| 277b. The Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920: Eurythmy Address
19 Oct 1919, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| Goethe imagines that in every single plant organ, namely in every single plant leaf, be it a green leaf or a colored petal, a whole plant should be contained in a simple way. In turn, Goethe imagined that the whole plant, however complicated it grows, is just a transformed leaf. |
| 277b. The Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920: Eurythmy Address
19 Oct 1919, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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 Dear attendees! The art of eurythmy, of which we are once again presenting a small sample to you today, is something that we ask you to receive in such a way that what we are able to offer is a beginning, an attempt that must lead in the future to what we actually envision as an ideal for the renewal of a certain field of art. It is not based on the opinion that we want to present something equal to other, similar art forms, which are actually only seemingly similar art forms – dance arts and the like. What we call the eurythmic art here has been fully thought out, or perhaps I should say felt and sensed out of the Goethean world view. Indeed, when one speaks of the Goethean worldview in such a context, one must not think in a scholastic way of the Goethe who died in Weimar in 1832, but of that which lived and lives on as a spirit in Goethe and can be taken up anew by each generation. It is an artistically defined area, an artistic area that is to be developed out of Goethe's world view as a eurythmic art. I do not wish to theorize, but I would like to say a few words about the sources of this eurythmic art. Particularly when such an art form first appears in cultural development, it is important to realize that - especially in the Goethean sense, it is intended that way - what we enjoy artistically, aesthetically, is actually there in terms of the mysterious depths of things, that we also try to reveal this through our knowledge. Goethe had the peculiarity that for him art and science were not strictly separate fields. It is a very characteristic expression of Goethe's when he says: one should not actually speak of the idea of truth, of the idea of beauty, of the idea of goodness; for Goethe thought that the idea is one and everything, and it reveals itself sometimes as the goodness of man, sometimes as beauty, sometimes as truth. In saying this, Goethe had in mind something much more alive and spiritual than the abstract idea that many people today have in mind. He had in mind the idea of what is alive and animates nature itself, and what man in turn finds in himself if he only descends deep enough into the depths of his own being. But we must enter into that which is most significant and characteristic of Goethe's world view if we want to see through what is actually meant here with eurythmy. The essence of Goethe's great view of nature, which is also an artistic view because it reveals itself artistically, is something that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated. Our science is basically a science of the dead, and we strive more and more, if we want to be true natural scientists, to understand the living as a dead thing, to think of the living as composed of the dead. Goethe wanted to look at the living directly. He called this looking at the living directly his metamorphosis doctrine. Once this doctrine of metamorphosis has been extended to cover the entire field of the human world view, something powerful will emerge from this expansion of our view of nature, from the transformation of all human views of nature and the world. It may look primitive and theoretical to explain the simple basic principle of Goethe's world view, which he advocates in his doctrine of metamorphosis. But when it is fully developed, it is something great and powerful that leads us deep into the essence of things and also of man. Goethe imagines that in every single plant organ, namely in every single plant leaf, be it a green leaf or a colored petal, a whole plant should be contained in a simple way. In turn, Goethe imagined that the whole plant, however complicated it grows, is just a transformed leaf. Each individual plant leaf can become a whole plant, and the whole plant, each individual organ, can in turn become a plant. And this is how Goethe imagined all living things, especially the living human organism. But Goethe's observations were limited to the form. This was due to the time in which he lived. By translating Goethe's observations into artistic expression through our eurythmy, we do not want to stop at the forms, but move on to human activity. And here it becomes possible, with a certain intuitive higher perception, with a real seeing, to bring to mind in a different way what one hears from one's fellow human beings through the sense of hearing as one's fellow human being speaks or sings. In particular, by shaping language in a song-like way, that is, in a musical or poetic way. In our daily lives, we direct our attention to what we can hear, to the activity of a single organ, the larynx and its neighboring organs. But he who, with a higher, supersensible gaze, looks through what happens in man as it reveals itself through a single organ, the larynx and its neighboring organs, can also , just as Goethe saw the individual leaf in the whole plant, so the one who has the gift of seeing can see the fine movements that are only potential in the larynx and its neighboring organs as movements of the whole human organism. And so what is presented to you here on the stage is, in essence, what language is, language made visible. What otherwise takes place invisibly in the human larynx is revealed here from the human organism as a whole, from all its limbs. In this way we can create an art that can go hand in hand with the musical art. What is happening on stage will be accompanied by the person himself, who is like a large, living larynx, accompanied by music on the one hand, and on the other hand by the recitation. However, it then becomes necessary, especially when what the whole person presents as a visible language is accompanied by recitation and by artful poetic language, to return to the good old forms of the art of recitation. The art of recitation today has basically gone astray. As much as people today dislike hearing it, it still has to be said. The art of recitation today has become more prosaic. What lies in the content of a poem is expressed through the art of recitation. This was not the case with the art of recitation in earlier times. The further back we go, the more the poetic artist was aware that rhythm, beat, the form of speech, the formal aspects, are the main thing. I need only remind you that when Schiller set about a poem, he did not first feel the content of the words of the poem in himself, but something like a melody, an indefinite melody, something musical. This, which lies in the language, apart from the thought, the content of the image or the word, is actually the most important and significant thing artistically. This is what must also be particularly expressed in the art of recitation. Goethe, when he rehearsed his “Iphigenic”, even a drama with his actors, rehearsed it with the baton in his hand, seeing everywhere less what the word content is. This is basically only the prosaic ladder by which the actual poetic art climbs up. He looked at the poetic power of creation, at the formal. In our art of recitation, which accompanies the eurythmic, you will see that essentially there is an inner rhythm in inner harmony of movement. What is really recitation art must also be expressed in recitation. Now, if you take the word as it is artistically designed, or even as a word, it is expressed in our visible language, which represents eurythmy, through what a person can initially reveal in his limbs as possible movements. But what we express, especially when we shape it musically or poetically, is imbued with inner warmth of soul, with joy and sorrow, with delight and pain. All this can also be presented in eurythmy. In the movements that are less attached to the individual limbs of the human being, but which the whole person performs or which he performs in space or in the circumstances in which he enters when we give group performances, in addition to the other performances of the groups, in these movements, in the more spatial movements, and in the temporal, that which shakes and vibrates through our speech, our audible speech, as soul warmth, as desire and suffering, as joy and pain, as enthusiasm and so on, is then expressed. But there is nothing arbitrary about it. And this is precisely how our eurythmy differs from certain neighboring arts, which could easily be confused with it: everything is always lawful. Not a momentary gesture is taken to express anything in the soul. Just as music itself consists of a lawful succession of notes in its melodies, so eurythmy consists of a succession of movements. If two people or groups of people perform the same thing in eurythmy, it is just as if two pianists perform the same Beethoven sonata. Individual expression plays no greater a role in eurythmy than it does, for example, when playing a single note or a piece of music. If you still see in our beginnings, in our first attempts, pantomime and mime, then this is still an imperfection that will also be overcome in the future. For it is precisely the pantomime, the facial expression, the gesture of the moment, that which otherwise inspires the art of dance, that is just as little included in our art as musical sound painting is included in real music. For us, it is not about somehow expressing moments through a gesture, through facial expressions, but rather about revealing these outwardly in accordance with an inner law that is inherent in the human organism, and thus, in reality, to fulfill in a particular limited area that which Goethe so beautifully expressed when he said: “To whom nature reveals her secret, longs for her most worthy interpreter, art.” For, since the human being is the synthesis of the laws of the harmonies of the whole universe, it is possible to artistically represent, in fact, something - one can say: of the laws of the whole universe - that is inherent in the human organism. While our knowledge presents the concept before that which is the secret of the world, art should express the secrets of the world directly. If I give an explanation of what is presented in eurythmy, it is only to point to the source; because it is self-evident that everything artistic must be felt directly in aesthetic contemplation and must reveal itself as sympathetic to the soul. But with Goethe, in particular, you see, esteemed attendees, one has the feeling that the art of eurythmy can pass the test. We have tried to present certain scenes from the second part of Goethe's “Faust” in eurythmy, namely the earlier performances here. You may know how difficult the second part of Faust is to present on stage. Yes, you may also know how many people say that the second part of Goethe's Faust is a late effort that no longer contains the power that Goethe expressed in his art in the first part. Those who speak thus are very much mistaken. In the second part of his Faust, Goethe did indeed reveal as art that which, after a mature life experience, had opened up to him as the sources of art. But when you represent in eurythmy that which enters completely into the forms, which no longer has anything to do with the content of prose but has become pure art, you arrive at the subtleties. But starting from that, we then came to the point of, I would say, going through the Goethean poems to see to what extent that which lived artistically in Goethe's soul can be expressed through the special art of eurythmy, that is, through a visible language. And more and more it turns out that in the moment when Goethe's artistic thinking passes over into the supersensible, into that which does not live in ordinary outer life, that then the eurythmic art enters into its full right. Of course, it is a daring statement to say today that Goethe's artistic thinking was such that, where he rises above the sphere of the everyday, one feels the necessity to move on to something that also goes beyond ordinary artistic representation and into eurythmic representation. But perhaps one can say something like this when one has gradually, over a long period of time, worked one's way up to that Goethean insight, which I believe is necessary, and which also takes Goethe seriously. When a lot of people, out of philistinism – Vischer and other people were, after all, also German aesthetes in a certain sense – when certain people feel they have to reject what Goethe created later – it's so hard to to grasp what one does not immediately understand, to struggle to understand, one much prefers to blame the poet for presenting it in such an incomprehensible way. Goethe once made a harsh statement about people who also appeared during his lifetime, who, for example, appreciated his “Iphigenia” and his “Natural Daughter” less than, say, we might say, those parts in the first part of Faust, which ultimately welled up from his soul in an elemental way and are less artistic than what Goethe first achieved as an art form in the course of a long life. Goethe was angry with those who valued what he produced in his youth – including the parts of Faust, for example – more highly than what he later produced after he had developed a more mature view of art. It was this kind of anger that led to Goethe's remark, found in his estate, where he says in reference to the audience that no longer understood him:
I am convinced, my dear attendees, that Goethe would express himself in a similar way about the understanding of Goethe, the presumed understanding of Goethe, that is spreading today. But precisely when one encounters what Goethe has achieved, then one also feels the necessity to advance to new forms of art in order to express what Goethe presented in his early works. Today, after the break, we are dealing with the beginning of the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, which is an early work. But we will try to do just those parts where what is otherwise ordinary life is led up into a higher sphere - where the human soul rises to a higher, supersensible one - [we will try to do that] just in the first part of “Faust” by means of eurythmy, so that one can get a sense of how the human being in his physical, sensual, earthly existence is connected to a higher existence. In this way, we would like to use eurythmy to bring to revelation everything in the human being that lies deeply hidden as the actual secret of the world. But you will only do justice to this eurythmic art if you see it, as we are already able to offer it today, only as a beginning, as a weak attempt at what is to come. We are our own harshest critics and we know what is still lacking. But we believe that if our contemporaries show interest and attention to what is being attempted, it will be possible to bring this beginning to ever greater and greater perfection. In short, we are convinced that the art form that we are in the process of creating in eurythmy will perhaps be developed further by ourselves, albeit weakly, but by others it will be developed more and more and that it will then be recognized as a fully-fledged art form alongside other fully-fledged art forms. |
| 277b. The Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920: Eurythmy Address
14 Dec 1919, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| Goethe's view, if I am to express myself in popular terms, is that in every living thing, for example in plants, a single organ, the green leaf, is the simpler expression, the simpler revelation of the whole plant. And again, the whole plant is only the complicated expression of the individual leaf. |
| 277b. The Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920: Eurythmy Address
14 Dec 1919, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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 Public eurythmy performance in the presence of English friends Dear attendees, We would like to take the liberty of presenting a sample of what we call the eurythmic arts here. However, the art we are able to practice here is only just beginning. It is the attempt at the beginning of a new art. And so, just as everything that is striven for here in connection with this building, which is intended to represent our efforts in a certain sense, how everything here wants to tie in with what I would like to call Goetheanism, so this eurythmic art also wants to tie in with Goethe's artistic and world-view attitude. Just by saying this, I ask not to be misunderstood. It is not, so to speak, that which is to be linked to what has already emerged through Goethe, who died in 1832, but rather Goetheanism, which has been thrown into the evolution of humanity like a seed and which can produce the most diverse blossoms and fruits. We are not talking here about the Goethe of 1832, we are talking about the Goethe of 1919, about an evolved Goetheanism. And an attempt has been made to educate this eurythmic art from the same meaningful, deep sources from which Goethe drew his worldview and his artistic endeavors, in line with the progress that the human spirit has made since then. And it is not to explain this art that I would like to speak these introductory words, because that which is art must explain itself, must reveal everything that is in it in the direct gaze for the aesthetic impression. But I would like to speak to you about the sources of what we call eurythmic art here. This eurythmic art makes use of the whole human being as a means of expression. It attempts to express all the possibilities of movement that are inherent in the human organism. On the stage here before you, you will see people moving, groups of people moving. What is it that these people are meant to present? It is also a language, an inaudible, mute language. But it is not just a comparison that I use when I say that eurythmy should be a language, but it is the expression of a reality. When people speak in such a way that our spoken words become audible, then, spiritually speaking, two elements of the human being flow together in what we speak: from one side - I would say from the head side - the element of thought; and from the whole human being, the will element encounters this element of thought, which works through its organs – today this can also be proven physiologically. In every single word we speak, there is a revelation of the confluence of the element of thought with the element of will. Now, when we listen to a spoken word, we first turn our attention through the ear to the tone, the sound, the sound context, and so on. But behind what reaches us as sound, as tone, as tone and sound relationships, in the vocal, in the musical and in the literal, lie the underlying possibilities of movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs, the tongue, the palate and so on. We do not pay attention to these movements. We simply hear the sound. Through a certain kind of looking – in the Goethean sense, one could speak of a sensual-supersensory looking – the one who enables himself to do so can perceive which movements, in particular which movement tendencies, underlie the spoken word. These movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs are to be grasped. And from this knowledge of what really happens in the human being, through movements, when he speaks, the art of eurythmy has arisen from observation of this. In the training of this eurythmy, too, we have proceeded, if I may say so, in a Goethean way. You are familiar with – I do not want to theorize, but I just want to briefly mention an important principle of knowledge and art of Goethe – you are familiar with what is called the Goethean theory of metamorphosis. It has not yet been sufficiently appreciated today, because once its foundations are recognized, it will be the gateway to a meaningful world view that leads into the living. Goethe's view, if I am to express myself in popular terms, is that in every living thing, for example in plants, a single organ, the green leaf, is the simpler expression, the simpler revelation of the whole plant. And again, the whole plant is only the complicated expression of the individual leaf. And what Goethe applied only to form can be applied to the movements that find expression in an organism. And it becomes particularly meaningful when this view is applied in such a way that one artistically brings out of the human being what is present in the whole human being in the way of movement. Something very interesting comes to light here. It turns out that the movements that can be perceived through the characterized sensory-supersensory vision as underlying our language can be transferred to the whole person. Just as the whole plant is morphologically, formally, a complicated development of the individual leaf, so can the whole person be moved in his limbs so that he becomes a living larynx. Then the whole human being performs that which otherwise remains invisible and unnoticed to us when we listen to speech. On the one hand, you create a tool for an art. You create the whole human being as a tool for this eurythmic art. And since the same movements that the larynx and its neighboring organs make can be extracted from the whole human being, the whole human being becomes a visible expression of speech. When you consider that the human being, as he stands before us in his organization - in fact, you only have to look through him to see this - is a summary of all that is otherwise spread out in the whole universe that is accessible to us , then one recognizes that eurythmy uses as its instrument of expression the most complicated tool, the tool that contains the most secrets of the universe. By turning the whole human being into a larynx, one comes very close to what Goethe so beautifully characterized as his view of the relationship between man, nature and art, when he says: “When man is placed at the top of nature and feels himself to be this summit, he in turn produces a higher nature within himself, so that he finally elevates himself to the production of the work of art by combining measure, order, harmony and meaning. But at the same time, something else is achieved. The essence of art lies in the fact that, by immersing ourselves in the work of art, we silence all understanding, all intellectual activity, everything that lives only in concepts and ideas. The more art contains ideas and concepts, the less it is art. If you bypass everything conceptual and imaginative and immerse the whole person in the revelation of nature's secrets, you come closer to excluding ideas, to the true weaving and reign of nature's secrets. Then this perception, this perception without ideas or concepts, and this immersion in things is precisely the artistic. And working with such secrets of the universe, which cannot be grasped conceptually but only by immersing the whole human being in them, excluding the conceptual and the imaginative, can be achieved to the highest degree through eurythmy. For I have told you: in ordinary speech, two elements flow together, the thought element and the will element. By transferring the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs to the whole human being, so that one creates a mute language through this whole human being, one excludes precisely the thought element and the will element, which is rooted in the whole human being. This is then expressed through the movements that you see on stage. And so, on the one hand, you will see in the individual representations something like the whole human being as a moving larynx; you will see groups of people; you will also see movements of the individual human being in space, and the relationships of movement between the individual members of the groups. If we shape the art of eurythmy as I have described, it becomes quite natural for us to want to express the warmth of soul, the enthusiasm, the joy and suffering, the delight and pain, the uplift and so on that flows through our words. Everything that flows and permeates the speech element more from the heart, so to speak, is expressed through the movements of the individual in space and through the movements of the groups, through the relationships of the groups among themselves, while the actual speech element, that is, that which lies in the sound and in the sequence of sounds, is expressed by the whole human being moving his limbs. But this is what distinguishes what we are attempting here with eurythmy from all neighboring arts. We certainly do not want to compete with these neighboring arts, with the various types of dance. We are well aware that they are, of course, more perfect in their way than our eurythmy, which is only at the beginning of its endeavors. But it is something completely different. These arts create a connection between the gesture of movement and the soul, which is, so to speak, an instantaneous connection. But everything that can be expressed in this way through pantomime, through momentary gestures, is not what we strive for in our eurythmy. Just as speech itself is thoroughly lawful, just as the musical is lawful, so there is also a strict inner lawfulness in what we strive for in eurythmy. If something pantomime-like or mimic-like still comes through, it is still an imperfection and will be discarded later when the eurythmic art becomes more and more perfect. Therefore, there is nothing arbitrary about it. If two people or two groups of people in different places were to present one and the same thing in eurythmy, no greater leeway would be allowed for individual interpretation than is allowed when two pianists present one and the same Beethoven sonata according to their own interpretation. Everything arbitrary is excluded. It is a lawful, silent language. Therefore, today, when of course not everyone can be present at the eurythmic as such, this eurythmic can be accompanied on the one hand by the musical, which is, after all, the expression of the same, but can also be accompanied by the recitation. And it is precisely in recitation that it becomes clear how art finds its way to art when combined with eurythmy. You can't recite as it is popular to recite today. Today, when reciting, the unartistic element of poetry is particularly favored. Today, when reciting, a great deal of attention is paid to the fact that the content of the prose is expressed through the recitation. And that is also what one loves. This is the unartistic element. One feels this unartistic element when one remembers, firstly, how certain types, I would like to say of primitive recitation, have been emphasized in primitive cultures. Those of us who are older could still experience this in the countryside; we could see how the storytellers, as they traveled around, accompanied their tales with gestures that were very natural, not in the sense as one would call it today, but which were actually very similar to our eurythmic gestures, accompanied with such gestures, often with the whole body moving around, what they presented in the recitative. And after all, it is not the content of prose that is the main basis of real poetry, but rather the rhythmic, the formal, the formal, the rhythmic, the lawful in the succession of the audible. When writing his most significant poems, Schiller did not begin with the literal content in mind, but rather had something vaguely melodious in his soul, and it was only later, when he added the literal content to this vaguely melodious quality, that the literal content was added. The formative process that underlies all real poetry should be felt everywhere. Most of the things we call poetry today are not really poetry. So much is written today that, in fact, ninety-nine percent too much is written. But eurythmy could not be used to accompany the art of recitation, which is so popular today and which pays particular attention to the literal content of prose. So here we are trying to go back to the truly artistic in the art of recitation as well. Goethe, with the baton still in his hand like a conductor, rehearsed his “Iphigenia”, a dramatic poem, with his actors, looking at what lies at the heart of the truly artistic. The formal elements of the prose, the literal content, are not the basis for the truly artistic expression. And so it is particularly the case that what is otherwise expressed in poetry through the word, can be represented in its will element through the eurythmic art. You will therefore hear recitations of poems, and you will see these poems presented on stage in the silent eurythmic language. I believe that Goethe's poems in particular demonstrate the validity of this eurythmic art. Today we will show you, for example, eurythmy performances for Goethe's cloud poems. Goethe also applied his metamorphic view - more externalizing it, but thereby precisely translating it into art - to the transforming cloud formations stratus, cumulus, cirrus, nimbus. Goethe has illustrated in beautiful verses how these cloud formations transform into one another, an insight that came to him when he read the cloud observer Howard. He wrote a very beautiful poem “To Howard's Honorary Memory”, which we will also present to you today in eurythmy. But especially when one has such poems by Goethe, in which it is so important to follow a process in nature in poetry with such forms that the process in nature wells up and surges in the rhythm and shaping of language, then one can also follow the poetry with the forms of eurythmy. And that is why I believe that Goethe's Cloud Poems are particularly suitable for beautifully expressing how eurythmy can be found to be completely adequate for expressing what can also be expressed poetically. Now there is a poem by Goethe in which Goethe himself has expressed the whole nature of his metamorphic thought, his metamorphic feeling, in the poem “The Metamorphosis of Plants”. The whole poem lives in the presentation of form observation. From line to line, we actually have the feeling that we must not cling to the abstract idea, but that we must show ourselves obedient with our whole soul to the forms that surge and swell in the poet's imagination. And that is why the eurythmic presentation can be fully adapted to this particular poem of Goethe's about metamorphosis. And for today's performance, we have also tried to cast this poem by Goethe about the metamorphosis of plants in eurythmic forms. Especially where the poetry itself becomes like an imprint of the secrets of nature, directly created by the soul, the artistic development of human feeling reveals itself on the one hand, on the other hand, the possibility of presenting this artistic element in the way it can be presented when the whole human being is used, as I have indicated, as a kind of musical-linguistic instrument. Thus we can indeed penetrate deeply into the secrets of nature if we seek these secrets in this formal language, which we strive to reveal in eurythmy. I only ask you to consider everything that we can present today, everything that we can currently offer as a sample of our eurythmic art, as a beginning, perhaps as an attempt at a beginning. We are our own harshest critics, even in relation to what we can already do today. However, we are also convinced that if what is alive in the attempt at a new art is further developed, either by ourselves or probably by others – and there are many, many possibilities for development in this – then this eurythmic art will certainly be able to present itself as a fully-fledged art form alongside other fully-fledged art forms. As I said, we are being modest in what we can offer today, and I therefore ask you to also accept what we will present to you with indulgence as the beginning of a new art form. |
| 170. The Sense-Organs and Aesthetic Experience
15 Aug 1916, Dornach Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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| But in everything connected with the sphere of the tongue a process goes on which has a delicate similarity to the process of tasting. If you simply look at a green parrot in the way we grasp things through the senses, it is your eyes that see the green colour. |
| 170. The Sense-Organs and Aesthetic Experience
15 Aug 1916, Dornach Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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We have been concerned with getting to know the human being as he is related to the world through the realm of his senses and the organs of his life-processes, and we have attempted to consider some of the consequences of the fact which underlies such knowledge. Above all, we have cured ourselves of the trivial attitude which is taken by many people who like to regard themselves as spiritually minded, when they think they should despise everything that is called material or sense-perceptible. For we have seen that here in the physical world man has been given in his lower organs and his lower activities a reaction of higher activities and higher connections. The sense of touch and the Life-sense, as they are now, we have had to regard as very much tied to the physical, earthly world. The same applies to the Ego-sense, the Thought-sense and the Speech-sense. It is different with the senses which serve the bodily organism only in an internal way; the sense of Movement, the sense of Balance, the sense of Smell, the sense of Taste, to a certain extent even the sense of Sight. We have had to accustom ourselves to regard these senses as a shadowy reflection of something which becomes great and significant in the spiritual world, when we have gone through death. We have emphasised that through the sense of Movement we move in the spiritual world among the beings of the several Hierarchies, according to the attraction or repulsion they exercise upon us, expressed in the form of the spiritual sympathies and antipathies we experience after death. The sense of Balance does not only keep us in physical balance, as it does with the physical body here, but in a moral balance towards the beings and influences found in the spiritual world. It is similar with the other senses; the senses of Taste, Smell and Sight. And just where the hidden spiritual plays into the physical world, we cannot look to the higher senses for explanations, but have to turn to those realms of the senses which are regarded as lower. At the present day it is impossible to speak about many significant things of this kind, because today prejudices are so great. Many things that are in a higher spiritual sense interesting and important have only to be said, and at once they are misunderstood and in all sorts of ways attacked. For the time being I have therefore to abstain from pointing out many interesting processes in the realms of the senses which are responsible for important facts of life. In this respect the situation in ancient times was more favourable, though knowledge could not be disseminated as it can be today. Aristotle could speak much more freely about certain truths than is now possible, for such truths are at once taken in too personal a way and awaken personal likes and dislikes. You will find in the works of Aristotle, for example, truths which concern the human being very deeply but could not be outlined today before a considerable gathering of people. They are truths of the kind indicated recently when I said: the Greeks knew more about the connection between the soul and spirit on the one hand and the physical bodily nature on the other, without becoming materialistic. In the writings of Aristotle you can find, for example, very beautiful descriptions of the outer forms of courageous men, of cowards, of hot-tempered people, of sleepyheads. In a way that has a certain justification he describes what sort of hair, what sort of complexion, what kind of wrinkles brave or cowardly men have, what sort of bodily proportions the sleepyheads have, and so on. Even these things would cause some difficulties if they were set forth today, and other things even more. Nowadays, when human beings have become so personal and really want to let personal feelings cloud their perception of the truth, one has to speak more in generalities if one has, under some circumstances, to describe the truth. From a certain point of view, every human quality and activity can be comprehended, if we ask the right questions about what has been recently described here. For instance, we have said: the realms of the senses, as they exist in the human being today, are in a way separate and stationary regions, as the constellations of the Zodiac are stationary regions out in cosmic space as compared with the orbiting planets, which make their journeys and alter their positions relatively quickly. In the same way, the regions of the senses have definite boundaries, while the life-processes work through the whole organism, circling through the regions of the senses and permeating them with the effects of their work. Now we have also said that during the Old Moon period our present sense-organs were still organs of life, still worked as life-organs, and that our present life-organs were then more in the realm of the soul. Think of what has often been emphasised: that there is an atavism in human life, a kind of return to the habits and peculiarities of what was once natural; a falling back, in this case into the Old Moon period. In other words, there can be an atavistic return to the dreamlike, imaginative way of looking at things that was characteristic of Old Moon. Such an atavistic falling back into Moon-visions must today be regarded as pathological. Please take this accurately: it is not the visions themselves which are pathological, for if this were so, and if all that man experienced during the Old Moon time, when he lived only in such visions, had to be regarded as pathological—then one would have to say that humanity was ill during the Old Moon period; that during the Old Moon period man was in fact out of his mind. That, of course, would be complete nonsense. What is pathological is not the visions themselves, but that they occur in the present earthly organisation of the human being in such a way that they cannot be endured; that they are used by this earthly organisation in a way that is inappropriate for them as Moon visions. For if someone has a Moon vision, this is suited only to lead to a feeling, an activity, a deed which would have been appropriate on the Old Moon. But if someone has a Moon vision here during the Earth period and does things as they are done with an earthly organism, that is pathological. A man acts in that way only because his earthly organism cannot cope with the vision, is in a sense impregnated by it. Take the crudest example: someone is led to have a vision. Instead of remaining calm before it, and contemplating it inwardly, he applies it in some way to the physical world—although it should be applied only to the spiritual world—and acts accordingly with his body. He begins to act wildly, because the vision penetrates and stirs his body in a way it should not do. There you have the crudest example. The vision should remain within the region to which it naturally belongs. It does not do so if today, as an atavistic vision, it is not tolerated by the physical body. If the physical body is too weak to prevail against the vision, a state of helplessness sets in. If the physical body is strong enough to prevail, it weakens the vision. Then it no longer has the character of pretending to be the same as a thing or process in the sense-world; that is the illusion imposed by a vision on someone made ill by it. If the physical organism is so strong that it can fight the tendency of an atavistic vision to lie about itself, then the person concerned will be strong enough to relate himself to the world in the same way as during the Old Moon period, and yet to adapt this behaviour to his present organism. What does this mean? It means that the person will to some extent inwardly alter his Zodiac, with its twelve sense-regions. He will alter it in such a way that in his Zodiac, with its twelve sense-regions, more life-processes than sense-processes will occur. Or, to put it better, the effect is to transform the sense-process in the sense-region into a life-process and so to raise it out of its present lifeless condition into life. Thus a man sees, but at the same time something is living in his seeing; he hears and at the same time something is living inwardly in his hearing; instead of living only in the stomach or on the tongue, it lives now in the eye and in the ear. The sense-processes are brought into movement. Their life is stimulated. This is quite acceptable. Then something is incorporated in these sense-organs which today is possessed only to this degree by the life-organs. The life-organs are imbued with a strong activity of sympathy and antipathy. Think how much the whole of life depends upon sympathy and antipathy! One thing is taken, another rejected. These powers of sympathy and antipathy, normally developed by the life-organs, are now poured into the sense-organs. The eye not only sees the colour red; it feels sympathy or antipathy for the colour. Permeation by life streams hack into the sense organs, so we can say that the sense-organs become in a certain way life-regions once more. The life-processes, too, then have to be altered. They acquire more activity of soul than they normally possess for life on earth. It happens in this way: three life-processes, breathing, warming and nutrition, are brought together and imbued with heightened activity of soul. In ordinary breathing we breathe crude material air; with the ordinary development of warmth it is just warmth, and so on. Now a kind of symbiosis occurs; when these life-processes form a unity, when they are imbued with activity of soul, they form a unity. They are not separate as in the present organism, but set up a kind of association. An inward community is formed by the processes of breathing, warming and nutrition; not coarse nutrition, but a process of nutrition which takes place without it being necessary to eat, and it does not occur alone, as eating does, but in conjunction with the other processes.  Similarly, the other four life-processes are united. Secretion, sustenance, growth and reproduction are united and also form a process embracing activity of soul. Then the two parties can themselves unite: not that all the life-processes then work together, but that, having entered into separate unities of three and four processes, they work together in that form. This leads to the emergence of soul-powers which have the character of thinking, feeling and willing; again three. But they are different; not thinking, feeling and willing as they normally are on earth, but somewhat different. They are nearer to life-processes, but not as separate as life-processes are on earth. A very intimate and delicate process occurs in a man when he is able to endure something like a thinking back into the Old Moon, not to the extent of having visions, and yet a form of comprehension arises which has a certain similarity to them. The sense-regions become life-regions; the life-processes become soul-processes. A man cannot stay always in that condition, or he would be unfitted for the earth. He is fitted for the earth through his senses and his life-organs being normally such as we have described. But in some cases a man can shape himself in this other way, and then, if his development tends more towards the will, it leads to aesthetic creativity; or, if it tends more towards comprehension, towards perception, it leads to aesthetic experience. Real aesthetic life in human beings consists in this, that the sense-organs are brought to life, and the life-processes filled with soul. This is a very important truth about human beings, for it enables us to understand many things. The stronger life of the sense-organs and the different life of the sense-realms must be sought in art and the experience of art. And it is the same with the processes of life; they are permeated with more activity of soul in the experience of art than in ordinary life. Because these things are not considered in their reality in our materialistic time, the significance of the alteration which goes on in a human being within the realm of art cannot be properly understood. Nowadays man is regarded more or less as a definite, finished being; but within certain limits he is variable. This is shown by a capacity for change such as the one we have now considered. What we have gone into here embraces far-reaching truths. Take one example: it is those senses best fitted for the physical plane which have to be transformed most if they are to be led back halfway to the Old Moon condition. The Ego—sense, the Thought-sense, the immediate sense of Touch, because they are directly fitted for the earthly physical world, have to be completely transformed if they are to serve the human condition which results from this going back halfway to the Old Moon period. For example, you cannot use in art the encounters we have in life with an Ego, or with the world of thought. At the most, in some arts which are not quite arts the same relationship to the Ego and to thought can be present as in ordinary earthly life. To paint the portrait of a man as an Ego, just as he stands there in immediate reality, is not a work of art. The artist has to do something with the Ego, go through a process with it, through which he raises this Ego out of the specialisation in which it lives today, at the present stage in the development of the earth; he has to give it a wide general significance, something typical. The artist does that as a matter of course. In the same way the artist cannot express the world of thought, as it finds expression in the ordinary earthly world, in an artistic way immediately; for he would then produce not a poem or any work of art, but something of a didactic, instructive kind, which could never really be a work of art. The alterations made by the artist in what is actually present form a way back towards that reanimation of the senses I have described. There is something else we must consider when we contemplate this transformation of the senses. The life-processes, I said, interpenetrate. Just as the planets cover one another, and have a significance in their mutual relationships, while the constellations remain stationary, so is it with the regions of the senses if they pass over into a planetary condition in human life, becoming mobile and living; then they achieve relationships to one another. Thus artistic perception is never so confined to the realm of a particular sense as ordinary earthly perception is. Particular senses enter into relationships with one another. Let us take the example of painting. If we start from real Spiritual Science, the following result is reached. For ordinary observation through the senses, the senses of sight, warmth, taste and smell are separate senses. In painting, a remarkable symbiosis, a remarkable association of these senses comes about, not in the external sense-organs themselves, but in what lies behind them, as I have indicated. A painter, or someone who appreciates a painting, does not merely look at its colours, the red or blue or violet; he really tastes the colours, not of course with the physical sense-organ—then he would have to lick it with his tongue. But in everything connected with the sphere of the tongue a process goes on which has a delicate similarity to the process of tasting. If you simply look at a green parrot in the way we grasp things through the senses, it is your eyes that see the green colour. But if you appreciate a painting, a delicate imaginative process comes about in the region behind your tongue which still belongs to the sense of taste, and this accompanies the process of seeing. Not what happens upon the tongue, but what follows, more delicate physiological processes—they accompany the process of seeing, so that the painter really tastes the colour in a deeper sense in his soul. And the shades of colour are smelt by him, not with the nose, but with all that goes on deeper in the organism, more in the soul, with every activity of smelling. These conjoined sense-activities occur when the realms of the senses pass over more into processes of life. If we read a description which is intended to inform us about the appearance of something, or what is done with something, we let our speech-sense work, the word-sense through which we learn about this or that. If we listen to a poem, and listen in the same way as to something intended to convey information, we do not understand the poem. The poem is expressed in such a way that we perceive it through the speech-sense, but with the speech-sense alone we do not understand it. We have also to direct towards the poem the ensouled sense of balance and the ensouled sense of movement; but they must be truly ensouled. Here again united activities of the sense-organs arise, and the whole realm of the senses passes over into the realm of life. All this must be accompanied by life-processes which are ensouled, transformed in such a way that they participate in the life of the soul, and are not working only as ordinary life-processes belonging to the physical world. If the listener to a piece of music develops the fourth life-process, secretion, so far that he begins to sweat, this goes too far; it does not belong to the aesthetic realm when secretion leads to physical excretion. It should be a process in the soul, not going as far as physical excretion; but it should be the same process that underlies physical excretion. Moreover, secretion should not appear alone. All four life-processes—secretion, sustenance, growth and reproduction—should work together, but all in the realm of soul. So do the life-processes become soul-processes. On the one hand, Spiritual Science will have to lead earth-evolution towards the spiritual world; otherwise, as we have often seen, the downfall of mankind will come about in the future. On the other hand, Spiritual Science must renew the capacity to take hold of and comprehend the physical by means of the spirit. Materialism has brought not only an inability to find the spiritual, but also an inability to understand the physical. For the spirit lives in all physical things, and if one knows nothing of the spirit, one cannot understand the physical. Think of those who know nothing of the spirit; what do they know of this, that all the realms of the senses can be transformed in such a way that they become realms of life, and that the life-processes can be transformed in such a way that they appear as processes of the soul? What do present-day physiologists know about these delicate changes in the human being? Materialism has led gradually to the abandonment of everything concrete in favour of abstractions, and gradually these abstractions are abandoned, too. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people still spoke of vital forces. Naturally, nothing can be done with such an abstraction, for one understands something only by going into concrete detail. If one grasps the seven life-processes fully, one has the reality; and this is what matters—to get hold of the reality again. The only effect of renewing such abstractions as elan vital and other frightful abstractions, which have no meaning but are only admissions of ignorance, will be to lead mankind—although the opposite may be intended—into the crudest materialism, because it will be a mystical materialism. The need for the immediate future of mankind is for real knowledge, knowledge of the facts which can be drawn only from the spiritual world. We must make a real advance in the spiritual comprehension of the world. Once more we have to think back to the good Aristotle, who was nearer to the old vision than modern man. I will remind you of only one thing about old Aristotle, a peculiar fact. A whole library has been written about catharsis, by which he wished to describe the underlying purpose of tragedy. Aristotle says: Tragedy is a connected account of occurrences in human life by which feelings of fear and compassion are aroused; but through the arousing of these feelings, and the course they take, the soul is led to purification, to catharsis. Much has been written about this in the age of materialism, because the organ for understanding Aristotle was lacking. The phrase has been understood only by those who saw that Aristotle in his own way (not, of course, the way of a modern materialist) means by catharsis a medical or half-medical term. Because the life-processes become soul-processes, the aesthetic experience of a tragedy carries right into the bodily organism those life-processes which normally accompany fear and compassion. Through tragedy these processes are purified and at the same time ensouled. In Aristotle's definition of catharsis the entire ensouling of the life-processes is embraced. If you read more of his Poetics you will feel in it something like a breath of this deeper understanding of the aesthetic activity of man, gained not through a modern way of knowledge, but from the old traditions of the Mysteries. In reading Aristotle's Poetics one is seized by immediate life much more than one can be in reading anything by present day writers on aesthetics, who only sniff round things and encompass them with dialectics, but never reach the things themselves. Later on a significant high-point in comprehending aesthetic activity of man was reached in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). It was a time given more to abstractions. Today we have to add the spiritual to a thinking that remains in the realm of idealism. But if we look at this more abstract character of the time of Goethe and Schiller, we can see that the abstractions in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters embrace something of what has been said here. With Schiller it seems that the process has been carried down more into the material, but only because this material existence requires to be penetrated more deeply by the power of the spiritual, taken hold of intensively. What does Schiller say? He says: Man as he lives here on earth has two fundamental impulses, the impulse of reason and the impulse that comes from nature. Through a natural necessity the impulse of reason works logically. One is compelled to think in a particular way; there is no freedom in thinking. What is the use of speaking of freedom where this necessity of reason prevails? One is compelled to think that three times three is not ten, but nine. Logic signifies the absolute necessity of reason. So, says Schiller, when man accepts the pure necessity of reason, he submits to spiritual compulsion. Schiller contrasts the necessity of reason with the needs of the senses, which live in everything present in instinct, in emotion. Here, too, man is not free, but follows natural necessity. Now Schiller looks for the condition midway between rational necessity and natural necessity. This middle condition, he finds, emerges when rational necessity bows before the feelings that lead us to love or not to love something; so that we no longer follow a rigid logical necessity when we think but allow our inner impulses to work in shaping our mental images, as in aesthetic creation. And then natural necessity, on its side, is transcended. Then it is no longer the needs of the senses which bring compulsion, for they are ensouled and spiritualised. A man no longer desires simply what his body desires, for sensuous enjoyment is spiritualised. Thus rational necessity and natural necessity come nearer to one another. You should, of course, read this in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters themselves; they are among the most important philosophical works in the evolution of the world. In Schiller's exposition there lives what we have just heard here, though with him it takes the form of metaphysical abstraction. What Schiller calls the liberation of rational necessity from its rigidity, this is what happens when the senses are reanimated, when they are led back once more to the process of life. What Schiller calls the spiritualisation of natural need—he should really have called it “ensouling”—this happens where the life-processes work like soul-processes. Life-processes become more ensouled; sense-processes become more alive. That is the real procedure, though given a more abstract conceptual form, that can be traced in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. Only thus could he express it at that time, when there was not yet enough spiritual strength in human thoughts to reach down into that realm where spirit lives in the way known to the seer. Here spirit and matter need not be contrasted, for it can be seen how spirit penetrates all matter everywhere, so that nowhere can one come upon matter without spirit. Thinking remains mere thinking because man is not able to make his thoughts strong enough, spiritual enough, to master matter, to penetrate into matter as it really is. Schiller was not able to recognise that life-processes can work as soul-processes. He could not go so far as to see that the activity which finds material expression in nutrition, in the development of warmth and in breathing, can live enhanced in the soul, so that it ceases to be material. The material particles vanish away under the power of the concepts with which the material processes are comprehended. Nor was Schiller able to get beyond regarding logic as simply a dialectic of ideas; he could not reach the higher stage of development, attainable through initiation, where the spiritual is experienced as a process in its own right, so that it enters as a living force into what otherwise is merely cognition. Schiller in his Aesthetic Letters could not quite trust himself to reach the concrete facts. But through them pulses an adumbration of something that can be exactly grasped if one tries to lay hold of the living through the spiritual and the material through the living. So we see in every field how evolution as a whole is pressing on towards knowledge of the spirit. When, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, a philosophy was developed more or less out of concepts, longings were alive in it for a greater concreteness, though this could not yet be achieved. Because the power to achieve it was inadequate, the endeavour and the longing for greater concreteness fell into the crude materialism that has continued from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the present day. But it must be realised that spiritual understanding cannot reside only in a turning towards the spiritual, but must and can overcome the material and recognise the spirit in matter. As you will see, this has further consequences. You will see that man as an aesthetic being is raised above earthly evolution into another world. And this is important. Through his aesthetic attitude of mind or aesthetic creativity a man no longer acts in a way that is entirely appropriate for the earth, but raises the sphere of his being above the sphere of the earth. In this way through our study of aesthetics we approach some deep mysteries of existence. In saying such things, one may touch the highest truths, and yet sound as if one were crazy. But life cannot be understood if one retreats faint heartedly before the real truths. Take a work of art, the Sistine Madonna, the Venus of Milo—if it is really a work of art, it does not entirely belong to the earth. It is raised above the events of earth; that is quite obvious. What sort of power, then, lives in it—in a Sistine Madonna, in a Venus of Milo? A power, which is also in man, but which is not entirely fitted for the earth. If everything in man were fitted only for the earth, he would be unable to live on any other level of existence as well. He would never go on to the Jupiter evolution. Not everything is fitted for the earth; and for occult vision not everything in man is in accord with his condition as a being of the earth. There are hidden forces which will one day give man the impetus to develop beyond earth-existence. But art itself can be understood only if we realise that its task is to point the way beyond the purely earthly, beyond adaptation to earthly conditions, to where the reality in the Venus of Milo can be found. We can never acquire a true comprehension of the world unless we first recognise something which there will be increasing need to recognise as we go forward to meet the future and its demands. It is often thought today that when anyone makes a logical statement that can be logically proved, the statement must be applicable to life. Logic alone, however, is not enough. People are always pleased when they can prove something logically; and we have seen arise in our midst, as you know, all kinds of world outlooks and philosophical systems, and no-one familiar with logic will doubt they can all be logically proved. But nothing is achieved for life by these logical proofs. The point is that our thinking must be brought into line with reality, not merely with logic. What is merely logical is not valid—only what is in keeping with reality. Let me make this clear by an example. Imagine a tree-trunk lying there before you, and you set out to describe it. You can describe it quite correctly, and you can prove, beyond a doubt, that something real is lying there because you have described it in exact accordance with external reality. But in fact you have described an untruth; what you have described has no real existence. It is a tree-trunk from which the roots have been cut away, and the boughs and branches lopped off. But it could have come into existence only along with boughs and blossoms and roots, and it is nonsense to think of the mere trunk as a reality. By itself it is no reality; it must be taken together with its forces of growth, with all the inner forces which enabled it to come into being. We need to see with certainty that the tree-trunk as it rests there is a lie; we have a reality before us only when we look at a tree. Logically it is not necessary to regard a tree-trunk as a lie, but a sense for reality demands that only the whole tree be regarded as truth. A crystal is a truth, for it can exist independently—independently in a certain sense, for of course everything is relative. A rosebud is not a truth. A crystal is; but a rosebud is a lie if regarded only as a rosebud. A lack of this sense for reality is responsible for many phenomena in the life of today. Crystallography and, at a stretch, mineralogy are still real sciences; not so geology. What geology describes is as much an abstraction as the tree-trunk. The so-called “earth's crust” includes everything that grows up out of it, and without that it is unthinkable. We must have philosophers who allow themselves to think abstractly only in so far as they know what they are doing. To think in accordance with reality, and not merely in accordance with logic—that is what we shall have to learn to do, more and more. It will change for us the whole aspect of evolution and history. Seen from the standpoint of reality, what is the Venus of Milo, for instance, or the Sistine Madonna? From the point of view of the earth such works of art are lies; they are no reality. Take them just as they are and you will never come to the truth of them. You have to be carried away from the earth if you are to see any fine work of art in its reality. You have to stand before it with a soul attuned quite differently from your state of mind when you are concerned with earthly things. The work of art that has here no reality will then transport you into the realm where it has reality—the elemental world. We can stand before the Venus of Milo in a way that accords with reality only if we have the power to wrest ourselves free from mere sense-perception. I have no wish to pursue teleology in a futile sense. We will therefore not speak of the purpose of Art; that would be pedantic, philistine. But what comes out of Art, how it arises in life—these are questions that can be asked and answered. There is no time today for a complete answer, only for a brief indication. It will be helpful if we consider first the opposite question: What would happen if there were no Art in the world? All the forces which flow into Art, and the enjoyment of Art, would then be diverted into living out of harmony with reality. Eliminate Art from human evolution and you would have in its place as much untruth as previously there had been Art. It is just here, in connection with Art, that we encounter a dangerous situation which is always present at the Threshold of the spiritual world. Listen to what comes from beyond the Threshold and you will hear that everything has two sides! If a man has a sense of reality, he will come through aesthetic comprehension to a higher truth; but if he lacks this sense of reality he can be led precisely by aesthetic comprehension of the world into untruth. There is always this forking of the road, and to grasp this is very important: it applies not only to occultism but to Art. To comprehend the world in accordance with reality will be an accompaniment of the spiritual life that Spiritual Science has to bring about. Materialism has brought about the exact opposite—a thinking that is not in accord with reality. Contradictory as this may sound, it is so only for those who judge the world according to their own picture of it, and not in accordance with reality. We are living at a stage of evolution when the faculty for grasping even ordinary facts of the physical world is steadily diminishing, and this is a direct result of materialism. In this connection some interesting experiments have been made. They proceed from materialistic thinking; but, as in many other cases, the outcome of materialistic thinking can work to the benefit of the human faculties that are needed for developing a spiritual outlook. The following is one of the many experiments that have been made. A complete scene was thought out in advance and agreed upon. Someone was to give a lecture, and during it he was to say something that would be felt as a direct insult by a certain man in the audience. This man was to spring from his seat, and a scuffle was to ensue. During the scuffle the insulted man was to thrust his hand into his pocket and draw out a revolver—and the scene was to go on developing from there. Picture it for yourselves—a whole prearranged programme carried out in every detail! Thirty persons were invited to be the audience. They were no ordinary people: they were law students well advanced in their studies, or lawyers who had already graduated. These thirty witnessed the whole affair and were afterwards asked to describe what had occurred. Those who were in the secret had drawn up a protocol which showed that everything had taken place exactly as planned. The thirty were no fools, but well-educated people whose task later on would be to go out into the world and investigate how scuffles and scrimmages and many other things come about. Of the thirty, twenty-six gave a completely false account of what they had seen, and only four were even approximately correct ... only four! For years experiments like this have been made for the purpose of demonstrating how little weight can be attached to depositions given before a court of justice. The twenty-six were all present; they could all say: “I saw it with my own eyes.” People do not in the least realise how much is required in order to set forth correctly a series of events that has taken place before their very eyes. The art of forming a true picture of something that takes place in our presence needs to be cultivated. If there is no feeling of responsibility towards a sense-perceptible fact, the moral responsibility which is necessary for grasping spiritual facts can never be attained. In our present world, with its stamp of materialism, what feeling is there for the seriousness of the fact that among thirty descriptions by eyewitnesses of an event, twenty-six were completely false, and four only could be rated as barely correct? If you pause to consider such a thing, you will see how tremendously important for ordinary life the fruits of a spiritual outlook can become. Perhaps you will ask: Were things different in earlier times? Yes, in those times men had not developed the kind of thinking we have today. The Greeks were not possessed of the purely abstract thinking we have, and need to have, in order that we may find our place in the world in the right way for our time. But here were are concerned not with ways of thinking, but with truth. Aristotle tried, in his own way, to express an aesthetic understanding of life in much more concrete concepts. And in the earliest Greek times it was expressed, still more concretely, in Imaginations that came from the Mysteries. Instead of concepts, the men of those ancient times had pictures. They would say: Once upon a time lived Uranus. And in Uranus they saw all that man takes in through his head, through the forces which now work out through the senses into the external world. Uranus—all twelve senses—was wounded; drops of blood fell into Maya, into the ocean, and foam spurted up. Here we must think of the senses, when they were more living, sending down into the ocean of life something which rises up like foam from the pulsing of the blood through life-processes which have now become processes in the soul. All this may be compared with the Greek Imagination of Aphrodite, Aphrogenea, the goddess of beauty rising from the foam that sprang from the blood-drops of the wounded Uranus. In the older form of the myth, where Aphrodite is a daughter of Uranus and the ocean, born from the foam that rises from the blood-drops of Uranus, we have an imaginative rendering of the aesthetic situation of mankind, and indeed a thought of great significance for human evolution at large. We need to connect a further idea with this older form of the myth, where Aphrodite is the child not of Zeus and Dione, but of Uranus and the ocean. We need to add to it another Imagination which enters still more deeply into reality, reaching not merely into the elemental world but right down into physical reality. Beside the myth of Aphrodite, the myth of the origin of beauty among mankind, we must set the great truth of the entry into humanity of primal goodness, the Spirit showering down into Maya-Maria, even as the blood-drops of Uranus ran down into the ocean, which also is Maya. Then will appear in its beauty the dawn of the unending reign of the good and of knowledge of the good; the truly good, the spiritual. This is what Schiller had in mind when he wrote, referring especially to moral knowledge: Nur durch das Morgentor des Schoenen You see how many tasks for Spiritual Science are mounting up. And they are not merely theoretical tasks; they are tasks of life. |
| 199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture VII
21 Aug 1920, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar Rudolf Steiner |
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| Then, thoughts do, indeed, appear only like so many associated atomistic formations that coalesce when we form an opinion. The tree is green. Here “green” is the one thought, “tree” is the other, and the two flow together. The inner being is no longer alive; it has been disemboweled and only the thought mechanism remains. |
| 199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture VII
21 Aug 1920, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar Rudolf Steiner |
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Genuine knowledge of the impulses holding sway in humanity, knowledge that must be acquired if we wish to take a Position in life in any direction, is possible only if we attempt to go deeply into the differences of soul conditions existing between the members of the human race. In respect to the right progress for all mankind, it is certainly necessary that human beings understand one another, that an element common to all men is present. This common element, however, can only develop when we focus on the varieties of soul dispositions and developments that exist among the different members of humanity. In an age of abstract thinking and mere intellectualism such as the one in which we find ourselves, people are only too prone to look only for the abstract common denominators. Because of this they fail to arrive at the actual concrete unity, for it is precisely by grasping the differences that one comprehends the former. From any number of viewpoints, I have referred in particular to the mutual relationships resulting out of these differences between the world's population of the West and East. Today, I should like to point to such differentiations from yet another standpoint. When we look at the obvious features of present general culture, what do we actually find? The form taken by the thoughts of most people in the civilized world really shows an essentially Western coloring, something originating in the characteristic tendencies of the West. Look at newspapers today that are published in America or England, in France, Germany, Austria or Russia. Although you will definitely sense certain differences in the mode of thinking, and so on, you will also notice one thing they have in common. If this is the Western region here (see sketch), this the middle one and that the Eastern, this common element, which comes to light everywhere, say, in newspapers as well as in ordinary popular literary and scientific publications, does not derive its impulse from the depths of the national characteristics. In a St. Petersburg paper, for instance, you do not find what arises from the heritage of the Russian people. You do not discover the heritage of Central European peoples by reading a Viennese paper or one from Berlin. The element determining the basic configuration and character (of all publications) has basically arisen in the West, and then poured itself into the individual regions. The fundamental coloring of what has come to the fore from among the peoples of the West has, therefore, essentially spread out over the civilized world.  When things are viewed superficially, one might doubt this; but if you go more deeply into the matters under discussion here, you can no longer doubt them. Consider the attitude, the basic sentiment, the conceptual form, expressed in a newspaper from Vienna or Berlin, or a literary or scientific work from either city. Compare this with a publication from London—quite aside from the language—and you will discover that there is a greater similarity between the publication from London and the book from Vienna, Paris, or even New York or Chicago than there is between the present thoughts and ideas in literary and scientific works from Vienna and Berlin, and the special nuance which Fichte53 for example, poured into his thoughts as an enlivening element. I shall demonstrate this to you by citing just one example. There is a saying by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great philosopher who was born at the turn of the nineteenth century, that is so characteristic of him that no one today understands it. It goes, “The external world is the substance of duty become visible.” The sentence means nothing less than this. When we look out into the world of mountains, clouds, woods and rivers, of animals, plants and minerals, all this is in itself something devoid of meaning, without reality, it is merely a phenomenon. It is only there to enable the human being in his evolution to fulfill his duty. For I could not carry out my obligations in a world in which I would not be surrounded by things that I could touch. There must be wood, there must be a hammer. In itself, it has no significance and no materiality. It is only the substance of my duty which has become sense-perceptible. Everything outside exists primarily for the purpose of bringing duty to light. This saying was coined by a man a century ago out of the innermost sentiments of his soul and character as well as his folk spirit. It did not become generally known. When people talk about Johann Gottlieb Fichte today, when they write books about him and mention him in newspaper articles, they only perceive the external form of his words. No one really understands anything about Fichte. You may take everything you find on him today, either literary or scientific, but it has nothing whatever to do with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It does, however, have a great deal to do with what arose out of the Western folk spirit, and has spread over the rest of the civilized world. These more delicate relationships are not discerned. That is the reason why nobody even thinks of characterizing in a deep and exhaustive manner the essential feature of what arises from the spirit of the various nationalities. For it is all inundated today by what arises from the West. In Central Europe, in the East, people imagine that they are thinking along their own ethnic lines. This is not the case, they think in accordance with what they have adopted from the West. In what I am now saying lies the key to much of what is really the riddle of the present age. This riddle can be solved only when we become aware of the specific qualities arising from the various regions of the world. There is, first of all, the East that today certainly offers us no true picture of itself. If untruthfulness were not the underlying characteristic of all public life in our time, the world would not be so ignorant of the fact that what we call Bolshevism is spreading rapidly throughout the East and into Asia; that it has gone far already. People have a great desire to sleep through the actual events, and are glad to be kept in ignorance. It is therefore easy to withhold from them what is really taking place. Thus, people will live to see the East and the whole of Asia inundated by the most extreme, radical product of Western thought, namely Bolshevism, an element utterly foreign to these people. If we wish to look into what it is that the world of the East brings forth out of the depths of its folk character, it becomes obvious that it is possible to discover the fundamental nuance of feeling in the East only by going back into earlier times and learning through them. For, in regard to its original character, the East has become completely decadent. Forgetting its very nature, the East has allowed itself to be inundated by what I have described as the most extreme, radical offshoots of Western thought. Certainly, it is true that what was once there is still living within Eastern humanity, but today it is all covered up. What once lived in the East, what once vibrated through Eastern souls, survives in its final results where it is no longer understood, where it has turned into a superstitious ritual, where it has become the hypocritical murmurings of the popes of the Orthodox Russian ritual, incomprehensible even to those who believe they understand it. A direct line runs from ancient India to these formulas of the Russian church ritual, which are now only rattled off to the multitudes in the form of lip service. For this whole inclination which thus expressed itself, which bestowed on the Eastern soul its imprint and also does so today in a suppressed form, is the potential for developing a spiritual state of mind that guides the human being towards the prenatal, to what exists in our life before birth, before conception. In the very beginning, the nature of what permeated the East as a world conception and religious attitude was connected with the fact that this East possessed a concept which has been completely lost to the West. As I have said here before, the West has the concept of immortality, not that of “not having been born,” of “unbornness.” We have the word immortality, we do not have the term “unbornness.” This implies that in our thinking we continue life after death, but not into the time before birth. On the other hand, the East possessed that special soul inclination it had that still included Imagination and Inspiration in its thoughts and concepts. By means of this particular manner of expressing the conceptual content of its soul world, the East was far less predisposed to pay heed to the life after death than to that before birth. In regard to the human being it viewed life here in the sense world as something that comes to man after he has received his tasks prior to birth, as something that he has to absolve here in the sense of the task given him. He was disposed to regard this life as a duty set human beings by the gods before they descended into this earthly body of flesh. It goes without saying that such a world conception encompasses both repeated earth lives and the lives between death and birth; for one can quite well speak of a single life after death, but not of only one before birth. That would be an impossible teaching. After all, one who refers at all to pre-existence would then not speak of one earth life only, which is something that should be obvious to you upon reflection. It was the way they had of looking up into the supersensory world, which was brought about by the whole predisposition of these Eastern souls, but it was one that focused their attention on the life we lead between death and a new birth prior to being drawn down to earthly life. Everything else, everything in the way of political, social, historical and economical ideas was only the consequence of what dwelt in the soul due to the orientation towards the life between birth and conception. This life, this mood of soul, is particularly fitted to turn the human soul's gaze to the spiritual, to fill man with the super-sensible world. For even here on earth, man considers himself entirely a creation of the spiritual world, indeed, as a being who, in the world of the senses, is merely pursuing his super-sensible life. Everything that became decadent in later ages, the establishment of kingdoms, the social structure of the ancient Orient and its very constitution, developed from this special underlying mood of soul. This soul condition might be said today to be overpowered, because it became weak and crippled, because it was only promulgated as if out of what I would like to call “rachitic” soul members, as for example, in the works of Rabindranath Tagore,54 which are like something that is poured into vague, nebulous formulas. In actual practice, we are today inundated by what expresses itself in Bolshevism as the most extreme, radical wing of Western thinking. The West will have to experience that something it did not wish to have for itself is moving over into the East, that in a not very distant future, what the West pushed off on the East will surge back upon it from there. This will result in a strange kind of self-knowledge. What has this remarkable development in the East led to? It has led the people of the East to employ the holy inner zeal they once utilized to foster the impulse for the supersensory world and to apprehend the spiritual in all its purity, to accept the most materialistic view of outer life with religious fervor. Even though Bolshevism is the most extreme consequence of the most materialistic view of the world and social life, it will, as it moves further into Asia, increasingly transform itself into something that is received there with the same religious zeal as was the spiritual world in former times. In the East, people will speak of the economic life in the same terminology once used to speak of the sacred Brahma. The fundamental disposition of the soul does not change; it endures, for it is not the content (of the soul) that matters here. The most materialistic views can be approached with the same fervor formerly used to grasp the most spiritual. Let us now turn and look at the West. The West has given rise to the human soul's most recent development. It must be of special interest to us because it has brought forth the view which, rising like a mist, has since spread over the whole civilized world. It is the manner of conception that already found, its most significant expression in Francis Bacon and Hobbes; in minds of more recent times, in the economist Adam Smith, for example; among philosophers, in John Stuart Mill, and among historians, in Buckle, and so on.55 It is a form of thinking that no longer contains any Imagination and Inspiration in its conceptions and ideas, where the human being is dependent on directing his conceptual life entirely outwards to the sense world, absorbing the impressions of the latter according to the associations of thoughts resulting from that same world. This came to its most brilliant philosophical expression in David Hume, also in other such as Locke.56 There is something very strange here that must, however, be mentioned. When we focus on the West, we must pay heed to how minds like John Stuart Mill, for example, speak of human thought associations. The term “association of ideas” is in fact a completely Western thought form, but in Central Europe, for instance, it has been in such common use for more than half a century that people speak of it as if it had originated there. When psychology is taught in John Stuart Mill's sense, one says, for instance, that in the human soul, thoughts first connect themselves by means of one thought embracing another, or by one thought attaching itself to another, or by one permeating another. This implies that people look upon the thought world and view the individual thoughts as they would little spheres that relate themselves to each other (see drawing). To be consistent one would have to eliminate everything to do with the ego and astral body, inwardly referring only to a mere thought mechanism, something that a great number of people do, in fact, speak of. The soul of man is disemboweled, as it were. When you read a book by John Stuart Mill with its deductive and inductive logic, you feel as if you were mentally placed in a dissecting room where a number of animals hang that are having their innards taken out. Likewise, in the way Mill proceeds, one feels as if man's soul-spiritual being were disemboweled. He first empties the human being of everything within, leaving only the outer sheath. Then, thoughts do, indeed, appear only like so many associated atomistic formations that coalesce when we form an opinion. The tree is green. Here “green” is the one thought, “tree” is the other, and the two flow together. The inner being is no longer alive; it has been disemboweled and only the thought mechanism remains.  This manner of conceiving of things is not derived from the sense world; it is imposed upon it. In my book, The Riddles of Philosophy,57 I have drawn attention to how a mind such as John Stuart Mill's is in no way related to the inner world; it is simply given to behaving like a mere onlooker in whom the external world is reflected. Our concern here is that this method of thinking brings about what I have often described as the tragedy of materialism, which is that it no longer comprehends matter. For how can materialism fathom the nature of matter—and we have seen that, by going deeply into the human being, one penetrates into the true material element of the earth—if it first eliminates in thought what actually represents matter? In this regard, an extreme consequence already has been reached. This extreme consequence could easily be traced today if it were not for the fact that people never look at the whole context of things, only at the details. Imagine where it must lead if all the actual inner flexible aspects of the ego are eliminated, if the human being is emptied of the very element that can enlighten him in the sense world concerning the spirit. Just think, where must this finally lead? It must result in the human being feeling that he no longer has anything of the actual content of the world. He looks outside at the sense world without realizing the truth of what we said yesterday, namely, that behind the external world of the senses there are spiritual beings. When he gives himself up to illusions, he assumes that atoms and molecules exist outside. He dreams of atoms and molecules. If man has no illusion concerning the external world, he can say nothing but that the whole outer world contains no truth, that it really is nothing. Inwardly, on the other hand, he has found nothing; he is empty. He must talk himself into believing that there is something inside him. He has no grasp of the spirit; therefore, he suggests spirit to himself, developing the suggestion of spirit. He is not capable of maintaining this suggestion without rigorously denying the reality of matter. This implies that he accommodates himself to a world view which does not perceive the spirit but only suggests it, merely persuading itself into the belief of spirit, while denying matter. You find the most extreme Western exponent of this in Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science58 as the counterpart of what I described just now for the East. This was bound to arise as the final outcome of such conceptions as those of Locke, David Hume or John Stuart Mill. Christian Science as a concept is, however, also the final consequence of what has been brought about in recent times by the unfortunate division of man's soul life into knowledge and faith. Once people start restricting themselves to knowledge on one side and faith on the other, a faith that no longer even tries to be knowledge, this leads in the end to their not having the spirit at all. Faith finally ceases to have a content. Then, people must suggest a content to themselves. They make no attempt to reach the genuine spirit through a spiritual science. In their search for the spirit, they arrive at Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science, this spirit which has come to expression there as the final consequence. The politics of the West have for some time been breathing this spirit. It does not sustain itself on realities; it lives on self-made suggestions. Naturally, when it is not a matter of an in-depth cure, one can even effect cures with Christian Science, as has been reported, and accounts are given of its marvelous cures. Likewise, all kinds of edifying results can be achieved with the West's politics of suggestion. Yet, this Western concept possesses certain qualities, qualities of significance. We can best understand them when we contrast them with those of the East. On looking back to the ages when the Eastern qualities came especially to the fore, we find that they were those which, first of all, were capable of focusing the soul's eye on the prenatal life. They were therefore preeminently fitted to constitute what can represent the spiritual part, the spiritual world, in a social organism. Fundamentally speaking, all that we have created in Central Europe and the West is in a certain sense the legacy of the East. I have already mentioned this on another occasion. The East was particularly predisposed to cultivate the spiritual life. The West, on the other hand, is especially talented at developing thought forms. I have just described them in a somewhat unfavorable light. They can, however, be depicted in a favorable light as well, namely, if we consider all that has originated with Bacon of Verulam, Buckle, Mill, Thomas Reid, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Spencer, and others of like mind, for example, Bentham.59 On the one hand, we admit that these thought forms are certainly not suited to penetrate into a spiritual world by means of Imagination and Inspiration, to comprehend the life before birth. Yet, on the other hand, we are obliged to say, particularly when one studies how this manner of thinking has pervaded and lives in our Western science, that all this is especially appropriate for economic thinking; and one day, when the economic life of the social organism will have to be developed, we shall have to become students of Western thought, of Thomas Reid, John Stuart Mill, Buckle, Adam Smith, and the rest. They have only made the mistake of applying their form of thinking to science, to epistemology, and the spiritual life. This thinking is in order when we train ourselves by means of it and reflect on how to form associations, how best to manage the economy. Mill should not have written a book on logic; the spiritual capacity he applied to doing this should have been used for describing in detail the configuration of a given industrial association. We must realize that when anyone today wishes to produce a book such as my Towards Social Renewal, it is necessary for him to have learned to understand in what manner one attains to the spiritual sphere in the Oriental sense, and in what manner—although following a much more erratic path—one arrives at economic thinking in the West. For both directions belong together and are necessary to one another. As far as a view of life is concerned, this Western thinking then does lead to pseudo-sciences like the one by Mrs. Eddy, her Christian Science. We must not, however, look at matters according to what they cannot be, but consider what they can be. For unity must come about through the cooperation of all human beings on earth, not by some abstract, theoretical structure of ideas that is simply laid down, and then viewed as a unity. At this point, one may ask from where in the human organization this particular thinking of Mill, Buckle, and Adam Smith originates. We find that Oriental thinking has basically arisen from a contact with the world, especially when looking back to the more ancient forms of Oriental philosophy. It is a thinking, a feeling, which gives the impression that, out of the earth itself, the roots of a tree grow and produce leaves. In just this way, the ancient Indian, for example, seems to us to be united with the whole earth; his thoughts appear to us to have grown out of earthly existence in a spiritual manner, just as a tree's leaves and blossoms appear to have grown out of it by means of all the forces of the earth. It is precisely this attachment to the external world in the Oriental person, the absorption of the spirituality, that I have referred to as lying beyond the sense world. In the West, everything is brought out of the instincts, the depth of the personality—I might say, from man's metabolic system, not the external world. For the Oriental, the world works upon both his senses and Spirit, kindling within him what he calls his holy Brahma. In the West, we have what arises from the body's metabolism and leads to associations of ideas; it is something that is particularly suited to characterize the economic life, something that does not apply until the next earth incarnation. For, with the exception of the head, what we bear as our physical organism is something that does not find its true expression, as we have outlined, until the following life on earth. We have been given our head from our previous earth life; our limbs and our metabolic system are Borne by us into the next earthly incarnation. This is a metamorphosis from one life on earth to the next. Hence, in the West, people think with something that only becomes mature in the following earth life. For this reason, Western thinking is particularly predisposed to focus on the life after death, to speak of immortality, not of eternity, not to know the term, “unbornness,” but only the word, “immortality.” It is the West which represents life after death as something that the human being should above all else be concerned about. Yet, even now, something I might call radical, but in a radical sense something noble, is preparing itself in the West out of the totally materialistic culture. One with the faculty to look a little more deeply into what is thus trying to evolve makes a strange discovery. Although people strive in the most intimate way for life after death, for some kind of immortality, hence, for an egotistic life after death, they strive in such a manner that, out of this effort, something special will develop. While a large part of humanity still harbors an illusion in this regard, something quite remarkable is, oddly enough, developing in the West. Since individual elements of the ideas concerning life after death being developed by the West are reflected to a certain extent in a great majority of Europeans, they, too, have especially perfected this preoccupation with the postmortem life. The European, however, would prefer to say, “Well, my religion promises me a life after death, but in this transitory, unsatisfactory, merely material earth life I need make no effort to secure the immortality of my soul. Christ died to make me immortal; I need not strive for immortality. It is mine once and for all; Christ makes me immortal.”—or something to that effect. In the West, particularly in America, something different is preparing itself. Out of the most diverse, occasionally the most bizarre and trivial religious world conceptions, we see something trying to arise which, although it has quite materialistic forms, is nevertheless connected with. something that will be a part of life in the future, particularly in regard to this world-view of immortality. Among certain sects in America, the belief is prevalent that one cannot survive at all after death if one has made no effort in this earthly life, if one has not accomplished something whereby one acquires this life after death. A judgment concerning good and evil is envisioned after death that does not merely follow the pattern of earthly truth. He who makes no effort here on earth to bear through the portals of death what he has developed in his soul will be diffused and scattered in the cosmic all. What a person wishes to carry with him through death must be developed here. A man dies the second death of the soul—to use the saying of Paul—who does not provide here for his soul to become immortal. This is something that is definitely developing in the West as a world concept in place of the leisurely, passive, awaiting what will happen after death. It is something that is emerging in certain American sects. Perhaps today it is still little noticed, but there is a great deal of feeling in favor of viewing life here in a moral sense, and to arrange the conduct of life in such a manner that by means of what one does here, something is carried through the gate of death. As I said, in the East, the particular attention to the life before birth developed long ago. This made it possible for life on earth to be viewed as a continuation of this prenatal, supersensory life in the spirit. Earthly life thus received its content, not out of itself, but out of the spiritual life. In the West, an attitude is developing today for the future that will have nothing to do with a passive, indifferent life of waiting here for death because the life beyond is guaranteed; instead, the knowledge is growing that man carries nothing through the portal of death unless care is taken on earth to make something out of what one already has here. Thus, Western thinking is adapted, on the one hand, to organizing economic matters within the social organism; on the other hand, it is suited to develop further the one-sided doctrine of life after death. This is why spiritualism has had a special opportunity for developing in the West, and from there, could invade the rest of the world. After all, spiritualism was only devised to give a sort of guarantee of immortality to those who could no longer attain to any conviction concerning immortality by means of any kind of inner development. For, in most instances, a person actually becomes a spiritualist in order to receive by some means or the other the certain guarantee that he is immortal ,after death. Between these two worlds lies something that is implied in Fichte's words, “The external world is the substance of my duty become visible.” As I said before, people really have no understanding for this mode of thinking, and what is written today about Fichte could well be compared to what a blind man might say about color. Particularly in the last few years, a tremendous amount of talking and lecturing has been done about this saying by Fichte, but it was all accomplished in such a way that one is disposed to say that Fichte, that out-and-out Central European mind, has really been americanized by the German newspapers and writers of literature. One is confronted with americanized versions of Fichte. There, we find the nuance of human soul life which, in a special way, is supposed to develop the middle member of the social organism, the one that arises from the relationship of man to man. It would be of benefit if some of you would for once make an in-depth study—it isn't easy—of one of Fichte's writings where he speaks as though nature did not exist at all. Duty, for example, and everything else is deduced by first proving that external human beings actually exist in whom the materialized substance of duty can become reality. Here, all the raw material is contained, so to speak, from which the rights and state organism of the threefold social order have to be put together. What, then, is the actual cause of the catastrophic events in the past few years? The basic reason is that there was no living perception, no feeling, for such matters. Berlin's policies are American. This is fine for America, but it is not suitable for Berlin. This is why Berlin's politics amount to nothing. For, just imagine, since American policies were constantly carried out in Berlin or Vienna, we could just as well have called Berlin, New York, apart from the difference in language, and Vienna, Chicago for all the difference there would have been otherwise. When, in Central Europe, something is done that is completely foreign to it, something originating in the West where it has its rightful place, then the primal essence of the folk spirit is aroused and gives it the lie without the people being aware of it. This was basically the case in recent decades. This was the underlying phenomenon of what happened, the phenomenon that consists, for instance, in the fact that people have trampled Goethe's thinking underfoot, and as another example, have read Ralph Waldo Trine60 out of a sort of instinct. Actually, all our aristocratic dandies in politics have shown an interest in Trine, and received their special inner stimulus or whatever from that direction. When affairs came to the boiling point, they even turned to Woodrow Wilson;61 and he62 who would now again like to be President of the German Republic still has that frame of mind that allows his brain automatically to roll out Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Thus, in recent times, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, we experienced how a formerly truly representative German personality spouted forth americanisms. This is the best and most immediate example of how matters really stand at present. Indeed, we must be able to see through these archetypal phenomena if we wish to understand what is actually happening today. If we merely pick up a newspaper and read Prince Max von Baden's speeches, simply studying them out of context, then this is something absolutely worthless today. It is a mere kaleidoscope of words. Only when we are able to place such things into the whole context of the world can we hope to understand anything about the world. No progress can be made until people realize how necessary it is today that world understanding be acquired if one wishes to have a say. The most characteristic sign of the time is the belief that when a group of individuals have set up some trashy proposition as a general program—such as the unity of all men regardless of race, nation or color, and so forth—something has been accomplished. Nothing has been accomplished except to throw sand into people's eyes. Something real is attained only when we note the differences and realize what world conditions are. Formerly, human beings could live in accordance with their instincts. This is no longer possible; they must learn to live consciously. This can be done only by looking deeply into what is actually happening. The East was supreme in regard to life before birth and repeated earthly lives that are connected with it. The greatness of the West consisted in its disposition in regard to life after death. Here, in the middle (see drawing an next page), the actual science of history has originated, although today it is as yet misunderstood. Take Hegel63 as an example. In Hegel's works, we have neither preexistence nor postexistence; there is neither life before birth nor after death, but there is a spirited grasp of history. Hegel begins with logic, goes from there to a philosophy of nature, develops his doctrine of the soul, then that of the state, and ends with the triad of art, religion and science. They are his world content. There is no mention of preexistence or an immortal soul, only of the spirit that lives here in this world. Preexistence, postexistence—this is really life in the present state of mankind, the permeation of history. Read what has been drawn up particularly by Hegel as a philosophy of history. In libraries, one generally finds the pages of his books still uncut! Not many editions have appeared of Hegel's works. In the eighties of the last century, Eduard von Hartmann64 wrote that in all of Germany, where twenty universities exist that have faculties of philosophy, no more than two of the instructors had read Hegel! What he said could not be refuted; it was true. Nonetheless, it hardly needs to be said that all the students were ready to swear to what they had been told about Hegel by professors who had never read him. Do familiarize yourselves with his work and you will find that here, in fact, historical conception has come about, the experience of what goes on between human beings. There you also find the material from which the state, the rights sphere of the threefold social organism, has to be created. We can learn about the constitution of the spiritual organism from the Orient; the constitution of the economic sphere is to be learned from the West.  In this way, we have to look into the differentiations of humanity all over the whole earth, and can gain an understanding of the matter from one side or the other. If the goal is approached directly, namely, if the social life is studied, one arrives at the threefold order as developed in my book, Towards Social Renewal. By thus studying the life of mankind throughout the earth, we come to the realization that there is one part with a special disposition for the economy; there is another with a special aptitude for organizing the state; and yet another with a specific inclination towards the spiritual life. A threefold structure can then be created by taking the actual economy from the West, the state from the Middle, and from the East—naturally in a renewed form, as I have often said—the spiritual life. Here you have the state, here the economic life and here the spiritual life (see above sketch); the two others have to be taken across from here. In this way, all humanity has to work together, for the origins of these three members of the social organism are found in different regions of the earth, and therefore must be kept properly apart everywhere. If, in the old manner, human beings wish to mix up in a unified state what is striving to be threefold, nothing will result from it except that in the West the state will be a unity where the economic life overwhelms the whole, and everything else is only submerged into it. If the theorists then take hold of and study the matter, meaning, if Karl Marx moves from Germany to London, he then concludes that everything depends on the economic life. If Marx's insanity triumphs, the three spheres are reduced to one, the one being of a purely economic character. If one limits oneself to what wishes to be merely the state or rights configuration, one apes the economic life of the West, which for decades has been fashioning an illusory structure, which then naturally collapses when a catastrophe occurs—something that has indeed happened! The Orient, which possesses the spiritual life in a weakened state in the first place, simply has adopted the economic life from the West and has inoculated itself with something that is completely alien to it. When these matters are studied, we shall see particularly that blessings can only fall upon the earth when, everywhere, one gathers together into the threefold social organism through human activity what by its very nature develops in the various regions.
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| 272. Faust, the Aspiring Human: A Spiritual-Scientific Explanation of Goethe's “Faust”: The “Entombment” the Essence of the Lemurs, the Fat and Scrawny Devil
04 Sep 1916, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| I do not need to dwell at length on the question that was once put to me when I gave a lecture many years ago on Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, and a theosophical authority of the old school asked me whether I thought that Goethe knew everything that was said from the spiritual science to justify the deeper secret of the poem of the green snake and the beautiful lily. |
| 272. Faust, the Aspiring Human: A Spiritual-Scientific Explanation of Goethe's “Faust”: The “Entombment” the Essence of the Lemurs, the Fat and Scrawny Devil
04 Sep 1916, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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We will soon depict the scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, which precedes the final scene, which, as you know, has already been depicted. The scene begins with the holy anchorites:
Goethe calls it “Faust's Ascension” and the scene that now follows is usually called the “Entombment”. But we will begin where, in the broader sense, this entombment of Faust is depicted. When one comes to the various parts of Goethe's “Faust”, one must repeatedly and repeatedly fall into a certain astonishment at the infinite depth that lies in the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, in particular, deep in that one is dealing with an objectivity in the representation of the spiritual world that can be justified by spiritual science. And it is remarkable that Goethe presented the spiritual world with such objectivity at a time when spiritual science as such did not yet exist. I do not need to dwell at length on the question that was once put to me when I gave a lecture many years ago on Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, and a theosophical authority of the old school asked me whether I thought that Goethe knew everything that was said from the spiritual science to justify the deeper secret of the poem of the green snake and the beautiful lily. I could only reply whether the person in question believed that the plant also knows exactly what the botanist makes about it in order to be able to grow in the right way according to the botanical laws. When one hears such a question, one is usually aware of how clever the questioner feels. But if one thinks such a question through to its conclusion, then one realizes how endlessly foolish people often are, who think of themselves as being so clever. So we need not concern ourselves further with the question of whether Goethe, for instance, also studied spiritual science somewhere in the way we can study it today, even if objections can very easily be made from a point of view that considers this question. We want to go straight to the matter itself. We are presented with three types of figures in addition to those familiar to us from the rest of the Faust legend. We are presented with three types of figures that have to do with the period of time that elapses between the death of Faust and the ascent of his soul into the spiritual regions. The first type of figures presented to us are the lemurs; the second type of figures presented to us are the thick devils with short, straight horns, and the third are the scrawny devils with long, crooked horns; both types of devils are “of the old devil's grist and grain”. Now we can ask: What spiritual instinct, what deeper wisdom, would lead us to present these three figures in the Entombment and before the Ascension of Faust? This “Entombment” is introduced in such a way that Faust has grown old in his evolution, and, as Goethe himself stated, has become a hundred years old. So, at the beginning of this scene, we are dealing with the old, hundred-year-old Faust, who is still chained to Mephistopheles, but in such a way that Faust can now believe that Mephistopheles has become his servant. Faust has made the decision to wrest a piece of land from the sea, to cultivate this piece of land, and thereby create the basis for an area that will be beneficial to humanity, where this humanity, part of humanity, can develop in peace and freedom. This land is, so to speak, because it was wrested from the sea by Faust's labor, Faust's creation. It is to be made complete by draining a swamp that is there through a ditch, so that the air will also be purified, so that the health of the people who are to develop in peace and freedom will not be endangered by the polluting vapors of the swamp. Faust now believes that Mephisto has become his overseer in this beneficial work and commands the host that is to perform the last work. Faust has already gone blind, as was shown in the previous scene. So he does not see what Mephistopheles is doing on the external physical plane, and it is understandable that he later confuses the words “digging” and “grave”. While Faust is of the opinion that a ditch should be dug to drain the swamp water into the sea in order to purify the air, Mephistopheles has the grave of Faust dug by his lemurs. As a centenarian, Faust thus still experiences the deception, becomes entangled in the web of lies of Mephistopheles, who has the grave dug and, through the similarity of names, deceives Faust into imagining that a ditch is being dug. There are already many secrets in it. I do not want to get involved in these things today, perhaps it can be discussed another time. But I would prefer us to make ourselves clear about the nature of these three beings. Right at the beginning of the scene, which takes place in the forecourt of the palace that Faust has built for himself, Mephistopheles appears, as already mentioned, as the overseer of the workers, whom Faust believes he has assembled, while Mephistopheles calls his lemurs. Mephistopheles characterizes the lemurs not in a particular scenic remark, but in the scene itself:
So they are described to us as creatures that are held together only by the ligaments that hold the limbs of the human body together, anatomical tendons and bones. So what is not even present in the human organism in the form of muscles holds these figures together, they are patched together out of it. They are not full-natured, not whole-natured, they are half-natured, since they only have what is not blood, not muscle, not nerve, but what tendons, ligaments and bones are. They are patched together out of it. Furthermore, they are characterized by the fact that they later express themselves in chorus. And what they express indicates two things to us. First, how they actually come to do a job there under the supervision of Mephistopheles; but at the same time, this also tells us something about their nature. The lemurs express themselves in such a way that one hears in their quivering tones:
So the lemurs are also deceived at first: they have half heard that they are to be given a wide country. They are to dig the grave according to Mephistopheles' plan. But they have half heard and not fully heard that they are to receive a wide country. To this end, they bring sharpened stakes to work with.
It sounds in their half-nature, which is patched together from tendons, ligaments and bones, there is still something that sounds and rattles from a call. But what the content of the call is, what they are actually supposed to do there, they have forgotten. They are truly characterized by this. One can say that they are there, but they do not know why they are there. They know half of it, why they are there, they have heard something, but they do not know what they have heard. They have heard a call, but they have forgotten it again. So there they are in front of us, these lemurs, and Mephistopheles immediately reprimands them. He says: “This has nothing to do with the wide land you wanted; only act according to your own dimensions, according to such dimensions as are appropriate for one who consists only of legs and tendons:
So the one lemur has to lie down lengthwise, and now he instructs them how to dig the grave. In the next chorus of lemurs, we are told that there is still something in them of a half-remembered memory that they were once something like human beings, that they come from something like human beings:
— That is behind them, and only half conscious.
So they half-remember that they come from dead people. Mephisto first tried to come to terms with them, he needs them first. Now I ask you to remember that I have indeed said many times that we do not carry our physical bodies with us without further ado, and that we only discard them like an empty shell. It is not only our shell, I often said, it is our tool. It contains the forces through which we are connected to the mineral earth. Now I ask you to consider the following: we are, with our physical body, formed on Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, with what we now have between birth and death. Let us imagine all that has been implanted in us by Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, I would say, summed up and suggested by everything I am drawing here, and let us imagine that which is incorporated into the earth in that we receive an ego as a tool in the earth, that this ego is incorporated as a physical tool. Let us imagine that within.  During the time on earth, our physical body again receives what was demanded of it on Saturn, what was formed during the time of the sun and moon. But because the I works in it, what the human being has not through Saturn, Sun and Moon, but only through the development of the Earth, is incorporated. This is the external physical expression of the I. From this, the I emerges in death. What remains of Saturn, Sun and Moon has no place in earthly life; it has nothing to do with the forces of earthly development. The physical forces of the evolution of the earth would never have produced our muscles; they had to be produced by the physical forces of the evolution of the moon. But during the evolution of the earth, the impulses of the ego did indeed produce the bones, and the bones only during the Atlantean evolution, through the salt deposits in the Atlantic Ocean, the ligaments, the tendons. All this is integrated only through the forces of the earth. In this way we carry the earth within us, in our bones, tendons and ligaments. The spirit of the earth lives in them. The same forces live in them that are present in all the mineral, natural or technical domains of the earth. In the composition of our bones, tendons and ligaments, everything that can arise from the mineral-physical natural and technical effects of the earth lives. When we now go through the gate of death, we leave behind our Saturn, Sun and Moon parts. These are destroyed by the fact that they cannot exist in the earth. Bones, tendons and ligaments must destroy the forces of the earth itself, regardless of whether the person is buried or cremated; this makes no difference, the special forces of the earth must destroy them. Thus, because Faust has died, that which is subject to the special forces of the earth is handed over to the earth, to that earth to which all dead people are also handed over, insofar as they are made of bones, tendons and ligaments. A deep spiritual insight into nature is expressed in this formulation that Goethe gave to this scene, an infinitely deep knowledge of nature! For one should not believe that one has exhausted what remains of us when one says: Well, the physical body falls away from us, and our soul — as we have always described it — continues into the spiritual worlds. — No, there are secret spiritual forces in the whole physical body that remain on the earth. The earth can only retain that which it has produced itself, but it retains only the forces from bones, tendons and ligaments. Bury the human being and let him decay, burn him - in the earthly body itself, despite decay or burning, what remains for all future is always present in the forces in bones, tendons and ligaments! We hand over our skeleton, so to speak, to the earth, and it remains there until the earth itself has reached the goal of its evolution. Our skeleton is taken up by the skeletons of all those who have died before us, and enters into the community of those who have died before us. It would be a superficial view to say: “Everything is transitory here.” Only the form is transitory. The forces that prevail in them are contained in the earth's activity. And if you take the physical forces at work on earth today, if you look straight into the earth, the forces in it that have come about because people have been buried in the earth, or because they have somehow been destroyed, their bodies have somehow been destroyed. The forces that formed the human being are now in the earth, working in the interior of the earth, they are there, they are preserved. So we can say: Mephisto is initially faced with the task of dealing with the path of the physical body, with the path, with the paths that the physical body wants to take. - That's where he needs the lemurs, I would say, who are not ghostly, but under ghostly beings, phantom beings that are always united with the earthly body as the remains of dead people. He needs them. Do you know what would happen if what has been ours since Atlantean times were to disappear in our bones, tendons and ligaments? Even today the earth would be close to it, and it would soon be more likely that all people would be born with so-called “English limbs,” with weak and powerless limbs. People would be born rickety, because the earth only has a certain amount of the strength that lies in our bone movements and tendon development. And what we give back in death always goes into later human bodies in a mysterious way. Otherwise, people would be born rickety. And if one is born rickety, it is a sign that one has not entered into a right relationship in one's total karma with those forces that the earth gives again and again and again, and receives back again and again from the bones, tendons and ligaments of humanity. Thus an infinitely deep, spiritual thought of nature is expressed in the fact that Mephisto has summoned these underworldly spectres, these pure phantom beings, in whose ranks Faust's phantom also enters. We must, of course, grasp the scene quite spiritually. The interpreters of Faust always believed that there were bone men walking around. But they are only the forces that lie in the bones, tendons and ligaments, the supersensible forces. The scene is to be grasped entirely spiritually, only through spiritual vision, in the manner of spiritual vision. These lemurs have what is in man in that he has an I. But the I is outside. But the I is outside. So all the qualities that only came in through the I are gone, are only half present, only echoes. Therefore they are there and also not there. We human beings are only there when we send our I into our bones, tendons and ligaments. They no longer have that. We only understand what we have heard when we send our ego through our bones, tendons and ligaments. They only have the echo; they hear and do not know what they hear; they have heard a call and have only half heard it, have forgotten it because the memory lies in the system that is put together by bones, tendons and ligaments. So, because Mephistopheles first has to deal with the paths that Faust's physical body takes, he, who is a spirit but wants to assert his rights on earth, naturally comes into the necessity of having to deal with the lemurs, as they are meant here, because from them he could snatch the spiritual part of Faust's physical body. After all, the physical body is also based on a spiritual one. He could grasp this spiritual. Now, to understand the whole, let us recall something we can find in the chapter of the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds?' where the Dweller of the Threshold is mentioned. There you will find that when a person undergoes higher spiritual development, the individual powers that are otherwise united in him in ordinary human knowledge, diverge. I characterized them there according to their abilities. Will, feeling and thinking go their separate ways, each becoming something in itself. Mephisto, who remained behind on the lunar evolution with his own nature, was still familiar with the lunar evolution. That is how you have to understand him. He, Mephisto, is familiar with the lunar development in his practical view of life. But even in the atavistic view of the moon, the limbs of the human being were still separate and not yet united by the ego. So if Mephisto, in his way, wants to grasp the spiritual essence of Faust, he must actually grasp it in its threefold nature. He must grasp it as the spiritual essence of the physical body; there he must deal with the lemurs. Then he must want to grasp it as the second link in the etheric body, which separates soon after death. He is familiar with that, so he must want to grasp it. And then he must want to grasp it in what passes over into the spiritual world and has detached itself from the etheric body. What has been united through the ego does not yet correspond to his realm; he is not yet at home there, Mephisto; the separateness still exists. So he must instinctively attach importance to achieving what the spiritual is of the physical body; there he must let the lemurs work. Now, because he only knows the soul in separation, he wants to catch for himself - he does not know what - the etheric body, which leaves the human being through the lower limbs. So he puts the Dickteufel there to catch the etheric body for him. Then - he does not know how it should be. Perhaps he can grasp Faust's spiritual essence at the third link, at that which wants to ascend into the spiritual world? That is where he places the Dürrteufel. And so he wants to grasp Faust's spiritual essence. But he must, I would say, with devilish instinct, bring together the threefoldness that can convey to him the physical body directly in its spirituality – etheric body, soul-spiritual –. Etheric body - you see, physics cannot quite cope with the ether that is present because the ether has a strange property that distinguishes it from ordinary materiality. It is not heavy, it has no weight. The usual gravity of the earth cannot hold the ether. Mephisto wants to hold it. He wants to hold it through spiritual beings. Because the ether has already become spiritual, it should also be held by spiritual beings. To do this, he needs the thick devils, who, as spiritual beings, have a certain heaviness. They must therefore be thick-bellied creatures with huge, thick bodies – small, of course, because if they were towering, they would reach too far into the upper regions. They must be designed to be small and stout, their spiritual nature must be earthly, their spiritual nature must be such that it can sustain on earth that which seeks to fly spiritually. They must therefore be small and stout, and everything in them that is the physiognomic expression of humanity must be clumsy. They must have enormous strength in their somewhat stocky bodies. Therefore, the limbs that are more spiritualized are small; in reality they would have to have small hands, stumps, arm stumps. It is difficult to portray, can only be portrayed if the actors make every effort to move only the lower part of the arms; of course, this must be practiced and learned. But the nose, too, is difficult. It is developed, the nose that has become a horn in the devils, it is difficult; so it is, together with the forehead, the heavy organ that does not connect man with the air, but that works and is formed by its own weight. Mephisto needs such creatures to be able to hold back the etheric body, which we know takes a different path because it is not weighed down by the earth, in the rest of the earth. He must therefore hire them so that when the etheric body appears from the lower regions of Faust's body, they can grasp it. Therefore he hires them:
This is, of course, the same flame city that appears in Dante!
Here they come, the fat devils with short, straight horns! He now describes them:
So they are in the state in which the lunar creatures still breathed fire. They are “pot-bellied villains with fire-cheeks” who “are really fat from the brimstone of hell”.
So everything is immobile; mobility is already semi-spiritual. They are all clumsy and awkward, all so that they force the spirit into heaviness, because they are supposed to hold the light ether. And there he posts them:
- whether the etheric body comes out, which they are supposed to catch —
- he sees it as the soul! —
So he wants the etheric body in the form of a dragon, doesn't he.
He says very aptly now, by placing the devil's advocate there:
How should he know, since he has the three members of the soul; he does not really know what to start with!
That is the region where the etheric body must leave the person first.
So there we have the fat devils with short, straight horns who want to try to shape the spiritual so that it develops earthly heaviness. Mephisto wants to conquer the third part through the Dürrteufel. They must be very thin guys, again difficult to represent! Very thin, and all spiritual, so nose and forehead together to a horn united, which overcomes the matter as possible, in devilish way overcomes, so crooked and long, because they should achieve it, to become quite spiritual, to overcome the earth heaviness completely. Therefore, they are “Firlefanze”, as spinning tops, move quickly like spinning tops. They must now be employed to catch that which goes into the spiritual world - the third. So they are supposed to chase after the forces that develop precisely out of heaviness, so to speak. That which they are not supposed to get into the heaviness of the earth, they are supposed to develop, like a spinning top, counter to the heaviness, through their long, flexible limbs, which should actually grow out of them. That is how they should develop. That is how Mephisto sets them up:
— straight means long in this case, that they become thin and long.
– so long claws instead of fingers come out –
– the soul that goes to the spiritual worlds –
- in contrast to the etheric body: the genius, which is always soul-spiritual -
There you can see how, according to the way man is constituted, the function of the lemurs on the physical body, the thick devil on the etheric body, the dry devil for the spiritual-soul is sharply, clearly outlined! Now the heavenly host is approaching, the heavenly host, that is, the beings who belong to the spiritual worlds. And the matter is presented in such a way that none of those who can serve Mephisto – the lemures, the thick- and scrawny devils – achieve anything. The heavenly host is coming:
These are beings that have not experienced the earthly either, but do not claim to have an effect on the earthly sphere, but only on the spiritual and mental aspects of the human being. Mephistopheles is out of place, he has remained a ghost, a moon ghost, and has an effect on the earth. They have remained in their own sphere. They must therefore appear to him as beings who have not even become human, but are still pre-human, immature, less than children.
And so on. Of course, Mephisto is well aware of the close kinship between him and the angels as spiritual beings. They have both remained spiritual beings. That is why he calls them devils in his own way, but devils in disguise.
Now the battle begins between the host of angels and the demons and goblins down there who are striving for Faust's soul. Mephisto is standing there and must take part in this battle. He instructs his devils because he senses something. What does he actually sense? Yes, he knows the trinity as a soul quality. But that is not capable of grasping the I-unity. He does not believe that in Faust the I-unity is so strong that it holds the trinity together. That is his great error. While he is actually always talking about the trinity of the soul, the unity of the soul is asserted at this moment from the spiritual world, holding everything together. If this unity, this unity of the ego, were not there, the lemures would be able to draw the soul of the physical body to themselves, without it having remained connected to the whole world, to the whole cosmos. The Dürrteufel would be able to grasp the soul, the genius. But because they are held together by the ego in the human being between birth and death, each one goes its way: the body to the earth, the etheric body to the etheric region, that which is soul to the spiritual region, but they remain destined for each other. There remains a connection. And as soon as the connection, which is brought about by the character of the ego, is there, the devil can do nothing. But he is positioning himself quite correctly.
— the thick-skinned and scrawny devils sense that a different element is coming.
They scatter roses, namely, as a symbol of spiritual love coming from above.
Now they begin, because he commands them:
Now they blow away the love torment that surrounds them. This is a hot glow for them, which they cannot endure. Now they blow, but they blow too hard because they cannot find the right measure. They have not been taught about what is formed through the evolution of the earth.
He also only knows them insofar as he observes them on earth; he does not know them from his own nature, the right measures. But because he was with Faust for so long and saw what Faust needed, he recognizes the measures of men again for a while.
To him, love is only flattery, he turns everything into something purely selfish. And so we see how, through this struggle that unfolds here, how in the imagination – for the whole thing takes place in the imagination of Mephisto, who for a while transports himself back to his old time on the moon – how, for the imagination of Mephisto, the possibility presents itself that he could have the soul in its trinity, while it was actually snatched from him by the unity. The interesting thing is that in this scene in particular we also find an awareness of the inner spiritual evolution of humanity. Think of what I have often said, that only a certain narrow-mindedness can believe that as far back as people go, they have always looked the same; so spiritually, one imagines the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, all more or less the same as present-day people, while great developments have been undergone. People who only think about the last few centuries know nothing about what human beings have gone through in the course of the centuries in evolution. But spiritual beings notice this because they look at things spiritually. And so it is so wonderful that we can see from Mephisto's words here to Faust precisely what he, Mephisto, who is of course an old fellow, has gone through the whole evolution of the earth — you know how he says at one point that he once found “crystallized human race”! — yes, Mephisto sees how it has changed:
So, what does he actually want? Faust has died. He wants the soul, of which he only recognizes the trinity. We remember that Faust made a contract with Mephisto, even written in blood, a contract. What does Mephisto actually want, MephistoAhriman? What does he want? He wants to invoke his contract. If he shows the contract at the moment when the soul comes out, he believes that the soul cannot escape him. Well, I would rather not speak further on this point in view of some contemptuous words that have been spoken in this troubled time. Since our friends are already being accused of not thinking clearly about contracts, I do not want to develop a contract theory now that could be exploited in turn. Perhaps it could even be said, if I do not take the side of Mephisto in this scene, but rather the side of Faust: Faust would be a real Pan-Germanist in terms of his view of contracts! I do not want to talk further about the plight one could get into, because either one would have to take sides for Mephisto-Ahriman, or one would expose oneself to danger because Faust does not go into the blood-written title, to chalk this up to us as a pan-Germanistic view. So we prefer to remain silent about all the deeper wisdom that would have to be developed if one were to talk about Faust and Mephisto's contract. Let's leave it! But evolution with its inner meaning comes to us in the words of Mephisto, who points out that times change and with them the impulses that are in the development of humanity. In the past, when the old times were there, he still understood quite well how to catch souls – today we call it superstition, but we know that they were somewhat clairvoyant times. Then the souls were still easily accessible in their trinity; then he could still catch the souls if the matter was well prepared – and after all, he prepared them quite well in Faust. But now, as the fifth post-Atlantic period approaches and the unity of the soul is being established through the ego, he has not yet undergone his full training. Mephistopheles-Ahriman's nature in the fifth post-Atlantic period really must be pointed out, and there he actually finds himself “badly recommended” in this fifth post-Atlantic period. He is not very well recommended either, the devil, not recommended because he is not recognized when he is introduced somewhere as Mephistopheles-Ahriman, he is not considered befitting his station.
There he is, but he is not recommended. And so he gets the helpers he needs, who he believes can help him get what he wants: the soul in its trinity. But the fact that it no longer exists in its trinity, in its original form, allows it to slip through his fingers. It is a curious thing with this Mephisto-Ahriman. The beings that belong to the spiritual world come down into his spheres, and - yes, he actually falls in love with these beings. Goethe quite rightly describes a love scene between Mephisto and the angels. The devil has understanding. And a love affair between Mephisto and the angels is truly an absurd love affair, that is what Mephisto also calls it, it is truly an absurd love affair. But how is it that this absurd love affair can still affect him? That feelings of love arise in him at all? If he had not lived at Faust's side for so long and wanted to beguile Faust by stimulating such feelings in Faust in a particularly enticing way, they would not have crossed over to him. And so here again you have a deep wisdom, a wonderful wisdom. The devil actually has no erotic or other love in the earthly sense. He doesn't have it. Love affair is of course absurd for him, because we know that the earth is the cosmos of love. He is from the cosmos of wisdom. But he is out of place, he wanders around on earth and always wants to incorporate the earth into his realm. This means that he repeatedly finds himself in a position to incorporate into himself qualities that are developed on earth and that no longer fit his nature. In order to gain a soul, he must prepare this soul for the devil, that is, make it suitable for the qualities that Lucifer implanted at the beginning. But in doing so, he himself becomes infected by these qualities and once again makes himself incapable of keeping this soul. You see here in the big picture what happens on a small scale. Imagine that man is also capable of arousing passions, but if he develops them to a certain point, they destroy his organism at the same time. So you can only do it to a certain point. The devil must, as it were, vampirically absorb human qualities into himself so that he can arouse the passions in Faust. But in doing so, he destroys his own true devilish nature. This is how the absurd affair with the angels comes about, and he becomes inattentive and does not even realize that the angels are snatching his soul away. This darkening of consciousness, this transition of consciousness into the subconscious, had to occur in him. Since we will have the performance today, I cannot say more. I think that enough has been said for the time being to convey a little of the understanding of the trinity inherent in this scene. I think we see, especially when we devote ourselves to such a contemplation, how infinitely deep that is of which Goethe says that he has secretly incorporated it into the second part of 'Faust'. Those people who were able to evoke in themselves the idea that spiritual wisdom is at work through the evolution of humanity, that it has only receded somewhat in our time, that this spiritual wisdom often only a shadow in all kinds of legitimate or illegitimate occult societies, such people, as isolated individuals, always knew what profound wisdom is contained in Goethe's “Faust,” real wisdom, concrete world wisdom. That is why they have expressed themselves in this sense. And one such man dedicated a short poem to the memory of Goethe at the Feast of St. John in 1880, a poem in which he wanted to express how much he felt at one with him in spiritual wisdom, a man who, due to the erudition of the materialistic age, actually had very little of Goethe in him, very little of substance. And since spiritual science had not yet been born when this man wrote, he only had a vague feeling that this spiritual science lives in Goethe like an instinct. The Faust commentary that he wrote as a result, Oswald Marbach, did not become significant. But in the poem that he dedicated to the great mason's wisdom festival, the Manenfest, to the manes of Goethe — as one used to say in the past when speaking of the immortal part of man, the Manen, the same spirit lives that lives in the Manas – it shows that, as it were half-consciously only in lonely souls, there was always the connection with the great that lived in Goethe's poetry. And so he, who felt connected with the Manes of Goethe, with the individuality of Goethe, says at the Feast of St. John, the masonic feast in 1880:
May there come a time again when such words may and can be truth! |