence in accordance with thinking guided by reason? Epicurus could answer this question only by a method that considered life only between birth and death, for nothing else can, with perfect intellectual honesty, be derived from the atomistic world conception. The fact of pain must appear to such a conception as a peculiar enigma of life. For pain is one of those facts that drive the soul out of the consciousness of its unity with the things of the world. One can consider the motion of the stars and the fall of rain to be like the motion of one's own hand, as was done in the world conception of more remote antiquity. That is to say, one can feel in both kinds of events the same uniform spirit-soul reality. The fact that events can produce pain in man but cannot do so in the external world, however, drives the soul to the recognition of its own special nature. A doctrine of virtues, which, like the one of Epicurus, endeavors to live in harmony with world reason, can, as may easily be conceived, appreciate an ideal of life that leads to the avoidance of pain and displeasure. Thus, everything that does away with displeasure becomes the highest Epicurean life value. [ 62 ] This view of life found numerous followers in later antiquity, especially among Roman gentlemen of cultural aspiration. The Roman poet, T. Lucretius Carus (95–52 B.C.), has expressed it in perfect artistic form in his poem, De Rerum Natura. [ 63 ] The process of perceiving thoughts leads the soul to the recognition of its own being, but it can also occur that the soul feels powerless to deepen its thought experience sufficiently to find a connection with the grounds of the world through this experience. The soul then finds itself torn loose from these grounds through its own thinking. It feels that thinking contains its own being, but it does not find a way to recognize in its thought life anything but its own statement. The soul can then only surrender to a complete renunciation of any kind of true knowledge. Pyrrho (360–270 B.C.) and his followers, whose philosophical belief is called scepticism, were in such a situation. Scepticism, the philosophy of doubt, attributes no other power to the thought experience than the formation of human opinions about the world. Whether or not these opinions have any significance for the world outside man is a question about which it is unwilling to make a decision. [A true skeptic is agnostic on a subject. Doubt denotes an opinion for which a burden of proof is needed. Skepticism should be neutral – e.Ed] [ 64 ] In a certain sense, one can see a well-rounded picture in the series of Greek thinkers. One will have to admit, of course, that such an attempt to connect the views of the individual thinkers only too easily brings out irrelevant aspects of secondary significance. What remains most important is still the contemplation of the individual personalities and the impressions one can gain concerning the fact of how, in these personalities, the general human element is brought to manifestation in special cases. One can observe a process in this line of Greek thinkers that can be called the birth, growth and life of thought: in the pre-Socratic thinkers, the prelude; in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the culmination; after them, a decline and a kind of dissolution of thought life. [ 65 ] Whoever contemplates this development can arrive at the question as to whether thought life really has the power to give everything to the soul toward which it has led it by bringing it to the complete consciousness of itself. For the unbiased observer, Greek thought life has an element that makes it appear “perfect” in the best sense of the word. It is as if the energy of thought in the Greek thinkers had worked out everything that it contains in itself. Whoever judges differently will notice on closer inspection that somewhere in his judgment an error is involved. Later world conceptions have produced accomplishments through other forces of the soul. Of the later thoughts as such, it can always be shown that with respect to their real thought content they can already be found in some earlier Greek thinker. What can be thought and how one can doubt about thinking and knowledge, all enters the field of consciousness in Greek civilization, and in the manifestation of thought the soul takes possession of its own being. [ 66 ] Has Greek thought life, however, shown the soul that it has the power to supply it with everything that it has stimulated in it? The philosophical current called Neo-Platonism, which in a way forms an aftermath of Greek thought life, was confronted with this question. Plotinus (205–270 A.D.) was its chief representative. Philo, who lived at the beginning of the Christian era in Alexandria, could be considered a forerunner of this movement. He does not base his effort to construct a world conception on the creative energy of thought. Rather, he applies thought in order to understand the revelation of the Old Testament. He interprets what is told in this document as fact in an intellectual, allegorical manner. For him, the accounts of the Old Testament turn into symbols for soul events to which he attempts to gain access intellectually. Plotinus does not regard thought experience as something that embraces the soul in its full life. Behind thought life another life of the soul must lie, a soul life that would be concealed rather than revealed by the action of thought. The soul must overcome the life in thought, must extinguish it in itself and only after this extinction can it arrive at a form of experience that unites it with the origin of the world. Thought leads the soul to itself; now it must seize something in itself that will again lead it out of the realm into which thought has brought it. What Plotinus strives for is an illumination that begins in the soul after it has left the realm to which it has been carried by thought. In this way he expects to rise up to a world being that does not enter into thought life. World reason, therefore, toward which Plato and Aristotle strive, is not, according to Plotinus, the last reality at which the soul arrives. It is rather the outgrowth of a still higher reality that lies beyond all thinking. From this reality beyond all thought, which cannot be compared with anything that could be a possible object of thought, all world processes emanate. Thought, as it could manifest itself in Greek spiritual life, has, as it were, gone through a complete revolution and thereby all possible relationships of man to thought seem to be exhausted. Plotinus looks for sources other than those given in thought revelation. He leaves the continuing evolution of thought life and enters the realm of mysticism. It is not intended to give a description of the development of mysticism here, but only the development of thought life and what has its origin in this process is to be outlined. There are, however, at various points in the spiritual development of mankind connections between intellectual world conceptions and mysticism. We find such a point of contact in Plotinus. His soul life is not ruled only by thinking. He has a mystical experience that presents an inner awareness without the presence of thoughts in his soul. In this experience he finds his soul united with the world foundation. His way of presenting the connection of the world with its ground, however, is to be expressed in thoughts. The reality beyond thought is the most perfect; what proceeds from it is less perfect. In this way, the process continues down into the visible world, the most imperfect. Man finds himself in this world of imperfection. Through the act of perfecting his soul, he is to cast off what the world in which he finds himself can give him, and is thus to find a path of development through which he becomes a being that is of one accord with the perfect origin. [ 67 ] We see a personality in Plotinus who feels the impossibility to continue Greek thought life. He cannot find anything that would grow as a further branch of world conception out of thought itself. If one looks for the sense in which the evolution of philosophy proceeds, one is justified in saying that the formation of picture conception has turned into that of thought conceptions. In a similar way, the production of thought conception must change again into something else, but the evolution of the world conception is not ready for this in the age of Plotinus. He therefore abandons thought and searches outside thought experience. Greek thoughts, however, fructified by his mystical experiences, develop into the evolutionary ideas that present the world process as a sequence of stages proceeding in a descending order, from a highest most perfect being to imperfect beings. In the thinking of Plotinus, Greek thoughts continue to have their effect. They do not develop as an organic growth of the original forces, however, but are taken over into the mystical consciousness. They do not undergo a transformation through their own energies but through nonintellectual forces. Ammonius Sakkas (175–242), Porphyrius (232–304), Iamblichus (who lived in the fourth century A.D.), Proclus (410–485), and others are followers and expounders of this philosophy. In a way similar to that of Plotinus and his successors, Greek thinking in its more Platonic shade continued under the influence of a nonintellectual element. Greek thought in its Pythagorean nuance is treated by Nigidius Figulus, Apollonius of Tyana, Moderatus of Gades, and others.
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182. The Dead are with Us
10 Feb 1918, Nuremberg Tr. Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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In what I have now told you, you have as it were the fundamental form of the soul's communion with other souls during the period between death and a new birth. |
Control and discipline are necessary for this kind of intercourse with the spiritual world, for it is connected with a very significant law. The very same thing that we recognise in men on Earth as lower impulses is, from the other, the spiritual side, higher life; and it may therefore easily happen when the human being has not attained true control of himself, that he experiences the rising of lower impulses through direct intercourse with the dead. |
For we should not seek for the dead through externalities but should become conscious that they are always present. All historical life, all social life, all ethical life, proceed by virtue of co-operation of the so-called living with the so-called dead. |
182. The Dead are with Us
10 Feb 1918, Nuremberg Tr. Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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Our studies in Spiritual Science contain much that we cannot, perhaps, put to direct application in everyday life, and we may sometimes be inclined to feel it all rather remote from everyday life. But this is only seemingly the case. What we receive into the sphere of our knowledge concerning the secrets of the spiritual world is at every hour, at every moment, of vital and profound significance for our souls; what seems to be remote from us personally is often what the soul inwardly needs, In order to know the physical world we must make ourselves acquainted with it. But to know the spiritual world it is essential that we ourselves think through and make mental pictures of the thoughts and conceptions imparted to us by that world. These thoughts then often work quite unconsciously within the soul. That upon which the soul is working may seem to be quite remote, while in reality it is very near indeed to the higher domains of the life of soul. And so we will study again to-day the life that takes its course between death and a new birth—that life that seems so far removed from the human being in the physical world. I will begin with a simple narration of what is found by spiritual investigation. These things can be understood if they are thought over and pondered time and again; through their own power they make themselves comprehensible to the soul. Anyone who does not understand them should realise that he has not thought them through often enough. Such matters must be investigated by means of Spiritual Science, but they can be understood if the soul will ponder them time and again. They will then be confirmed by the facts which meet us in life; if only life is properly studied, they will be substantiated by the facts of life. You will realise from many of the Lecture Courses that have been given that consideration of the life between death and a new birth is fraught with difficulty, because its conditions are so entirely different from those of the life that can be pictured with the help of the organs of the physical body here within the physical world. We have to become acquainted with completely different conceptions. When we enter into relationship with the things in our physical environment we know that only a small proportion of the beings around us in the physical world react to our actions, our manifestations of will, in such a way that pleasure or pain is caused by these actions of ours to beings in our environment. Reaction of-this kind takes place in the case of the animal kingdom and the human kingdom; but we are justified in our conviction that the mineral world (including what is in air and water) and also, in essentials, the world of plants are insensitive to what we call pleasure or pain when actions are performed by us. (Spiritually considered, of course, the matter is a little different, but that need not concern us at this point.) In the environment of the dead all this is changed. In the environment of the so-called dead conditions are such that everything—including what is done by the dead themselves—arouses either pleasure or pain in the whole environment.—The dead can do no single thing, he cannot, if I may speak pictorially, move a single one of his limbs without pleasure or pain being caused by what he does. We must try to think our way into these conditions of existence.—We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment. During the whole period between death and a new birth we can do nothing, we cannot even move, pictorially speaking, without awakening pleasure or pain in our environment. The mineral kingdom as we have it around us on the physical plane does not exist for the dead, neither does our plant world. As you can gather from the book Theosophy these kingdoms are present in quite a different form. They are not present in the spiritual world in the form in which we know them here, namely, as realms devoid of feeling. The first kingdom of those we know on the physical plane, which has significance for the dead because it can be compared with what the dead has in his environment, is the animal kingdom. I do not of course mean the individual animals that are here on the physical plane, but the whole environment is such that its effect and influence are as if animals were there. The reaction of the environment is such that pleasure or pain proceeds from what is done. On the physical plane we stand upon mineral soil; the dead stands upon a ‘soil’, lives in an environment which may be compared with the animal nature in this sense. The dead, therefore, starts his life two kingdoms higher. On the Earth we get to know the animal kingdom only from the outside. The most external activity of the life between death and a new birth consists in acquiring a more and more intimate and exact knowledge of the animal world. For in this life between death and a new birth we must prepare all those forces which, working in from the Cosmos, organise our own body. In the physical world we know nothing of these forces. Between death and a new birth we know that our body, down to its smallest particles, is formed out of the Cosmos. For we ourselves prepare this physical body, bringing together in it the whole scope of animal nature; we ourselves build it up. In order to make the picture more exact, we must acquaint ourselves with a concept, an idea, that is rather remote from present-day mentality. Modern man knows quite well that when a magnetic needle lies with one end pointing towards the North and the other towards the South, this is not caused by the needle itself, but that the Earth as a whole is a cosmic magnet of which one end points towards the North and the other towards the South. It would be considered pure nonsense to assert that the direction is brought about merely by forces contained in the magnetic needle. In the case of a seed or germ which develops in an animal or in a human being, all science and all schools of thought deny the factor of cosmic influence. What would be described as nonsense in the case of the magnetic needle is accepted without further thought in the case of an egg forming within the hen. But when the egg is forming within the hen the whole Cosmos is, in fact, participating; what happens on Earth is merely the stimulus to the play of cosmic forces. Everything that takes shape in the egg is an imprint of cosmic forces and the hen herself is only a place, an abode, in which the Cosmos, the whole World-System, is developing this work. And it is the same in the case of the human being. This is a thought with which we must become familiar. Between death and a new birth, in company with Beings of the higher Hierarchies, the human being is working at this whole system of forces which permeates the Cosmos. For between death and a new birth he is not without employment; he works perpetually. He works in the Spiritual. The animal kingdom is the first realm with which he makes acquaintance—and in the following way. If he makes some mistake, he immediately becomes aware of pain, of suffering, in the environment; if he does something right, he becomes aware of pleasure, of joy, in the environment. He works on and on, calling forth pleasure or pain, until, finally, the soul-nature is such that it can descend and come together with what will live on Earth as a physical body, The being of soul could never descend if it had not itself worked at the physical form. It is the animal kingdom, then, with which acquaintance is first made. The next is the human kingdom. Mineral Nature and the plant kingdom are absent. The dead's acquaintance with the human kingdom is limited—if we may use a familiar phrase. Between death and a new birth—and this begins immediately or soon after death—the dead has contact and can make links only with those human souls, whether still-living on Earth or in yonder world, with whom he has already had karmic connection on Earth, in the last or in an earlier incarnation. Other souls pass him by; they do not come within his ken. He becomes aware of the animal realm as a totality; only those human souls come within his ken with whom he has had karmic connection here on Earth; with these he grows more and more closely acquainted. You must not imagine that their number is small, for individual human beings have already passed through many Earth lives. In every Earth life a whole host of karmic connections has been made and of these is spun the web which then, in the spiritual world, extends over all the souls whom the dead has known in life; only those with whom acquaintance has never been made remain outside the circle. This indicates a truth which should be emphasised, namely, the supreme importance of the Earth life for the individual human being. If there had been no Earth life we should be unable to form links with human souls in the spiritual world. The links are made karmically on Earth and then continue between death and a new birth. Those who are able to see into that world perceive how the dead gradually makes more and more links—all of which are the outcome of karmic connections formed on Earth, Just as concerning the first kingdom with which the dead comes into contact—the animal kingdom—we can say that everything the dead does, even when he simply moves, causes either pleasure or pain in his environment, so we can say concerning everything experienced in the human realm in yonder world that the dead is in much more intimate connection with human beings in the domain of soul-life. When the dead becomes acquainted with a soul, he gets to know this soul as if he himself were within it, After death knowledge of another soul is as intimate as knowledge here on Earth of our own finger, head or ear—we feel ourselves within the other soul. The connection is much more intimate than it can ever be on Earth. There are two basic experiences in the community among human souls between death and a new birth: we are either within the other souls, or outside them. Even in the case of souls with whom we are already acquainted, we are now within, and then again outside them. Meeting with them consists in feeling at one with them, being within them. To be outside them means that we do not notice them. If we look at some object here on Earth, we perceive it; if we look away from it, we no longer perceive it. In yonder world we are actually within human souls when we are able to turn our attention to them; and we are outside them when we are not in a position to do so. In what I have now told you, you have as it were the fundamental form of the soul's communion with other souls during the period between death and a new birth. Similarly, the human being is also within or outside the Beings of the other Hierarchies, the Angels, Archangels and so on. The higher the kingdom, the more intensely does a man feel bound to them after death; he feels as though they were bearing him, sustaining him with great power. The Archangels bear him more mightily than the Angels, the Archai again more mightily than the Archangels, and so on. People to-day still find difficulty in acquiring knowledge of the spiritual world. The difficulties would more or less solve themselves if men would take a little more trouble to grow acquainted with the secrets of the spiritual world. There are here two methods of approach. One way of becoming acquainted with the spiritual world leads to complete certainty of the Eternal in one's own being. This knowledge, that in human nature there is an eternal core of being which passes through births and deaths—this knowledge, remote as it is to modern humanity, is relatively easy to attain; and it will be attained by those who have enough perseverance, along the path described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in other writings. It is attained by treading the path there described. That is one form of knowledge of the spiritual world. The other is what may be called concrete, direct intercourse with beings of the spiritual world, and we will now speak of the intercourse that is possible between those who are still on Earth and the so-called dead. Such intercourse is most certainly possible but it presents greater difficulties than the first form of knowledge, which is easy to attain. Actual intercourse with an individual who has died is possible but difficult, because it demands scrupulous care on the part of the one who seeks it. Control and discipline are necessary for this kind of intercourse with the spiritual world, for it is connected with a very significant law. The very same thing that we recognise in men on Earth as lower impulses is, from the other, the spiritual side, higher life; and it may therefore easily happen when the human being has not attained true control of himself, that he experiences the rising of lower impulses through direct intercourse with the dead. When we make contact with the spiritual world in the general sense, when we acquire knowledge about our own immortality as beings of soul and spirit, there can be no question of the ingress of anything impure. But when it is a matter of contact with individuals who have died, the relation of the individual dead—strange as it seems—is always a relation with the blood and nervous system. The dead enters into those impulses which live themselves out in the system of blood and nerves, and in this way lower impulses may be aroused. Naturally, there can only be danger for those who have not purified their natures through discipline and control. This must be said, for it is the reason why it is forbidden in the Old Testament to have intercourse with the dead. Such intercourse is not sinful when it happens in the right way. The methods of modern spiritualism must, of course, be avoided. When the intercourse is of a spiritual nature it is not sinful, but when it is not accompanied by pure thoughts it can easily lead to the stimulation of lower passions. It is not the dead who arouse these passions but the element in which the dead live. For consider: what we here feel as ‘animal’ in quality and nature is the basic element in which the dead live. The kingdom in which the dead live can easily be changed when it enters into us; what is higher life in yonder world can become lower when it is within us on Earth. It is very important to remember this, and it must be emphasised when we are speaking of intercourse between the living and the so-called dead, for it is an occult fact. We shall find that precisely when we are speaking about this intercourse the spiritual world can be described as it really is; for such experiences reveal the complete difference of the spiritual world from the physical world. First of all, I will tell you something that may seem to have no meaning for man so long as he has not developed his clairvoyant faculties; but when we think it over, we shall realise that it concerns us closely, leading on as it does to matters in actual life. Those who are able to have intercourse with the dead as the result of developed clairvoyance, realise why it is so difficult for human beings to know anything about the dead through direct perception. Strange and grotesque as it may seem, the whole form of intercourse to which we are accustomed in the physical world has to be reversed when intercourse is set up between the Earth and the dead. In the physical world, when we speak with a human being from physical body to physical body, we ourselves are speaking, When we speak, we know that the words come from us; when the other man speaks to us, we know that the words come from him. The whole relationship is reversed when we are speaking with a dead man. The expression ‘when we are speaking’ can truthfully be used, but the relationship is reversed. When we put a question to the dead, or say something to him, what we say comes from him, comes to us from him. He inspires into our soul what we ask him, what we say to him. And when he answers us or says something to us, this comes out of our own soul. It is a process with which a human being in the physical world is quite unfamiliar. He feels that what he says comes out of his own being. In order to establish intercourse with the dead, we must adapt ourselves to hear from them what we ourselves say, and to receive from our own soul what they answer. Thus abstractly described, the nature of the process is easy to grasp; but really to become accustomed to the total reversal of the familiar form of intercourse is exceedingly difficult. The dead are always there, always among us and around us, and the fact that they are not perceived is largely due to lack of understanding of this reversed form of intercourse. On the physical plane we think that when anything comes out of our own soul, it comes from us. And we are far from being able to pay intimate enough attention to whether it is not, after all, being inspired into us from the spiritual environment. We prefer to connect it with experiences familiar on the physical plane, where, if something comes to us from the environment, we ascribe it at once to the other person. This is the greatest error when it is a matter of intercourse with the dead. I have here been telling you of one of the fundamental characteristics of intercourse between the so-called living and the so-called dead. If this example helps you to realise one thing only, namely, that conditions are completely reversed in the spiritual world, that there one has as it were to turn right round, then you will have taken hold of a significant concept that is constantly needed by those who wish to enter the spiritual world. The concept is extremely difficult to apply in the actual, individual case. For instance, in order to understand even the physical world, which is permeated through and through with the spiritual, it is essential to grasp this idea of complete reversal. And because modern science fails to grasp it and it is altogether unknown to popular consciousness, therefore there is today no spiritual understanding of the physical world. One experiences this even with people who try very hard indeed to comprehend the world, and one is often obliged simply to accept the situation and leave it so. Some years ago I spoke to a large number of our friends at a General Meeting in Berlin about the physical organism of man, with special reference to certain of Goethe's ideas. I tried to explain how the head, in its physical form, can only be understood aright when it is conceived as a complete transformation of the other part of the organism. No one was able to understand at all that a bone in the arm would have to be turned inside out like a glove, in order that a head-bone might be produced from it. It is a difficult concept but one cannot really understand anatomy without such pictures. I mention this in parenthesis only. What I have said to-day about intercourse with the dead is easier to understand. The happenings I have described to you are going on all the time. All of you sitting here now are in constant intercourse with the dead, only ordinary consciousness knows nothing of it because it proceeds in the sub-consciousness. Clairvoyant consciousness does not charm anything new into being; it merely brings up into consciousness what is present all the time in the spiritual world. All of you are in constant intercourse with the dead. And now we will consider how intercourse with the dead takes place in individual cases. When someone has died and we are left behind, we may ask: How do I approach the dead so that he experiences me in himself? How does the dead come near me again so that I can live in him? These questions may well be asked but they cannot be answered if we have recourse to concepts familiar to us on the physical plane. On the physical plane ordinary consciousness functions only from the time of waking until the time of falling asleep; but the other part of consciousness which remains dim in ordinary life between falling asleep and awaking is just as important. In the real sense, the human being is not unconscious when he is asleep; his consciousness is merely so dim that he experiences nothing of it. It is a dim consciousness. But the whole man—in waking and sleeping life—must be held in mind when we are studying the connections of the human being with the spiritual world. Think of your own biography. You consider the course of your life always with interruptions; you describe only what has happened in your waking life. Life is thus broken: waking-sleeping; waking-sleeping. But you are also there while you sleep; and in studying the whole human being, waking life and sleeping life must be taken into consideration. A third thing must also be considered in connection with man's intercourse with the spiritual world. For besides waking life and sleeping life there is a third state, even more important for intercourse with the spiritual world than waking and sleeping life as such. I mean the actual act of waking and the actual act of going to sleep, which last only a moment, for we immediately pass on into other conditions. If we develop delicate, sensitive feelings for these moments of waking and going to sleep, we shall find they shed great light on the spiritual world. In remote country places—such customs are gradually disappearing, but in the time when we who are older were still young—people were wont to say: When you wake up it is not good immediately to go to the window through which light is pouring; you should remain a little while in the dark. Country folk used to have some knowledge about intercourse with the spiritual world, and they preferred in this moment of waking not immediately to come into the bright daylight but to remain inwardly collected in order to preserve something of what sweeps with such power through the human soul at the moment of waking. The sudden brightness of daylight is disturbing. In the cities, of course, this is hardly to be avoided; there we are disturbed not only by the daylight but also even before waking by the noise of the streets, the clanging of tramcar bells and so forth. The whole of civilised life seems to conspire to hinder man's intercourse with the spiritual world. This is not said in order to decry material civilisation, but the fact must be borne in mind. Again at the moment of falling asleep the spiritual world approaches us with power; but we immediately fall asleep, losing consciousness of what has passed through the soul. Exceptions can, however, occur. These moments of waking and of falling asleep are of the utmost significance for intercourse, for example, with the so-called dead—and with other spiritual Beings of the higher world. In order however to understand what I have to say on this matter you must familiarise yourselves with an idea which it is not easy to apply on the physical plane and which is therefore practically unknown. The idea is this. In the spiritual sense, what is ‘past’ has not really passed away but is still there. In physical life men have this conception in regard to Space only. If you stand in front of a tree, then go away and look back at it later on, the tree has not disappeared; it is still there. In the spiritual world it is so in regard to Time. If you experience something at one moment, it has passed away the next so far as physical consciousness is concerned; spiritually conceived, it has not passed away. You can look back at it just as you looked back at the tree. Richard Wagner showed that he had knowledge of this, in the remarkable words: “ Time here becomes Space ”. It is an occult fact that in the spiritual world there are distances which do not come to expression on the physical plane. That an event is past means simply that it is farther away from us. I want you to bear this in mind. For man on Earth in the physical body, the moment of falling asleep is ‘past’ when the moment of waking arrives. In the spiritual world, however, the moment of falling asleep has not gone; we are only, at the moment of waking, a little farther distant from it. We confront our dead at the moment of falling asleep, and again at the moment of waking. (As I have said, this happens continually, only it usually remains in the sub-consciousness.) So far as physical consciousness is concerned, these are two quite different moments; for spiritual consciousness the one is only a little farther distant than the other. I want you to remember this in connection with what I am now going to say; otherwise you may find it difficult to understand. As I told you, the moments of waking and falling asleep are of particular importance for intercourse with the dead. In our whole life there are no single moments of falling asleep or of waking when we do not come into relation with the dead. The moment of falling asleep is especially favourable for us to turn to the dead. Suppose we want to ask the dead something. We can carry it in our soul, holding it until the moment of falling asleep; for that is the time to bring our questions to the dead, Other opportunities exist, but this moment is the most favourable. When, for instance, we read to the dead we certainly draw near to them. But for direct intercourse it is best of all if we address our questions to the dead at the moment of falling asleep. On the other hand, the moment of waking is the most favourable for what the dead have to communicate to us. And again there is no one—did people but know it—who does not bring with him at the moment of waking countless tidings from the dead. In the unconscious region of the soul we are speaking continually with the dead. At the moment of falling asleep we put our questions to them, we say to them what, in the depths of the soul, we have to say. At the moment of waking the dead speak with us, give us the answers. But we must grasp the connection that these are only two different points and that, in the higher sense, these things that happen after each other are really simultaneous, just as on the physical plane two places are simultaneous. Now, for intercourse with the dead, some things in life are more favourable, others less so. And we may ask: What can really help our intercourse with the dead? The manner of our intercourse with the dead cannot be the same as the manner of our speech with the living; the dead neither hear nor take in this kind of speech. There is no question of being able to chatter with the dead as we chatter with one another at five o'clock teas and in cafes. What makes it possible to put questions to the dead or to communicate something to the dead, is that we unite the life of feeling with our thoughts and ideas. Suppose a man has passed through the Gate of Death and you want your subconsciousness to communicate something to him in the evening. For it need not be communicated consciously. You can prepare it at some time during the day; then if you go to bed at ten o'clock at night having prepared it, say, at noon, it passes over to the dead when you fall asleep. The question must, however, be put in a particular way; it must not merely be a thought or an idea, it must be imbued with feeling and with will. Your relationship with the dead must be one of the heart, of inner interest. You must remind yourself of your love for the dead when he was alive, and address yourself to him not abstractly, but with real warmth of heart. This can so take root in the soul that in the evening at the moment of going to sleep, without your knowing it, it becomes a question to the dead. Or you may try to realise vividly what was the nature of your particular interest in the dead. It is very good to do the following. Think about your life with the one who is now dead; visualise actual moments when you were together with him, and then ask yourself: What was it that particularly interested me about him, that attracted me? When was it that I was so deeply impressed,—liked what he said, and found it helpful and valuable? If you remind yourself of moments when you were strongly connected with the dead and were deeply interested in him, and then turn this into a desire to speak to him, to say something to him—if you develop the feeling in purity and let the question arise out of the interest you took in the dead, then the question or the communication remains in your soul, and when you go to sleep it passes over to him. Ordinary consciousness as a rule will know little of the happening, because sleep ensues immediately; but what has thus passed over often remains present in dreams. In the case of most dreams—although from the point of view of actual content they are misleading—in the case of most dreams we have of the dead, all that happens is that we interpret them incorrectly. We interpret them as messages from the dead, whereas they are nothing but the echoing of the questions or communications we have ourselves directed to the dead. We should not think that the dead is saying something to us in our dream, but we should see in the dream something that goes out from our own soul to the dead. The dream is the echo of this. If we were sufficiently developed to be conscious of our question or communication to the dead at the moment of going to sleep, it would seem to us as though the dead himself were speaking—hence the echo in the dream seems as if it were a message from him. In reality it comes from us. This becomes intelligible only when we understand the nature of clairvoyant connection with the dead. What the dead seems to say to us is really what we are saying to him. The moment of waking is especially favourable for the dead to approach us. At the moment of waking, very much comes from the dead to every human being. A great deal of what we undertake in life is really inspired into us by the dead or by Beings of the higher Hierarchies, although we attribute it to ourselves, as coming from our own soul. What the dead say comes out of our own soul. The life of day draws near, the moment of waking passes quickly by, and we are seldom disposed to observe the intimate indications that arise out of our soul. And when we do observe them we are vain enough to attribute them to ourselves; Yet in all this—and in much else that comes out of our own soul—there lives what our dead have to say to us. What the dead say to us seems to arise out of our own soul. If men knew what life actually is, this knowledge would give rise to a feeling of reverence and piety towards the spiritual world in which we and our dead continually live. We should realise that in much of what we do, it is the dead who are working. The knowledge that round about us, like the air we breathe, there is a spiritual world, the knowledge that the dead are round about us and that it is only we who are not able to perceive them—this knowledge must unfold in Spiritual Science, not as external theory but permeating the soul as veritable inner life. The dead speak to us in our inner being but we interpret our own inner being incorrectly. If we were to understand it aright, we should know ourselves to be united in our inmost being with the souls who are the so-called dead. Now there is a great difference according to whether a soul passes through the Gate of Death in relatively early years or later in life. When young children who have loved us die, it is a very different thing from the death of people older than ourselves. Experience of the spiritual world describes this difference in the following way. The secret of communion with children who have died can be expressed by saying that in the spiritual sense we do not lose them, they remain with us. When children die in early life they continue ever present with us—spiritually—to a very marked degree. I should like to give it to you as a theme for meditation to be thought through and developed, that when children die they are not lost to us; we do not lose them, they stay with us spiritually. Of older people who die, the reverse may be said. Those who are older do not lose us. We do not lose little children; older people do not lose us. Older people when they die are strongly drawn to the spiritual world, but this also gives them the power so to work into the physical world that it is easier for them to approach us. True, they withdraw from the physical world much farther than do children who remain with us, but older people are endowed with higher faculties of perception than are children who die young. Those who are older retain us. Knowledge of different souls in the spiritual world reveals that those who died in old age live, through being able to enter more easily into souls on Earth; they do not lose the souls on Earth. And we do not lose the children, for the children remain more or less within the sphere of earthly man. The meaning of this difference can also be considered in another connection. We have not always sufficiently deep or delicate perceptions in regard to the experiences of the soul on the physical plane. When friends die, we mourn and feel pain. When good friends in the Society have passed away, I have often said that it is not the task of Anthroposophy to offer people shallow consolation for their pain or try to talk them out of their sorrow. Sorrow is justified; one should grow strong to bear it, not let oneself be talked out of it. In regard to the pain and the sorrow, people make no distinction as to whether it is caused by the death of a child or of an older person. Spiritually perceived, there is a great, great difference. When little children have died the pain of those who have remained behind is really a kind of compassion—no matter whether such children were their own or other children whom they loved. Children remain together with us and because we have been united with them they convey their pain to our souls; we feel their pain—that they would fain still be here! Their pain is eased when we bear it with them. The child feels in us. It is good when a child can share his feeling with us; his pain is thereby relieved. On the other hand, the pain we feel at the death of older people—whether it be our own parents or our friends—this can be called egotistical pain. An older person who has died does not lose us and the feeling he has is therefore different from the feeling present in a child. One who died in later life retains us, does not lose us. We here in life feel that we have lost him—the pain is therefore only our concern. It is egotistical pain. We do not share his feeling as we do in the case of children, we feel the pain for ourselves. It is really so that a clear distinction can be drawn between these two forms of pain: egotistical pain in regard to the old, a pain fraught with compassion in regard to little children. The child lives on in us and we actually feel what) the child feels. In reality, our own soul mourns only for those who died in the later years of their life. Just such a matter as this can show us the great significance of knowledge of the spiritual world. For you see, Divine Service for the Dead can be adjusted in accordance with these truths. In the case of a child who has died, it will not be altogether appropriate to emphasise the specifically individual aspect. Because the child, as we saw, lives on in us and remains with us, it is good that the service of remembrance should take a more universal form, giving the child, who is still living with us, something that is wide and universal. Therefore, in the case of a child, ceremonial in the service for the Dead is preferable to a specific funeral oration. The Catholic ritual is better here in one respect, the Protestant in the other. The Catholic service includes no funeral oration but consists in ceremony, in rite. It is general, universal; and it is alike for all. And what can be alike for all is especially good for children. In the case of one who has died in later years, the individual aspect is more important. The best funeral service here will be one in which the life of the individual is remembered. The Protestant service, with the oration referring to the life of the one who has died, will have great significance for the soul; the Catholic ritual will mean less in such a case. The same distinction holds good for all our thought about the dead. For the child it is best when we enter into a mood where we feel bound up with him; we try to turn our thoughts to him, and these thoughts will then draw near to him when we go to sleep. Such thoughts may be of a more general kind—such for example as may be directed to all those who have passed through the Gate of Death. In the case of an older person, we must direct our thoughts of remembrance to him as an individual, thinking about his life on Earth and what we experienced together with him. In order to enter into the right intercourse with an older person it is very important to visualise his being, to make his being come to life in ourselves—not only by remembering things he said which meant a great deal to us but by thinking of what he was as an individual and what his value was for the world. If we make these things inwardly living, they will enable us to come into connection with an older person who-has died and to have the right thoughts of remembrance for him. So you see, for the unfolding of true piety it is important to know what attitude should be taken to those who have died early and to those who have died in the later years of life. Just think what it means at the present time when so many human beings are dying in their youth, to be able to say to oneself: They are really always present, they are not lost to the world. I have spoken of this from other points of view, for such matters must always be considered from different angles. If we succeed in becoming conscious of the spiritual world, one realisation at least will light up for us out of the infinite sorrow with which the present days are fraught—that because those who die young remain present with us, a living spiritual life can arise through community with the dead. A living spiritual life can and will arise, if only materialism does not unfold its strength to such a degree that Ahriman is able to stretch out his claws and gain the victory over all human powers. Many a man may say, speaking purely on the physical plane, that indications such as I have been giving seem to him quite remote, he would prefer to be told something definite he can do morning and evening to bring him into a right relation with the spiritual world. But this is not quite correct thinking. Where the spiritual world is concerned the first essential is that we should develop thoughts about it. And even if it seems as though the dead were remote, while present life is near and close at hand, the very fact that we have such thoughts as have been described to-day, that we let our mind dwell on things seemingly remote from external life—this very fact uplifts and develops the soul, imparts to it spiritual force and spiritual nourishment. What brings us into the spiritual world is not what is seemingly near at hand, but first and foremost, what comes from the spiritual world itself. Do not, therefore, be afraid of thinking these thoughts through again and again, continually bringing them to life anew within the soul. There is nothing more important for life, even for material life, than the strong and sure realisation of communion with the spiritual world. If modern men had not so entirely lost their connection with the spiritual, these grave times would not have come upon us. Only a very few men to-day have insight into this connection; but insight will most surely come in the future. To-day men think: When a human being has passed through the Gate of Death, his activity ceases so far as the physical world is concerned. But it is not so, in reality. There is a living and perpetual intercourse between the so-called dead and the so-called living. Those who have passed through the Gate of Death have not ceased to be present, it is just that our eyes have ceased to see them. They are there, nevertheless. Our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses of will are connected with the dead. The Gospel words hold good for the dead as well: “ The Kingdom of the Spirit cometh not with observation (that is to say, external observation); neither shall they say, Lo here, lo there, for behold, the Kingdom of the Spirit is within you.” For we should not seek for the dead through externalities but should become conscious that they are always present. All historical life, all social life, all ethical life, proceed by virtue of co-operation of the so-called living with the so-called dead. The whole being of man can be infinitely strengthened when his consciousness is filled not only with the realisation of his firm stand here in the physical world but with the inner realisation that comes to him when he can say of the dead whom he has loved: The dead are with us, they are in our midst. This too is part of a true knowledge and understanding of the spiritual world, which has, as it were, to be pieced together from many different fragments. We can only say that we know the spiritual world when the way in which we think and speak about it comes from the spiritual world itself. The dead are in our midst—this sentence is in itself an affirmation of the spiritual world; and only the spiritual world can awaken within us the consciousness that the dead are, in very truth, with us. |
182. The Dead are with Us
10 Feb 1918, Nuremberg Tr. Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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What I have now said is an indication of the fundamental form of the soul's communion with other souls during the period between death and a new birth. |
I have here been telling you of one of the fundamental principles of intercourse between the so-called Living and the so-called Dead. If this example helps you to realise one thing only, namely, that conditions are entirely reversed in the spiritual world, then you will have grasped a very significant concept and one that is constantly needed by those who aspire to become conscious of the spiritual world. |
We should not seek for the Dead through externalities but become conscious that they are always present. All historical life, all social life, all ethical life, proceed by virtue of co-operation between the so-called Living and the so-called Dead. |
182. The Dead are with Us
10 Feb 1918, Nuremberg Tr. Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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In our study of Spiritual Science there is a great deal that we cannot, perhaps, directly apply in everyday life, and we may at times feel that it is all rather remote. But the remoteness is only apparent. What we receive into the sphere of our knowledge concerning the secrets of the spiritual world is at every hour, at every moment, of vital and profound significance for our souls; what seems to be remote from us personally is often what the soul inwardly needs. In order to know the physical world we must make ourselves acquainted with it. But to know the spiritual world it is essential that we ourselves shall think through and master the thoughts and conceptions imparted by that world. These thoughts then often work quite unconsciously within the soul. Many things may seem to be remote, whereas in reality they are very near indeed to the higher realms of the soul's life. And so again today we will think of the life that takes its course between death and a new birth—the life that seems so far removed from the human being in the physical world. I will begin by simply narrating what is found by spiritual investigation. These things can be understood if sufficient thought is applied to them; through their own power they make themselves comprehensible to the soul. Anyone who does not understand them should realize that he has not thought about them deeply enough. They must be investigated by means of Spiritual Science, but they can be understood through constant study. They will then be confirmed by the facts with which life itself confronts us, provided life is rightly observed. You will have realized from many of the lecture-courses that study of the life between death and rebirth is fraught with difficulty, because its conditions are so entirely different from those of the life that can be pictured by the organs of the physical body here in the physical world. We have to become acquainted with utterly different conceptions. When we enter into relationship with the things in our physical environment we know that only a small proportion of the beings around us in the physical world react to our deeds, to the manifestations of our will, in such a way that pleasure or pain is caused by these deeds of ours. Reaction of this kind takes place in the case of the animal kingdom and the human kingdom; but we are justified in the conviction that the mineral world (including what is contained in air and water), and also, in essentials, the world of plants, are insensitive to what we call pleasure or pain as the result of deeds performed by us. (Spiritually considered, of course, the matter is a little different, but that need not concern us at this point.) In the environment of the Dead all this is changed. Conditions in the environment of the so-called Dead are such that everything—including what is done by the Dead themselves—causes either pleasure or pain. The Dead can do no single thing, they cannot—if I may speak pictorially—move a single limb without pleasure or pain being caused by what is done. We must try to think our way into these conditions of existence. We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment. Through the whole period between death and a new birth we can do nothing, we cannot even move, metaphorically speaking, without causing pleasure or pain in our environment. The mineral kingdom as we have it around us on the physical plane does not exist for the Dead, neither does the world of plants. As you can gather from the book Theosophy, these kingdoms are present in an entirely different form. They are not present in the spiritual world in the form in which we know them here, namely, as realms devoid of feeling. The first kingdom of those familiar to us on the physical plane which has significance for the Dead because it is comparable with what the Dead has in his environment, is the animal kingdom. I do not, of course, mean individual animals as we know them on the physical plane, but the whole environment is such that its effects and influences are as if animals were there. The reaction of the environment is such that pleasure or pain proceeds from what is done. On the physical plane we stand upon mineral soil; the Dead stands upon a ‘soil,’ lives in an environment which may be compared with the animal nature in this sense. The Dead, therefore, starts his life two kingdoms higher. On the earth we know the animal kingdom only from outside. The most external activity of the life between death and a new birth consists in acquiring a more and more intimate and exact knowledge of the animal world. For in this life between death and a new birth we must prepare all those forces which, working in from the Cosmos, organize our own body. In the physical world we know nothing of these forces. Between death and a new birth we know that our body, down to its smallest particles, is formed out of the Cosmos. For we ourselves prepare this physical body, bringing together in it the whole of animal nature; we ourselves build it. To make the picture more exact, we must acquaint ourselves with an idea that is rather remote from present-day mentality. Modern man knows quite well that when a magnetic needle lies with one end pointing towards the North and the other towards the South, this is not caused by the needle itself, but that the earth as a whole is a cosmic magnet of which one end points towards the North and the other towards the South. It would be considered sheer nonsense to say that the direction is determined by forces contained in the magnetic needle itself. In the case of a seed or germinating entity which develops in an animal or in a human being, all the sciences and schools of thought deny the factor of cosmic influence. What would be described as nonsense in the case of the magnetic needle is accepted without further thought in the case of an egg forming inside the hen. But when the egg is forming inside the hen, the whole Cosmos is, in fact, participating; what happens on earth merely provides the stimulus for the operation of cosmic forces. Everything that takes shape in the egg is an imprint of cosmic forces and the hen herself is only a place, an abode, in which the Cosmos, the whole World-System, is working in this way. And it is the same in the case of the human being. This is a thought with which we must become familiar. Between death and a new birth, in communion with Beings of the higher Hierarchies, a man is working at this whole system of forces permeating the Cosmos. For between death and a new birth he is not inactive; he is perpetually at work—in the Spiritual. The animal kingdom is the first realm with which he makes acquaintance, and in the following way:—If he commits some error he immediately becomes aware of pain, of suffering, in the environment; if he does something right, he becomes aware of pleasure, of joy, in the environment. He works on and on, calling forth pleasure or pain, until finally the soul-nature is such that it can descend and unite with what will live on earth as a physical body. The being of soul could never descend if it had not itself worked at the physical form. It is the animal kingdom, then, with which acquaintance is made in the first place. The next is the human kingdom. Mineral nature and the plant kingdom are absent. The Dead's acquaintance with the human kingdom is limited—to use a familiar phrase. Between death and a new birth—and this begins immediately or soon after death—the Dead has contact and can make links only with those human souls, whether still living on earth or in yonder world, with whom he has already been karmically connected on earth in the last or in an earlier incarnation. Other souls pass him by; they do not come within his ken. He becomes aware of the animal realm as a totality; only those human souls come within his ken with whom he has had some karmic connection here on earth and with these he becomes more and more closely acquainted. You must not imagine that their number is small, for individual human beings have already passed through many lives on the earth. In every life numbers of karmic connections have been formed and of these is spun the web which then, in the spiritual world, extends over all the souls whom the Dead has known in life; only those with whom no acquaintance has been made remain outside the circle. This indicates a truth which must be emphasized, namely, the supreme importance of earthly life for the individual human being. If there had been no earthly life we should be unable to form links with human souls in the spiritual world. The links are formed karmically on the earth and then continue between death and a new birth. Those who are able to see into the spiritual world perceive how the Dead gradually makes more and more links—all of which are the outcome of karmic connections formed on earth. Just as concerning the first kingdom with which the Dead comes into contact—the animal kingdom—we can say that everything the Dead does, even when he simply moves, causes either pleasure or pain in his environment, so we can say about everything experienced in the human realm in yonder world that it is much more intimately connected with the life of soul. When the Dead becomes acquainted with a soul, he gets to know this soul as if he himself were within it. After death, knowledge of another soul is intimate as knowledge here on earth of our own finger, head or ear—we feel ourselves within the other soul. The connection is much more intimate than it can ever be on earth. There are two basic experiences in the community among human souls between death and a new birth; we are either within the other souls, or outside them. Even in the case of souls with whom we are already acquainted, we are sometimes within and sometimes outside them. Meeting with them consists in feeling at one with them, being within them; to be outside them means that we do not notice them, do not become aware of them. If we look at some object here on earth, we perceive it; if we look away from it, we no longer perceive it. In yonder world we are actually within human souls when we are able to turn our attention to them; and we are outside them when we are not in a position to do so. What I have now said is an indication of the fundamental form of the soul's communion with other souls during the period between death and a new birth. Similarly, the human being is also within or outside the Beings of the Hierarchies, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so on. The higher the kingdoms, the more intensely does man feel bound to them after death; he feels as though they were bearing him, sustaining him with great power. The Archangeloi are a mightier support than the Angeloi, the Archai again mightier than the Archangeloi, and so on. People today still find difficulties in acquiring knowledge of the spiritual world. The difficulties would soon solve themselves if a little more trouble were taken to become acquainted with its secrets. There are two ways of approach. One way leads to complete certainty of the Eternal in one's own being. This knowledge, that in human nature there is an eternal core of being which passes through birth and death—this knowledge, remote as it is to the modern mind, is comparatively easy to attain; and it will certainly be attained by those who have enough perseverance, along the path described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and in other writings. It is attained by treading the path there described. That is one form of knowledge of the spiritual world. The other is what may be called direct intercourse with beings of the spiritual world, and we will now speak of the intercourse that is possible between those still living on earth and the so-called Dead. Such intercourse is most certainly possible but it presents greater difficulties than the first form of knowledge, which is easy to attain. Actual intercourse with an individual who has died is possible, but difficult, because it demands scrupulous vigilance on the part of the one who seeks to establish it. Control and discipline are necessary for this kind of intercourse with the spiritual world, because it is connected with a very significant law. Impulses recognized as lower impulses in men on earth are, from the spiritual side, higher life; and it may therefore easily happen that when the human being has not achieved true control of himself, he experiences the rising of lower impulses as the result of direct intercourse with the Dead. When we make contact with the spiritual world in the general sense, when we acquire knowledge about our own immortality as beings of soul and spirit, there can be no question of the ingress of anything impure. But when it is a matter of contact with individuals who have died, the relation of the individual Dead—strange as it seems—is always a relation with the blood and nervous system. The Dead enters into those impulses which live themselves out in the system of blood and nerves, and in this way lower impulses may be aroused. Naturally, there is only danger for those who have not purified their natures through discipline and control. This must be said, for it is the reason why in the Old Testament it is forbidden to have intercourse with the Dead. Such intercourse is not sinful when it happens in the right way. The methods of modern spiritualism must, of course, be avoided. When the intercourse is of a spiritual nature it is not sinful, but when it is not accompanied by pure thoughts it can easily lead to the stimulation of lower passions. It is not the Dead who arouse these passions but the element in which the Dead live. For consider this: what we feel here as ‘animal’ in quality and nature is the basic element in which the Dead live. The kingdom in which the Dead live can easily be changed when it enters into us; what is higher life in yonder world can become lower impulses when it is within us on earth. It is very important to remember this, and it must be emphasized when we are speaking of intercourse between the Living and the so-called Dead, for it is an occult fact. We shall find that precisely when we are speaking about this intercourse, the spiritual world can be described as it really is, for such experiences reveal that the spiritual world is completely different from the physical world. To begin with, I will tell you something that may seem to have no meaning for man as long as he has not developed faculties of clairvoyance; but when we think it over we shall realize that it concerns us closely. Those who are able to commune with the Dead as the result of developed clairvoyance, realize why it is so difficult for human beings to know anything about the Dead through direct perception. Strange as it may seem, the whole form of intercourse to which we are accustomed in the physical world has to be reversed when intercourse is established between the earth and the Dead. In the physical world, when we speak to a human being from physical body to physical body, we know that the words come from ourselves; when the other person speaks to us, we know that the words come from him. The whole relationship is reversed when we are speaking with one who has died. The expression ‘when we are speaking’ can truthfully be used, but the relationship is reversed. When we put a question to the Dead, or say something to him, what we say comes from him, comes to us from him. He inspires into our soul what we ask him, what we say to him. And when he answers us or says something to us, this comes out of our own soul. It is a process with which a human being in the physical world is quite unfamiliar. He feels that what he says comes out of his own being. In order to establish intercourse with those who have died, we must adapt ourselves to hear from them what we ourselves say, and to receive from our own soul what they answer. Thus abstractly described, the nature of the process is easy to grasp; but to become accustomed to the total reversal of the familiar form of intercourse is exceedingly difficult. The Dead are always there, always among us and around us, and the fact that they are not perceived is largely due to lack of understanding of this reversed form of intercourse. On the physical plane we think that when anything comes out of our soul, it comes from us. And we are far from being able to pay intimate enough attention to whether it is not, after all, being inspired into us from the spiritual environment. We prefer to connect it with experiences familiar on the physical plane, where, if something comes to us from the environment, we ascribe it at once to the other person. This is the greatest error when it is a matter of intercourse with the Dead. I have here been telling you of one of the fundamental principles of intercourse between the so-called Living and the so-called Dead. If this example helps you to realise one thing only, namely, that conditions are entirely reversed in the spiritual world, then you will have grasped a very significant concept and one that is constantly needed by those who aspire to become conscious of the spiritual world. The concept is extremely difficult to apply in an actual, individual case. For instance, in order to understand even the physical world, permeated as it is with the spiritual, it is essential to grasp this idea of complete reversal. And because modern science fails to grasp it and it is altogether unknown to the general consciousness, for this reason there is today no spiritual understanding of the physical world. One experiences this even with people who try very hard indeed to comprehend the world and one is often obliged simply to accept the situation and leave it as it is. Some years ago I was speaking to a large number of friends at a meeting in Berlin about the physical organism of man, with special reference to certain ideas of Goethe. I tried to explain how the head, in respect of its physical structure, can only be rightly understood when it is conceived as a complete transformation of the other part of the organism. No one was able to understand at all that a bone in the arm would have to be turned inside out like a glove, in order that a head-bone might be produced from it. It is a difficult concept, but one cannot really understand anatomy without such pictures. I mention this in parenthesis only. What I have said today about intercourse with the Dead is easier to understand. The happenings I have described to you are going on all the time. All of you sitting here now are in constant intercourse with the Dead, only the ordinary consciousness knows nothing of it because it lies in the subconsciousness. Clairvoyant consciousness does not evoke anything new into being; it merely brings up into consciousness what is present all the time in the spiritual world. All of you are in constant intercourse with the Dead. And now we will consider how this intercourse takes place in individual cases. When someone has died and we are left behind, we may ask: How do I approach the one who has died, so that he is aware of me? How does he come near me again so that I can live in him?—These questions may well be asked but they cannot be answered if we have recourse only to concepts familiar on the physical plane. On the physical plane, ordinary consciousness functions only from the time of waking until the time of falling asleep; but the other part of consciousness which remains dim in ordinary life between falling asleep and waking is just as important. The human being is not, properly speaking, unconscious when he is asleep; his consciousness is merely so dim that he experiences nothing. But the whole man—in waking and sleeping life—must be held in mind when we are studying the connections of the human being with the spiritual world. Think of your own biography. You reflect upon the course of your life always with interruptions; you describe only what has happened in your waking hours. Life is broken: waking-sleeping; waking-sleeping. But you are also present while you sleep: and in studying the whole human being, both waking life and sleeping life must be taken into consideration. A third thing must also be held in mind in connection with man's intercourse with the spiritual world. For besides waking life and sleeping life there is a third state, even more important for intercourse with the spiritual world than waking and sleeping life as such. I mean the state connected with the act of waking and the act of going to sleep, which last only for brief seconds, for we immediately pass on into other conditions. If we develop a delicate sensitivity for these moments of waking and going to sleep we shall find that they shed great light on the spiritual world. In remote country places—although such customs are gradually disappearing—when we who are older were still young, people were wont to say: When you wake from sleep it is not good immediately to go to the window through which light is streaming; you should stay a little while in the dark. Country folk used to have some knowledge about intercourse with the spiritual world and at this moment of waking they preferred not to come at once into the bright daylight but to remain inwardly collected, in order to preserve something of what sweeps with such power through the human soul at the moment of waking. The sudden brightness of daylight is disturbing. In the cities, of course, this is hardly to be avoided; there we are disturbed not only by the daylight but also even before waking by the noise from the streets, the clanging of tramcar bells and so forth. The whole of civilized life seems to conspire to hinder man's intercourse with the spiritual world. This is not said in order to decry material civilization, but the facts must be remembered. Again at the moment of going to sleep the spiritual world approaches us with power, but we immediately fall asleep, losing consciousness of what has passed through the soul. Exceptions do, of course, occur. These moments of waking and of going to sleep are of the utmost significance for intercourse with the so-called Dead—and with other spiritual Beings of the higher worlds. But in order to understand what I have to say about this you must familiarize yourselves with an idea which it is not easy to apply on the physical plane and which is therefore practically unknown. It is this: In the spiritual sense, what is ‘past’ has not really vanished but is still there. In physical life men have this conception in regard to Space only. If you stand in front of a tree, then go away and look back at it later on, the tree has not disappeared; it is still there. In the spiritual world the same is true in regard to Time. If you experience something at one moment, it has passed away the next as far as physical consciousness is concerned; spiritually conceived, it has not passed away. You can look back at it just as you looked back at the tree. Richard Wagner showed that he had knowledge of this by the remarkable words: ‘Time here becomes Space.’ It is an occult fact that in the spiritual world there are distances which do not come to expression on the physical plane. That an event is past simply means that it is farther away from us. I beg you to remember this. For man on earth in the physical body, the moment of going to sleep is ‘past’ when the moment of waking arrives. In the spiritual world, however, the moment of falling asleep has not gone; we are only, at the moment of waking, a little farther distant from it. We encounter our Dead at the moment of going to sleep and again at the moment of waking. (As I said, this is perpetually happening, only it usually remains in the subconsciousness.) As far as physical consciousness is concerned, these are two quite different moments in time; for spiritual consciousness the one is only a little farther distant than the other. I want you to remember this in connection with what I am now going to say: otherwise you may find it difficult to understand. As I told you, the moments of waking and going to sleep are particularly important for intercourse with those who have died. Through the whole of our life there are no such moments when we do not come into relation with the Dead. The moment of going to sleep is especially favourable for us to turn to the Dead. Suppose we want to ask the Dead something. We can carry it in our soul, holding it until the moment of going to sleep, for that is the time to bring our questions to the Dead. Other opportunities exist, but this moment is the most favourable. When, for instance, we read to the Dead we certainly draw near to them, but for direct intercourse it is best of all if we put our questions to them at the moment of going to sleep. On the other hand, the moment of waking is the most favourable for what the Dead have to communicate to us. And again there is no one—did people but know it—who at the moment of waking does not bring with him countless tidings from the Dead. In the unconscious region of the soul we are speaking continually with the Dead. At the moment of going to sleep we put our questions to them, we say to them what, in the depths of the soul, we have to say. At the moment of waking the Dead speak with us, give us the answers. But we must realize that these are only two different points and that in the higher sense, these things that happen after each other are really simultaneous, just as on the physical plane two places are there simultaneously. Some factors in life are favourable for intercourse with the Dead, others are less so. And we may ask: What can really help us to establish intercourse with the Dead? The manner of our converse cannot be the same as it is with those who are alive, for the Dead neither hears nor takes in this kind of speech. There is no question of being able to chatter with one who has died as we chatter with one another at tea or in cafés. What makes it possible to put questions to the Dead or to communicate something to him is that we unite the life of feeling with our thoughts and ideas. Suppose a person has passed through the gate of death and you want your subconsciousness to communicate something to him in the evening. It need not to be communicated consciously; you can prepare it at some time during the day. Then, if you go to bed at ten o'clock at night having prepared it, say, at noon, it passes over to the Dead when you go to sleep. The question must, however, be put in a particular way; it must not merely be a thought or an idea, it must be imbued with feeling and with will. Your relationship with the Dead must be one of the heart, of inner interest. You must remind yourself of your love for the person when he was alive and address yourself to him with real warmth of heart, not abstractly. This feeling can take such firm root in the soul that in the evening, at the moment of going to sleep, it becomes a question to the Dead without your knowing it. Or you may try to realize vividly what was the nature of your particular interest in the one who has died. Think about your experiences with him; visualize actual moments when you were together with him, and then ask yourself: What was it about him that particularly interested me, that attracted me to him? When was it that I was so deeply impressed, liked what he said, found it helpful and valuable? If you remind yourself of moments when you were strongly connected with the Dead and were deeply interested in him, and then turn this into a desire to speak to him, to say something to him—if you develop the feeling with purity of heart and let the question arise out of the interest you took in him, then the question of the communication remains in your soul, and when you go to sleep it passes over to him. Ordinary consciousness as a rule will know little of the happening, because sleep ensues immediately. But what has thus passed over often remains present in dreams. In the case of most dreams—although in respect of actual content they are misleading—in the case of most dreams we have of the Dead, all that happens is that we interpret them incorrectly. We interpret them as messages from the Dead, whereas they are nothing but the echoing of the questions or communications we have ourselves directed to the Dead. We should not think that the Dead is saying something to us in our dream, but we should see in the dream something that goes out from our own soul to the Dead. The dream is the echo of this. If we were sufficiently developed to be conscious of our question or communication to the Dead at the moment of going to sleep, it would seem to us as though the Dead himself were speaking—hence the echo in the dream seems as if it were a message from him. In reality it comes from ourselves. This becomes intelligible only when we understand the nature of clairvoyant connection with the Dead. What the Dead seems to say to us is really what we are saying to him. The moment of waking is especially favourable for the Dead to approach us. At the moment of waking, very much comes from the Dead to every human being. A great deal of what we undertake in life is really inspired into us by the Dead or by Beings of the higher Hierarchies, although we attribute it to ourselves, imagining that it comes from our own soul. The life of day draws near, the moment of waking passes quickly by, and we seldom pay heed to the intimate indications that arise out of our soul. And when we do, we are vain enough to attribute them to ourselves. Yet in all this—and in much else that comes out of our soul—there lives what the Dead have to say to us. It is indeed so: what the Dead say to us seems as if it arises out of our own soul. If men knew what life truly is, this knowledge would engender a feeling of reverence and piety towards the spiritual world in which we are always living, together with the Dead with whom we are connected. We should realize that in much of what we do, the Dead are working. The knowledge that around us, like the very air we breathe, there is a spiritual world, the knowledge that the Dead are round about us only we are not able to perceive them—this knowledge must be unfolded in Spiritual Science not as theory but permeating the soul as inner life. The Dead speak to us inwardly but we interpret our own inner life incorrectly. If we were to understand it aright, we should know that in our inmost being we are united with the souls who are the so-called Dead. Now it is not at all the same when a soul passes through the gate of death in relatively early years or later in life. The death of young children who have loved us, is a very different thing from the death of people older than ourselves. Experience of the spiritual world discovers that the secret of communion with children who have died can be expressed by saying that in the spiritual sense we do not lose them, they remain with us. When children die in early life they continue to be with us—spiritually with us. I should like to give it to you as a theme for meditation, that when little children die they are not lost to us; we do not lose them, they stay with us spiritually. Of older people who die, the opposite may be said. Those who are older do not lose us. We do not lose little children; elderly people do not lose us. When elderly people die they are strongly drawn to the spiritual world, but this also gives them the power so to work into the physical world that it is easier for them to approach us. True, they withdraw much farther from the physical world than do children who remain near us, but they are endowed with higher faculties of perception than children who die young. Knowledge of different souls in the spiritual world reveals that those who died in old age are able to enter easily into souls on earth; they do not lose the souls on earth. And we do not lose little children, for they remain more or less within the sphere of earthly man. The meaning of the difference can also be considered in another respect. We have not always sufficiently deep insight into the experiences of the soul on the physical plane. When friends die, we mourn and feel pain. When good friends pass away, I have often said that it is not the task of Anthroposophy to offer people shallow consolation for their pain or try to talk them out of their sorrow One should grow strong enough to bear sorrow; not allow oneself to be talked out of it. But people make no distinction as to whether the sorrow is caused by the death of a child or of one who is elderly. Spiritually perceived, there is a very great difference. When little children have died, the pain of those who have remained behind is really a kind of compassion—no matter whether such children were their own or other children whom they loved. Children remain with us and because we have been united with them they convey their pain to our souls; we feel their pain—that they would fain still be here! Their pain is eased when we bear it with them. The child feels in us, shares his feeling with us, and it is good that it should be so; his pain is thereby ameliorated. On the other hand, the pain we feel at the death of elderly people—whether relatives or friends—can be called egotistical pain. An elderly person who has died does not lose us and the feeling he has is therefore different from the feeling present in a child. One who dies in later life does not lose us. We here in life feel that we have lost him—the pain is therefore ours; it is egotistical pain. We do not share his feeling as we do in the case of children; we feel the pain for ourselves. A clear distinction can therefore be made between these two forms of pain: egotistical pain in connection with the elderly; pain fraught with compassion in connection with little children. The child lives on in us and we actually feel what he feels. In reality, our own soul mourns only for those who died in the later years of their life. It is a matter such as this that can show us the immense significance of knowledge of the spiritual world. For you see, Divine Service for the Dead can be adapted in accordance with these truths. In the case of a child who has died, it will not be altogether appropriate to emphasize the individual aspect. Because the child lives on in us and remains with us, the Service of Remembrance should take a more universal form, giving the child, who is still near us, something that is wide and universal. Therefore in the case of a child, ceremonial in the Service is preferable to a special funeral oration. The Catholic ritual is better here in one respect, the Protestant in the other. The Catholic Service includes no funeral oration but consists in ceremony, in ritual. It is general, universal, alike for all. And what can be alike for all is especially good for children. But in the case of one who has died in later years, the individual aspect is more important. The best funeral Service here will be one in which the life of the individual is remembered. The Protestant Service, with the oration referring to the life of the one who has died, will have great significance for the soul; the Catholic ritual will mean less in such a case. The same distinction holds good for all our thought about those who have died. It is best for a child when we induce a mood of feeling connected with him; we try to turn our thoughts to him and these thoughts will draw near to him when we sleep. Such thoughts may be of a more general kind—such for example as may be directed to all those who have passed through the gate of death. In the case of an elderly person, we must direct our thoughts of remembrance to him as an individual, thinking about his life on earth and of experiences we shared with him. In order to establish the right intercourse with an older person it is very important to visualize him as he actually was, to make his being come to life in ourselves—not only by remembering things he said which meant a great deal to us but by thinking of what he was as an individual and what his value was for the world. If we make these things inwardly alive, they will enable us to come into connection with an older person who has died and to have the right thoughts of remembrance for him. So you see, for the unfolding of true piety it is important to know what attitude should be taken to those who have died in childhood and to those who have died in the later years of life. Just think what it means at the present time when so many human beings are dying in comparatively early years, to be able to say to oneself: They are really always present, they are not lost to the world. (I have spoken of this from other points of view, for such matters must always be considered from different angles.) If we succeed in becoming conscious of the spiritual world, one realisation at least will light up in us out of the deep sorrow with which the present days are fraught. It is that because those who die young remain with us, a living spiritual life can arise through community with the Dead. A living spiritual life can and will arise, if only materialism is not allowed to become so strong that Ahriman is able to stretch out his claws and gain the victory over all human powers. Many people may say, speaking purely of conditions on the physical plane, that indications such as I have been giving seem very remote; they would prefer to be told definitely what they can do in the morning and evening in order to bring themselves into a right relation with the spiritual world. But this is not quite correct thinking. Where the spiritual world is concerned, the first essential is that we should develop thoughts about it. And even if it seems as though the Dead are far away, while immediate life is close at hand, the very fact that we have such thoughts as have been described today and that we allow our minds to dwell on things seemingly remote from external life—this very fact uplifts the soul, imparts to it spiritual strength and spiritual nourishment. Do not, therefore, be afraid of thinking these thoughts through again and again, continually bringing them to new life with the soul. There is nothing more important for life, even for material life, than the strong and sure realization of communion with the spiritual world. If modern men had not lost their relationship with spiritual things to such an extent, these grave times would not have come upon us. Only a very few today have insight into this connection, although it will certainly be recognized in the future. Today men think: When a human being has passed through the gate of death, his activity ceases as far as the physical world is concerned. But indeed it is not so! There is a living and perpetual intercourse between the so called Dead and the so-called Living. Those who have passed through the gate of death have not ceased to be present; it is only that our eyes have ceased to see them. They are there in very truth. Our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses of will, are all concerned with the Dead. The words of the Gospel hold good for the Dead as well; ‘The Kingdom of the Spirit cometh not with observation’ (that is to say, external observation); ‘neither shall they say, Lo here, lo there, for behold, the Kingdom of the Spirit is within you.’ We should not seek for the Dead through externalities but become conscious that they are always present. All historical life, all social life, all ethical life, proceed by virtue of co-operation between the so-called Living and the so-called Dead. The whole being of man can be infinitely strengthened when he is conscious not only of his firm stand here in the physical world but is filled with the inner realization of being able to say of the Dead whom he has loved: They are with us, they are in our midst. This too is part of a true knowledge and understanding of the spiritual world, which have as it were, to be woven together from many different threads. We cannot say that we know the spiritual world until the way in which we think and speak about it comes from that world itself. The Dead are in our midst—these words in themselves are an affirmation of the spiritual world; and only the spiritual world itself can awaken within us the consciousness that in very truth the Dead are with us. |