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Three years have passed to-day
since we last gathered together on this hill, where a number of
our friends met to lay the foundation-stone of this building,
which is to stand as a promise that into the recent development
of culture there shall break those spiritual impulses which
have become for it an absolute necessity; they have become a
necessity because only from those impulses can we hope for that
insight into life which is necessary for the very existence of
mankind, and because from these impulses alone can we hope for
that loving human understanding which is necessary for human
life. Three years ago we held this celebration, feeling that we
were experiencing a critical moment in that spiritual
development which, some of us for a long time already, and some
for a shorter period, we have had at heart as the persuasive
power of our lives. At that time there passed through our minds
all that the human heart can feel as the progress of mankind.
We did not think of what, although it was to be foreseen, still
was not — by the mysterious power that is hidden in
thoughts — destined to be kept in mind; we did not think
then of that time of suffering and pain which has since
descended upon human life in Europe. There still lay in the
future, though the near future, the most tragic experience of
suffering that has befallen people on this earth in our time.
Whatever pain they have had to suffer formerly, the experience
which has since passed over Europe is enough to make anyone
despair, who lacks that power of inner recovery which springs
from a profound consciousness of the life and activity of the
spiritual world.
Now
that we have worked three years at our building it seems indeed
no time for joyful celebrations. We should be untrue, in
a way, to our own hearts, were we to allow even a suggestion of
the festive mood. We must leave this for another time, and we
shall do better, to-day, to dwell — in a few thoughts
re-echoing what we have already said on just this very spot
— about the ideals which filled us, to some extent as an
historical moment in our movement, when we set ourselves to
realise this building.
This thought arose from the self-sacrificing spirit in which
many souls, or at least a number of souls, spent year after
year, while our movement gradually took shape within them. The
longing of our movement to build its own sanctuary arose
most vividly and forcefully in the soul of our unforgettable
Fräulein Sophie Stinde at Munich — and coincided
later with our need for a place in which to hold our Mystery
Plays and the ceremonies connected with them. In this way the
thought was first conceived of building a sanctuary for our
movement and the spirit that pervades it. And from this arose
the other thought, of realising our spiritual movement in the
form of this building; that is, of so building this place, that
in its form, in its very essence, it should be to the world a
visible representation of our spiritual movement. But to
achieve this, the building had to be placed like a living,
creative thing, not merely on a foundation of modern spiritual
life, but on all the essentials, and potential essentials, of
modern spiritual life. No ordinary building was to be created
for our souls, but it must realise for them a cultural thought.
A deep question then arose: What building does modern culture
itself demand as a thought expressing modern culture? The
answer depended on the knowledge that all truly fruitful
thoughts in building, like all fruitful artistic impulses, have
been bound up with contemporary spiritual movements, and
above all with new, advancing ones.
One
cannot think of Greek architecture without feeling that its
very forms express the Greek experience of culture: they are
this culture crystallised, moulded, made to live in forms.
Whoever studies deeply the Greek style of architecture will
find that the achievement of this pure Greek architectural
style corresponds to the emotional expression of the Greek
outlook on life; it corresponds to the answer the Greek found
to his tremendous question about humanity: What powers are
those which are active from the moment of the earth's
existence, and support the human being, so that he finds
himself placed harmoniously on the earth? If, creating the
Greek again in spirit, we see the ancient Greek moving through
his Grecian land with his particular conception of the world,
with his way of seeing the world in its substance, we feel how
there lived in this Greek, more or less consciously, just that
power, — sprung from the forces of gravity in the earth
— which was to place this Greek upon the earth with just
his Greek experience of life between birth and death. This
Greek experience is reflected in the beautiful proportions, in
the wonderful statics of Greek architecture; it lives in that
inward compactness or completeness of Greek architecture,
which gives its form the appearance of growing out of the
mysterious forces of gravity and balance in the very body of
the earth, out of the forces which, with inner, discreet
harmony, suffuse and permeate the creations of the Greek tragic
poets, of Homer, and Greek plastic art, even of Greek
philosophy. A great tide in art can only come from a profound
understanding of the world. The Greek wished to live in the
Spirit of the Earth itself. Out of the Spirit of the Earth
[Geist der Erde] he created his statics of architecture.
Surveying the centuries which follow, we find that again,
although we must speak with the inaccuracy inevitable in
such a cursory survey, there develop, under the influence of
the Mystery of Golgotha and from the impulses which led a part
of the human race to an understanding of this Mystery of
Golgotha, new architectural forms. We see that man has
discovered, in addition to his earlier experience, that
he does not only stand rooted in an earth- spiritual existence
that lasts from birth to death, but that the universal soul
pervades and spiritualises, from above, all that man effects on
earth. And as an external embodiment of this gift of the Spirit
of Heaven to mediaeval mankind, as the Greek received his
impulses from the Spirit of Earth, we see the rise of mediaeval
architecture. Mediaeval architecture, again, is spiritualised,
flooded, permeated by the forceful, powerful stream of
the new conception of life which is passing through, and
illuminating the world. I should have to go into great detail
to show how the Christian spirit identified itself with
art, to show how it found a home in Pre-Raphaelite, in
Raphaelite art, in the art of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, in the
Gothic architecture that aspires to heaven. I should have to
enter into great detail were I to describe all the impulses
which found such powerful utterance wherever it was sought to
express, in form, the action and speech of the soul on the
wings of the heavenly spirit; this expression found its
consummation in Dürer and Holbein. For the soul that lives
in Gothic architecture lives also in Dürer and
Holbein.
With this hasty survey, certainly inexact, we come to modern
times. And at this point the human spirit is, in a sense,
brought to a standstill by the misery of the Thirty Years War
which passed over Europe, particularly Central Europe, and had
been preceded by a wonderful exaltation of all hearts to
liberty, in such movements as that of Zwingli, Huss, and others
like them. We see here, without yet being able to understand it
completely, but so that it is clear, this whole misery of the
Thirty Years War fanned and provoked by a spirit which already
contained much of the later Jesuit spirit. And we see, under
the influence of this impulse, ostensibly cultivating the
spirit, just those forces grow up which have let loose
materialism in Europe. We see that period approach, in which a
philosophy of life, only directed, from the point of view of
inner human perception, towards the material, cannot grasp the
material, because it will not grasp the spirit in matter. We
see a philosophy of life sweep Europe, denying freedom, because
it desires to restrict everything that aspires to freedom
within the limits of a rigid, blind obedience. We see the
influx of a human perception — ”all too
human” — into the spirit that permeates history.
And we see how there comes about, under this influence, the
impossibility of realising the spiritual life directly in
the forms of art.
Then there arose what one might call the ecclesiastic
Baroque art, which is through and through a faithful expression
of the new era, but in which human thoughts, human perceptions,
are expressed in a subjectively arbitrary manner in artistic
form and works of art. We no longer see the soul's urge to
participate in the mysteries of earth-statics and
earth-gravity, as it did when it built the Greek temple; we no
longer see the soul directly expressing its experiences when it
loses itself in heavenly heights, as it did when it created
Gothic art, when Dürer adapted his profoundly expressive
figures to the experiences which saturated his soul. We see
rather the attempt everywhere to imbue potential architectural
thoughts with human reason, with human, all too human,
feelings. We see introduced into the pillars, into the element
of support, all kinds of figures which have no
architectural function, which originate in human design and are
there only for decorative effect. There is no knowledge
of the clear distinction between a plastic and picturesque
thought and an architectural thought, and yet no power to
combine — because of the inability to differentiate
between — these different kinds of themes. We see that
there is now employed a sham inwardness to support a conception
of life no longer filled with its own true inwardness. We enter
many a church building whose pillars we no longer understand
because they have not been constructed from a study of the
objective facts of the world, but betray the fact that people's
conception of the cosmos itself in all its spontaneous
elementary power has vanished. Here we go along colonnades
where pillars have shapes which are not architectural, but
picturesque; recesses are marked by pillars in picturesque
manner. But the secret and mysterious should speak from such
recesses. And the way such pillars have to support what they
have to support should look as a secret. We see human saints
introduced in the most impossible places, not springing from a
spontaneous architectural necessity, by which plastic art
and painting grow out of the architecture with inevitable
right- ness. We see art expressing what has no direct
connection with a vision of the world; we see the materialistic
conception of the world develop, powerless, however, to create
for itself a real, appropriate form of art.
It
was not a long way from this to the path which led to the
degeneracy of the Baroque style, that style which is so
particularly interesting and significant because it shows
how this later period desires to live itself out in its own
unspiritual way — but how it is unable to find any sort
of original artistic thought, but only the thought of the
commonplace, with which people are filled and which they can
express more or less inartistically. This is particularly
clear when the Baroque style is, as it were, taken by force
from the Jesuits by Louis XIV and translated into worldly
terms. Certainly humanity was always aware that monumental art
must be connected with the highest and best of which
humanity is capable, when it sinks itself in the
universe. But with the new human, all too human, perception,
there was intermingled — in a somewhat frigid and
academic form — a renewal of antique art, not more than a
dash of it, with the Rococo, which we often see mixed
grotesquely with the antique. Thus we see, precisely in the art
connected with the name of Louis XIV, the apparent severely
classical forms concealing all too human Rococo forms, where
the human spirit is not seeking admittance to any universal
mysteries, however close at hand, but is only desiring to
perpetuate its whims and fancies, its everyday feelings and
perceptions in the forms which appear around it on the
walls.
Thus we see how edifices arose — for certain reasons I do
not wish to mention individual buildings, because they are not
properly judged by our times and my valuations therefore would
not be understood — which, judged by the inner
necessities of art, are simply human champagne-whims poured
frothing into forms. We see the Rococo Voltairianism of thought
reappearing in countless places in the Rococo treatment of
artistic form. This, however, is not adapted, like Greek or
Gothic forms, to the very essence of man's conception of the
world, but is like an external copy of human inner
experience.
Then we see, in surveying further the development of human art,
that in the eighteenth century a human yearning turns to the
past to revive the Greeks — Greek taste, Greek art. We
see a spirit such as Winckelmann seeking a truly religious
consecration in an understanding of the Greek spirit, of the
Greek art-spirit. We see the nineteenth century, inspired by
Winckelmann, aspiring to recreate those artistic forms. But the
philosophy of materialism was never able to win the power, the
inner power, by which what is thought, felt, inwardly
experienced, is so deeply thought, felt, and experienced,
that it overflows as though of itself into its own forms, as it
did with the Greeks, as it did with Gothic art. Thus we see, in
the nineteenth century, that wonderful, yet, after all,
curiously superficial, aspiration of an Overbeck, of a
Cornelius, to create forms, to create artistic figures, yet
without that permeating impulse of a world-vision. Old motifs,
old philosophies are hunted out; old ideas are to live
again.
It
was architecture that chiefly suffered under this powerlessness
of modern materialistic thought. Beauty — beauty, in the
grand style, was achieved by the architects of the nineteenth
century in the revival of antiquity. But everything is prompted
by the impulse just described. Study such a wonderful revival
of the Renaissance as that brought about by Gottfried Semper
— you can study it at the Polytechnic in Zurich —
and you will see that it is impossible for the deliberate
architectural thought to catch that spirit of which it should
be an expression.
Thus we see the time approach, when architecture, with a
certain greatness, because it has wonderfully studied old forms
and can use them, reveals its impotence in the face of the
higher impulses of human development. We see Greek forms, just
like an outer husk, built round those great buildings which
actually only shame what they do not understand, as many a
modern architect has done, when he has evolved Greek forms like
husks round modern Parliaments. Or we see architects,
with a profound knowledge of Gothic art, yet far removed in
heart and soul from Catholicism, build Gothic forms around what
should be the essence of the Gothic building, but which is
completely foreign to their feeling and perception. Thus we
stand before these buildings with a finer sense of art if we
can feel: these were built by people who are really far removed
in their hearts and perceptions from the sacrifice of the mass
and all that is celebrated here.
What a different experience is ours in the buildings
raised by those who still had sympathy with the old Christian
feelings, common in the times when the Host was elevated for
Consecration with different emotions from those of a latter
day; what a different experience, where mysticism was incarnate
in the building, compared with the cold life of the present age
expressed in the structure of the spiritual-social life of
humanity; how different are the buildings where, in the fitting
in of stone to stone, there is no flowing in of sacred action
or of the tremor of emotion in the human soul. One often feels
about art of this kind — if one really contemplates art
with sympathy — that an atheist is painting a
Madonna.
Only from this kind of discrimination could there proceed the
impulse to the cultural thought necessary for our
building. The old impulses can no longer be brought to that
degree of vitality at which they can live themselves out in
forms. Anything created in the old forms can only be
antiquated. But we may well believe that our spiritual science
has such an inner vitality as to be able to give birth to forms
of its own; such forms, indeed, as we believe to have proceeded
through an inner living process from our spiritual scientific
conception of the cosmos, and as desire realisation in our
building. These forms should manifest again that connection
between art and the cosmic conception, which is inherent in the
fact that only he can paint a Madonna who has an impulse in his
soul towards the feelings for a Madonna. People to-day cannot
feel this impulse in their soul to the extent that they can
truthfully create artistic forms from it. If mankind does not
wish to reduce itself ad absurdum new impulses must come
through spiritual science into humanity. We must therefore make
a start with new artistic forms which must be the natural fruit
of a new world- outlook. Whoever wishes to understand rightly
the meaning of the building whose foundation-stone we laid
three years ago, must understand it by a living understanding
of our spiritual scientific conception of the world, must
understand how this, no more than a beginning, flows from a
synthesis between a comprehension of heaven and earth, which we
call the spiritual scientific conception of the world. This
should arise just as Greek architecture sprang from the Greek
conception of the earth, and as Gothic architecture grew from
the conception of heaven held by mediaeval Christianity. We
should be stupid indeed to imagine that anything
considerable, in the highest sense, not to mention
anything perfect, could be achieved at one stroke. We shall
never be able to do otherwise than admit that what we have
begun is very imperfect; a first tentative groping towards
forms which must arise and yet in very many ways be completely
different from those evolved by our building. But it is at
least easy to see from our building that it is a trial of the
spontaneous growth of artistic forms from the urge and
the perception that pulsate through our vision of the world. It
is because so much in it is new that those who will never
tolerate anything new cannot understand — and naturally
so — anything so different from what has hitherto
been experienced in the former kind of plastic art and
painting. Only if we humbly see imperfection, and an inadequate
beginning in our building shall we develop the right feeling,
with which the beginnings of any evolution should be
regarded, when the imperfect beginning is nothing but a
stimulus to so much that is still to be created.
We
have now worked three years at the building, and those whose
hearts are bound up with the ideal it expresses will now be
filled with a warm sense of gratitude towards all those who
have made their sacrifice to bring this about — a
sacrifice in one form or another — and who have further
expended their energy upon it — for a great deal of
beautiful, splendid work has flowed into the building
which we see before us on the Dornach hill. If these three
years have also brought with them difficult food for thought
and difficult experiences for our movement, we can still say:
Whatever turn things may take, whatever may be in store for our
movement in the lap of Karma — what we have been able to
experience in connection with this achievement is precisely a
profound experience flowing from the very essence of our
movement and can be reckoned among the most beautiful fruits of
modern experience. We have seen many a metamorphosis of this
experience; we have seen, for instance, many people, like our
unforgettable Fräulein Stinde, whose whole heart and whole
soul were bent upon erecting this building in Munich, sacrifice
their desires with deep devotion in order to participate in the
transformation of their plans destined by Karma. Whether the
resolutions formed at that time, to effect this transformation,
were absolutely right, only the future can show, when the facts
prove how far the culture of the present day is taking up the
anthroposophical movement. Much of what could be expected is
still unfulfilled, and it would sound like foolish boasting if
I were to mention only some of the expectations which could
rightly be described as disappointed.
The
building was there. It revealed even in its outward forms the
existence of a movement of some kind. Let anyone turn to the
bibliography of our movement in many languages in the educated
world to-day, and let him see from it how much
opportunity there was of understanding our movement, how
much opportunity was given of connecting the building on the
Dornach hill with certain essentials in our cultural movement.
It was all the more to be expected that, at the present time,
which has imposed so severe an ordeal on mankind there should
be heard, precisely in view of this difficult time of
suffering, expressions of sympathy with the deeper cultural
significance of this spiritual scientific trend. Of such voices
we can say that not a single one was heard from outside, during
the terrible time of suffering and war; only a few
isolated voices were raised within the anthroposophical society
itself, and, because the outside world showed so little
understanding for the movement, these died perforce on the
wind.
Thus, to-day, when we wished to look back to some extent on the
impulses which inspired us three years ago, we can only pledge
ourselves anew and with the greatest solemnity to remain true
to that impulse, to win understanding for the contribution of
this spiritual scientific conception of the world, and all that
it involves, to the development of humanity.
From outside Europe, from distant Asia, opinions are being
formed on the European situation which are in a way more
illuminating than the war that is raging through Europe. But
just these opinions show that the re-birth of Europe is only
possible through the spiritual scientific conception of the
world. May this eventually meet with understanding. We
suffer from the Karma of thoughtlessness, that
thoughtlessness which is at the same time I brutal, because it
desires everywhere to crush underfoot any glimmering of
the spiritual necessities underlying the development of
our time. It is remarkable. The yearnings — as I have
often said — are coming to the surface everywhere,
yearnings which do not understand themselves because they do
not know what they want, and because they cannot, in the
brutality of the times, find the way to the vision of the world
of which our building is a monument. Whoever contemplates this
age at all finds many signs of the times; but they are all
signs of longings.
We
find, however, a queer fish of a fellow, a simple journeyman
carpenter, who is a living refutation, through what he became,
of the senseless idea of modern times that spiritual science is
only for educated people and not for simple souls. This is a
senseless idea; for just the simplest souls are aware of those
longings which could actually be satisfied within them if they
were not repressed by the so- called brutal culture of the
times. What longings are voiced in words like these of a simple
carpenter, who has read a few books and taken stock of the aims
and possibilities of the present day, and who expresses himself
in these lines:
In
the sphere of dream and spirit
I am now, it seems, absorbèd,
And there whisper billows, orbèd
With their countless secrets strange.
And the sounds of life come welling
Out of Nature's inmost place,
Clouds of mist behold dispelling
From the infinite mystery's eternal trace.
Let
us go out to meet the longings, and find the way to those whose
hearts are full of yearning. We can look from this simple
journeyman carpenter, a queer fellow, as I said, who tried to
fight through from knowledge to contemplation — to the
man whom I have mentioned before, Christian von Ehrenfels, who
is Professor at the University of Prague, and who attempted in
his Cosmogony to imagine a “Retrospective
Vision,” in which we see longing, inclining towards the
attainment and acquisition of what can only be attained and
striven for precisely through spiritual immersion in a
backward-looking vision. The thick night of modern
so-called philosophy naturally allows such spirits only a
limited vision, while permitting occasional glimmerings to
shoot up within them; but the stultifying culture of the age
restrains them from an understanding of spiritual science.
Their longings get no farther. But these longings are sometimes
quite curious. And this Cosmogony of Christian von
Ehrenfels has a remarkable conclusion. This professor
attempted, in his way, to contemplate the world and the course
of the universe, he attempted to get a clear conception of the
needs of the present day by studying the course of history; and
what is his final word? — “In this sense, and from
this point of view, I have sought to understand the history of
mankind, and have come to the following conclusion —
which, however, I am enabled to impart for the first time
without the armour of scientific argument, and simply as the
result of expectant awareness;
“In God, with the elevation of the human intellect (and
probably with similar processes on other heavenly bodies)
consciousness awoke and a deepening process began in His
activity.
“In, and with man, God is seeking a guiding principle
capable of directing this hitherto impulsive creation into
paths of conscious design.
“This principle is not yet found.”
You
must remember, such a man naturally calls the nearest spirit he
senses his God, as does, for that matter, the whole present
age. But he understands from history that he lives in a time
when this spirit, near him, has some plan for mankind and
stands at a critical turning point. So he says: “In God
Himself a phase of deepening has dawned in His activity.”
He feels so much. “In and with man” (he goes on)
“God is seeking a guiding principle.” As a man he
feels himself incapable of thinking out guiding principles,
guiding purposes; but he senses a God who seeks guiding
principles “capable of directing His hitherto impulsive
creation (the Creation of God) into the paths of conscious
design. This principle is not yet found.” This is how the
book closes: may some God, hovering somewhere about, find a
guiding principle somewhere in His impulsive will. This is how
a philosophical book ends, and one that has been written in the
immediate present.
Wherever we look — the two examples I have taken, that of
a journeyman carpenter and that of a university professor,
could be multiplied by hundreds and thousands —
everywhere we should see that there are longings to be
satisfied by the message of our building. When people
understand how this building had to be kept free from all
conventionality, and that thus only the spontaneous perception
flowing from the spiritual scientific conception of the world
can be embodied in it — when people understand how,
on the other hand, we had to keep ourselves unsullied by
that superficial symbolising practised everywhere by abortive,
superficially occult societies and societies aspiring to
occultism — when people understand, how, between the
conventionality and the shallow symbolism of the present
day, we had to seek truth in this architectural thought, people
will at last discover in this memorial the fruitful seeds and
productive impulses of spiritual science.
If,
with all that the future may bring forth, we absorb this
desire, this experience in our soul, the building will be for
us, even in what it has been since it was built three years
ago, the beginning that we felt it to be, when we laid the
foundation-stone, at a time when we were filled with our
spiritual scientific ideals. Let us feel this particularly in
the midst of an age in which quite a different impulse is
reducing itself ad absurdum: let us try to
feel how one thing is connected with another: we shall see that
we can feel this if we will. Much, indeed, has not yet been
brought to pass through this experience. But in many of our
souls an honest, genuine will is alive; and this honest,
genuine will, if it is true to itself, will add understanding
to its honesty of purpose, and then in all our souls there will
be formed that other foundation-stone, which will bear into the
world, spiritually and in abundant variety, the building that
we strove to raise up for our ideal — over the physical
foundation-stone which we entrusted reverently to the
earth upon this hill three years ago.
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