| 165. The Universal Human: The Universal Human: The Unification of Humanity Through the Christ Impulse
09 Jan 1916, Bern Tr. Gilbert Church, Sabine H. Seiler Rudolf Steiner |
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| Many of you probably know that philosophy speaks of antinomies, and that Kant has even gone so far as to claim that it can be proven with equal conclusiveness that the two statements “the world is infinite in terms of space” and “the world is finite in terms of space” are correct. |
| 165. The Universal Human: The Universal Human: The Unification of Humanity Through the Christ Impulse
09 Jan 1916, Bern Tr. Gilbert Church, Sabine H. Seiler Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
Basically Spiritual Science aims at understanding humanity in its essence, tasks, and strivings in the course of evolution. We have often talked about how the outside world misunderstands our spiritual science. This is largely because people nowadays have a hard time getting used to certain fundamental truths—truths that simply must be perceived and acknowledged if we are to understand the life and nature of humanity at all. Let us begin today by asking what modern scientific thinking, whose great and significant triumphs over the last four centuries we must fully acknowledge and appreciate, is based on. It is based on what it can perceive, on what is manifest, in physical existence. Now, of course, it goes without saying that first we trust in what we perceive as so-called reality in our environment, and then we try to explain this reality on the basis of all that we find within its domain. It is naturally difficult for us to be aware at the outset that this reality itself may well contain an element of semblance or illusion, that it may well be deceiving us. Those who truly want to understand spiritual science must first overcome this stumbling block. They must realize that the reality around us can indeed deceive us—it can mislead us into interpreting it falsely. Much of what we have learned in spiritual science over the years has convinced us that immediate reality, as it surrounds us, may indeed be deceptive. Today we will start from a particular point that can only be reached through spiritual science. In spiritual science we must first understand things; then, when we have understood them, we can find them confirmed in reality. Some of the most important things in spiritual science must first be understood before they can be seen. It would be easy to show that this same method is frequently applied in the outer world, notably in the sciences, but we will not go into that today. It is not always possible to develop everything from the beginning. Now one aspect of the outer appearance or physiognomy of reality that is most apt to deceive us about this reality is the differences, the diversities among human beings. When we look at the human beings inhabiting the earth, we realize that no two of them are alike on the physical plane. Here in the physical realm all human beings are different from one another. Once we have accepted this diversity of human beings as a fact—I mean the diversity of their physical bodies—it is quite natural that people then try to find out, on the basis of the facts of earthly life, why human beings are different, why they look so different. However, from the point of view of spiritual science we see something very different. According to spiritual science, if we consider only the forms the physical body can take through the forces of the earth, we find that human beings could not be different but rather would all have to be alike and have the same outer form. Indeed, the forces that exist on earth to give us our physical shape are such that if only these formative forces were to work on us, we would all have the same outer, physical form. This is because the physical human body has undergone a long preparation. We know it was prepared through the epochs of Saturn, Sun, and Moon.1 It was prepared by forces that worked during these three epochs in such a way that the forces of the earth itself could influence our physical body in no other way than to give it a uniform shape if they had indeed been the only forces at work. I might put it this way: Through all the forces that have been incorporated into our physical body during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon epochs, we human beings are so fortified against any diversities coming from earthly forces that if we were left to the earthly forces alone, we would be alike everywhere on earth. Spiritual science, therefore, must start from the fact that a single and uniform shape is predestined for humanity so far as the terrestrial forces are concerned. Even if we consider just the difference between male and female what I have just said is true. This difference is not caused by the work of earthly forces; it is the result of quite other forces, which we will speak of presently. Thus, we can assume a certain totality of earth forces that works formatively upon human beings and wants to produce absolutely identical human forms everywhere on earth. Of course, we must now ask why human beings are so different after all. We know we must consider not only our physical body, but also the etheric body that stands behind it. Spiritual science shows us that while we should all be alike in our physical body, in regard to our etheric body we must be different because earthly forces are not the only ones that work on our etheric body. Forces coming out of the cosmos work on our etheric body, forming and shaping it. We must therefore distinguish between the uniform earthly forces working all over the earth that would make all human forms the same and the forces working out of the universe on the earth, making each etheric body different. We can see the differences between etheric bodies through spiritual scientific research. At the one extreme are those etheric bodies that have strong forces and are tough, retaining their form almost as much as we do our physical form. This is one kind of etheric body. There is a second kind that is mobile, like something that is fluttering and always in movement, flowing and moving. But these two kinds of etheric bodies still reveal themselves in such a way that we can describe their inner tone and shading as being more or less alike. There is another kind of etheric body that is inwardly tinted, inwardly shimmering, not uniform in color but having various tones and colors. There is a fourth kind of etheric body that has one primary color throughout its whole substance, but this color changes over time though we cannot pinpoint other than purely inward causes for this. These etheric bodies are not shimmering in different colors or shaded in many tones; they have only one color, but they change it in the course of time. We may call them chameleon-like etheric bodies. Then there are those etheric bodies that have a strong tendency to light up inwardly, growing at times brighter and brighter. Other etheric bodies have a powerful faculty to reproduce the harmonies of the spheres. Finally, there are those etheric bodies that appear especially in inventive people and persons of genius—etheric bodies that, if I may say so, reveal forces within them that are rare and strange in this earthly world. Whereas the above-mentioned six kinds of etheric bodies are found among ordinary, even average, human beings, the last kind of etheric body produces the type of human being with powerfully developed faculties, those we often say are “not of this earth”—poets, artists, and the like. It is not by arbitrarily picking the number seven that we distinguish these seven forms of etheric bodies. We simply have to count, and we find no others besides those I have just described as typical. For this simple reason, there are seven kinds of etheric bodies. There are seven different kinds of human etheric bodies, and in the etheric bodies we have forces that are not earthly, but come in from the cosmos. Our etheric body forms and molds the physical body. If only earthly forces worked on us, we would all be alike in our physical body. However, the influence of the etheric body makes us different. The astral body brings about further differences, such as those between male and female bodies, through forces it develops between death and a new birth, during the time when we prepare ourselves for the gender that karma requires us to have in the next incarnation. But for the moment, let us just look at the etheric body. If we take only earthly forces into account, we can say that our physical bodies would have to be alike. However, because our etheric bodies differ in their constitution, composition, and structure in the cosmos, there would have to be seven groups of human beings. This is the fact we gradually arrive at when we investigate the relationship between our etheric body and our physical body with the methods of spiritual science. Now this difference is connected with the racial diversities on the earth. Basically, because of this difference in etheric bodies, the several races can always be reduced to the number seven. Even though certain typical forms atrophy, and though natural science may distinguish fewer than seven basic races, there are really seven basic racial distinctions in the human species. These diversities are brought about by the etheric body; they do not result from the earthly forces that work during our evolution, but originate in cosmic forces. Now, when we trace the evolution of the earth back into the Atlantean or even into the Lemurian epochs, we find that initially impulses and tendencies existed that would have prevented our physical body from developing the physiognomy it now has through the power of the etheric body—that is, the diversities. Instead, if everything had gone a certain way (we shall see directly in what way), the seven-colored etheric body would have brought about diversities in our physical form, but successively, one after the other. Thus, the etheric body would have created one form of human being in the fifth period of Atlantis, a second in the sixth period of Atlantis, a third in the seventh, a fourth in the first post-Atlantean period, a fifth in the second post-Atlantean period, a sixth in the third, and a seventh in the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, in the Greco-Roman time. That is what would have happened; various types of human beings would have appeared one after the other. Thus, in the fifth Atlantean period we would have had human beings in whose physical formation one type of etheric body would have predominated. In the sixth Atlantean period, the second of the etheric bodies just described would have been at work, and so on right until the fourth post-Atlantean period. That was the original conception. However, Lucifer and Ahriman opposed this; they did not want it to happen that way. They fought against this harmonious tendency of development in the evolution of humanity, and they managed to change the whole process so that various developments were shifted and displaced. While there should have been basically only one form of human being in the fifth Atlantean period that was to develop gradually into another type, Lucifer and Ahriman preserved the form of the fifth Atlantean period into the sixth, and again that of the sixth Atlantean period into the seventh, and even into the time after the Atlantean flood. Thus, forms that should have disappeared remained. Instead of racial diversities developing consecutively, older racial forms remained unchanged and newer ones began to evolve at the same time. Instead of the intended consecutive development of races, there was a coexistence of races. That is how it came about that physically different races inhabited the earth and are still there in our time although evolution should really have proceeded as I have described it. Even when we consider only what resulted from the development of the etheric body, we see everywhere that Lucifer and Ahriman play their part in the earthly evolution of humanity. Now we must ask what the intended consecutive development of humanity up until the Greco-Roman epoch meant in the larger cosmic context. As we know, around the Atlantean time, human souls gradually came down from the planets to which they had ascended. You may remember that I described in my An Outline of Occult Science that the souls had ascended and then came down again and that the life of earthly incarnations, properly speaking, begins with their descent.2 Thus, the I of human beings, their individualities, would have gone through the various human forms mentioned above in consecutive periods. In the fifth Atlantean period, the I would have had one human form, in the sixth another, in the seventh again another; in the first post-Atlantean epoch it would have had yet another form, and so on. We would all have lived through these types of humanity, one after the other. Indeed, it was planned that human beings would thus complete the necessary schooling of human individuality by passing through various etheric formations that had different effects on their physical body. In fact, according to the original plan, there could have been a type of human being on the earth who would have been the result, as it were, of seven successive periods of development, each of which would have contributed to the perfection of that human type. In the fifth post-Atlantean period, then, there would have been one united type of human being spread over the whole face of the earth. However, Lucifer and Ahriman interfered and thwarted the original design. As a result, the ancient Greeks could only dream of an ideal, superhuman type, which they tried to represent in various ways, for example, in the form of Apollo, Zeus, or Athena. They could not fully encompass this type simply because it did not really exist. But if we have a sense for Greek sculpture, we can feel how the ancient Greeks dreamed of a uniform, perfect, beautiful type of human being that should have developed. This development did not occur because Lucifer and Ahriman preserved older racial forms that had developed, so that there was a coexistence of races rather than a succession. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the Greco-Roman era, human evolution was faced with the fact that what the gods guiding the evolution of the earth had intended for the outer forms on this earth had not been realized because of the luciferic-ahrimanic influence. The spirits of the hierarchy of form had intended that the harmonious working of the various hierarchies of form should really lead to a human type with perfect physical development. As it turned out, the ancient Greeks could only dream of this perfect type and express it in their art. It is a deeply moving experience to realize in the course of spiritual research why the Greeks created such perfection in their plastic art. They did it because through a soul-spiritual instrument they perceived that Lucifer and Ahriman had disappointed the good divine-spiritual beings, whose plans for humanity were different from the development that actually occurred. What should have developed through the work of these good divine-spiritual beings weighed on the ancient Greeks' minds, and so they wanted to at least represent it even though it did not exist in outer reality. It is great and wonderful and also deeply moving to behold these inner forces of human evolution that appear there in artistic forms, striving to express what could not be achieved in outer reality. Such insights shed new light on Greek art as it was developed so uniquely and unrepeatably at that time. The Greek era was also the time when humanity faced a crisis because of the luciferic-ahrimanic influence. Lucifer and Ahriman had caused races to live side by side instead of one after the other. At the same time, however, all the forces the spirits of form were pouring into human evolution on the earth were immobilized. Now they could do no more than stimulate and inspire the creative imagination of the Greeks so that it developed as I have described it. The spirits of form had to decide whether the human race should continue to develop so that human beings would never again be united in earthly evolution. For this indeed is what would have happened. If earthly evolution had continued beyond the fourth, the Greco-Roman period, in the same way it was prior to that, then humanity would have become separated into seven groups due to luciferic and ahrimanic forces. These seven groups would have been as different from each other as the various species of animals. Animal species do not understand each other, but regard each other as foreign. Similarly, toward the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period and in the fifth one, in which we live, people would have had to develop more and more the view that there are seven groups of human beings on earth that see each other as completely different species. This view would still have prevailed in our time; in fact, the separation between the seven groups would not yet have reached its culmination or completion, but would still be developing and widening. The term “human being” for all people on earth would have seemed wrong; we would have had seven different terms, one for each of the seven groups. Therefore, in the fourth post-Atlantean age, in the Greco-Roman period, something had to be done in the universe to forestall the development that threatened to result in the future, at the end of earth evolution, namely, the evolution of seven groups of human beings, each called by a different name, just as each animal species has a different name. These groups would not have regarded each other as belonging to the same species, and at most there would have been handed down to them some copy of the Greek forms, such as the statues of Zeus or Apollo. They would have regarded these statues as something alien to them—something that could never have existed on earth. Precautions had to be taken to prevent such a development. Physical evolution had already gone too far and could not be changed anymore. Therefore, precautions had to be taken for our etheric body; an impulse had to enter our etheric body that would counteract the separating of earthly humanity into seven groups. This impulse that was to counteract the growing fragmentation of humanity and that was to make it possible for the term “human being” to retain—and, in fact, increase—its true meaning over the whole face of the earth was the Mystery of Golgotha, which we can now see in a new light. The first attempt that had been made with earthly humanity before the luciferic and ahrimanic impulses interfered in evolution was to create unity among human beings everywhere through the forming of the physical body. This attempt by the spirits of form failed because of luciferic-ahrimanic interference. But it could not be allowed to fail altogether; precautions had to be taken to prevent complete failure and to immobilize and offset the work of Lucifer and Ahriman. The physical body could no longer be worked on as was originally intended; therefore, the etheric body had to be worked on. This was done by the divine-spiritual being we have so often spoken of—the Christ Being—taking on human form at the time in human evolution when the possibility to express the archetype of humanity was the greatest. At what period in human evolution was this? All the forces that counteract the original, identical design of our physical body are at work in us mostly in the first seven years of life, when the physical body is still soft and pliant. They do not allow our physical body to become the same everywhere, but from within the body they immobilize the forces for the original identical design.3 These opposing forces can still go on working in the second seven years until puberty; indeed, they can even continue to work in the third and fourth seven-year periods during the development of the astral body and the sentient soul. However, in the middle of the development of the intellectual or mind soul, which evolved above all in the fourth post-Atlantean or Greco-Roman time, the extra-earthly forces are less and less able to reach us. And in the very midst of this development, that is, in the period between our twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years, they have least access to us. If we add two years at the beginning of this period and subtract two years at the end, the time in question is that between the thirtieth and the thirty-third year. In the time following those years, extra-earthly forces once more have the greatest influence. The period from the thirtieth to the thirty-third year, however, is the time of the greatest influence of earthly forces on the human being. And if in this period of three years there remained only the degree of diversity that existed in younger years and only what is to appear in later years would be added—in short, if only what works on human beings between the thirtieth and the thirty-third year remained effective, then people would indeed be much more alike. Christ had to use these three years—very special and unique years—to unite with those earthly forces in human beings that had retained most of the earthly element in the human being. To this end, as we have discussed, the body for Christ was prepared through the two Jesus bodies up to the thirtieth year. Then, from the thirtieth to the thirty-third year, Christ took possession of this body. Where the earth forces were most active and where deformations could have set in, there no further development was possible, and physical death occurred. Thus, the sun-being, Christ, really entered into the earth sphere and united with the whole etheric body of the earth, as I have often explained. He then entered into the earth aura and now continues to work there. This sun-being must work for us in such a way that we realize more and more that in Christ the divine spirit was sent to us who was to counterbalance and redeem from within the separation and diversification in humanity created by Lucifer and Ahriman's opposition to the original impulses. In outer human nature, the good spiritual beings work together with Lucifer and Ahriman. But what human beings originally, at the beginning of earth evolution, were intended to have on the outside, namely, uniformity and the applicability of the term “human being” everywhere on earth, was now to be brought forth out of the innermost essence of the human being through the Christ-Spirit. It is one of the many meanings of the Mystery of Golgotha that with the Christ-Spirit something was given to the earth that, when rightly understood, makes the name “human being” again applicable to all earthly humanity. The real substance of Christianity, which has already been partially revealed through its teachings, will be explored by those who, in regard to Christ, seek in the spiritual world what Christ is continually revealing in accordance with his words: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.” When what can be conveyed to human beings in the name of Christ from within thus gradually becomes known, then, as a result, what Lucifer and Ahriman did in earthly humanity can more and more be made up for and redeemed. We may, of course, ask now if there is any meaning in this detour. This is really a childish question, and it is often raised by people who think themselves cleverer than the cosmic wisdom—and indeed there are many who aspire to such superior cleverness. Such people say, “If there are mighty divine beings, could they not have eliminated the luciferic-ahrimanic influence at the beginning of earthly evolution in order to protect their work?” This may be human wisdom, but in St. Paul's sense it is “folly with God.” It is nothing more than mere human wisdom. In our lectures, we must look at things as we are now doing, and then what has developed through the opposition of Lucifer and Ahriman does not seem absolutely evil to us, but only relatively evil. For let us now consider the other side of the matter. Let us assume the original, divine cosmic plan for the earth had been fulfilled. Imagine that in the regular course of evolution the Greco-Roman era would have arrived, as I have pointed out, and that beautiful, harmonious type of human being the Greeks dreamed of would not only have been created by their sculptors, but would have lived among them and would gradually have spread over the whole earth. All other human forms would gradually have disappeared, and only what lives in the Apollo type, the Zeus type, the Diana type, and the Athena type would have spread over the earth. Since such beings would have recognized each other as belonging to the same species, they would have given themselves the name “human being.” Then the term “human being” would indeed have been applicable, and at the same time there would have been a sense of the equality of all people. In that case, a human race of Grecian beauty would have spread over the earth, and in our age we would already see humanity approaching more and more this beautiful Grecian type, which would reach its perfection when the earth arrives at its goal in the seventh post-Atlantean epoch, after which it will pass over into other stages of existence. However, human beings would have advanced to this common humanity in unfreedom—that is what we must bear in mind. We would have been compelled to see all human beings everywhere as the same beings. It is only because such an identical form did not develop that all the other things could happen that allow us to see others as different, so that each sees the other as unlike himself and does not love his neighbor as himself. You will probably understand that if human beings had really become outwardly as alike as the original divine-spiritual forces had intended if Lucifer and Ahriman had not interfered, the feeling that one must love one's neighbor as oneself would necessarily have developed. There would not have been any choice; for anything else would have seemed to be nonsense, both in terms of feeling and of perception. However, this development was not supposed to come from the outside because then it would have made us into beings who love automatically—that is, we would have loved others because they are our own kind, but without knowing the force that urges us to this love. Thus, what would otherwise have come to us in unfreedom was prepared for freedom through Lucifer and Ahriman's opposition. This sanction of the opposition is therefore inherent in the original plan of divine wisdom. Indeed, we may say that in still earlier periods of earthly evolution, the opposition against the harmonious progressive divine-spiritual powers was created precisely so that it could later bring about freedom. At this point, we must realize that our concepts must change when we leave the sphere of physical observation and ascend to a higher order of perception. Many of you probably know that philosophy speaks of antinomies, and that Kant has even gone so far as to claim that it can be proven with equal conclusiveness that the two statements “the world is infinite in terms of space” and “the world is finite in terms of space” are correct. Similarly, both “the world has had a beginning” and “the world has had no beginning” can be proven conclusively. Why is this? It is because logic does not apply when we come into a sphere that can no longer be comprehended by physical means. We finally have to realize that our physical logic works neither in the realm of philosophy nor anywhere else where we concern ourselves with other than physical forms of existence. We must not make the mistake of looking at the opposition of Lucifer and Ahriman as we would at the antagonism between a good and an evil person on earth. This kind of mistake occurs when we continue to carry over the earthly into the super-earthly realm. Most people picture Ahriman and Lucifer as evil beings—albeit much more intensely evil than human beings. But this is not true; we must keep in mind that certain earthly feelings we associate with our concepts lose their meaning when we go beyond the earthly realm. Thus we cannot say that there are good gods on the one hand and the evil gods Ahriman and Lucifer on the other. We must not assume that a trial should be held in the universe where a highly qualified cosmic judge would sit on the cosmic judgment seat and sentence Lucifer and Ahriman to be locked up once and for all, so that only the good gods can get to work. True, locking somebody up can at times make sense in earthly life; in the cosmos it would not make any sense because there such ideas and concepts have no meaning. The opposing forces were created by the good gods themselves in an earlier period so that they would be able to bring to bear their full force for the development I have described. For freedom to enter in so that human beings did not develop an unfree love through their outer shape or form, the luciferic and ahrimanic elements had to be part of our evolution. Only in this way can we arrive from within ourselves at the unity indicated by the term “humanity.” Thus, the gods allowed humanity to be fragmented by the opposing forces, so that later, after their bodily nature had been thus separated, human beings could again be brought into a unity in their spiritual nature through Christ. This is one of the meanings of the Mystery of Golgotha: the attainment of the unity of humanity from within. Externally human beings are becoming more and more different. The result will be not sameness but difference over the earth, and human beings must exert all the more force from within to attain unity. There will always be setbacks in this process of achieving unity—we can see them coming if we look for them. What was actually intended only for an earlier epoch is preserved into a later epoch, and what was to create differences in consecutive periods coexists. Human beings form different groups, and while they are struggling for unity all over the world in the name of Christ, through the Christ impulse, differences remain as aftereffects and setbacks. Such differences will always exist because human beings will only gradually be able to attain unity. At the same time, different groups will fight each other tooth and nail about everything concerning their outer life. There are setbacks from earlier epochs that run counter to the Christ impulse, rather than in harmony with it. Indeed, here we see a very profound meaning of this Christ impulse. Based on true knowledge, we can say Christ is our savior who keeps humankind from being fragmented into groups. This is not yet fully understood by all people because the old still exists alongside the new. Today, people hardly understand the community of life in the Christ impulse, and this is connected with the fact that this understanding must proceed from our innermost being. We must realize that the Christ impulse has worked in the earth aura for the last two thousand years, but has not been understood. As we have often emphasized, this Christ impulse can only be fully understood through what spiritual science gives us. It is only when a growing number of people can more and more grasp, think, and feel what actually entered our earthly evolution in the fourth post-Atlantean period that understanding for that event will increase. To expect modern humanity to understand the Christ impulse is really asking too much. After all, just think how unwilling people are to acknowledge that this fourth post-Atlantean period of evolution, the Greco-Roman epoch, is of such paramount, such mighty significance in human evolution. Just think how unwilling people are to recognize any such post-Atlantean age at all with the Greco-Latin epoch as its pivotal point. To accept such truths, people need to take in the ideas of spiritual science. Without them one cannot understand these things at all—that is, one cannot understand the evolution of humanity if one has not taken in these concepts. We have to understand the significance of the spirits of form, who had intended to develop a homogeneous human race in seven successive stages. This homogeneous human race was fragmented by Lucifer and Ahriman, but the force that wants to spread the one name “human being” over all the earth and unto the end of time—in spite of the outer differences between people—was revived from within by the Christ impulse. One of the chief tasks of the immediate future is to understand that Christ stands between Lucifer and Ahriman and to grasp his significance in relation to them. Therefore, we must always call Lucifer and Ahriman by their true names—we must call a spade a spade, so to speak—and look to the Christ impulse as the one combating them and saving the earth from this one-sided luciferic-ahrimanic impulse. This is what must be presented more and more often. In our Dornach building we have therefore placed the statue The Representative of Humanity in the most prominent place; it presents the archetype of humanity that is to be recreated by Christ from within, surrounded by the luciferic-ahrimanic elements.4 That is the meaning of this central statue in our building. Looking at this central figure, people will realize that this is indeed what the good gods had intended. The human race was fragmented, Lucifer and Ahriman made their appearance, but the Christ impulse triumphs and recreates from within, from within us, what was originally intended for the outside. In the process, our freedom is created. Our building and what will be in it are to place before humanity what must be accomplished in terms of understanding human evolution. What is most needed for humanity in the immediate future is to be revealed in our building; we want people to understand human evolution showing and telling them what is most important for the near future. Of course, many objections can be raised, and some of them have already been brought to our attention. After seeing the paintings and sculptures in the Goetheanum, some people have said that a true work of art must be understandable immediately to everyone without requiring an explanation. Here, on the other hand, people need theoretical explanations to understand our art works. Well, if people would only think a little! Imagine a Turk, for example, understanding nothing at all except what is contained in the Koran, a Turk who has heard nothing about Christ except that he must fight against Christianity. Suppose you took this Turk to see the Sistine Madonna and showed it to him without any explanations. Naturally, a work of art can only be understood by those who live in the same spiritual stream out of which the work was created. Thus, our ideal figure surrounded by Lucifer and Ahriman will only be understood by those who live in our spiritual stream. This is true for all works of art in all ages: they are comprehensible only to those who live in the same spiritual stream. Only within that stream are they true works of art. The spiritual orientation must be inherent in them. Those who understand Raphael's Sistine Madonna or, let us say, his Transfiguration must know something of the spiritual stream in which the pictures were created. Similarly, to understand what they have seen in our building, people must have some element belonging to our spiritual stream in their souls and hearts. If they have this element within them, then the work of art must speak for itself, and no labels, identifying names, or other comments will be needed to explain or interpret it. For example, when people look at one of our glass windows, they see in the bottom part a kind of coffin with a dead man in it; above that, they see an old man, a youth, a young woman, and a child standing on a winding path. If people have taken in our spiritual stream, they will realize that this is the review of life. Immediately after we have passed through the gate of death, we will see the course of our earthly life in reverse. Of course, you have to know this fact to make sense of the picture in the window. But if you know this, then the picture works by virtue of what it contains, just as the Sistine Madonna works upon those who know the Christian history behind it, but it has no such effect on the Turk. By the same token, what is presented in our building cannot work upon those who have not taken in our spiritual stream. These things just have to be seen in the right way. Today, I wanted above all to explain that Christ was that spirit from the cosmos who, in the course of earthly evolution, brought spiritually what was originally intended for our outer form but could not develop externally, because we would then have become automatons of love and equality. On the physical plane there prevails the fundamental law that everything must operate through antitheses, through polarities. The gods could not simply have sent down Christ at the very beginning of earth evolution, as our naive wisdom might suggest they should have done. For then the antithesis of external fragmentation and inner concentration could never have developed. Humanity, however, must live in this antithesis and polarity. We have the right feelings for Christ only when we see in him the savior, rescuing humanity from dispersion and separateness; only then can Christ fill our own innermost I. Christianity lives wherever people are able to understand this union of all humanity through Christ. In the future, it will not matter much whether what Christ is will still be called by that name. However, a lot will depend on our finding in Christ the spiritual uniter of humanity and accepting that external diversity will increase more and more. We will also have to accept that there will still be many setbacks for this spiritual understanding of the Christ impulse. What developed at the same time instead of consecutively will for a long time continue to evoke forces that fight against a spiritual understanding of global human equality. There will be many and terrible onslaughts, and, for the most part, their purpose will be to continue the luciferic-ahrimanic war against the Christ impulse. And it will be one of the greatest, most beautiful and significant achievements of our age if we can be among the few who understand this thought of the unifying of all human beings, who understand how remnants of the luciferic-ahrimanic elements strive to bring to the fore what is unique in various groups of human beings so as to exclude all others. It is very difficult to say anything at this time about the final outcome of these matters. As human hearts are now, to speak about that outcome would only be upsetting and bewildering; it may lead to opposition, perhaps even to hatred and abuse rather than to working in accordance with the Christ impulse. However, what can be said about this principle in the Christ impulse, namely, the salvation of humanity out of bodily fragmentation into spiritual unity, must be told, for it must become more and more effective in human evolution. We have to be able to face calmly and courageously the increasing diversity in human nature because we know that we can carry a word into all these diversities that is not merely a word of speech but one of power. Though there may be groups that fight against each other and though we may even belong to one of them, we know that we can bring something that will express: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” into every group. We know that this “Christ who lives in me” will not lead to the forming of groups; rather, it will bring about the spreading of the glory of the name “human being” over the whole earth. The understanding of spiritual science brings to life the realization that we can carry the power that comes from the words “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” into the groups that are fighting each other—no matter into which group we bring our I. This is one of the practical and moral-ethical aspects of our strivings in spiritual science. With the force of these words we bring something into the group that does not belong exclusively to one or the other group but to all humanity. It is only through this that we can arrive at a true spiritual understanding of Christianity. It is the hallmark of mighty spiritual paths that they are finally expressed in simple words. Think of the simple words that can express the whole of Christianity, which has permeated the world for nearly two thousand years. But these simple words can only be found on the basis of big, long-term developments. These simple words that express Christianity were not just there all at once; they had to be worked for. We must be aware that we are among those people working to make it possible that someday simple words may be found to express, in a basic, elementary way, the truths we have to spread and develop today. Without such development the simple could never come about. We may not yet be able to put our spiritual science into simple words in any language—words that would condense it on a quarter of a page—so that all striving people would understand it, as was done for Christianity when it originated two thousand years ago. Yet, we can be sure that those simple words will contain something of what I said today, something that will direct our attention to the Greco-Roman age, especially to the Mystery of Golgotha during that time, as well as to the contrast or polarity between Christ and Lucifer-Ahriman. What can be seen everywhere will be concentrated in a few simple words that can then be handed down to future humanity in the same way as the commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Just as this commandment expresses something that had to be attained as a result of a long development, so, in the future, the findings of spiritual science will be put into simple words, and then all people will understand them. This requires our spiritual work, for the simple can only arise in the spiritual evolution of humanity when people have been willing to spend long periods of time learning about the details. You are called upon to help in this development, which will lead to something appearing to people in bright clarity, something we cannot yet express because we do not have the words for it in our languages, yet something spiritual science works toward. When you feel you belong to such a spiritual stream, and feel at home in it, because you see that it is necessary for human evolution, then you have the right understanding of our spiritual movement—you belong to it in such a way that you rightly understand the greatest of its goals based on your increasing understanding of the contrast between Christ and Lucifer-Ahriman. You understand that this contrast is vital and had to exist. This is what I wanted to bring before your souls today. It is all connected with the question of the meaning of our whole earthly evolution. For when spirits from other planets look down upon the earth and ask what the meaning of this earthly evolution is, they will understand it when they learn about the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything that happens in the course of earthly evolution has its meaning only through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha radiates out into the cosmos and imparts to everything else that radiates out from the earth its meaning, its central meaning.
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| 272. Faust, the Aspiring Human: A Spiritual-Scientific Explanation of Goethe's “Faust”: “Faust”, the Greatest Work of Striving in the World, the Classical Phantasmagoria
30 May 1915, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| In this way, I tried to throw a thought into the hustle and bustle of philosophy, and it will be interesting to see whether it will be understood or whether such a very plausible thought will be met again and again with the foolish objection: “Yes, but Kant has already proved that knowledge cannot approach things.” He proved it only from the point of view of knowledge, which can be compared to the consumption of grains of wheat, and not from the point of view of knowledge that arises with the progressive development that is in things. |
| 272. Faust, the Aspiring Human: A Spiritual-Scientific Explanation of Goethe's “Faust”: “Faust”, the Greatest Work of Striving in the World, the Classical Phantasmagoria
30 May 1915, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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If you combine the reflections I presented here yesterday with the other lectures I gave here a week ago, you will, to a certain extent, gain an important key to much of spiritual science. I will only mention the main thoughts that we need for our further considerations, so that we can orient ourselves. About a week ago I pointed out the significance of the processes that, from the point of view of the physical world, are called processes of destruction. I pointed out that, from the point of view of the physical world, one actually only sees the real in what arises, what, as it were, emerges from nothingness and comes into noticeable existence. Thus, one speaks of the real when the plant struggles up from the root, developing leaf by leaf until it blossoms, and so forth. But one does not speak of the real in the same way when one looks at the processes of destruction, at the gradual withering, the gradual fading, the ultimate flowing away, one might say, to nothingness. But for anyone who wants to understand the world, it is eminently necessary that he also looks at the so-called destruction, at the processes of dissolution, at that which ultimately results for the physical world like flowing into nothingness. For consciousness can never develop in the physical world where mere sprouting and sprouting processes are taking place, but consciousness begins only where that which has sprouted in the physical world is in turn worn away and destroyed. I have pointed out how those processes that life evokes in us must be destroyed by the soul-spiritual if consciousness is to arise in the physical world. It is indeed the case that when we perceive anything external, our soul-spiritual must instigate processes of destruction in our nervous system, and these processes of destruction then mediate consciousness. Every time we become aware of something, the processes of consciousness must arise out of processes of destruction. And I have indicated how the most significant process of destruction, the process of death, is precisely the creator of consciousness for the time we spend after death. Through the fact that our soul and spirit experiences the complete dissolution and detachment of the physical and etheric bodies, the absorption of the physical and etheric bodies into the general physical and etheric world, our soul and spirit draws the strength – from the process of death our soul and spirit draws the strength to be able to have processes of perception between death and a new birth. The saying of Jakob Böhme: 'Thus, then, death is the root of all life' acquires through this a higher significance for the whole context of world phenomena. Now you will often have asked yourselves: What actually is the time that passes for the human soul between death and a new birth? It has often been pointed out that for the normal human life this time is a long one in relation to the time we spend here in the physical body between birth and death. It is short only for those people who use their lives in a way that is contrary to the world, who, I will say, come to do only that which in a real and true sense can be called criminal. Then there is a short lapse of time between death and a new birth. But for people who have not fallen prey to selfishness alone, but live their lives in a normal way between birth and death, there is usually a relatively long period of time between death and a new birth. But the question must, I would say, burn in our souls: What determines whether a human soul returns to a new physical embodiment at all? The answer to this question is intimately connected with everything that can be known about the significance of the destructive processes I have mentioned. Just think that when we enter physical existence with our souls, we are born into very specific circumstances. We are born into a certain age, driven to certain people. So we are born into very specific circumstances. You must realize very thoroughly that the content of our life between birth and death is actually filled with everything we are born into. What we think, what we feel, what we sense, in short, the whole content of our life depends on the time into which we are born. But now you will also easily be able to understand that what surrounds us when we are born into physical existence depends on the preceding causes, on what has happened before. Suppose, if I am to draw this schematically, we are born at a certain point in time and walk through life between birth and death. (It was drawn.) If you add what surrounds you, you do not stand there in isolation, but are the effect of what has gone before. What I mean is: you are brought together with what has gone before, with people. These people are children of other people, who in turn are children of other people, and so on. If we consider only these physical relationships of succession in generations, you will say: When I enter into physical existence I take something on from the people around me; during my education I take on much from the people around me. But these people, in turn, have also taken on very much from their ancestors, from the acquaintances and relatives of their ancestors, and so on. You could say that people have to search ever higher up to find the causes of what they themselves are. If you then let your thoughts go further, you can say that you can follow a certain current upwards through your birth. This current has, as it were, brought with it everything that surrounds us in the life between birth and death. And if we continue to follow this current upwards, we would then come to a point in time where our previous incarnation lay. So by following the time upwards, before our birth, we would have a long time in which we dwelled in the spiritual world. During this time, many things have happened on earth. But what has happened has brought with it the conditions in which we live, into which we are born. And then, in the spiritual world, we finally come to the time when we were on earth in a previous incarnation. When we talk about these circumstances, we are definitely talking about average circumstances. Of course, there are many exceptions, but they all lie, I would say, in the line I indicated earlier for natures that come to earthly embodiment more quickly. What determines whether we are born here again after a period of time has passed? Well, if we look at our previous embodiments, we were also surrounded by circumstances during our time on earth, and these circumstances had their effects. We were surrounded by people, these people had children, and passed on to the children their feelings and ideas. But if you follow the course of historical life, you will say to yourself: there will come a time in the course of evolution when you will no longer be able to recognize anything truly the same or even similar in the descendants as in the ancestors. All this is transferred, but the basic character that is present at a particular time appears in the children in a weakened form, in the grandchildren even more weakened and so on, until a time approaches when there is nothing left of the basic character of the environment in which one was in the previous incarnation. So that the stream of time works to destroy what the basic character of the environment once was. We watch this destruction in the time between death and a new birth. And when the character of the earlier age has been erased, when there is nothing left of it, when what it was like in an earlier incarnation has been destroyed, then the time comes when we enter earthly existence again. Just as the second half of our life is actually a kind of wearing down of our physical existence, so between death and a new birth there must be a kind of wearing down of earthly conditions, a destruction, a annihilation. And new conditions, new surroundings, into which we are born, must be there. So we are reborn when all that for the sake of which we were born before has been destroyed. So this idea of destruction is connected with the successive return of our incarnation on earth. And what our consciousness creates at the moment of death, when we see the body fall away from our spiritual and mental self, is strengthened at this moment of death, at this contemplation of destruction for the contemplation of the process of destruction that must take place in the circumstances on earth between our death and a new birth. Now you will also understand that someone who has no interest at all in what surrounds him on earth, who basically is not interested in any person or any being, but is only interested in what is good for himself, and simply steals from one day to the next, that he is not very strongly connected to the conditions and things on earth. He is also not interested in following their slow erosion, but comes very soon to repair them, to really live with the conditions with which he must live, so that he learns to understand their gradual destruction. He who has never lived with earthly conditions does not understand their destruction, their dissolution. Therefore, those who have lived very intensely in the basic character of any age, have absorbed themselves in the basic character of any age, will, above all, tend, if nothing else intervenes, to bring about the destruction of that into which they were born, and to reappear when a completely new one has emerged. Of course, I would say that there are exceptions at the top. And these exceptions are particularly important for us to consider. Let us assume that one lives one's way into such a movement, as the spiritual-scientific movement is now, at this point in time, where it does not agree with everything that is in the surrounding world, where it is something completely alien to the surrounding world. In this sense, the spiritual-scientific movement is not something we are born into, but something we have to work on, something we want to enter into the spiritual cultural development of the earth. In this case it is a matter of living with conditions that are contrary to spiritual science and then reappearing on earth when the earth has changed so much that the spiritual-scientific conditions can truly take hold of cultural life. So here we have the exception to the upside. There are exceptions downwards and upwards. Certainly, the most earnest co-workers of spiritual science today are preparing to reappear in an earthly existence as soon as possible, by working at the same time during this earthly existence to eliminate the conditions into which they were born. So you see, when you take the last thought, that you are helping, so to speak, the spiritual beings to direct the world by devoting yourself to what lies in the intentions of the spiritual beings. If we consider the conditions of the times today, we have to say: on the one hand, we have something that is heading towards decadence and decline. Those who have a heart and soul for spiritual science have been placed in this age, so to speak, to see how it is ripe for decline. Here on earth they are introduced to that with which one can only become acquainted on earth, but they carry this up into the spiritual worlds, now see the decline of the age and will return when that is to bring about a new age, which lies precisely in the innermost impulses of spiritual striving. Thus the plans of the spiritual guides, the spiritual leaders of earthly evolution, are effectively furthered by what such people, who occupy themselves with something that is, so to speak, not the culture of the time, absorb into themselves. You are perhaps familiar with the accusations that are very often made by people of today to those who profess spiritual science, namely that they deal with something that often appears to be outwardly unfruitful, that does not outwardly intervene in the conditions of the time. Yes, there is really a necessity for people in earthly existence to occupy themselves with that which is of significance for further development, but not immediately for the time. If anyone objects to this, then he should just consider the following. Imagine that these were consecutive years:  We could then go further. Suppose these were consecutive years and that these were the grain crops w w of the consecutive years. And what I am drawing here would always be the mouths > that consume these grains of grain. Now someone may come and say: Only the arrow that goes from the grains of grain to the mouths > is important, because that sustains the people of the following years. And he can say: Whoever thinks realistically only looks at these arrows going from the grain to the mouth. But the grain cares little about this arrow. It does not care at all, but has only the tendency to develop each grain of wheat into the next year. The grain kernels only care about this arrow; they don't care at all about being eaten. That is a side effect, something that arises along the way. Each grain kernel has, if I may say so, the will, the impulse to go over into the next year to become a grain kernel again. And it is good for the mouths that the grains follow this arrow direction, because if all the grains followed this arrow direction, then the mouths here would have nothing more to eat next year! If the grains from the year 1913 had all followed this arrow, then the mouths from the year 1914 would have nothing more to eat. If someone wanted to carry out materialistic thinking consistently, he would examine the grains of corn to see how they are chemically composed so that they produce the best possible food products. But that would not be a good observation; because this tendency does not lie in the grains of corn at all, but in the grains of corn lies the tendency to ensure further development and to develop over into next year's grain of corn. But it is the same with the end of the world. Those truly follow the course of the world who ensure that evolution continues, and those who become materialists follow the mouths that only look at this arrow here. But those who ensure that the course of the world continues need not be deterred in their striving to prepare the next following times, any more than the grains of corn are deterred from preparing those of the following year, even if the mouths here long for the completely different arrows. I pointed this out at the end of Riddles of Philosophy, pointing out that what we call materialistic knowledge can be compared to eating grain seeds, that what happens in world events really happens in the world, can be compared to reproduction, to what happens from one grain seed to the next year's. Therefore, what is called scientific knowledge is just as insignificant for the inner nature of things as eating is without inner significance for the growth of grain fruits. And today's science, which is only concerned with the way in which what can be known about things is received by the human mind, is doing exactly the same as the man who uses the grain for food, because what the grains of corn are when we eat them has nothing to do with the inner nature of the grains of corn, just as the outer knowledge has nothing to do with what develops inside the things. In this way, I tried to throw a thought into the hustle and bustle of philosophy, and it will be interesting to see whether it will be understood or whether such a very plausible thought will be met again and again with the foolish objection: “Yes, but Kant has already proved that knowledge cannot approach things.” He proved it only from the point of view of knowledge, which can be compared to the consumption of grains of wheat, and not from the point of view of knowledge that arises with the progressive development that is in things. But we must familiarize ourselves with the fact that we have to repeat again and again to our age and to the age to come, in all possible forms, only not in hasty forms and not in agitative forms, not in fanatical forms, what the principle and essence of spiritual science is, until it is drummed into us. For it is precisely the characteristic of our age that Ahriman has made the skulls so hard and thick, and that they can only be softened slowly. So no one should shrink, I would say, from the necessity of emphasizing again and again, in all possible forms, what the essence and impulse of spiritual science is. But now let us turn to another conclusion that was drawn here yesterday in connection with a number of assumptions: the conclusion that reverence for the truth must grow in our time, reverence for knowledge, not for authoritative knowledge, but for the knowledge that one acquires. There must be a growing realization that one should not judge out of nothing, but out of one's acquired knowledge of the workings of the world. Now, by being born into a particular age, we are dependent on our environment, completely dependent on what is in our environment. But, as we have seen, this is connected with the whole stream of development, with the whole striving that leads upwards, so that we are born into circumstances that depend on the preceding circumstances. Just consider how we are placed into them. Of course we are placed in it by our karma, but we are still placed in that which surrounds us as something quite definite, as something that has a certain character. And now consider how we thereby become dependent in our judgment. This is not always clearly evident to us, but it is really so. So that we have to ask ourselves, even if it is related to our karma: What if we had not been born at a certain point in time and in a certain place, but fifty years earlier in a different place? How would it be then? Wouldn't we have received the form and inner direction of our judgments from the different circumstances of our environment, just as we have received them from where we were born? So that on closer self-examination we really come to the conclusion that we are born into a certain milieu, into a certain environment, that we are dependent on this milieu in our judgments and in our feelings, that this milieu reappears, as it were, when we judge. Just think how it would be different, I just want to say, if Luther had been born in the 19th century and in a completely different place! So even with a personality who has an enormous influence on their surroundings, we can see how they incorporate into their own judgments that which is characteristic of the age, whereby the personality actually reflects the impulses of the age. And this is the case for every person, except that those for whom it is most the case are the least aware of it. Those who most closely reflect the impulses of their environment, into which they were born, are usually the ones who speak the most about their freedom, their independent judgment, their lack of prejudice, and so on. On the other hand, when we see people who are not as thoroughly dependent as most people are on their environment, we see that it is precisely such people who are most aware of what makes them dependent on their environment. And one of those who never got rid of the idea of dependence on their environment is the great spirit, of whom we have now seen another piece pass before our eyes, is Goethe. He knew in the most eminent sense that he would not be as he was if he had not been born in 1749 in Frankfurt am Main and so on. He knew that, in a sense, his age speaks through him. This moved and warmed his behavior in an extraordinary way. He knew that by seeing certain times and circumstances in his father's house, he formed his judgment. By spending his student days in Leipzig, he formed his judgment. By coming to Strasbourg, he formed his judgment. That is why he wanted to get out of these circumstances and into completely different ones, so that in the 1880s, one might say, he suddenly disappeared into the night and fog and only told his friends about his disappearance when he was already far away, after he could not be brought back under the circumstances at the time. He wanted to break out so that something else could speak through him. And if you take many of Goethe's utterances from his developmental period, you will notice this feeling, this sense of dependence on the environment everywhere. Yes, but what would Goethe have had to strive for if, at the moment when he had truly come to realize that one is actually completely dependent on one's environment, if he had connected his feelings, his perceptions of this dependence with the thoughts we have expressed today? He would have had to say: Yes, my environment is dependent on the whole stream of evolution right back to my ancestors. I will always remain dependent. I would have to transport myself back in thought, in soul experience, to a time when today's conditions did not yet exist, when completely different conditions prevailed. Then, if I could transport myself into these conditions, I would come to an independent judgment, not just judging as my time judges about my time, but judging as I judge when I completely transcend my time. Of course, it is not necessary for such a person, who perceives this as a necessity, to place himself in his own previous incarnation. But essentially he must place himself at a point in time that is connected with an earlier incarnation, where he lived in completely different circumstances. And when he now transfers himself back into this incarnation, he will not be dependent as before, because the circumstances have become quite different, the earlier circumstances have since been destroyed, perished. It is, of course, different if I now transfer myself back to a time when the whole environment, the whole milieu has disappeared. What do you actually have then? Yes, one must say: before, one lives in life, one enjoys life; one is interwoven with life. One can no longer be interwoven with the life that has perished, with the life of an earlier time; one can only relive this life spiritually and mentally. Then one would be able to say: “We have life in its colorful reflection.” Yes, but what would have to happen if such a person, feeling this, wanted to depict this emergence from the circumstances of the present and the coming to an objective judgment from a point of view that is not possible today? He would have to describe it in such a way that he would be transported back into completely different circumstances. Whether this is exactly the previous incarnation or not is not important, but rather the circumstances on earth were completely different. And he would have to strive to fill his soul with the impulses that were there at that time. He would have to, as it were, place himself in a kind of phantasmagoria, identify with this phantasmagoria and live in it, live in a kind of phantasmagoria that represents an earlier time. But that is what Goethe strives for by continuing his “Faust” in the second part. Consider that he has initially brought his Faust into the circumstances of the present. There he lets him experience everything that can be experienced in the present. But in spite of all this, he has a deep inner feeling: “This cannot lead to any kind of true judgment, because I am always inspired by what is around me; I have to go out, I have to go back to a time when the circumstances have been completely changed up to our time, and so they cannot affect the judgment.” Goethe therefore allows Faust to go all the way back to classical Greek times and to enter, to come together with the classical Walpurgis Night. That which he can experience in the deepest sense in the present has been depicted in the Nordic Walpurgis Night. Now he must go back to the classical Walpurgis Night, because from the Nordic Walpurgis Night to the classical Walpurgis Night, all conditions have changed. What was essential in the classical Walpurgis Night has disappeared, and new conditions have arisen, which are symbolized by the Nordic Walpurgis Night. There you have the justification for Faust's return to Greek times. The whole of the second part of “Faust” is the realization of what one can call: “In the colored reflection we have life.” First, there is still a passage through the conditions of the present, but those conditions that are already preparing destruction. We will see what is developing at the “imperial court,” where the devil takes the place of the fool and so on. We see through the creation of the homunculus how the emergence from the present is sought, and how in the third act of “Faust” the classical scene now occurs. Goethe had already written the beginning around the turn of the 18th century; the most important scenes were not added until 1825, but the Helena scene was already written (800) and Goethe calls it a “classical phantasmagoria” to suggest through the words that he means a return to conditions that are not the physical, real conditions of the present. That is the significant thing about Goethe's Faust poetry, that it is, I would say, a work of striving, a work of wrestling. I have really emphasized clearly enough in recent times that it would be nonsense to regard Goethe's Faust poetry as a completed work of art. I have done enough to show that it cannot be considered a finished work of art. But as a work of striving, as a work of wrestling, this Faust epic is so significant. Only then can one understand what Goethe intuitively achieved when one opens oneself to the light that can fall from our spiritual science on such a composition and sees how Faust looks into the classical period, into the milieu of Greek culture, where within the fourth post-Atlantic period very different conditions existed than in our fifth post-Atlantic period. One is truly filled with the greatest reverence for this struggle when one sees how Goethe began to work on this Faust in his early youth, how he abandoned himself to everything that was accessible to him at the time, without really understanding it very well. Truly, when approaching Faust, one must apply this point of view of spiritual science, for the judgments that the outer world sometimes brings are too foolish in relation to Faust. How could it escape the attention of the spiritual scientist when, time and again, people who think they are particularly clever approach and point out how magnificently the creed is expressed by this Faust, and say: Yes, compared to what so many people say about some confession of faith, one would have to remember more and more the conversation between Faust and Gretchen:
Well, you know what Faust is discussing with Gretchen, and what is always mentioned when someone thinks they have to emphasize what should not be seen as religious reflection and what should be seen as religious sentiment. But what is not considered is that in this case, Faust was formulating his religious creed for the sixteen-year-old Gretchen, and that all the clever professors are then demanding that people never progress beyond the Gretchen point of view in their religious understanding. The moment you present that confession of Faust to Gretchen as something particularly sublime, you demand that humanity never rise above the Gretchen point of view. That is actually easy and convenient to achieve. It is also very easy to boast that everything is feeling and so on, but you don't realize that it is the Gretchen point of view. Goethe, for his part, strove quite differently to make his Faust the bearer of an ongoing struggle, as I have now indicated again with reference to this placing himself in a completely earlier age in order to get at the truth. Perhaps at the same time or a little earlier when Goethe wrote this “classical-romantic phantasmagoria”, this placing of Faust in the world of the Greeks, he wanted to make clear to himself once again how his “Faust” should actually proceed, what he wanted to present in “Faust”. And so Goethe wrote down a scheme. At that time, there was a version of his “Faust” available: a foundation, a number of scenes from the first part and probably also the Helena scene. Goethe wrote down: “Ideal pursuit of influence and empathy in all of nature.” So, as the century drew to a close, Goethe took up, as he said, “the old thread, the barbaric composition”, at Schiller's suggestion. That is how he rightly described his “Faust” at the end of the century, because it was written scene by scene. Now he said to himself: What have I actually done there? And he stood before the soul of this striving Faust: out of erudition, closer to nature. He wrote down: “I wanted to set forth 1. Ideal striving for influence and empathy in all of nature. 2. Appearance of the spirit as a world and deed genius. This is how he sketches the appearance of the earth spirit. Now I have shown you how, according to the appearance of the earth spirit, it is actually the Wagner who appears, and who is only a means to the self-knowledge of Faust, which is in Faust himself, a part of Faust. What is arguing in Faust? What is Faust doing now that something is arguing in him? He realizes: Until now you have only lived in your environment, in what the outer world has offered you. He can see this most clearly in the part that is within him, in Wagner, who is quite content. Faust is in the process of attaining something in order to free himself from what he is born into, but Wagner wants to remain entirely as he is, to remain in what he is on the outside. What is it that lives out itself outwardly in the world from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch? It is the form into which human striving is molded. The spirits of form work outside in that which we are to live in. But man must always, if he does not want to die in the form, if he really wants to progress, strive beyond this form. “Struggle between form and formlessness,“ Goethe also writes. ”3. Struggle between form and formlessness." But now Faust looks at the form: the Faust in Wagner in there. He wants to be free of this form. This is a striving for the content of this form, a new content that can arise from within. We could also have looked at all possible forms and studied all possible styles and then built a new building, as many architects of the 19th century did, as we find it everywhere outside. We would not have created anything new from the form that has come about in the evolution of the world: Wagner nature. But we preferred to take the 'formless content'. We have sought to take the spiritual science that is vividly experienced from what is initially formless, what is only content, and to pour it into new forms. This is what Faust does by rejecting Wagner:
“4. Preference for formless content,” Goethe also writes. And that is the scene he has written, in which Faust rejects Wagner: “Preference for formless content over empty form.” But over time, the form becomes empty. If, after a hundred years, someone were to perform a play exactly as we are performing it today, it would again be an empty form. That is what we must take into account. That is why Goethe writes: “5. Content brings form with it.” That is what I want us to experience! That is what we want to achieve with our building: form brings content with it. And, as Goethe writes, “Form is never without content.” Of course it is never without content, but Wagnerian natures do not see the content in it, which is why they only accept the empty form. The form is as justified as it can possibly be. But the point is to make progress, to overcome the old form with the new content. “6. Form is never without content.”
And now a sentence that Goethe writes down to give his “Faust”, so to speak, the impulse, a highly characteristic sentence. For the Wagnerian natures, they think about it: Yes, form, content - how can I concoct that - how can I bring it together? — You can very well imagine a person in the present day who wants to be an artist and who says to himself: Well, spiritual science, all right. But it's none of my business what these tricky minds come up with as spiritual science. But they want to build a house that, I believe, contains Greek, Renaissance, Gothic styles; and there I see what they are thinking in the house they are building, how the content corresponds to the form. One could imagine that this will come. It must come, if people think about eradicating contradictions, while the world is precisely composed of contradictions, and it is important that you can put the contradictions next to each other. So Goethe writes: "7. These contradictions, instead of uniting them, are to be made more disparate. That is, he wants to present them in his “Faust” in such a way that they emerge as strongly as possible: “These contradictions, instead of uniting them, make them more disparate.” And to do that, he juxtaposes two figures again, where one lives entirely in form and is satisfied when he adheres to form, greedily digs for treasures of knowledge and is happy when he finds earthworms. In our time, we could say: greedily striving for the secret of becoming human and glad when he finds out, for example, that the human being has emerged from an animal species similar to our hedgehogs and rabbits. Edinger, one of the most important philosophers of the present day, recently gave a lecture on the emergence of the human being from a primal form similar to our hedgehog and rabbit. The theory that the human race descended from apes, prosimians, and so on, is no longer accepted by science; we have to go further back, to an earlier point of divergence between the animal species. Once upon a time there were ancestors that resembled the hedgehog and the rabbit, and on the other hand we have man as our ancestor. It is not true that because man is most similar to the rabbit and the hedgehog in certain things in terms of his brain formation, he must have descended from something similar. These animal species have survived, everything else has of course died out. So dig greedily for treasures and be glad if you find rabbits and hedgehogs. That is one striving, striving only in form. Goethe wanted to place it in Wagner, and he knows well that it is a clever striving; people are not stupid, they are clever. Goethe calls it: “Bright, cold, scientific striving.” “Wagner,” he adds. “8. Bright, cold, scientific striving: Wagner.” The other, the disparate, is what one wants to work out with all the fibers of the soul from within, after not finding it in the forms within. Goethe calls it “dull, warm, scientific striving”; he contrasts it with the other and adds “student” to it. Now that Wagner has been confronted with Faust, the student also confronts him. Faust remembers how he used to be a student, what he took in as philosophy, law, medicine and, unfortunately, theology. What he said to himself when he was still like the student: “All of this makes me feel as stupid as if a mill wheel were turning in my head.” But that's over. He can no longer put himself back in that position. But it all had an effect on him. So: “9. Dull, warm, scientific striving: schoolboy.” And so it continues. From this point onwards, we actually see Faust becoming a schoolboy and then once again delving into everything that allows one to grasp the present. Goethe now calls the rest of Part One, insofar as it was already finished and was still to be finished: “10. The enjoyment of life as seen from the outside; in dullness and passion, first part.” Goethe is clear about what he has created. Now he wants to say: how should Faust really come out of this enjoyment of life into an objective worldview? — He must come to the form, but he must now grasp the form with his whole being. And we have seen how far he must go back, to where completely different conditions exist. There the form then meets him as a reflection. There the form meets him in such a way that he now absorbs it by becoming one with the truth that was justified at that time, and discards everything that had to happen at that time. In other words, he tries to put himself in the position of the time insofar as it was not permeated by Lucifer. He tries to go back to the divine point of view of ancient Greece. And when you immerse yourself in the outside world in such a way that you enter it with your whole being, but take nothing from the circumstances into which you have grown, then you arrive at what Goethe describes as beauty in the highest sense. That is why he says: “Enjoyment of the deed”. Now no longer: enjoyment of the person, enjoyment of life. Enjoyment of the deed, going out, gradually moving away from oneself. Settling into the world is enjoyment of the deed outwards and enjoyment with consciousness. “ii. Enjoyment of the deed outwards and enjoyment with consciousness: beauty, second part.” What Goethe was no longer able to achieve in his struggle because his time was not yet the time of spiritual science, he sketches out for himself at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. For Goethe has very significant words at the end of this sketch, which he wrote there, and which was a recapitulation of what he had done in the first part. He had already planned to write a kind of third part to his “Faust”; but it only became the two parts, which do not express everything Goethe wanted, because he would have needed spiritual science to do so. What Goethe wanted to depict here is the experience of the whole of creation outside, when one has emerged from one's personal life. This whole experience of Creation outside, in objectivity in the world outside, so that Creation is experienced from within, by carrying what is truly within outwards, that is sketched out by Goethe, I would say, stammering with the words: 'Enjoyment of Creation from within' - that is, not from his standpoint, by stepping out of himself. “12. Enjoyment of Creation from Within.” With this “Enjoyment of Creation from Within,” Faust had now entered not only the classical world, but the world of the spiritual. Then there is something else at the end, a very strange sentence that points to the scene that Goethe wanted to do, did not do, but did want to do, that he would have done if he had already lived in our time, but that shone before him. He wrote: "13. Epilogue in Chaos on the Way to Hell. I have heard very clever people discuss what this last sentence: “Epilogue in Chaos on the Way to Hell” means. People said: So, in 1800, Goethe really still had the idea that Faust goes to hell and delivers an epilogue in the chaos before entering hell? So it was only much, much later that he came up with the idea of not letting Faust go to hell! I have heard many, many very learned discussions about this, as well as many other discussions! It means that in 1800 Goethe was not yet free from the idea of letting Faust go to hell after all. But they did not think about the fact that it is not Faust who delivers the epilogue, but of course Mephistopheles, after Faust has escaped him in heaven! The epilogue would be, as we would say today, Lucifer and Ahriman on their way to hell; on their way to hell, they would discuss what they had experienced with the striving Faust. I wanted to draw your attention to this recapitulation and to this exposition by Goethe once again because it shows us in the most eminent sense how Goethe, with all that he was able to gain in his time, strove towards the path that leads straight up into the realm of spiritual science. We shall only be able to view Faust aright if we ask ourselves: Why has Faust, in its innermost core, remained an incomplete work of literature, despite being the greatest work of striving in the world, and why is Faust the representative of all humanity in that he strives out of his environment and is even carried into an earlier age? Why has this Faust nevertheless remained an unsatisfactory work of literature? Because it represents the striving for what spiritual science should incorporate into human cultural development. It is good to focus attention on this fact: that at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, a work of literature was created in which the figure of Faust, who forms the center of this work, was to be lifted out of all the restrictive limitations that must surround human beings, by having him go through his life in repeated lives on earth. The significance of Faust lies in the fact that, however intensely he has outgrown his nationality, he has nevertheless outgrown nationality and grown into the universal human condition. Faust has nothing of the narrow limitations of nationality, but strives upward to the general humanity, so that we find him not only as the Faust of modern times, but in the second part as a Faust who stands as a Greek among Greeks. It is a tremendous setback in our time, when in the course of the 19th century people began to place the greatest emphasis on the limits of human development again, and even see in the “national idea” an idea that could somehow still be a cultural force for our era. Mankind could wonderfully rise to an understanding of what spiritual science should become, if one wanted to understand something like what is secretly contained in “Faust”. It was not for nothing that Goethe said to Eckermann, when he was writing the second part of his “Faust”, that he had secretly included in the “Faust” much that would only come out little by little. Hermann Grimm, whom I have often spoken to you about, has pointed out that it will take a millennium to fully understand Goethe. I have to say: I believe that too. When people have delved even deeper than they have in our time, they will understand more and more of what lies within Goethe. Above all, what he strove for, what he struggled for, what he was unable to express. Because if you were to ask Goethe whether what he put into the second part of 'Faust' was also expressed in his 'Faust', he would say: No! But we can be convinced that if we were to ask him today: Are we on the same path of spiritual science that you strove for at that time, as it was possible at that time? - he would say: That which is spiritual science moves in my paths. And so it will be, since Goethe allowed his Faust to go back to Greek times in order to show him as one who understands the present, it will be permissible to say: reverence for truth, reverence for knowledge that struggles out of the knowledge of the environment, out of the limitations of the surroundings, that is what we must acquire for ourselves. And it is truly a warning of the events of the times, which show us how humanity is heading in the opposite direction, towards judging things as superficially as possible, and would prefer to stop at the events of 1914 in order to explain all the terrible things we are experiencing today.But anyone who wants to understand the present must judge this present from a higher vantage point than this present itself is. That is what I have tried to put into your souls as a feeling in these days, a feeling that I have tried to show you follows from a truly inner, living understanding of spiritual science, and how it has been striven for by the greatest minds of the past, of whom Goethe is one. Only by not merely absorbing what arises in our soul in these contemplations as something theoretical, but by assimilating it in our souls and letting it live in our soul's meditations, does it become living spiritual science. May we hold it so with this, with much, indeed with all that passes through our soul as spiritual science. |
| 74. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Thomas and Augustine
22 May 1920, Dornach Tr. Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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| In this address I sought to prove that a real and spiritual Monism had been given in Thomism, that this spiritual Monism, moreover, had been given in such a way that it reveals itself through the most accurate thought imaginable, of which more recent philosophy, under the influence of Kant and Protestantism has at bottom not the least idea, and no longer the capacity to achieve it. And so I fell foul also of Monism. |
| 74. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Thomas and Augustine
22 May 1920, Dornach Tr. Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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Ladies and Gentlemen, I should like in these three days to speak on a subject which is generally looked at from a more formal angle, as if the attitude of the philosophic view of life to Christianity had been to a certain extent dictated by the deep philosophic movement of the Middle Ages. As this side of the question has lately had a kind of revival through Pope Leo XIII's Ordinance to his clergy to make “Thomism” the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, our present subject has a certain significance. But I do not wish to treat the subject which crystallized as mediaeval philosophy round the personalities of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, only from this formal side; rather I wish in the course of these days to reveal the deeper historical background out of which this philosophic movement, much underrated to-day, has arisen. We can say: Thomas Aquinas tries in the thirteenth century quite clearly to grasp the problem of the total human knowledge of philosophies, and in a way which we have to admit is difficult for us to follow, for conditions of thought are attached to it which people to-day scarcely fulfil, even if they are philosophers. One must be able to put oneself completely into the manner of thought of Thomas Aquinas, his predecessors and successors; one must know how to take their conceptions, and how their conceptions lived in the souls of those men of the Middle Ages, of which the history of philosophy tells only rather superficially. If we look now at the central point of this study, at Thomas Aquinas, we would say: in him we have a personality which in face of the main current of mediaeval Christian philosophy really disappears as a personality; one which, we might almost say, is only the co-efficient or exponent of the current of world philosophy, and finds expression as a personality only through a certain universality. So that, when we speak of Thomism, we can focus our attention on something quite exceptionally impersonal, on something which is revealed only through the personality of Thomas Aquinas. On the other hand we see at once that we must put into the forefront of our inquiry a full and complete personality, and all that term includes, when we consider the individual who was the immediate and chief predecessor of Thomism, namely Augustine. With him everything was personal, with Thomas Aquinas everything was really impersonal. In Augustine we have to deal with a fighting man, in Thomas  Aquinas, with a mediaeval Church defining its attitude to heaven and earth, to men, to history, etc., a Church which, we might say, expressed itself as a Church, within certain limitations it is true, through the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. A significant event separates the two, and unless one takes this event into consideration, it is not possible to define the mutual relationship of these mediaeval individuals. The event to which I refer is the declaration of heresy by the Emperor Justinian against Origen. The whole direction of Augustine's view of the world becomes clear only when we keep in mind the whole historical background from which Augustine emerged. This historical background, however, becomes in reality, completely changed from the fact that the powerful influence—it was actually a powerful influence in spite of much that has been said in the history of philosophy—that this powerful influence on the Western world which had spread from the Schools of Philosophy in Athens, ceased to exist. It persisted into the sixth century, and then ebbed, but so that something remains which in fact, in the subsequent philosophical stream of the West, is quite different from that which Augustine knew in his lifetime. I shall have to ask you to take note that to-day's address is more in the nature of an introduction, that we shall deal tomorrow with the real nature of Thomism, and that on the third day I shall make clear my object in bringing before you all I have to say in these three days. For you see, ladies and gentlemen, if you will excuse the personal reference, I am in rather a special position with regard to Christian mediaeval philosophy, that is, to Thomism. I have often mentioned, even in public addresses, what happened to me once when I had put before a working-class audience what I must look upon as the true course of Western history. The result was that though there were a good many pupils in agreement with me, the leaders of the proletarian movement at the turn of the century hit on the idea that I was not presenting true Marxism. And although one could assert that the world in future must after all recognize something like freedom in teaching, I was told at the final meeting: This party recognizes no freedom in teaching, only a rational compulsion! And my activity as a teacher, in spite of the fact that at the time a large number of students from the proletariat had been attracted, was forced to a sudden and untimely end. I might say I had the same experience in other places with what I wanted to say, now about nineteen or twenty years ago, concerning Thomism and everything that belonged to mediaeval philosophy. It was of course just the time when what we are accustomed to call “Monism” reached its height, round the year 1900. At this time there was founded in Germany the “Giordano-Bruno-Bund” apparently to encourage a free, independent view of life, but au fond really only to encourage the materialistic side of Monism. Now, ladies and gentlemen, because it was impossible for me at the time to take part in all that empty phrase-making which went out into the world as Monism, I gave an address on Thomism in the Berlin “Giordano-Bruno-Bund.” In this address I sought to prove that a real and spiritual Monism had been given in Thomism, that this spiritual Monism, moreover, had been given in such a way that it reveals itself through the most accurate thought imaginable, of which more recent philosophy, under the influence of Kant and Protestantism has at bottom not the least idea, and no longer the capacity to achieve it. And so I fell foul also of Monism. It is, in point of fact, extraordinarily difficult to-day to speak of these things in such a way that one's word seems to be based sincerely on the matter itself and not to be in the service of some Party or other. I want in these three days to try once more to speak thus impartially of the matters I have indicated. The personality of Augustine fits into the fourth and fifth centuries, as I said before, as a fighting personality in the fullest sense. His method of fighting is what sinks deep into the soul if we can understand in detail the particular nature of this fight. There are two problems which faced Augustine's soul with an intensity of which we, with our pallid problems of knowledge and of the soul, have really no idea. The first problem can be put thus: Augustine strives to find the nature of what man can recognize as truth, supporting him, filling his soul. The second problem is this: How can you explain the presence of evil in a world which after all has no sense unless its purpose at least has something to do with good? How can you explain the pricks of evil in human nature which never cease—according to Augustine's view—the voice of evil which is never silent, even if a man strives honestly and uprightly after the good? I do not believe that we can get near to Augustine if we take these two questions in the sense in which the average man of our time, even if he were a philosopher, would be apt to take them. You must look for the special shade of meaning these questions had for a man of the fourth and fifth centuries. Augustine lived, after all, at first a life of inner commotion, not to say a dissipated life; but always these two questions ran up before him. Personally he is placed in a dilemma. His father is a Pagan, his mother a pious Christian; and she takes the utmost pains to win him for Christianity. At first the son can be moved only to a certain seriousness, and this is directed towards Manichaeism. We shall look later at this view of life, which early came into Augustine's range of vision, as he changed from a somewhat irregular way of living to a full seriousness of life. Then—after some years—he felt himself more and more out of sympathy with Manichaeism, and fell under the sway of a certain Scepticism, not driven by the urge of his soul or some other high reason, but because the whole philosophical life of the time led him that way. This Scepticism was evolved at a certain time from Greek philosophy, and remained to the day of Augustine. Now, however, the influence of Scepticism grew ever less and less, and was for Augustine, as it were, only a link with Greek philosophy. And this Scepticism led to something which without doubt exercised for a time a quite unusually deep influence on his subjectivity, and the whole attitude of his soul. It led him into a Neoplatonism of a different kind from what in the history of philosophy is generally called Neoplatonism. Augustine got more out of this Neoplatonism than one usually thinks. The whole personality and the whole struggle of Augustine can be understood only when one understands how much of the neoplatonic philosophy had entered into his soul; and if we study objectively the development of Augustine, we find that the break which occurred in going over from Manichaeism to Platonism was hardly as violent in the transition from Neoplatonism to Christianity. For one can really say: in a certain sense Augustine remained a Neoplatonist; to the extent he became one at all he remained one. But he could become a Neoplatonist only up to a point. For that reason, his destiny led him to become acquainted with the phenomenon of Christ-Jesus. And this is really not a big jump but a natural course of development in Augustine from Neoplatonism to Christianity. How this Christianity lives in Augustine—yes—how it lives in Augustine we cannot judge unless we look first at Manichaeism, a remarkable formula for overcoming the old heathenism at the same time as the Old Testament and Judaism. Manichaeism was already at the time when Augustine was growing up a world-current of thought which had spread throughout North Africa, where, you must remember, Augustine spent his youth, and in which many people of Western Europe had been caught up. Founded in about the third century in Asia by Mani, a Persian, Manichaeism had extraordinarily little effect historically on the subsequent world. To define this Manichaeism, we must say this: there is more importance in the general attitude of this view of life than in what one can literally describe as its contents. Above all, the remarkable thing about it is that the division of human experience into a spiritual side and a material side had no meaning for it. The words or ideas “spirit” and “matter” mean nothing to it. Manichaeism sees as “spiritual” what appears to the senses as material and when it speaks of the spiritual it does not rise above what the senses know as matter. It is true to say of Manichaeism—much more emphatically true than we with our world grown so abstract and intellectual usually think,—that it actually sees spiritual phenomena, spiritual facts in the stars and their courses, and that it sees at the same time in the mystery of the sun that which is manifest to us on earth as something spiritual. It conveys no meaning for Manichaeism to speak of either matter or spirit, for in it what is spiritual has its material manifestation and what is material is to it spiritual. Therefore, Manichaeism quite naturally speaks of astronomical things and world phenomena in the same way as it would speak of moral phenomena or happenings within the development of human beings. And thus this apposition of “Light” and “Darkness” which Manichaeism, imitating something from ancient Persia, embodies in its philosophy, is to it at the same time something completely and obviously spiritual. And it is also something obvious that this same Manichaeism still speaks of what apparently moves as sun in the heavens as something which has to do with the moral entities and moral impulses in the development of mankind; and that it speaks of the relation of this moral-physical sun in the heavens, to the Signs of the Zodiac as to the twelve beings through which the original being, the original source of light delegates its activities. But there is something more about this Manichaeism. It looks upon man and man does not yet appear to its eyes as what we to-day see in man. To us man appears as a kind of climax of creation on earth. Whether we think more or less in material or spiritual terms, man appears to man now as the crown of creation on earth, the kingdom of man as the highest kingdom or at least as the crown of the animal kingdom. Manichaeism cannot agree to this. The thing which had walked the earth as man and in its time was still walking it, is to it only a pitiful remnant of that being which ought to have become man through the divine essence of light. Man should have become something entirely different from the man now walking the earth. The being now walking on earth as man was created through original man losing the fight against the demons of darkness, this original man who had been created by the power of light as an ally in its fight against the demons of darkness, but who had been transplanted into the sun by benevolent powers and had thus been taken up by the kingdom of light itself. But the demons have managed nevertheless to tear off as it were a part of this original man from the real man who escaped into the sun and to form the earthly race of man out of it, the earthly race which thus walks about on earth as a weaker edition of that which could not live here, for it had to be removed into the sun during the great struggle of spirits. In order to lead back man, who in this way appeared as a weaker edition on earth, to his original destination the Christ-being then appeared and through its activity the demonic influences are to be removed from the earth. I know very well, that all that part of this view of life which is still capable of being put into modern language, can hardly be intelligible; for the whole of it comes from substrata of the soul's experience which differ vastly from the present ones. But the important part which is interesting us to-day is what I have already emphasized. For however fantastic it may appear, this part I have been telling you about the continuation of the development on earth in the eyes of the Manichaeans—Manichaeism did not represent it at all as something only to be viewed in the spirit, but as a phenomenon which we would to-day call material, unfolding itself to our physical eyes as something at the same time spiritual. That was the first powerful influence on Augustine, and the problems connected with the personality of Augustine can really only be solved if one bears in mind the strong influence of this Manichaeism, with its principle of the spiritual-material. We must ask ourselves: What was the reason for Augustine's dissatisfaction with Manichaeism? It was not based on what one might call its mystical content as I have just described it to you, but his dissatisfaction arose from the whole attitude of Manichaeism. At first Augustine was attracted, in a sense sympathetically moved by the physical self-evidence, by the pictorial quality with which this philosophy was presented to him; but then something in him appeared which refused to be satisfied with this very quality which regarded matter spiritually and the spiritual materially. And one can come to the right conclusion about this only if one faces the real truth which often has been advanced as a formal view; namely, if one considers that Augustine was a man who was fundamentally more akin to the men of the Middle Ages and even perhaps to the men of modern times than he could possibly be to those men who through their soul-mood were the natural inheritors of Manichaeism. Augustine has already something of what I would call the revival of spiritual life. In other places I have often pointed, even in public lectures, to what I mean. These present times are intellectual and inclined to the abstract, and so we always see in the history of any century the influences at work from the preceding century, and so on. In the case of an individual it is of course pure nonsense to say: something which happens in, let us say, his eighteenth year is only the consequence of something else which happened in his thirteenth or fourteenth year. In between lies something which springs from the deepest depths of human nature, which is not just the consequence of something that has gone before in the sense in which one is justified in speaking of cause and effect, but is rather something which is inherent in the nature of man, and takes place in human life, namely, adolescence. And such a gap has to be recognized also at other times in human evolution—in individual human evolution, when something struggles from the depths to the surface; so that we cannot say: what happens is only the direct uninterrupted consequence of whatever has preceded it. And such gaps occur also in the case of all humanity. We have to assume that before such a gap Manichaeism occurred, and after such a gap occurred the soul-attitude, the soul-conception in which Augustine found himself. Augustine could simply not come to terms with his soul unless he rose above what a Manichaean called material-spiritual to something purely spiritual, something built and seen in the spiritual sphere; Augustine had to rise to something much more free of the senses. So he had to turn away from the pictorial, the evidential philosophy of Manichaeism. This was the first thing that developed so intensively in his soul. We read it in his words: the heaviest and almost the only reason for error which I could not avoid was that I had to imagine a bodily substance when I wanted to think of God. In this way he refers to the time when Manichaeism with its material spirituality and its spiritual materiality lived in his soul; he refers to it in these words and characterizes this period of his life thus as an error. He needed something to look up to, something which was fundamental to human nature. He needed something which, unlike the Manichaean principles, does not look upon the physical universe as spiritual-material. As everything with him struggled with intensive and overpowering earnestness to the surface of his soul, so also this saying: “I asked the earth and it said: `I am not it,' and all things on it confessed the same.” What does Augustine ask? He asks what the divine really is, and he asks the earth and it says to him, “I am not it.” Manichaeism would have: “I am it as earth, in so far as the divine expresses itself through earthly works.” And again Augustine says: “I asked the sea and the abysses and whatever living thing they cover:” “We are not your God, seek above us.” “I asked the sighing winds,” and the whole nebula with all its inhabitants said: “The philosophers who seek the nature of things in us were mistaken, for we are not God.” (Thus not the sea and not the nebula, nothing in fact which can be observed through the senses.) “I asked the sun, the moon, and the stars.” They said: “We are not God whom thou seekest.” Thus he gropes his way out of Manichaeism, precisely out of that part of it which must be called its most significant part, at least in this connection. Augustine gropes after something spiritual which is free of all sensuousness. And in this he finds himself exactly in that era of human soul-development in which the soul had to free itself from the contemplation of matter as something spiritual and of the spiritual as something material. We entirely misunderstand Greek philosophy in reference to this. And because I tried for once to describe Greek philosophy as it really was, the beginning of my Riddles of Philosophy seems so difficult to understand. When the Greeks speak of ideas, of conceptions, when Plato speaks of them, people now believe that Plato or the Greeks mean the same by ideas as we do. This is not so, for the Greeks spoke of ideas as something which they observed in the outer world like colours or sounds. That part of Manichaeism which we find slightly changed, with—let us say—an oriental tinge, that is already present in the whole Greek view of life. The Greek sees his idea just as he sees colours. And he still possesses that material-spiritual, spiritual-material life of the soul, which does not rise to what we know as spiritual life. Whatever we may call it, a mere abstraction or the true content of our soul, we need not decide at the present moment; the Greek does not yet reckon with what we call a life of the soul free from matter; he does not distinguish, as we do, between thinking and outward use of the senses. The whole Platonic philosophy ought to be seen in this light to be fully understood. We can now say, that Manichaeism is nothing but a post-Christian variation (with an oriental tinge) of something already existing among the Greeks. Neither do we understand that wonderful genius who closes the circle of Greek philosophy, Aristotle, unless we know that whenever he speaks of concepts, he still keeps within the meaning of an experienced tradition which regarded concepts as belonging to the outer world of the senses as well as perceptions, though he is already getting close to the border of understanding abstract thought free from all evidence of the senses. Through the point of view to which men's souls had attained during his era, through actual events happening within the souls of men in whose rank Augustine was a distinctive, prominent personality, Augustine was forced not just only to experience within his soul, as the Greeks had done, but he was forced to rise to thoughts free from sense-perceptions, to thoughts which still kept their meaning even if they were not dealing with earth, air and sea, with stars, sun and moon; thoughts which had a content beyond the sense of vision. And now only philosophers and philosophies spoke to him which spoke of what they had to say from an entirely different point of view, that is, from the super-spiritual one just explained. Small wonder, then, that these souls striving in a vague way for something not yet in existence and trying with their minds to seize what was there, could only find something they could not absorb; small wonder that these souls sought refuge in scepticism. On the other hand, the feeling of standing on a sound basis of truth and the desire to get an answer to the question of the origin of Evil was so strong in Augustine, that equally powerful in his soul lived that philosophy which stands under the name of Neoplatonism at the end of Greek philosophic development. This is focused in Plotinus and reveals to us historically what neither the Dialogues of Plato and still less Aristotelian philosophy can reveal, namely, the course of the whole life of the soul when it looks for a greater intensiveness and a reaching beyond the normal. Plotinus is like a last straggler of a type which followed quite different paths to knowledge, to the inner life of the soul, from those which were gradually understood later. Plotinus must appear fantastic to present-day men. To those who have absorbed something of mediaeval scholasticism Plotinus must appear as a terrible fanatic, indeed, as a dangerous one. I have noticed this repeatedly. My old friend Vincenz Knauer, the Benedictine monk, who wrote a history of philosophy and who has also written a book about the chief problems of philosophy from Thales to Hamerling was, I may well say, good-nature incarnate. This man never let himself go except when he had to deal with Neoplatonism, in particular with Plotinus, and he would then get quite angry and would denounce Plotinus terribly as a dangerous fanatic. And Brentano, that intelligent Aristotelian and Empiric, Franz Brentano, who also carried mediaeval philosophy deeply and intensely in his soul, wrote a little book: Philosophies that Create a Stir, and there he fumes about Plotinus in the same way, for Plotinus the dangerous fanatic is the philosopher, the man who in his opinion “created a stir” at the close of the ancient Greek period. To understand him is really extraordinarily difficult for the modern philosopher. Concerning this philosopher of the third century we have next to say this: What we experience as the content of our understanding, of our reason, what we know as the sum of our concepts about the world is entirely different for him. I might say, if I may express myself clearly: we understand the world through sense-observations which through abstraction we bring to concepts, and end there. We have the concepts as inner psychic experience and if we are average men of to-day we are more or less conscious that we have abstractions, something we have sucked as it were out of things. The important thing is that we end there; we pay attention to the experiences of the senses and stop at the point where we make the total of our concepts, of our ideas. It was not so for Plotinus. For him this whole world of sense-experience scarcely existed. But that which meant something to him, of which he spoke as we speak of plants and minerals and animals and physical men, was something which he saw lying above concepts; it was a spiritual world and this spiritual world had for him a nether boundary, namely, the concepts. While we get our concepts by going to concrete things, make them into abstractions and concepts and say: concepts are the putting-together, the extractions of ideal nature from the observation of the senses, Plotinus said—and he paid little heed to the observation of the senses: “We, as men, live in a spiritual world, and what this spiritual world reveals to us finally, what we see as its nether boundary, are concepts.” For us the world of the senses lies below concepts: for Plotinus there is above concepts a spiritual world, the intellectual world, the world really of the kingdom of the spirit. I might use the following image: let us suppose we were submerged in the sea, and looking upward to the surface of the water, we saw nothing but this surface, nothing above the surface, then this surface would be the upper boundary. Suppose we lived in the sea, we might perhaps have in our soul the feeling: This boundary would be the limit of our life-element, in which we are, if we were organized as sea-beings. But for Plotinus it was not so. He took no notice of the sea round him; but the boundary which he saw, the boundary of the concept-world in which his soul lived, was for him the nether boundary of something above it; just as if we were to take the boundary of the water as the boundary of the atmosphere and the clouds and so on. At the same time this sphere above concepts is for Plotinus what Plato calls the “world of ideas” and Plotinus throughout imagines that he is continuing the true genuine philosophy of Plato. This “idea-world” is, first of all, completely a world of which one speaks in the sense of Plotinism. Surely it would not occur to you, even if you were Subjectivists or followers of the modern Subjectivist philosophy, when you look out upon the meadow, to say: I have my meadow, you have yours, and so and so has his meadow; even if you are convinced that you each have only before you the image of a meadow, you speak of the meadow in the singular, of one meadow which is out there. In the same way Plotinus speaks of the one idea-world, not of the idea-world of this mind, or of another or of a third mind. In this idea-world—and this we see already in the whole manner in which one has to characterize the thought-process leading to this idea-world—in this idea-world the soul has a part. So we may say: The soul, the Psyche, unfolds itself out of the idea-world and experiences it. And the Soul, just as the idea-world creates the Psyche, in its turn creates the matter in which it is embodied. So that the lower material from which the Psyche takes its body is chiefly a creation of this Psyche. But precisely there is the origin of individuation, there the Psyche, which otherwise takes part in the single idea-world, becomes a part of body A, and body B, and so on, and through this fact there appear, for the first time, individual souls. It is just as if I had a great quantity of liquid in one mass, and having taken twenty glasses had filled each with the liquid, so that I have this liquid, which as such is a unity, thus divided, just so I have the Psyche in the same condition, because it is incorporated in bodies which, however, it has itself created. Thus in the Plotinistic sense a man can view himself according to his exterior, his vessel. But that is at bottom only the way in which the soul reveals itself, in which the soul also becomes individualized. Afterward man has to experience within him his very own soul, which raises itself upward to the idea-world. Still later there comes a higher form of experience. That one should speak of abstract concepts—that has no meaning for a Plotinist; for such abstract concepts—well, a Plotinist would have said: “What do you mean—abstract concepts? Concepts surely cannot be abstract: they cannot hang in the air, they must be suspended from the spirit; they must be the concrete revelations of the spiritual.” The interpretation therefore that ideas are any kind of abstractions, is therefore wrong. This is the expression of an intellectual world, a world of spirituality. It is also what existed in the ordinary experience of those men out of whose relationships Plotinus and his fellows grew. For them such talk about concepts, in the way we talk about them, had absolutely no meaning, because for them there was only a penetration of the spiritual world into souls. And this concept-world is found at the limit of this penetration, in experiencing. Only when we went deeper, when we developed the soul further, only then there resulted something which the ordinary man could not know, which the man experienced who had attained a higher stage. He then experienced that which was above the idea-world—the One, if you like to call it so—the experience of the One. This was for Plotinus the thing that was unattainable to concepts, just because it was above the world of concepts, and could only be attained if one could sink oneself into oneself without concept, a state we describe here in our spiritual science as Imagination. You can read about it in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It. But there is this difference: I have treated the subject from the modern point of view, whereas Plotinus treated it from the old. What I there call the Imagination is just that which, according to Plotinus stands above the idea-world. From this general view of the world Plotinus really also derived all his knowledge of the human soul. It is, after all, practically contained in it. And one can be an individualist in the sense of Plotinus if one is at the same time a human being who recognizes how man raises his life upwards to something which is above all individuality, to something spiritual; whereas in our age we have more the habit of reaching downwards to the things of the senses. But all this which is the expression of something which a thorough scientist regards as fanaticism, all this is in the case of Plotinus, not something thought out, these are no hypotheses of his. This perception—right up to the One which only in exceptional cases could be attained—this perception was as clear to Plotinus and as obvious, as is for us to-day the perception of minerals, plants and animals. He spoke only in the sense of something which really was directly experienced by the soul when he spoke of the soul, of the Logos, which was part of the Nous, of the idea-world and of the One. For Plotinus the whole world was, as it were, a spirituality—again a different shade of philosophy from the Manichaean and from the one Augustine pursued. Manichaeism recognizes a sense-supersense; for it the words and concepts of matter and spirit have as yet no meaning. Augustine strives to reach a spiritual experience of the soul that is free from the sense and to escape from his material view of life. For Plotinus the whole world is spiritual, things of the senses do not exist. For what appears material is only the lowest method of revealing the spiritual. All is spirit, and if we only go deep enough into things, everything is revealed as spirit. This is something which Augustine could not accept. Why? Because he had not the necessary point of view. Because he lived in his age as a predecessor—for if I might call Plotinus a “follower” of the ancient times in which one held such philosophic views,—though he went on into the third century,—Augustine was a predecessor of those people who could no longer feel and perceive that there was a spiritual world underneath the idea-world. He just did not see that any more. He could only learn it by being told. He might hear that people said it was so, and he might develop a feeling that there was something in it which was a human road to truth. That was the dilemma in which Augustine stood in relation to Plotinism. But he was never completely diverted from searching for an inner understanding of this Plotinism. However, this philosophical point of view did not open itself to him. He only guessed: in this world there must be something. But he could not fight his way to it. This was the mood of his soul when he withdrew himself into a lonely life, in which he got to know the Bible and Christianity, and later the sermons of Ambrosius and the Epistles of St. Paul; and this was the mood of his soul which finally brought him to say: “The nature of the world which Plotinus sought at first in the nature of the idea-world of the Nous, or in the One, which one can attain only in specially favourable conditions of soul, why! That has appeared in the body on earth, in human form, through Christ-Jesus.” That leapt at him as a conviction out of the Bible: “Thou hast no need to struggle upward to the One, thou needest but look upon that which the historical tradition of Christ-Jesus interprets. There is the One come down from heaven, and is become man.” And Augustine exchanges the philosophy of Plotinus for the Church. He expresses this exchange clearly enough. For instance, when he says, “Who could be so blind as to say: 'The Apostolic Church merits no Faith” the church which is so faithful and supported by so many brotherly agreements that it has transmitted their writings as conscientiously to those that come after, as it has kept their episcopal sees in direct succession down to the present Bishops. This it is on which Augustine, out of the soul-mood described, laid the chief stress:—that, if one only goes into it, it can be shown in the course of centuries that there were once men who knew the Lord's disciples, and here is a continuous tradition of a sort worthy of belief, that there appeared on earth the very thing which Plotinus knew how to attain in the way I have indicated. And now there arose in Augustine the effort, in so far as he could get to the heart of it, to make use of this Plotinism to comprehend that which had through Christianity been opened to his feeling and his inner perception. He actually applied the knowledge he had through Plotinism to understand Christianity and its meaning. Thus, for example, he transposed the concept of the One. For Plotinus the One was something experienced; for Augustine who could not attain this experience, the One became something which he defined with the abstract term “being”; the idea-world, he defined with the abstract concept “knowing,” and Psyche with the abstract concept “living,” or even “love.” We have the best evidence that Augustine proceeded thus in that he sought to comprehend the spiritual world, with neoplatonic and Plotinistic concepts, that there is above men a spiritual world, out of which the Christ descends. The Trinity was something which Plotinism made clear to Augustine, the three persons of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.  And if we were to ask seriously, of what was Augustine's soul full, when he spoke of the Three Persons—we must answer: It was full of the knowledge derived from Plotinus. And this knowledge he carried also into his understanding of the Bible. We see how it continues to function. For this Trinity awakens to life again, for example, in Scotus Erigena, who lived at the court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century, and who wrote a book on the divisions and classification of Nature in which we still find a similar Trinity: Christianity interprets its content from Plotinism. But what Augustine preserved from Plotinism in a specially strong degree was something that was fundamental to it. You must remember that man, since the Psyche reaches down into the material as into a vessel, is really the only earthly individuality. If we ascend slightly into higher regions, to the divine or the spiritual, where the Trinity originates, we have no longer to do with individual man, but with the species, as it were, with humanity. We no longer direct our visualization in this bald manner towards the whole of humanity, as Augustine did as a result of his Plotinism. Our modern concepts are against it. I might say: Seen from down there, men appear as individuals; seen from above—if one may hypothetically say that—all humanity appears as one unity. From this point of view the whole of humanity became for Plotinus concentrated in Adam. Adam was all humanity. And since Adam sprang from the spiritual world he was as a being bound with the earth, which had free will, because in him there lived that which was still above, and not that which arises from error of matter—itself incapable of sin. It was impossible for this man who was first Adam to sin or not to be free, and therefore also impossible to die. Then came the influence of that Satanic being, whom Augustine felt as the enemy-spirit. It tempted and seduced the man. He fell into the material, and with him all humanity. Augustine stands, with what I might call his derived knowledge, right in the midst of Plotinism. The whole of humanity is for him one, and it sinned in Adam as a whole, not as an individual. If we look clearly between the lines particularly of Augustine's last writings, we see how extraordinarily difficult it has become for him thus to regard the whole of mankind, and the possibility that the whole fell into sin. For in him there is already the modern man, the predecessor as opposed to the successor; there lived in him the individual man who felt that individual man grew ever more and more responsible for what he did, and what he learnt. At certain moments it appeared to him impossible to feel that individual man is only a member of the whole of the human race. But Neo-Platonism and Plotinism were so deep in him that he still could look only at the whole of humanity. And so this condition in the whole man, this condition of sin and mortality—was transferred into that of the impossibility to be free, the impossibility to be immortal; all humanity had thus fallen, had been diverted from its origin. And God, were He righteous, would have simply thrown humanity aside. But He is not only righteous, He is also merciful—so Augustine felt. Therefore, he decided to save a part of mankind, note well, a part. That is to say, God's decision destined a part of mankind to receive grace, whereby this part is to be led back from the condition of bondage and mortality to the condition of potential freedom and immortality, which, it is true, can only be realized after death. One part is restored to this condition. The other part of mankind—namely, the not-chosen—remains in the condition of sin. So mankind falls into these two divisions, into those that are chosen and those who are cast out. And if we regard humanity in this Augustinian sense, it falls simply into these two divisions: those who are destined for bliss without desert, simply because it is so ordained in the divine management, and those who, whatever they do, cannot attain grace, who are predetermined and predestined to damnation. This view, which also goes by the name of Predestination, Augustine reached as a result of the way in which he regarded the whole of humanity. If it had sinned it deserved the fate of that part of humanity which was cast out. We shall speak tomorrow of the terrible spiritual battles which have resulted from this Predestination, how Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism grew out of it. But to-day I would add as a final remark: we now see how Augustine stands, a vivid fighting personality, between that view which reaches upward toward the spiritual, according to which humanity becomes a whole, and the urge in his soul to rise above human individuality to something spiritual which is free from material nature, but which, again, can have its origin only in individuality. This was just the characteristic feature of the age of which Augustine is the forerunner, that it was aware of something unknown to men in the old days—namely individual experience. To-day, after all, we accept a great deal as formula. But Klopstock was in earnest and not merely the maker of a phrase when he began his “Messiah” with the words: “Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man's salvation.” Homer began, equally sincerely: “Sing, O Goddess, of the wrath. ... “: or “Sing, O Muse, to me now of the man, far-travelled Odysseus.” These people did not speak of something that exists in individuality, they interpreted something of universal mankind, a race-soul, a Psyche. It is no empty phrase, when Homer lets the Muse sing, in place of himself. The feeling of individuality awakens later, and Augustine is one of the first of those who really feel the individual entity of man, with its individual responsibility. Hence, the dilemma in which he lived. The individual striving after the non-material spiritual was part of his own experience. There was a personal, subjective struggle in him. In later times that understanding of Plotinism, which it was still possible for Augustine to have, was—I might say—choked up. And after the Greek philosophers, the last followers of Plato and Plotinus, were compelled to go into exile in Persia, and after they had found their successors in the Academy of Jondishapur, this looking up to the spiritual triumphed in Western Europe—and only that remained which Aristotle had bequeathed to the after-world in the form of a filtered Greek philosophy, and then only in a few fragments. That continued to grow, and came in a roundabout way, via Arabia, back to Europe. This had no longer a consciousness of the idea world, and no Plotinism in it. And so the great question remained: Man must extract from himself the spiritual; he must produce the spiritual as an abstraction. When he sees lions and thereupon conceives the thought “lions” when he sees wolves and thereupon conceives the thought “wolves,” when he “sees man and thereupon conceives the thought” man these concepts are alive only in him, they arise out of his individuality. The whole question would have had no meaning for Plotinus; now it begins to have a meaning, and moreover a deep meaning. Augustine, by means of the light Plotinism had shed into his soul, could understand the mystery of Christ-Jesus. Such Plotinism as was there was choked up. With the closing by the Emperor Justinian of the School of Philosophy at Athens in 529 the living connection with such views was broken off. Several people have felt deeply the idea: We are told of a spiritual world, by tradition, in Script—we experience by our individuality supernatural concepts, concepts that are removed from the material How are these concepts related to “being?” How so the nature of the world? What we take to be concepts, are these only something spontaneous in us, or have they something to do with the outer world? In such forms the questions appeared; in the most extreme abstractions, but such as were the deeply earnest concern of men and the mediaeval Church. In this abstract form, in this inner-heartedness they appeared in the two personalities of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Then again, they came to be called the questions between Realism and Nominalism. “What is our relationship to a world of which all we know is from conceptions which can come only from ourselves and our individuality?” That was the great question which the mediaeval schoolmen put to themselves. If you consider what form Plotinus had taken in Augustine's predestinationism, you will be able to feel the whole depth of this scholastic question: only a part of mankind, and that only through God's judgment, could share in grace, that is, attain to bliss; the other part was destined to eternal damnation from the first, in spite of anything it might do. But what man could gain for himself as the content of his knowledge came from that concept, that awful concept of Predestination which Augustine had not been able to transform—that came out of the idea of human individuality. For Augustine mankind was a whole; for Thomas each separate man was an individuality. How does this great World-process in Predestination as Augustine saw it hang together with the experience of separate human individuality? What is the connection between that which Augustine had really discarded and that which the separate human individuality can win for itself? For consider: Because he did not wish to lay stress on human individuality, Augustine had taken the teaching of Predestination, and, for mankind's own sake, had extinguished human individuality. Thomas Aquinas had before him only the individual man, with his thirst for knowledge. Thomas had to seek human knowledge and its relationship to the world in the very thing Augustine had excluded from his study of humanity. It is not sufficient, ladies and gentlemen, to put such a question abstractly and intellectually and rationally; it is necessary to grasp such a question with the whole heart, with the whole human personality. Only then shall we be able to assess the weight with which this question oppressed those men who, in the thirteenth century, bore the burden of it. |
| 161. Meditation and Concentration: Three Kinds of Clairvoyance: Lecture III
02 May 1915, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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| He said: Representation and will are what constitutes the foundation of the world. But—obsessed by Kant’s method of thinking—he goes on to say that representation are never more than dream-pictures and that it is impossible ever to come to reality through them. |
| 161. Meditation and Concentration: Three Kinds of Clairvoyance: Lecture III
02 May 1915, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday I drew attention to the way in which a man is able with the higher members of his being - his etheric body, astral body and ego—to leave his physical body; and I pointed out how, having left his physical body, he then makes his first steps in initiation, and learns that what we call man's spiritual activity does not come only with initiation but, in reality, is there all the time in everyday life. We had particularly to emphasize that the activity which enters our consciousness through our thoughts actually takes its course in man's etheric body, and that this activity taking its course in man's etheric body, this activity underlying the thought-pictures, enters our consciousness by reflecting itself in the physical body. As activity it is carried on in soul and spirit, so that a man when he is in the physical world and just thinks—but really thinks, is carrying out a spiritual activity. It may be said, however, that it does not enter consciousness as a spiritual activity. Just as when we stand in front of a mirror it is not our face that enters our consciousness out of the mirror but the image of our face, so in everyday life it is not the thinking but its reflection that as thought-content is rayed back into consciousness from the mirror of the physical body. In the case of the will it is different. Let us keep this well in mind—that what finds expression in thinking is an activity which actually does not enter our physical organism at all, but runs its course entirely outside it, being reflected back by the physical organism. Let us remember that as men we are actually in our soul-spiritual being all the time. Now this is how it might be represented diagrammatically. If this (a) represents man's bodily being, in actual fact his thinking goes on outside it, and what we perceive as thoughts is thrown back. Thus, with our thinking we are always outside our physical body; in reality spiritual knowledge consists in our recognizing that we are outside the physical body with our thinking.  It is different with what we call will-activity. This goes right into the physical body. What we call will-activity enters into the physical body everywhere and there brings about processes; and the effect of these processes in man is what is brought about by the will as movement. We can thus say: While living as man in the physical world there rays out of the spiritual into our organism the essential force of the will and carries out certain activities in the organism enclosed within the skin. Between birth and death we are therefore permeated by will-forces; whereas the thoughts do not go on within our organism but outside it. From this you may conclude that everything to do with the will is intimately connected with what a man is between birth and death by reason of his bodily organization. The will is really closely bound up with us and all expressions of the will are in close connection with our organization, with our physical being as man between birth and death. This is why thinking really has a certain character of detachment from the human being, a certain independent character, never attainable by the will. Now for a moment try to concentrate on the great difference existing in human life between thinking and what belongs to the will. It is just spiritual science that is capable from this point of view of throwing the most penetrating side-lights on certain problems in life. Do we not all find that what can be known through spiritual science really confronts us in life in the form of questions which somehow have to be answered? Now think what happens when anyone goes to a solicitor about some matter. The solicitor hears all about the case and institutes proceedings for the client in question. He will look into all possible ingenious grounds—puts into this all the ingenuity of which he is capable—to win the case for his client. To win the case he will summon up all his powers of intelligence and reasoning. What do you think would have happened (life will certainly give you the answer) had his opponent outrun the client mentioned and come a few hours before to the same solicitor? What I am assuming hypothetically often happens in reality. The solicitor would have listened to the opponent's case and put all his ingenuity into the grounds for the defense of this client—grounds for getting the better of the other man. I don't think anyone will feel inclined to deny the possibility of my hypothesis being realized. What does it show however? It shows how little connection a man has in reality with his intelligence and his reason with all that is his force of thought, that in a certain case he can put them at the service of one side just as well as of the other. Think how different this is when man's will-nature is in question, in a matter where man’s feelings and desires are engaged. Try to get a clear idea of whether it would be possible for a man whose will-nature was implicated to act in the same way. On the contrary, if he did so we should consider him mentally unsound. A man is intimately bound up with his will—most intimately; for the will streams into his physical organism and in this human physical organism, induces processes directly related to the personality. We can therefore say: It is just into these facts of life which, when we think about life at all, confront us so enigmatically, that light is thrown by all we gain through spiritual science. Ever more fully can spiritual science enlighten men about what happens in everyday life, because everything that happens has supersensible causes. The most mundane events are dependent on the supersensible, and are comprehensible only when these supersensible causes are open to our view. But now let us take the case of a man going with his soul through the gate of death. We must here ask: What happens to his force of thinking and to his will-force? After death the thinking force can no longer be reflected by an organism such as we bear with us between birth and death. For the significant fact here is that after death this organism, everything present in us lying beneath the surface of our skin, is cast off. Therefore, when we have gone through the gate of death, the thinking cannot be reflected by an organism no longer there, neither can an organism no longer there induce inner processes. What the thinking force is continues to exist—just as a man is still there when after passing a mirror he is no longer able to see his reflection. During the time he is passing it his face will be reflected to him; had he passed by earlier the reflection would have appeared to him earlier. The thinking force is reflected in the life of the organism as long as we are on earth, but it is still there even though we have left our physical organism behind. What happens then? What constitutes the thinking force cannot, in itself be perceived; just as the eye is incapable of seeing itself so also is the thinking, for it has to be reflected-back by something—and the bodily organism is no longer there. When a man has discarded his physical organism what will then throw back the thinking force for whatever the thinking force develops in itself as process? Here something occurs that is not obvious to human physical intelligence; but it must, be considered if we really want to understand the life between death and rebirth. This can be under stood through initiates' teachings. An initiate knows that even during life in the body knowledge does not come to him through the mirror of his body but outside it, that he goes out of his body and receives knowledge without it, that therefore he dispenses with his bodily mirrors. Whoever cultivates in himself this kind of knowledge sees that what constitutes the thinking force henceforward enters his consciousness outside the body; it enters consciousness by the later thoughts being reflected by those that have gone before. Thus, bear this well in mind—when an initiate leaves his body, and is outside it, he does not perceive by something being reflected by his body, he perceives by the thinking force he now sends out being reflected by what he has previously thought. You must therefore imagine that what has been thought previously—not only because it was thought previously—mirrors back the forces developed by the thinking, when this development takes place outside the body.  I can perhaps put it still more clearly. Let us suppose that someone today becomes an initiate. In this state of initiation how can he perceive anything through the force of his thinking? He does this by encountering, with the thinking forces he sends out, what, for instance, he thought the day before. What he thought the day before remains inscribed in the universal cosmic chronicle—which you know as the Akashic record—and what his thinking force develops today is reflected by what he thought yesterday. From this you may see that the thinking must be qualified to make the thought of yesterday as strong as possible, so that it can reflect effectively. This is done by the rigorous concentration of one's thought and by various kinds of meditation, in the way described from time to time in lectures about knowledge of the higher worlds. Then the thought that otherwise is of a fleeting nature is so densified in a man, so strengthened, that he is able to bring about the reflection of his thinking force in these previously strengthened and densified thoughts. This is how it is also with the consciousness men develop after death. What a man has lived through between birth and death is indeed inscribed spiritually into the great chronicle of time. Just as in this physical world we are unable to hear without ears, after death we are unable to perceive unless there is inscribed into the world our life, with all that we have lived through between birth and death. This is the reflecting apparatus. I drew attention to these facts in my last Vienna cycle.1 Our life itself, in the way we go through it between birth and death, becomes our sense-organ for the higher worlds. You do not see your eye nor do you hear your ear, but you see with your eye, you hear with your ear. When you want to perceive anything to do with your eye you must do so in the way of ordinary science. It is the same in the case of your ear. The forces a man develops between death and rebirth have the quality of always raying back to the past earth-life, so as to be reflected by it; then they spread themselves out and are perceived by a man in the life between death and rebirth. From this it can be seen what nonsense it is to speak of life on earth as if it were a punishment, or some other superfluous factor in man’s life as a whole. A man has to make himself part of this earthly life, for in the spiritual world in life after death it becomes his sense-organ. The difficulty of this conception consists in this that when you imagine a sense-organ you conceive it as something in space. Space, however, ceases as soon as we go either through the gate of death or through initiation; space has significance only for the world of the senses. What we afterwards meet with is time, and, just as here we make use of ears and eyes that are spatial, there we need temporal processes. These processes are those carried out between birth and death, by which the ones developed after death are reflected back. In life between birth and death everything is perceptible to us in space; after death everything takes its course in time, whereas formerly it was in space that we perceived it. The particular difficulty in speaking about the facts of spiritual science is that, as soon as we turn our gaze to the spiritual worlds, we have really to renounce the whole outlook we have developed for existence in space; we must entirely give up this spatial conception and realize that there space no longer exists, everything running its course in time—that there even the organs are temporal processes. If we would find our way about among the events in spiritual life, we have not only to transform our way of learning; we must entirely transform ourselves, re-model ourselves, acquire fresh life, in such a way that we adopt quite a different method of conception. Here lies the difficulty referred to yesterday, which so many people shun, however ingenious for the physical plane their philosophy may be. People indeed are wedded to their spatial conceptions and cannot find their bearings in a life that runs its course entirely in time. I know quite well that there may be many souls who say: But I just cannot conceive that when I enter the spiritual world this spiritual world is not to be there in a spatial sense.—That may be, but if we wish to enter the spiritual world the most necessary thing of all is for us to make every effort to grow beyond forming our conceptions as we do on the physical plane. If in forming our conceptions of the higher worlds we never take for our standards and models any but those of the physical world, we shall never attain to real thoughts about the higher worlds—at best picture thoughts. It is thus where thinking is concerned. After death thinking takes its course in such a way that it reflects itself in what we have lived through, what we were, in physical earthly life between birth and death. All the occurrences we have experienced constitute after death our eyes and our ears. Try by meditating to make real to yourselves all that is contained in the significant sentence: Your life between birth and death will become eye and ear for you, it will constitute your organs between death and rebirth. Now how do matters stand with the will forces? The will-forces bring about in us the life-processes within the limits of our body—it is our life-processes which they bring about. The body is no longer there when a man has gone through the gate of death, but the whole spiritual environment is there. True as it is that the will with its forces works into the physical organism, it is just as true that after death the will has the desire to go out from the man in all directions; it pours itself into the whole environment, in the opposite way to physical life when the will works into man. You gain some conception of this out—pouring of the will into the surrounding world, if you consider what you have to acquire in the way of inner cultivation of the will in meditation, when you are really anxious to make progress in the sphere of spiritual knowledge. The man who is willing to be satisfied with recognizing the world as a merely physical one sees, for example, the color blue, sees somewhere a blue surface, or perhaps a yellow surface; and this satisfies the man who is content to stop short at the physical world. We have already discussed how, even through a true conception of art, we must get beyond this mere grasping of the matter in accordance with the senses; how when we must experience blue as if we let our will, our force of heart, stream out into space, and as if from us out into space there could shine forth towards what shines forth to us as blue something we feel like a complete surrender—as if we could pour ourselves out into space. Our own being streams into the blue, flows away into it. Where there is yellow, however, the being, the being of the will, has no wish to enter—here it is repulsed; it feels that the will cannot get through, and that it is thrown back on itself. Whoever wishes to prepare himself to develop in his soul those forces which lead him into the spiritual world, must be able in his life of soul to connect something real with what I have just been saying. For instance, he must in all reality connect the fact that he is looking at a blue surface with saying: This blue surface takes me to itself in a kindly way; it lets my soul with its forces flow out into the illimitable. But the surface here, this yellow surface, repels me, and my soul-forces return upon my soul like the pricks of a needle. It is the same with everything perceived by the senses; it all has these differences of color. Our will, in its soul-nature, pours itself out into the world and can either thus pour itself out or be thrust back. This can be cultivated by giving the forces of our soul a training in color or in some other impression of the physical world. You will discover in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds" how this may be done. When, however, this has been developed, when we know that if the forces of the soul float away, become blue (becoming blue and floating away are one and the same thing), this means to be taken up with sympathy whereas becoming yellow is to be repelled and is identical with antipathy—well, then we have forces such as these within us. Let us say that we have experienced this coloring of the soul when we are taken up sympathetically and that we do not, in this case, confront a physical being at all, but that it is possible through our developed soul-forces for a spiritual being with whom we are in sympathy to flow into us. This is the way in which we can perceive the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies and the beings of the elemental world. I will give you an example, one that is not meant to be personal but should be taken quite objectively. We need not develop merely through the forces in our color-sense, it is possible to do so through any forces of the soul. Imagine that we arouse in our self-knowledge a feeling of how it appears to our soul when we are really stupid or foolish. In everyday life we take no notice of such things, we do not bring them into consciousness; but if we wish to develop the soul we must learn to feel within us what is experienced when something foolish is done. Then we notice that when this foolish action occurs will-forces of the soul stream forth which can be thrown back from outside. They are, however, thrown back in such a way that on noticing the repulsion we feel we are being mocked at and scorned. This is a very special experience. When we are really stupid and are alive to what is happening spiritually we feel looked down upon, provoked. A feeling can then follow of being provoked from out of the spiritual world. If we then go to someplace where there are the nature-spirits we call gnomes, we then have the power to perceive them. This power is acquired only when we perceive in ourselves the feeling I have just described. The gnomes carry-on in a way that is provoking, making all manner of gestures and grimaces, laughing, and so on. This is perceptible to us only if when we are stupid we observe ourselves. It is important that we should acquire inward forces through these exercises, that with our will forces we should delve deeply into the world surrounding us; then this surrounding world will come alive, really and truly alive. Thus we see while our life between birth and death becomes an organ, an organ of perception, within the spiritual organism that we bear between death and rebirth, our will becomes a participator in our whole spiritual environment. We see how the will rays back in initiates (in the seeing of gnomes, for example) and in those who are dead. When gnomes are seen it is an example of this, out of the elemental world. Now consider how there once lived a philosopher who in the second half of the nineteenth century had a great influence on many people, namely, Schopenhauer. As you know, he exercised a great influence both on Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. Schopenhauer derived the world—as others have derived it from other causes—from what he called conception, or representation, and will. He said: Representation and will are what constitutes the foundation of the world. But—obsessed by Kant’s method of thinking—he goes on to say that representation are never more than dream-pictures and that it is impossible ever to come to reality through them. It is only through the will that we can penetrate into the reality of things—this is done by the will. Now Schopenhauer philosophises in an impressive manner about representation and will; and, if one may say so—he does this indeed rather well. He is, however, one of those who I have likened to a man standing in front of a door and refusing to go through it. When we take his words literally—the world is representation, the world is a mere dream-picture—we have to forgo all knowledge of the world through representation and can then pass on to knowledge of the representations themselves, pass on to doing something in one's own soul with the representations—in other words to meditate, to concentrate. Had Schopenhauer gone a step further he would have reached the point of saying: "I must renounce representations! If a representation is something produced within me, I must put it to an inward use.’ Had he made this step he would have been driven to cultivate his representations, to work upon them in meditation and concentration. When he says: The world is will—when, as in his clever treatise on the "Will in Nature", he goes on to describe this will in nature, he does not take his own proposition in earnest. In describing the will we seek the help of representations and he denies those all possibility of knowledge. This reminds us of Munchausen who to pull himself out of a bog catches hold of his own pigtail. What would Schopenhauer have been obliged to be if had taken in earnest his own words—the world is will? He would have had to say: Then we ought to pour out our will into the world; we must use our will to creep inside things. We must delve right into the world, send into it cur will, no longer taking the color blue as mere representation, but trying to perceive how the will sinks down into it; no longer thinking of our stupidity as a representation, but realizing what can be experienced through that stupidity. You can see that here too it is possible to arrive at a description which needs only to be taken in earnest. Had Schopenhauer gone further he would have had to say: If the representation is really only a picture we represent to ourselves, then we must work upon it; if the will is really in the things, then we must go with it right into the things, not just describe how things have the will within them. You see here another example of how a renowned Philosopher of the nineteenth century takes men to the very gates of initiation, right up to spiritual science; and how this philosopher then does everything he can to close these gates to men. Where people really take hold of life they are shown on all sides that the time is ripe for picking the fruits of spiritual science—only things must be taken in earnest, deeply in earnest. Above all we must understand how to take people at their word. For it is not required of spiritual science to stand on its own defense. For the most part this is actually done by others, by its opponents, though they do not know this, have no notion of it. Now consider a certain class of human beings to which very many in the nineteenth century belonged—the atomistic philosophers, those who conceived the idea that atoms in movement were at the basis of all the phenomena of life. They had the idea that behind this entire visible and audible world there was a world of atoms in movement, and through this movement arose processes perceived by us as what appears in our surroundings. Nothing spiritual is there, the spiritual is merely a product of atomic movement, and all—prevailing atomic activity. Now how has the thought of these whirling atoms arisen? Has anyone seen them? Has anyone discovered them through what they have experienced or come to know empirically? Were this the case they would not be what they are supposed to be, for they are supposed to be concealed behind empirical knowledge. Had they any reality, by what means would they have to be discovered? Suppose the movement of atoms were there—the understanding cannot discover them in what is sense-perceptible. What would a man have to be in order to possess the right to speak of this world of atoms? He would have to be clairvoyant; the whole of this atom-world would have to be a product of inner vision, of clairvoyance. The only thing we can say to the people who have appeared as the materialists of the nineteenth century is: There is no need for us to prove that there are clairvoyants for either you must be silent about all your theories, or you must admit that to perceive these things you are possessed of clairvoyant vision—at least to the point of being able to perceive atoms behind the world of the senses. For if there is no such things as clairvoyance it is senseless to speak of this material world of atoms. If you find it a necessity to have moving atoms you prove to us that there are clairvoyant human beings. Thus we take these people seriously, although they do not take themselves seriously when they say things of this kind. If Schopenhauer is taken in earnest we must come to this conclusion—“If you say the world is will and what we have in the way of representation is only pictures, you ought to penetrate into the world with your will, and penetrate into your thinking through meditation and concentration. We take you seriously but you do not take yourselves so.” Strictly speaking, it is the same with everything that comes into question. This is what is so profoundly significant in the world—conception of spiritual science, that it takes in all earnest what is not so taken by the others—what they skim over in a superficial way. Proofs are always to be found among the opponents of spiritual science. But people never notice that in their assertions, in what they think, at bottom they are at the same time setting at naught what they think. For the materialistic atomist, and Schopenhauer too, set a naught what they themselves maintain. Schopenhauer nullifies his own system when he asserts: Everything is will and representation. The moment he is not willing to stop there, however, he is obliged to lead men onto the development of spiritual science. It is not we who form the world-conception of spiritual science; how then does this world-conception come into being? It enters the world of itself—is there, everywhere, in the world. It enters life through unfamiliar doors and windows; and even when others do not take it in earnest, it finds its way into men’s cultural life. But there is still something else we can recognize if, through considerations of this kind we really have our attention drawn to how superficially men approach their own spiritual processes, and how little in a deeper sense they take themselves seriously—even when they are clever and profound philosophers. They weave as it were a conceptual web, but with it they shy away from really fulfilling the inner life’s work that would lead them to experience the forces upon which the world is founded. Hence we see that the centuries referred to yesterday, during which ordinary natural science has seen its great triumphs, have also been the centuries to develop in human beings the superficial thinking. The more glorious the development of science, the more superficial has become investigation into the sources of existence. We can point to really shining examples of what has just been touched upon here. Suppose we have the following experience—a man, who has never shown any interest in the spiritual world undergoes a sudden change, begins to concern himself about the spiritual world and longs to know something about it. Let us suppose we have this experience after having found our way into spiritual science. What will become a necessity for us when we experience how a man, who has never worried about the spiritual world, having been immersed in everyday affairs, now finds himself at one of the crossroads of life and turns to the spiritual world? As spiritual scientists we shall interest ourselves about what has been going on in this man’s soul. We shall try as often as possible to enter into the soul of such a man, and it will then be useful for us to know what has often been stressed here, namely, that the saying in constant use about nature making no sudden jumps is absolutely untrue. Nature does make sudden jumps. She makes a jump when the green leaf becomes the colourful petal, and when she so changes a man who has never troubled himself about the spiritual world that he begins to interest himself in it, this too is like a sudden jump; and for this we shall seek the cause. We shall make certain discoveries about the various spiritual sources of which we have spoken here, and see how anything of this kind takes place. When doing this we shall ask: How old was the man? We know that every seven years something new is born in the human being: From the seventh year on, the etheric body; from the fourteenth year on, the astral body, and so on. We shall gather up all that we know about the etheric and astral bodies, taking this particularly from an inner, not an outer, point of view. Then we shall be able to gain a good deal of information about what is going on in a human soul such as this. It is also possible to proceed in another way. We can become interested in the fact that men in ordinary life suddenly go over to a life concerned with spiritual truths, and the profundities of religion. Some men may look upon spiritual science as a foolish phantasy, and when we examine into what is going on in the depths of his soul it is possible for us to discover what makes him find it foolish. But we can then do the following. We write, let us say 192, or even more, letters to people whom we have heard about as having gone through a change of this kind. We send these letters to a whole continent, in order to learn in reply what it was that brought about this change in their life.—We then receive answers of the most diverse kind….someone writes: When I was fourteen my life led me into all manner of bad habits. That made my father very angry and he gave me a good thrashing; this it was which induced in me a feeling for the spiritual world.—Others assert that they have seen a man die, and so on. Suppose then that we get 192 answers and proceed to arrange them in piles—one pile for the letters in which the writers say that they have been changed by their fear of death or of hell; a second pile in which it is stated that the writers come across good men, or imitated them; a third pile—and so on. In piles such as these matters easily become involved and then we make an extra pile for other, egocentric motives. Then we arrive at the following. We have sorted the 192 letters into piles and have counted how many letters go into each one; then we are able to make a simple calculation of the percentage of letters in each pile. We can discover, for example, that 14 per cent of the changes come about through fear, either of death or of hell; 6 per cent come from egocentric motives; 5 per cent because altruistic feelings have arisen in the writers; 17 per cent of them are striving after some moral ideal—supposedly those belonging to an ethical society; 16 percent through pangs of conscience, 10 per cent by following teachings concerning what is good, 13 per cent through imitating other men considered to be religious, 19 per cent by reason of social pressure, the pressure of necessity and so forth. Thus, we can proceed by trying with love to delve into the soul who confesses to a change of this kind; we can try to discover what is within the soul; and for this we have need of spiritual science. Or we can do what I have just been describing. One who has done this is a certain Starbuck who has written about these matters a book which has aroused a good deal of attention. This is the most superficial exposition and the very opposite of all we must perceive in spiritual science. Spiritual science seeks everywhere to go to the very root of things. A tendency that has arisen to the materialistic character of the times is to apply even to the religious life this famous popular science of statistics. For, as it has clearly pointed out, this means of research is incontrovertible. It has one quality particularly beloved by those people who are unwilling to enter the doors of spiritual science—it can truly be called easy, very easy. Yesterday we dwelt on the reason for so many people being unwilling to accept spiritual science, mainly, its difficulty. But we can say of statistics that it is easy, in truth very easy. Now today people go in for an experimental science of the soul; I should have to talk about this science at great length to give you a concept of it. It is called experimental psychology; outwardly a great deal is expected from it. I am going just to describe the beginning that has been made with these experiments. We take, let us say, ten children and give these ten children a written sentence—perhaps like this: M… is g… by st… We then look at our watch and say to one of the children: “Tell me what you make of that sentence.” The child doesn’t know; it thinks hard and finally comes out with “Much is gained by striving.” Then it is at once noted down how much time it took the child to complete the sentence. Obviously there must be several sentences for effort has to be made to read them; gradually this will be done in a shorter space of time. Note is then made of the number of seconds taken by the various children to complete one of these sentences, and the percentages among the children are calculated and treated further statistically. In this way the faculty of adaption to outer circumstance and other matters, are tested. This method of experimental psychology has a grand-sounding name, it is called “intelligence tests”; whereas the other method is said to be the testing by experiment of man’s religious nature. My dear friends, what I have given you here in a few words is no laughing matter. For where philosophy is propounded today these experimental tests are looked upon as the future science of the soul to a far greater extent than any serious feeling is shown, not for what we subscribe to here, but for what was formerly discovered by inner observation of the soul. Today people are all for experiment. These are examples of people’s experiments today and these methods have many supporters in the world. Physical and chemical laboratories are set up for the purpose of these experiments and there is a vast literature on the subject. We can even experience what I will just touch upon in passing. A friend of ours, chairman of one of our groups, a group in the North, had been preparing his doctorate thesis. It goes without saying that he went to a great deal of trouble (when talking to children one goes to a great deal of trouble to speak on a level with their understanding) to leave out of his thesis anything learnt from spiritual science. All that was left out. Now among the examiners of the thesis there was one who was an expert in these matters, who therefore was thoroughly briefed in these methods; this man absolutely refused to accept the thesis. (The case was even discussed in the Norwegian Parliament.) Anyone who is an experimental psychologist is firmly convinced that his science of the soul is founded on modern science and will continue to hold good for the future. There is no intention here of saying anything particular against experimental psychology. For why should it not be interesting once in a way to learn about it? Certainly one can do so and it is all very interesting. But the important thing is the place such things are given in life, and whether they are made use of to injure what is true spiritual science, what is genuine knowledge of the soul. It must repeatedly be emphasized that it is not we who wish to turn our back on what is done by people who in accordance with their capacities investigate the soul—the people who investigate what has to do with the senses, and like to make records after the fashion of those 192 replies. This indeed is in keeping, with men's capacities; but we must take into consideration what kind of world it is today in which spiritual science takes its place. We must be very clear about that. I know very well that there are those who may say: Here is this man, now, abusing experimental psychology—absolutely tearing it to shreds! People may seek thus just as they said: At Easter you ran down Goethe's "Faust" here and roundly criticized Goethe. These people cannot understand the difference between a description of something and a criticism in the superficial sense; they always misunderstand such things. By characterizing them I am wanting to give them their place in the whole sphere of human life. Spiritual Science is not called upon to play the critic, neither can what has been said be criticism. Men who are not scientists should behave in a Christian way towards true spiritual science. Another thing is to have clear vision. Thus when we look at science we see how superficially it takes all human striving, how even in the case of religious conversion it does not turn to the inner aspect but looks upon human beings from the outside. In practical life men are not particularly credulous. The statisticians of the insurance companies—I have referred to this before—calculate about when a man will die. It can be calculated, for instance, about when an 18-year-old will die, because he belongs to a group of people a certain number of whom will die at a certain age. According to this the insurance quota is reckoned and correctly assigned. This all works quite well. If people in ordinary life, however, wanted to prepare for death in the year reckoned as that of their probable death by the insurance company, they would be taken for lunatics. The system does not determine a man’s the length of life. Statistics have just as little to do with his conversion. We must look deeply into all these things. Through them we strive for a feeling which has within it intuitive knowledge. It will be particularly difficult to bring to the world-culture of today what I would call the crown of spiritual science—knowledge of the Christ. Christ-knowledge is that to which—as the purest, highest and most holy—we are led by all that we receive through spiritual science. In many lectures I have tried to make it clear how it is just at this point of time that the Christ-impulse, which has come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, has to be made accessible to the souls of men through the instrument of spiritual science. In diverse ways I tried to point out clearly the way in which the Christ-impulse has worked. Remember the lectures about Joan of Arc, about Constantine, and so on. In many different ways I tried to make clear how in these past centuries the Christ-impulse has been drawn more into the unconscious, but how we are now living at a time when the Christ-impulse must enter more consciously into the life of man, and when there must come a real knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. We shall never learn to know about this Mystery of Golgotha if we are not ready to accept conceptions of the kind touched upon at Eastertide2—about Christ in connection with Lucifer and Ahriman—and if we do not permeate these conceptions with spiritual science. We are living in a terribly hard time, a time of suffering and sorrow. You know that for reasons previously mentioned I am not able to characterize this time; neither do I want to do so but from a quite different angle I will just touch upon something connected with our present studies. This time of suffering and sorrow has wakened many things in human souls, and anyone living through this time, anyone who concerns himself about what is going on, will notice that today, in a certain direction, a great deepening is taking place in the souls of men. These human souls involved in present events were formerly very far from anything to do with religion, their perceptions and feelings were thoroughly materialistic. Today we can repeatedly find in their letters, for one thing, how because of having been involved in all the sorrowful events of the present time they have recovered their feeling for religion. The remarkable thing is that they begin to speak of God and of a divine ordering when formerly such words never passed their lips. On this point today among those people who are in the thick of events we really experience a very great religious deepening. But one fact has justly been brought before us which is quite as evident as what I have now been saying. Take the most characteristic thing, in the letters written from the front, in which can be seen this religious deepening. Much is said of how God has been found again but almost nothing, almost nothing at all—this has been little noticed—of Christ. We hear of God but nothing of Christ. This is a very significant fact—that in this present time of heavy trial and great suffering many people have their religious feeling aroused in the abstract form of the idea of God. Of a similar deepening of men's perception of the Christ we can hardly speak at all. I say “hardly", for naturally it is to be met with here and there, but generally speaking things are as I have described. You can see from this, however, that today, when it behooves the souls of men to look for renewed connection with the spiritual world, it is difficult to find the way to what we call the Christ-impulse, the Mystery of Golgotha. For this, it is necessary for the human soul to rise to a conception of mankind as one great whole. It is necessary for us not merely to foster mutual interest with those amongst whom we are living just for a time; We should extend our spiritual gaze to all times and beings, to how as souls we have gone through various lives on earth and thorough various ages. Then there gradually arises in the soul an urgent need to learn how there exists in man a deepening and then an ascending evolution. In the evolution of Time we must feel one with all mankind; we must look back to how the earth came originally into being, focus our gaze on this ascending and descending evolution, in the centre point of which the Mystery of Golgotha stands; we must feel ourselves bound up with the whole of humanity, feel ourselves bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha. Today the souls of men are nearer the cosmos spatially than they are temporally, that is, to what has been unfolded in the successive evolutionary stages. We shall be led to this, however, when with the aid of spiritual science we feel ourselves part of man's whole course of evolution. For then we cannot do other than recognize that there was a point of time when something entered the evolution of mankind which had nothing to do with human force. It entered man's evolution because into it an impulse made its way from the spiritual world through a human body—an impulse present in the beginning of the Christian era. It was a meeting of heaven with the earth. Here we touch upon something which must be embodied into the religious life through spiritual-science. We shall touch upon how spiritual science has to sink down into human feeling so that men come into a real connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and find the Christ-impulse in such a way that it can always be present in them not only as a vague feeling but also in clear consciousness. Spiritual science will work. We have recognized and repeatedly stressed the necessity for this work. In reality, the fact of your sitting there is proof that all of you in this Movement for spiritual science are willing to put your whole heart into working together. When in the future hard times fall again upon mankind, may spiritual science have already found the opportunity to unite the deepening of men's souls not only with an abstract consciousness of God but with the concrete, historical consciousness of Christ. This is the time, my dear friends, when perceptions, feelings, of a serious nature can be aroused in us and they should not avoid arousing in ourselves these serious, one might say solemn, feelings. This is how those within our movement for spiritual science should be distinguished from the people who, by reason of their karma, have not yet found their way into this Movement—that the adherents of spiritual science take everything that goes on in the world—the most superficial as also the profoundest—in thorough earnest. Just consider how important it is in everyday life to see that with our ordinary understanding bound up with our brain and with our reason we are outside what mostly interests us in ordinary physical experience, and that hence—as is the case with our hypothetical solicitor—we are strangers to our own thinking, strangers to ourselves. When we enter spiritual science, however, we develop a heart outside our body, as we said yesterday, and what we thoroughly reflect upon will once more be permeated by what is full of inner depth and soul. We can make use both of the understanding bound up with our body and of our reason, in various directions, only if we do not draw upon what unites us most deeply with the spheres in which we live with our thinking. Through spiritual science we shall draw upon this, and in what we think we shall become, with our understanding and with our reason, men of truth, men wedded to the truth; and life has need of such men. What we let shine upon us from the sun of spiritual science grows together with us because we grow together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Then our thinking is not so constituted that like that solicitor we can apply it to either party in a legal case. We shall be men of truth by becoming one with those who are spiritual truth itself. By discovering how to grasp hold of our will in the way described today, we shall find our path into the very depths of things. This will not be by speaking of the will in nature as Schopenhauer did, but by living ourselves into things, developing our forces in them. Here we touch upon something terribly lacking at the present time, namely, going deeply and with love into the being of things. This is missing today to such a terrible degree. I might say that over and over again one has to face, the bitter-experience in life of how the inclination to sink the will into the being of things is lacking among men. What on the ground of spiritual science has to be over-come is the falsifying of objective facts; and this falsifying of objective facts is just what is so widespread at the present time. Those who know nothing of previous happenings are so ready to make assertions which can be proved false. When a thing of his kind is said, my dear friends, is to be taken as an illustration, not as a detail without importance. But this detail is a symptom for us to ponder in order to come to ever greater depth in the whole depth that is to be penetrated by our spiritual movement. This spiritual movement of ours will throw light into our souls quite particularly when we become familiar with what today cannot yet be found even by those whose hearts are moved by the most grievous events of the times in which they are living, and who seek after the values of the spiritual world. Spiritual science must gradually build up for us the stages leading to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha—an understanding never again to be lost. This Mystery of Golgotha is the very meaning of the earth. To understand what this meaning of the earth is, must constitute the noblest endeavor of anyone finding his way step by step into spiritual science.
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| 292. The History of Art II: “Disputa” of Raphael — the School of Athens
05 Oct 1917, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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| Raphael's soul had counter acted: It should not be like this, I will throw myself against this mindless epoch with its imposed notions in frozen space with mindless mist in the form of the Kant-Laplace theories, with my lively spiritual existence. I want to permeate the imagination as much as possible in this dreary existence with true imagination which offers itself to clairvoyant understanding of the world. |
| 292. The History of Art II: “Disputa” of Raphael — the School of Athens
05 Oct 1917, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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I didn't want to use several images as an introduction to my art history lecture today, but limit our observational introduction to only two images, both which will be placed into the newer historical development of mankind. We will then link these to the introduction of cultural epochs as we have done in earlier years. Look at this first painting to which our primary observation will refer; a painting you know well, the so-called “Disputa” of Raphael.  Let us visualize the painting's content briefly: below, in the centre, we see a kind of altar with a chalice on it and the host, a sacramental symbol. To the left and right are religious individuals and we recognise them as teachers, popes and bishops according to their drapery. Opposite the middle, the group is seen as moving from left and right according to the hand gesture of a person directly right of the altar. According to this we observe that these individuals are taking part in something descending from above. As a result we see, by looking at the space close behind the altar where the group is positioned, into the landscape and directly above it—in the upper half of the picture—cloud masses accumulating. To some extent we see the infinite horizon within this space. From out of the middle of these cloud masses we see angelic genii rise, floating on both sides of the dove, bringing the Gospels, transported out of the undeterminable spiritual world. In the centre we can see the Holy Ghost depicted in the symbol of a dove. Above the somewhat receding Holy Ghost we have—clearly, the angelic figures carrying the Gospels are actually coming forward in perspective—the figure of Christ Jesus and above Him the figure of the Father God. Thus we have the Trinity above the chalice where the sanctuary is found. On both sides of the Christ figure we have corresponding groups; a heavenly group above, reflected below by the worldly group. On both sides of the central Christ figure appear Saints, the Madonna on his right and John the Baptist, followed by others: David, Abraham, Adam, Paul, Peter and so on. Still further up rising into the clouds are actual genii figures, spiritual individualities. This image we have in front of us now—of course there are much better copies available—I would like to link this to the evolution of mankind. Primarily we need to clearly distinguish between what is given here and what we can experience when we transport ourselves into the feelings of the time when this image was actually being painted. If we shift ourselves into the 16th Century and compare it with the complexity of sensations a painter would paint in, today, we need to say: at that time, in Rome, when Pope Julius II reigned and what worked in him as Julius II in the middle of his twentieth year to call Raphael to Rome, was at that time, and in every town, the human experience of something which lived as a deep truth depicted in this painting. Today of course something similar could be painted; but if it was to be similar to this painting in the scene design, it would not depict any true reality. Such things need to be made completely clear otherwise one will never arrive at a concrete observation of human history but forever remain in abstract observations of a legend—a bad saga—which is called the history today in schools and universities. Every detail which we can lay our eyes on in order to understand this painting, to really understand it artistically, means every small detail has a certain meaning. Just think how Raphael, this extraordinary individuality Raphael, about whom we have often spoken, how he arrived in Rome. He too was in a body of a twenty year old and one can easily conclude that while he was mainly painting this picture, he was approaching the end of his twenties. At the time he was completely under the influence of two old people who had already experienced two great battles in life and who had plans and ideas, ideas who everyone, one could say, considered as most far-reaching. Let us be completely clear: under the papal predecessors before Julius II, Rome was at the time basically completely different than during Julius II's reign. The most remarkable here, as predecessors, were the Borgias. One could say that during the time of Alexander VI Rome was gradually being developed as overlapping the old ruins and rubble work of the ancient world where the Church of St Peter almost expired and became impractical. Admittedly these people were filled with a certain nostalgia for the artistic immensity of antiquity and wanting to enliven it again. However, a strange incident happened between the Borgias and Julius II, just at the turn of the 15th into the 16th century. Beneath the room and hall which belonged to the Camera della Segnatura, Alexander VI had two frescoes painted which we want to talk about today. It is surely extraordinary that Julius II, the patron of Raphael, had shunned this lower room which had been the ordinary residence of his predecessor, as if ghosts of cholera and the plague circulated there. He shunned this completely, could not be bothered with artistic or any other events which had taken place there before. On the contrary he decided, according to his ideas for the rooms and halls in the upper storeys, to spruce them up as we can still see them today. We must just think of the mind-set of Pope Julius II in connection with the beginning of the 16th Century and how his mind worked quite differently to those of his predecessors. The other patron of Raphael was Bramante. He had a plan in his head for the new St Peter's Church. Both Julius II and Bramante were already old people, as I said, who had the storms of life behind them. They called youthful individuals like Raphael to Rome to serve them, bring to expression picturesquely the new ideas powerfully rumbling in their heads, new impulses which they thought should penetrate humanity. One should look more closely at these impulses that originated in Rome and were to penetrate humanity from the beginning of the 16th Century onwards. These impulses depended from the one side on the close connection of the development of the outer Christian ecclesiastical world and then again, what the establishment of the Christian ecclesiastical world would relate to. On the other side it relates to the entire historic development of the western world. Just think for once, that today's human being has great difficulty in transporting his feelings and thoughts into a time, as it were, that have developed out of this image, so often named the “Disputa”. Even more difficult it is for contemporary mankind to transport themselves into centuries further back when Christianity already had power. I have often mentioned that people today have the impression that mankind were always as they are today. That is not quite the case, particularly in relation to their soul life, they were not like now. Just as with almost two thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha something had been inserted into human evolution beside this Mystery which has spread into the breadth of social evolution, so something quite different to the Mystery of Golgotha came forth which we understand in a different way today. People imagine far too vaguely that at the time when this image was created, mankind was subjected to the discovery of America towards the end of the 15th century; secondly the entirely different social understanding came about through the invention of printing which finally, through Copernican and Kepler viewpoints established a new science. Just look at this painting. I want to say: if a painter would paint it today it would not in the same sense of truth be what it was then, it can't be; because today one couldn't find the soul who would paint this image in the same sense as at that time when it was actually painted, who would objectively with such an imagination for the earth have been thus, as if America hadn't yet been discovered. These would be souls who look at up at the clouds with true faith, who imagine the spiritual world in the clouds as we imagine it today, who to a certain extent imagine the clouds as real spatial bodies. Such souls are no longer to be found today, not even amongst the most naive. However, we imagine the souls of those times incorrectly if we don't believe that the content of this painting was something directly reflected by them. Let us consider—what exactly is the content of this painting? Out of today's scientific viewpoint we could identify the content of this image: we are accustomed to say that Imagination is the first step to looking into the higher worlds. If we say: up to the 16th century mankind had a view regarding the world and cosmic space in relation to the earthly world, which depended on imagination, then this is the actual truth. Imaginations were at that time something lively; and Raphael painted lively representations of soul experiences. The view of the world, the world image, was still at that time something imaginative. These imaginations were dispelled by the caustic power of Copernicanism, the discovery of America and the art of printing. From this time mankind took the place of imagination, what we call imaginative knowledge and imaginative perception, and replaced it with outer representational images of the world's construction in totality. Thus, while presently we imagine the sun, the circling planets around it and so on, the people then couldn't do so at all; when they wanted to speak about something similar, they spoke about imaginative images. A representation of such an imagination is this painting. In the centuries in which imaginative cognition developed gradually to allow such paintings like those Raphael made, came to a certain cessation in the 16th Century, these centuries are thus the 16th, 15th, 14th, 13th, 12th, 11th, 10th right back to the 9th Century, but no further back. If we want to go yet further back we won't find any real imaginative representations any longer if we ourselves want to experience imaginative art, as people did in these mentioned centuries, which we find difficult enough to raise in the soul today, imaginatively. If we wish to experience what Christianity was before the 6th Century we need to imagine the Christian experience as far more spiritual than we tend to do usually. Augustine extracted only what he could use from the Christian imaginations. Yet by reading Augustine today one gets quite a different feeling for what else lived as a world view and as an image of the interconnections of the world with humanity at that time, so different from now. Of particular importance are the ideas which you find on reading Scotus Erigena, who taught at the time of Charles the Bald. One might say that these ancient centuries before the 9th were permeated with Christian thoughts experienced by those who at least elevated their thoughts to permeate their Christian thinking with highly spiritual imagination. One might say when humanity created a world view during these ancient times they included really very little of their direct sense experiences. From their world view they included much more of that which did not result from sense experiences but had been brought about by old clairvoyant sight of the world. When we go back to the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha and follow the Christian ideas then we find that these ideas are such than one would rather say—these people were interested in the heavenly Christ, the Christ as He was in the spiritual worlds, while what He became on the earth below they considered more as supplementary. To search for The Christ amidst spiritual beings, to think of Him in relation to super-sensory spirituality was their essential striving, and that came out of the old spiritual—then the atavistic—world view. This world view filled the ancient culture right down to the third post-Atlantean age. At that time it was thought that the earth really was some kind of supplement to the spiritual. One should familiarise oneself with an imagination which is entirely essential if one would understand, would want to comprehend, how humanity actually developed from that time to now. With this imagination we must acquaint ourselves with the idea that the Europeans had by necessity to drive back spiritual imagination for the unfolding of their culture. This should be dealt with in sympathy and not antipathy—this should in no way be judged with a critical mind but the facts should simply be taken as they are presented: it was simply the fate, Europe's karma to acquire their culture in a way they had to. It was Europe's fate: pushing back spiritual ideas, curbing it so to speak. Thus it became ever clearer and more meaningful that from the 9th Century Europe needed Christianity while spiritual ideas were being suppressed. A result of this necessity was the splitting of the Greek- oriental and the Roman Catholic Church. At that time it split the East from the West. This is very important. The West had the destiny to push spiritual impulses into the East. There they remained. One can really not understand what happens in the becoming of being human beings when one doesn't have a clear understanding of the need to repel spiritual impulses towards the East—to what is connected to Asia and to Russia as a European peninsula—from the 8th and 9th Centuries. These impulses were pushed together and developed independently from western European and central European life, and propagated into the present Russia. This is very important. Only once this was properly established. Today there is a tendency not to consider things through relationships. As a result an event such as the Russian revolution apparently developed in a few months—someone or other came to this idea—while the truth pre-empting it lay in the background as a result of the specific course of events through the centuries, while spiritual life became invisible, impractical and pushed back towards the East and being stuck, yet still working in a chaotic, indefinable way made people stand right within events in the East. Yet this standing within it was really hardly living within it just like people who swim in a lake—if they have not exactly drowned—have seawater surrounding them. Likewise, what worked as spiritual impulses superficially in the East, still existed spiritually. People swam inside it and had no clue what pressed in on the surface from the 9th Century and which was then pushed back to the East, so that it could be safe guarded to survive and enter evolution later. People who originated in the East and who gradually developed from migration and similar relationships, into their souls the spiritual impulses were introduced which couldn't be used in the West, South and Central Europe. The West retained something extraordinary. The East, without knowing—most important things run their course in the subconscious—the East, without knowing, remained steady on the basic saying of the Gospels: “My Kingdom is not of this world”. Hence in the East the leaning within the physical plane is always upwards, towards the spiritual world. The West depended on reversing the sentence: “My Kingdom is not of this World” by correcting it to make the Kingdom of Christ in this world. As a result we see Europe had the fate of constituting the realm of Christ outwardly as an empire on the physical plane. One could say from Rome the law was proclaimed since the 9th Century: break away from the sentence “My Kingdom is not of this World” by actually constituting a worldly kingdom, a kingdom for Christ Jesus on earth, which would be on the physical plane. The Roman pope gradually became the one to say: My Kingdom is the Kingdom of Christ; but this Kingdom of Christ is from this world; we have constituted it in such a way that this Kingdom of Christ is of this world. However a consciousness prevailed that Christ's kingdom was not one which could be based on the 13 ground rules of external natural existence. People were aware that when they looked out into nature, lit by the sun's morning redness and the sunset's glow, by the stars, then it is not only a matter of what the eyes saw, what the ears heard or the hands could grip, but in the widths of infinite space at the same time existed something of the spiritual kingdom. Everything visible in the world is to some extent the last outflow, the last wave of the spiritual world. This visible world is only complete when one is totally aware that it is the outflow of a spiritual world. The spiritual world is real; humanity has but lost their sight of this spiritual world. It is hidden yet it is a reality, an actuality. When a person enters the gate of death and is particularly blessed, he or she steps into the spiritual world. In times past people were far more lively in their thoughts than we can imagine. When the blessed ones who had died went through the gate of death, they entered a world which we can imagine in the very present time—permeated with clouds, permeated with stars, piercing the orbit of the planets. It was something so concrete that the souls of the dead could create the upper group depicted in the painting. The souls of the dead combined what existed for them out of the past to depict this concrete mystery, this concrete secret of the nature of the Trinity in their midst: as the Father God—out of the character of the present: the Christ Jesus—and out of the reality of the future: the Holy Ghost. In the reality of that present day world, if the physically sensed world did not appear as a mere illusion to people and let them live like animals, what differentiated itself in the reality of time had to appear on the physical plane in sighs, as a reference to the invisible spiritual world weaving and living above the clouds. Future generations have to have living signs for those not yet born and for those who are now passed over souls and are in possession of direct sight. On the altar stands the Chalice with the Sanktissimum, the host. This host or wafer is no mere bit of external matter for people who stand on the right, left and around it, but this host is surrounded by its aura. Within this aura of the host forces work which pour down from the Trinity. Such imaginations experienced by the heads of church fathers, bishops and popes regarding the sanctity of an altar are incomprehensible by present day humanity. This imagination has elapsed in the course of time. A moment is eternalized in this painting by the people below the altar rising: here is the mystery which is positioned on the altar: something surrounds the host. This something can be seen by those who have died, namely the blessed ones: David, Abraham, Adam, Moses, Peter and Paul—these departed ones look upon this in the same way we on the physical plane would observe things in the sense world. When we look at what is below, under the central sacred sacrament, we have to some measure an image in the lower layers of the painting of which a person like Pope Julius II said: This, in its great glory, I want to establish on earth in Rome if at all possible; such a kingdom, such an empire—not a state but an empire—in order for things to take place in this empire and be so enveloped by these auras that the past and its impulses live on in these auras. An empire that exists in this world but which, because it is of this world, contains signs and symbols for what lives in the spiritual world. Ideas of this kind Julius II incited first in Bramante and then in youthful Raphael. Thus it came about that the young Raphael could compose this painting. In a way Julius II wanted this painting in his study, have it constantly before him like a holy saying on which Rome had to be based because it contained the most important things in the mysteries. However this empire had to be on this earth, of this earth with a spiritual inclusion. If one allows all these experiences we have spoken about to work on one's soul, from its impression one might say: the spiritual world has been pushed back into the East since the 9th Century as is shown by the clouds driven backward and up, waiting for their time to come. In contrast there were preparations being made in the West for the 5th post-Atlantean epoch in which we are all still living and in which we will live for a long time, which exists under the signature: My kingdom is of this world and this kingdom will increasingly become more of this world. However this kingdom which is of this world was founded nearly from the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch under the influence of old people like Bramante and Julius II, but also the youth Raphael. The most important historical things happen subconsciously and from this subconscious yet wise basis Julius II called Raphael. We know that humanity was becoming ever younger through the centuries; we know that since the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch the age of the twenty eight had been reached and it was now “27 years old”. Certainly Bramante and Julius II were old people but they were not as directly placed in the world as could the youthful Raphael in his young body with youthful forces of twenty-eight when he painted this way. This is an important spiritual background in the development of humanity. We can recall how Raphael painted in the characterized thought (explained above) of Rome at the time; he painted to a certain extent in protest against the 5th post-Atlantean epoch for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This was not the case but let us hypothetically argue that it was thus in Raphael's soul: we can imagine that in his soul, in his subconscious soul lived knowledge which would be coming out of the 5th post Atlantean time. Out of this godless, spirit-robbed world of the 5th post-Atlantean time humanity's thoughts would be permeated with bare, barren and icy space where sun and spiritless planets depict the dreary space, spiritlessly imagining the world and try, according to spiritless laws of nature, construct the unfolding of the world. Let us imagine what had been presented to Raphael's soul: the reality of the spiritual emptiness of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch. Raphael's soul had counter acted: It should not be like this, I will throw myself against this mindless epoch with its imposed notions in frozen space with mindless mist in the form of the Kant-Laplace theories, with my lively spiritual existence. I want to permeate the imagination as much as possible in this dreary existence with true imagination which offers itself to clairvoyant understanding of the world.—Suppose this is what Raphael's soul depicted. Thus it appeared in his subconscious soul; it had even appeared in the same way in the soul of Julius II. Our age really doesn't need to despise great minds like Julius II or even the Borgias as is done with historical winners, because history still has to reduce some judgements regarding our contemporaries—the greatest ones of our times—just as it did with the Borgias or Julius II and will be the case of individuals in the future. People present at that time just did not have a distance to it. Raphael was born at the start of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch, one could say, as a child of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch. He was really born out of this 5th post-Atlantic epoch but as a lively protest against his age—he wanted to stand within its beauty which this epoch no longer experienced as real; this epoch strived to insert sensible spirituality into de-spiritualized certainty and impose that on the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, as has been discovered from spiritual research. Raphael's aim was more or less to depict clear images visible in the spiritual realm, imported from that realm into this world, in a painting filled with signs of the supersensible, thereby creating another world. As a result this image is through and through a true picture because it has originated in a lively experience arising from that time. Just consider this particular time when the child of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch drew the entire imaginative, spiritual imagery of the 4th post-Atlantean time into the 5th. Roughly at this time, during nearly the same year, a Nordic personality slipped up the penitent's stair in Rome, the stairs acclaimed for their ability to be equated to godly work according to the number of stairs climbed, because the number of steps taken on the stairs meant the same number of days relieved of hell fire. While Raphael was painting in the Vatican the Camera della Segnatura and similar images, this Nordic person, so devoted, in full of belief, so concerned for his soul's salvation, ascended the stair—so many stairs for so many days free from purgatory, doing work to please God. While he was thus climbing the stair, he had a vision—the vision showed him the futility of such holy work rushing up the stairs—a vision which ripped open the veil between him and that world which Raphael as a child of the 5th post-Atlantean time was painting as a testament of the 4th post-Atlantean time. You can recognise this person as Luther, the antitheses of Raphael. Raphael, even when he was looking around in the outer world, would see colour and form, all kinds of spiritual images, everything as expressions of the supersensible world yet reflected, expressed as sensual colour, forms and gestures. Luther was at the same time in Rome, filled with song and poetry, yet amorphous, formless in his soul, rejecting everything in this world which surrounded him in Rome. Like the spiritual world was pushed back in the 9th century into the East, it was now a testament of the 4th post-Atlantean epoch in Europe. Luther pushed it all back. Thus in the future the threefold world presented itself: in the East spirituality was pushed back, in the South it was somewhat divided as the testament of the 4th post-Atlantean epoch and again became pushed back and rejected. The musical element of the North took the place of the colour and form-rich testament of the South. Luther is really the antithesis of Raphael. Raphael is a child of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, his soul however contained everything which lived in the 4th post-Atlantean time. Luther is a late-comer of the 4th post-Atlantean time, he doesn't belong in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch; one might say he was transferred from the 4th into the 5th. In his frame of mind Luther was completely within the 4th post-Atlantean time. His thoughts and feelings were like a person living in the 4th epoch but he was transferred into the 5th and lived now out of an echo sounding into the 5th epoch with its blatancy, its obvious natural history and ice fields of barren spirituality. Raphael had the soul content of the 4th post-Atlantean time; Luther, even though he was transferred out of the 4th into the 5th, had a soul standing right in the 4th post-Atlantean time but rejected everything external, he wanted by contrast to create everything which had nothing to do with external work and external human activities—a soul based solely between the formless inner connection of the human soul and the spiritual world, dependant on faith only. Just think for a moment how a painter like Raphael would have painted out of southern Catholicism, and compare how it could be painted from a Lutheran standpoint. What would he paint? He would paint a Christ figure somewhat like Albrecht Dürer's; or he would paint a religious person in whose physiognomic expression one would recognise a soul with nothing in common regarding the material surroundings and the objects within this environment into which it has been imposed. Thus one age connects to another. In the present time mankind has quite different ideas. This you see in paintings where Christ is depicted as a person amongst the people: “Come, Master Jesus, be our guest”—as human and equal as possible:  In our painting we have a group of Bishops, learned church fathers, and in the middle the obvious sign, the symbol. This points to the supersensible world; the Trinity is concretely included. Let us lift out this “Trinity” in particular. We have another painting which represents this Trinity on its own.   At the top we see the Father God, below that, Holy Ghost and the Son. You behold these members as concrete content of the future, the present, taken out of the past. It would not have been appropriate in the world view of that present time to mix the blessed souls of the dead directly with the observation of the outer visible world. However Raphael used, in the sense of the imagination of that time, what he observed as the truth, the free view in the widths of natural realms. To a certain extend he had to express the blatant obviousness that filled the space was not the truth; but the truth places them within the space. Thus we have at the bottom—you still notice the line of the horizon—the width, infinity within the expanding perspective. To a certain extent protest is expressed against representing nature at present as a purely sense perceptible image. Raphael didn't simply arrive at this image and hit upon the composition. In order for it to become clear, let us consider two of Raphael's preliminary sketches towards the painting's gradual development:  Imagine the entire story, from the time Raphael came to Rome roundabout the time Julius II called him to execute the commission in 1507, 1508, and try include this into the painting which he had in his imagination. Gradually he was first instructed by Julius II; gradually a relationship developed in him between space, nature and the supersensible and sensible aspects in the human group, how it had to be.  Section: the church teachers, in crayon (Windsor, Königliche Bibliothek) Also the other sketch refers more to the lower part than the first sketch, with still incomplete indications. You see it hasn't come into its own. What Raphael came to was this: he had to really imagine himself into that time and the relationship between the spiritual world and nature. In olden times, still up to the 9th Century, there was still a clear imagination of the relationship between the human past and the natural present. The people before the 9th Century—as grotesque as it may sound to mankind today—didn't think that when something was happening to them, it was by chance; no, they knew that when something happened to them it was because of the events into which they were being spun was where the dead were living, connected to them through karma. Before the 9th century the events which surrounded us place the dead before us. Such images diminished gradually and remained in the past as I have characterised for you in the 16th Century. Returning once more to the 9th Century we arrive at an imagination which needs consideration: a timely separation between the natural- and the spiritual world was not apparent for these ancient folk. Nature was at the same time a continuation—before the 9th Century, mind you—a continuation of the spiritual world. Already during the Greek times the human being had introduced their own I into their world view, by using thinking. Raphael was painting—he expressed this in the upper part of the canvas in the image later called “Disputa” even though certainly nothing was being disputed—and introduced a female figure out of the symbolism of that time with the motto: DIVINARUM RERUM NOTITIA = divinely written comment. Basically before the 9th Century the world view included the “divinely written comment” and nature was like a wave of the godlike world extending below to where mankind found itself.   This entire notion, as I've mentioned, was pushed back to the East and the echo remained within the imagination, like a testament painted by Raphael from the 4th post-Atlantic epoch. In those days it was deliberated from the south to establish the kingdom of Christ on the physical plane itself as a real empire of power. Pope Julius II had even, like other similar personalities, written on his flag what he really wanted. He wanted to really establish this which could not happen because Luther came along, as did Calvin and Zwingli. He wanted to create the foundation for Christ's Empire in this world. He dared not say so. One can usually see this in such personalities as something esoteric. Julius II did not dare go through Italy as a commander in order to harness the Italians to his empire. He said it differently. He said he was going through Italy as a commander in order to free the Italian folk. This is what was said. In later times it was said something or other should be done to free the folk while this only hid the real goal. At the time however, many believed Julius II went through Italy to free the separate Italian nations. It didn't occur to him, just as little as it occurred or could in anyway occur to Woodrow Wilson, to set some or other folk free. Now, you see, here we have this immense border, one might say, between the two time periods: the backward push to everything southerly. Retained from this is the division in the world view in the Greek time. It was clearly as follows: What had streamed through nature as deeds of the dead was no longer present when people developed spiritual powers in themselves, unfolding it in their souls; it then doesn't become DIVINARUM RERUM NOTITIA, not something “written up as godly things” but becomes CAUSARUM COGNITIO—and attains “direct knowledge of causes in the world”. Here care should be taken not to want an interpretation of nature in its totality as an outcome. To come to an idea of nature—this Julius II felt compelled to shout in thunderous words—an imagination was to be made to show that the sun rises, the morning- and evening glow exists as do the stars, and just as people did in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, it meant lying. In fact one denied that the souls of the dead were within the Trinity which was really something capable of imaginative expression by looking back to the dead souls, David, Abraham, Paul, Peter and express the Holy Trinity. Julius said: Leave away nature and the old Eons, only depict the youngest Eons! Do you want to rely on yourselves? If you want to develop through only human forces, depend only on what is inherent in the physical body, then you arrive at an external science regarding the outer nature of people, a science only in so far as the human being has no connection with the endless expanse of the world, but is hemmed in, interwoven within the boundaries it sets itself. This is roughly what Julius II told Raphael: If you want to paint what the human being through his own soul faculties know about humanity then you must not paint the people out of an endless perspective in nature, but include the people, whether genial or wise, in their self-made borders. You must include them in halls to show: from these rooms where the world is governed—because Julius wanted to have the world depicted as it would have become had no Luther arrived, nor a Zwingli, or any Calvinist.—If you want to paint the world as it is governed from these rooms, then paint on the one side the reality existing in the breadth of nature and on the other side, what people can find if they only sought forces from within their own souls. Then you may not paint nature but paint the people in their self-imposed borders. This is what we have when we allow the contrasting aspects in the image to work on us ... the so-called “School of Athens”.  This painting, later becoming known as the “School of Athens”, was often painted over in the course of time and so the man standing in the middle had his book painted over with “Ethics” then later with “Time”—that was painted even later. The painting is in many ways ruined and one can't find the true image of the original painting today in Rome. In Raphael's time it was never called “The School of Athens”, this only happened later and then theories developed about it. We can imagine it essentially thus: truly the world is measured through the changed painting (197) when we peer into the endless realms of space and imagine nature not with obvious senses but permeated with everything existing in eternity and temporality, permeated with that which has gone through the gate of death. Taking knowledge from within one's own soul and representing it in everything coming together, like these wise men, here (202); the heavenly knowledge which can only be found built up within oneself, is represented in a personality which points upwards (203). No inartistic stupidity is needed to see Plato in this figure. (See below) You can imagine the following: the gesture of the rising hand represents the word being spoken by the figure on the right. The personality on the right begins to speak as if his expression is translated into words. Everything originating by itself in the human soul can only be truly imagined if it is contained within an enclosed space, where one remains within oneself. If one searches within for an image of nature then nothing other than an abstract image of nature will be found, much like the Copernican world view represents which is not a picture of concrete nature. Thus Raphael took the task from Julius II and placed it before the godly experience which could live by itself in the human soul in the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch. Here everything of worldly science is grouped, but worldly science raised up to divine concepts, to intellectual understanding of the godly. On analysis the seven free arts appear: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. Up to the culminating expression you can find the whole of worldly science applied to the divine and how this is expressed by the human word—here the opposites of looking and speaking are alive—expressed in the image itself. Un-artistic, amateurishly learned chitchat saw the entire Greek philosophy in the same image. That is unnecessary and has no relevance to the artwork we have been speaking about and of which we finally want to point out: it shows us how this painting, in the sense of that time, represents a true human experience—an experience which the soul discovers when it is allowed to find wisdom within itself regarding mankind. We have more details of this painting which I want to show you:   If you allow yourself to be drawn in more you will recognise the right sided figures are linked to the central main figure who is entering into speech; here on the right (205) we have everything which depends more on Inspiration, and to the left, (204) it touches more on Imagination and its equivalent. We have one more image of the central figures:  The opposite of looking and speaking is presented. Let us be clear about it—the present time can only be understood if we try to throw more and more of such glances into the past which we can do by experiencing such paintings in an artistic sense. Our time is the time in which something returns to itself. In our time there is a return in Europe—Central Europe, Northern Europe and in certain moods in Western Europe—of karmic connections with the European development of the 9th Century. This hasn't become particularly observable to most people, actually in fact, not at all. What happens today takes place out of necessity, the opposite manner used to spiritually grasp what Europe's destiny had to be in the 9th century. What had been pushed back to the East at that time was the spiritual world, so now it has once again to be manifested on the physical plane. The moods of the 9th Century after Christ are now reappearing in western European, in Central and Northern Europe. Out of Europe's east will develop something like moods out of the terrible chaos, spreading out in something like moods which will mysteriously remind us of the 16th Century. Only out of the combined harmonising of the 9th and 16th Centuries will mysteries originate which to some extent can give a degree of clarity for present day humanity who wants to rise to its own understanding of evolution. It is remarkable to see how in the 16th Century everything most secret and mysterious in nature, man and God, was visibly represented outwardly in art. The holy secret of the Trinity we have found in the most meaningful images of the world set before our souls. The opposite appears at the same time—the Protestant-Evangelistic mood which totally denies these holy secrets being able to share this historic period. At intervals Herman Grimm, a truly northern Lutheran spirit, speaks about the thoughts his contemporaries have regarding Christ, thoughts they treasure as wholly good within their souls—the exact opposite in Raphael's mood when he painted the world. You see, at the beginning of the 16th Century the Reformation brought evolution further which became the world's lot, even in Rome, in the sphere of Julius II, of the popes. But how? It became the lot of the world that people wanted to reflect about the supersensible worlds as if they were visible but visible through human development. As a result—this Herman Grimm discovered rightly—the Pauline Christianity became a particular problem for Raphael and his contemporaries—yes, even the figure of Paul himself. It can be said that up to the 16th Century Christianity was far more permeated by what one could call the Peter Christianity—Peter who saw the supersensible and sensible worlds as undivided, experiencing in the sensible world the supersensible within it, finding the supersensible in the sense perceptions. The extrasensory world disappeared from it. People were aware of this right up to the 16th Century. The experience of the Damascus secret living in Paul as a seer, and the figure of Paul himself, became a problem. As a result Raphael tried in his later development to depict, and include, Paul's figure in various paintings. It can be said: from the south a Reformation wanted to be established with the aim to depict the Pauline vision in the world in such a way as I set before you now, as it lived in Raphael's paintings which originated through the inspiration of Julius II. Paul was a problem for him. You appreciate this when you research Paul's form in Raphael's other paintings. You see a visual expression of the music of the spheres in the “Saint Cecile”.  Naturally it is inaccurately expressed. Left, in the corner, is the practical shape of Paul. Raphael made a study of Paul in a painterly way. Repeatedly Paul posed a problem. Why?—Because Paul's quest originates from within him as a human individuality through which he strives to have sight, penetrate into the sight. Here we see it in his whole attitude, in his gesture: Paul as he participates in something self-evident to others as a seeker. He develops both sides, therefore if it comes down to him, he shows Christian revelation differently. As Paul understands—you see it here, how Paul teaches—it became a problem for Raphael. Now we have another painting: Paul speaking in Athens.  You can see Raphael studied Paul. What did Paul become for him?—The hero, the spiritual hero of the Reformation who should have succeeded from the south, but did not succeed. This impulse was pushed back and later Jesuitism from the South was put in the place of the Reformation—more about that at another time. Paul should have established the Kingdom of Christ on earth as foreseen by Julius II. Now characterise for yourself the two Paul heads, which we have before us now and allow it to really work on us.  These are heads studied by Raphael in which he wanted to depict through the physiognomy a gaze penetrating the secrets of the spiritual Christian world, into the spiritual secrets enabling words to outwardly pronounce these secrets; we have in Paul the binding link between the world of causes and the world into which only those with blessed vision have access, the supersensible world. Paul is looking and teaching, the connecting link between the world of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch and the ancient spiritual time. Remind yourselves of your consideration of the Paul physiognomy, the Pauline gestures right up to the movement of the fingers—here only the arm is lifted—and be reminded of that ...  ... consider these and then look once more at the figure in the so-called “School of Athens”: ... and compare that to the two heads of Paul which we have looked at (235, 236) with the heads here (203) on your right and you have such a personality in whom seeing has become words, one might say: because Paul, who grew out of seeing the results of the Mystery of Damascus and became the orator of Christianity, made his pact of compromise with what can be found in the Causarum Cognitio when the experience of the physical causal world is elevated into a relation of possible experiences of divine things. As a result you will experience something like the constant “Signatur” which wafts through the “Camera della Segnatura” when you look over the image which later was called the “Disputa”, to what is called the “School of Athens”. In the “Disputa” is the truth, the spiritual truth in a nature filled space; glancing over to the other, opposite wall, so companions and visionaries encounter Paul the teacher who points to the worldly learning from which everything can arise which the human soul can find within itself. Looking at the fresco, which is the so-called “School of Athens”: ...so one finds a soul living in the central figure with a content which is painted in the opposite fresco: ... then one roughly has the connection. Take the one wall—everything that is within the soul, all one does not see except as the outer bodily aspect, that very aspect is revealed on the opposite wall, on the fresco of the so-called “Disputa”. I would like to say: if you could see into the souls of these two people painted on the one wall, then you will see what lives in the souls of these two people on the opposite wall, on the fresco. More about this later. |