Lecture 10
27th August, 1911
N
the course of these lectures we have been able to show how in the most
widely different epochs men have formed conceptions of what really lies
behind the world and its happenings. By forming stable ideas, stable
concepts, by acquiring definite sentiments and feelings about what
happens in the world, and about its Beings, man attains a certain
satisfaction, arrives at something of which he can say that it
relates him fitly to things, either because it throws light for him
upon the mysteries of the world, or because it satisfies him in some
other way. Through this activity man demonstrates that he is not
content to adopt a passive attitude towards the world, but that he
has an impulse to struggle for a knowledge beyond what is evident to
his senses, or even to his clairvoyant knowledge; he aims at a
knowledge which goes further, a knowledge which is, to begin with,
hidden from him, so that he may achieve true harmony with the world.
In this way he shows that he is seeking for an explanation of the
world, that the world presents itself to him as a riddle, and that
his ultimate relationship to it is not limited to the one he started
from.
In ancient times this
was expressed by dwelling upon the feeling which men have in face of
the most arresting Beings and facts of the world-process. It was said
that the human being starts out from a feeling of wonder about things
and Beings and that from this feeling of wonder all philosophy, all
men's efforts to reach enlightenment about the world spring.
However it is now a matter of common experience that the soul works
its way out of this feeling of wonder to something which reduces it.
The soul cannot remain at the stage of mere wonder, for in that way
the whole world would consist of nothing else. The soul cannot
continue to stand in amazement before the wonders of the world, it
has to subdue its astonishment, it has so to say to get rid of what
seems a marvel by finding, through its own activity, a kind of
explanation, an answer to the enigma, an answer to what is marvellous
in the phenomena and Beings of the world.
We have seen for
instance how the ancient Greeks got rid of this wonder in quite a
different way, by gazing with penetration upon what was current among
them as the ancient clairvoyant consciousness and expressing what
they saw in the figures of their gods. As soon as the Greek became
aware that in one or another fact, one or another thing in the world,
spirit-forms were at work which were represented by the figures and
Beings of Greek mythology, his feeling of wonder transformed itself
into a kind of harmony between his own soul and these
‘world-wonders’. Today, in a world which is materialistic
compared with that of the Greeks, we think in a very different
fashion. Today when we deem it necessary to reduce the feeling of
wonder, we are not at all inclined to find the answer to the riddle
of the world in pictorial images. In our time this would be regarded
as ridiculous. Our age seeks an answer to the world-enigma which
appeals to the understanding, one which we can call scientific. But
as a result of the varied sentiments which have perhaps been evoked
in these and other lectures you may well understand that the modern
way, this dry, prosaic appeal to reason, is only a phase, an epoch,
in the struggle to assuage our wonder at the marvels of the world.
For when the man of today looks back from the method which he calls
scientific to the Greek way of explaining the world and calls it
childish, regarding it as derived purely from fantasy and as having
nothing to do with reality — when the man of today believes
that he has found what will continue to be regarded as scientific for
all time, then we must tell him that he is very short-sighted. For
just as the progress of humanity has advanced beyond the form of
Greek enlightenment to a stage suited to the prosaic intellectual
demands of our time, so it will reach beyond this intellectual,
materialistic phase. And unless meanwhile man has become much more
sensible, he will in future think much the same of what today counts
as true science as we today do of Greek mythology. The laws of
Kepler, our biological laws, will inevitably appear to our
descendants to be as much a mythology as that of the Greeks, unless
these descendants of ours are enabled through a wider outlook on the
world to perceive that each kind of explanation is justified in its
turn. The great arrogance of our age which maintains that mythology
is fantasy and our own science a definitive explanation of the
universe, will be overthrown, and it will be seen that our own time,
just like earlier ones, only represents a phase which in its turn has
to be superseded. But when we consider our own intellectual
explanation of the world, an explanation which is generally called
science, one has to say that it is just this explanation of the
world, intellectual in form and idea, which is least able to enter
into the realities. We must seriously try to discover why this is
so.
If you take into
account the whole spirit of this course of lectures, as well as of
many others which have been addressed to you from time to time, you
must see that the manner in which the human being looks at the world
has undergone many changes. Man has become very different. Far
stronger, more powerful forces, forces emanating from the entire
human being, came into play in the old clairvoyant days. To achieve
the purely materialistic interpretation, the soul through the
instrument of the brain detaches from itself highly attenuated
shadow-like images as intellectual ideas wherewith to explain the
world. The old interpretations in times which were more or less
clairvoyant were filled with far more life, far more reality. We saw
yesterday that our brain is a kind of apparatus which impedes our
astral body, brings it to a standstill, and lets the images of this
astral body, because they are not allowed to pass through our brain,
come to consciousness as our thoughts about the world. But in ancient
clairvoyant times it was not only the images of the astral body that
were held back, but also those of the etheric body. The result was
that the human being let flow far more of his own self, far more of
the stuff of his own soul, into the images of his knowledge.
Expressed
diagrammatically it is like this. The old clairvoyance, even the
ancient Greek outlook (more disposed as it was to fantasy) was such
that when a thought of Zeus or of Dionysos came before the soul, this
thought was full of the living sap of reality. Admittedly this really
came in the first place from the stuff of the human soul; but because
this stuff itself derived from the depths of the cosmos, ancient
Greek thoughts about their gods contained far more reality than the
thought-forms of modern times. If I represent the thoughts of the
ancient Greeks as a circle,
[ 1 ]
I have to show
the thoughts of the man of today as far more thinly filled with
soul-stuff, soul-substance. In forming the ideas of today the human
soul draws forth far less from itself, what it produces is much
thinner. Thus in the picture of the world which the soul can acquire
with present-day consciousness there is far less of world-reality
than was to be found in the earlier images. So that what the
arrogance of modern academic learning for the most part supposes,
namely that the Greeks formed pictures of their gods out of fantasy,
pictures in which there was no reality, and that the only reality
lies in the abstract ‘laws of nature’ of today, is the
very opposite of the truth. This modern view is not true. The
creations of Greek knowledge were far more densely packed with true
reality, and compared with it the knowledge which we acquire today
through the laws of nature is like a squeezed-out lemon! This is
something which the soul can feel if it is not preocccupied with the
pride of present-day science, but thirsts to fill its consciousness
with reality. Such a thirst will reveal that it is just what is
lauded as strictly scientific that is above all entangled in
illusion, in maya. There has never been in the world such
entanglement in maya as in the thought-forms of present-day
philosophy and science.
Why has that come
about? It is because man in the course of his Earth evolution has had
to develop his present ego-consciousness. He has had to become
independent, to stand entirely alone with his own ego. He has had to
be weaned from his union with the world outside him. The very strong
substantial content which made it possible for him to instil much of
the stuff of his soul into the figures he fashioned, as happened in
the case of the Greek gods, this very thing would have made it
impossible for him — just because he would have been too much
poured out into the world — to attain to consciousness of his
ego. To enable man to become strong as regards his ego-consciousness
he had to be torn away from the world-realities, cut off from them;
for objective knowledge of the world our souls had to become weak,
utterly weak. Our soul, the knowing soul, the soul which perceives
through understanding, the soul which is ego-conscious, is at its
very weakest as regards cosmic consciousness, as regards conditions
which it once passed through. This weakness, which we had to develop,
has rendered inevitable the emergence in modern consciousness of our
tenuous ideas, devoid of reality, and our abstract laws of
nature.
Anyone who by
academic learning or by some form of belief in authority has been
trained to a natural science which is only at home in pure
abstractions will not succeed in feeling this great impoverishment as
regards true reality. But anyone who feels within him a thirst to
grow into world-reality knows that at a certain point in his life
there comes over him the feeling: ‘How hopelessly cut off from
true reality one feels by all the ideas of today, and what phantom
and shadowy forms they are!’ That sentiment could even be
formulated in the terms of ordinary science and you will find it so
formulated in my little book
Wahrheit und Wissenschaft,
on Goethe's theory of knowledge, which appeared many years ago.
There I showed that in the attainment of the customary intellectual
knowledge the human being acquires only a part of knowledge, a part
of truth, and that he is pressing forward to another aspect of the
world than the one offered by the intellect. This is to take a
scientific path which is quite practicable, even though to modern
philosophy it may sound incomprehensible; whereas the feeling I have
described gives rise to an attempt to penetrate along the esoteric
path into a much more vital reality than the purely abstract laws of
reason can provide. If the soul feels that with the normal
consciousness of today it can only produce ideas which are
maya in face of the living reality, and if it is not like a
squeezed lemon, acknowledging only the science of today, then it
feels itself empty in face of the real world. It certainly feels able
to reach with its ideas the furthest limits of the world, but it
fails to take into account the warning in my second Mystery Play
The Soul's Probation — (Scene 1)
— ‘End not at last in cosmic distances’. To do that must
involve a feeling of being spread out, with a set of weak ideas,
through an endless expanse of space. The further we expand thence
into space the thinner our ideas become, and we find ourselves at
last before an empty and bottomless abyss. That is an ordeal which
the soul has to face. The man thirsting for reality who seeks to
solve the riddles of the world, the ‘wonders of the
world’, along the lines of abstract science, finds himself at
last standing before the cosmic void with his ideas entirely
dissipated into spiritual vapour. Then his soul has to experience an
infinity of terror in the presence of this void. The man who is
unable to experience this fear in the presence of the void is simply
not sufficiently advanced to feel the truth about present-day
consciousness.
Thus, when we try to
expand our present-day consciousness into the far spaces of the
world, we have to face this terrifying spectre, this fear of the
cosmic void; nobody who takes seriously what normal modern
consciousness is can be spared this experience. The soul has
to undergo this ordeal if it wants to experience the meaning and the
spirit of our time. It has at some time to face the abyss which opens
out on all sides when we try to penetrate the widths of space with
our ideas; it has to experience the unending fear of the void, the
fear of losing oneself in cosmic distances.
If we are familiar
with the Goethean phrase, ‘to become one with the whole world,
to enlarge oneself to become a world’, then we must say:
‘If a healthy soul with the means available to modern knowledge
has reached out into the far spaces of the world, and tries to
comprehend the world with the philosophic principles of
today — which are bound to be abstract, because they are derived
from present-day consciousness — then that soul is bound to
experience the ordeal of standing before the void, before the abyss
on every hand; every healthy soul has to undergo the fear of being
swallowed up with the best part of his being, with what constitutes
his consciousness, in infinite nothingness.’ This is the universal
experience and any other feeling is but a variation of this
horror vacui. Closely confined as the life of the soul is,
there would be something amiss with it if, as soon as it tries to
expand to the limits of the universe, it were not to feel its
present-day consciousness pulverised, shattered, in face of the
infinite universe. That is the fate of the soul when with its
present-day consciousness it tries to penetrate into cosmic
distances, into the widths of space.
There is another path
open to the soul. It can descend into its own depths in such a way
that it experiences what its own organisation is. Under modern
conditions of consciousness the soul really only experiences what has
been added to its organisation on the Earth. What it received on the
Old Moon as astral body remains subconscious; it lights up in the
etheric body, but in normal consciousness is not experienced. Still
less does man experience what he acquired during the Sun evolution as
etheric body, or what through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions he has
received in his physical body. These are closed regions to him. But
upon these closed regions countless generations of gods, of spiritual
hierarchies, have laboured. Indeed when through clairvoyant
knowledge, through esoteric training, we descend into these regions
and penetrate behind our ego-consciousness into our own being, when
we encounter what is in us as astral, etheric and physical bodies,
then we do not come to a vacuum, we come rather to a condensed
world-substance. We meet there everything which has been worked into
us men throughout millions and millions of years by innumerable
spiritual hierarchies. But when through the serious cultivation of
self-knowledge such as is given by esoteric training a man tries to
enter, learns how to plunge into the work of countless generations
through millions of years, he does not encounter in a pure form what
the gods have created. For man has stamped into it all that through
the generations he himself has experienced as impulses, desires,
passions, emotions and instincts. In the course of his terrestrial
incarnations what he has developed in this way has united with what
is there below in his astral, etheric and physical natures. Together
they form a dense mass; and it is into this dense mass that he first
enters. What we ourselves have done to this divine nature of ours
veils it from us.
Thus when we plunge
into ourselves we find the opposite of what we find when we expand
into cosmic space. If we expand into the widths of space there is the
danger of finally encountering the void; if we descend into ourselves
there is the danger of coming into denser and denser regions, which
we ourselves have condensed through our impulses, desires and
passions. Just as we feel the matter of our consciousness scatter and
disintegrate if we go out into cosmic distances, so when we plunge
into our own soul-depths we feel ourselves to an ever greater extent
repulsed; we feel like a rubber ball resuming its shape after it has
been squeezed. Again and again we are repelled, when we try to
penetrate into our own inner being. We can be very clearly aware of
this. It is not only that our impulses, desires and passions, which
are what we first meet when we enter into ourselves, seem horrifying
to us when we meet them face to face, but — added horror
— they seem at every moment to be trying to capture us. They
wax strong and powerful, their will-nature comes to the fore. Whereas
in ordinary consciousness we do not obey this or the other impulse,
this or the other instinct, as soon as we descend a little way into
ourselves, these instincts develop their full strength, and we cannot
but give way to them. Again and again we become gripped by a will of
a lower nature in ourselves, and are thrown back upon ourselves worse
than before. That is the other danger — that when we plunge
into ourselves we are confronted as it were by the density of our
impulses and instincts.
Thus we have to face
formidable dangers. If we expand into universal space we are in
danger of dissolving with our consciousness into nothingness; if we
plunge into ourselves, we are in danger of surrendering our
consciousness to the impulses and instincts which are within us and
of falling a prey to the worst possible egotism. Those are the two
poles between which lie all vicissitudes of soul — fear of the
void and the collapse into egotism. All other ordeals are variations
directed against what we may call dissolution into nothing, or
against surrender to egotism. Even higher knowledge is dangerous in
this connection. For through it we learn that countless spiritual
hierarchies have been at work upon us, we learn how our physical,
etheric and astral bodies in all their parts have been assembled by
the hierarchies, we learn how cosmic Spirits have been at work in
order that at last man should come into existence. So when in the
esoteric life a man delves into his own inner being, he is overcome
by the thought: ‘You are actually the aim and goal of the gods.
It is to create you that the gods have laboured.’ Here he
confronts the great danger of falling into immeasurable
arrogance.
When Capesius learns
from the mouth of Felix Balde
[ 2 ]
how the spiritual hierarchies have laboured, and how man is the goal
of all their efforts, he is afraid of this pride. That is the significance
of the uneasiness he expresses. It is part of his soul's ordeal
that he should feel this. That is why it is so necessary that man
should humbly draw near to this knowledge that he is the goal of the
gods, and in lowliness assimilate it, otherwise it will lead to
overweening presumption. For when we recognise that man is the goal
of the gods, we in this world have every occasion for pride, for
presumption. When we see the gods in the macrocosm exerting
themselves all the time to develop what is human being, we
have every occasion for pride.
It will be good for
us to make our ideas as to how the gods have laboured at the
formation and perfecting of man a little more concrete. Throughout
the Saturn evolution the Thrones co-operated with the Spirits of
Personality, during the Sun evolution the Cherubim worked with the
Spirits of Wisdom and the Archangels, during the Moon evolution the
Seraphim worked together with the Spirits of Movement and the
Angels.
Can we point to
something upon the Earth now of this work from without upon the human
form? Here we encounter once more a characteristic phenomenon of the
life of the mind in modern times, a phenomenon to which we have
already often had to refer in these lectures. In point of fact
nothing is so well able to furnish proof for all that is proclaimed
in Spiritual Science as the facts of modern science. The development
of this science during the last decades provides, in general, proof
of all that is here said. It is only that the facts are often least
understood by those who discover them. The interpretation put upon
the facts by modern philosophy and modern science does constitute a
great stumbling-block to an understanding of Spiritual Science. The
facts themselves invariably support what we say here, but the current
explanation of the facts always constitutes a stumbling-block. It is
really phenomenal. I have drawn attention to specific instances of it
in a number of places. You will have gathered from my lectures that
the brain was the last human organ to be developed; the rest of the
human organisation was worked into man earlier by the Spirits of the
various hierarchies. But even today the half unconscious part of us
continues to work on the organisation of the brain; that is something
capable of observation, only the marvellous and beautiful phenomena
furnished by modern science are not interpreted in the right way. Let
me give you an example.
In April of this year
there could have been celebrated the half-centenary of an extremely
important discovery of modern science, a discovery which, rightly
understood, fully confirms the spiritual-scientific doctrine of
evolution. Of course spiritual-scientific discoveries can only be
made through clairvoyance, but they can be confirmed by the facts
which ordinary science brings to light. The fiftieth anniversary of
that important dissertation on the speech-centre which the great
doctor and philosopher Broca delivered before the Paris
Anthropological Society in April 1861 might well have been celebrated
this year; for the work of Broca is a complete proof that the
predisposition to that configuration, that formation of a specific
part of the brain which brings about both the aesthetic consciousness
of speech and the understanding of its sounds does not lie in the
inner laws of the physical brain. When in April 1861 Broca found that
the organ of speech lies in the third convolution of the brain, and
that this organ must be in order if a man is to understand the sounds
of speech, and that another part must be in order for him to speak,
the discovery constituted an important advance which can be turned to
good account by Spiritual Science and is a verification of the facts
known to it. Why is this? Because the way this speech centre is
developed shows that a man's outer movements, the movements of
his hands (i.e. what he does half unconsciously) plays a part in the
configuration of this speech centre. Why is this speech-centre
especially developed on the left side? It is because under the
cultural conditions which have prevailed hitherto, men have made
particular use of the right hand. Thus it is the etheric and astral
bodies which, out of the unconscious, bring about the movements of
the hands which work into the brain and mould it. Today anthropology
makes it plain that the brain is formed from without by macrocosmic
forces. When this part of the brain is injured, there is no capacity
for speech. If we take into consideration that the side of the brain
which through our right-handedness has been strongly developed can
be relieved from without by the use of the left hand — a thing
which is still possible in childhood though no longer so in later
life — then it is seen that, by means of systematic activity
from without, the brain can be so moulded that a speech-centre
develops in the corresponding third convolution of the brain on the
right side. Are we not driven to say that it is the greatest possible
error to think that the faculty of speech is formed through the
predisposition of the brain? It is not the natural tendency of the
brain which brings into existence the faculty of speech but the
activity which the man himself develops. The faculty of speech is
developed in the brain from out of the macrocosm. The organ of speech
comes from speaking, not speaking from the speech-organ. That is what
has been established through the important physiological facts
discovered by Broca. It is because the gods, or the Spirits of the
hierarchies, have helped men to carry out such activities as create
his speech-centre, that this speech-centre has been fashioned from
without. The speech-centre arises from speech, not vice versa.
When rightly
understood all such modern discoveries provide confirmation for
Spiritual Science, and it is a pity that I am never able to do more
than make a brief reference to such things. Were I able to speak at
greater length about characteristic examples of this kind you would
see how shortsighted are the people who say that Spiritual Science
contradicts modern science. On the contrary it is only at variance
with the interpretation placed on the facts by modern scholarship,
not at all at variance with the actual facts themselves.
Thus it is the
activity of the hierarchies, who have worked into us from without,
which has made of our macrocosmic formation what we are during Earth
existence. We are indeed a product of the macrocosm. Today we are a
product of the movements of our limbs, of our gestures, which carry
on a silent speech; these movements imprint themselves on the brain,
which had no prior disposition to speech. The archetypal man had of
himself no predisposition to anything, but everything has been formed
and developed and bestowed upon him by the macrocosmic activity of
the spiritual hierarchies.
From this you will
see that in our present consciousness we are in fact but feeble. If
we try to go out into the cosmos we find ourselves before the void;
if we try to sink into ourselves we find ourselves ensnared in our
own will-nature. This is what brings about the severe ordeals which
are inevitable when a man, starting from his present-day
consciousness, would seek to probe in either direction the mysteries
of the world, about which he begins by marvelling because they
confront him as world-wonders.
Why is this so? It is
because when we press out into cosmic space we come into a region
which we have closely described in the last two lectures as the
region of the upper gods or spirits, spirits who are only the ideas
or representations of the real gods; thus we come into a world which
has no independence. It is no wonder that what we can gain from this
world leads us in the end to the void. However hard a man is
struggling to acquire knowledge, when he reaches the utmost limits to
which his ideas can attain, he himself can only come to
ideas of the gods, he cannot attain to true reality. But if
a man plunges into himself, into what has been built up during
millions and millions of years, then he comes to the deeds, to the
achievements, of the other divine-spiritual Beings, whom in the
course of recent lectures we have called the sub-earthly, the true
gods. But in order to reach these we have first to penetrate through
our own impulses, desires, passions, through all that imprisons us,
seizes hold of us and changes us so that we are obliged to follow it.
This leads us into egotism and cuts us off from those lower gods.
This constitutes the other pole of the soul's ordeals. If we
try to reach the upper gods we come to the void, to the world of mere
idea; if we try to reach the lower gods, all thought abandons us
because we are seized by the blindly raging impulses of our own inner
beings and burn ourselves up in them. That is why the ordeals are so
arduous. But there is one thing which offers a ray of hope, to begin
with purely theoretical. We have to say to ourselves: ‘However
tenuous the ideas are, or however slight is what our egotism enables
us to receive, it comes nevertheless from the entire cosmos.’
And if we can only find ourselves within this consciousness of ours
in the right way, so that we can look, upon it in its independence,
observe it as it is in itself, and if this consciousness becomes
stronger and stronger, then we can perhaps make progress along one or
the other path in such a way that we can withstand the ordeals. This
is only meant to give a slight indication of how it is possible to
make progress in another way than with the ordinary
consciousness.
Let us suppose that
we permeate ourselves with what we have already in a variety of
contexts named the Christ Impulse. We then learn to understand in its
deepest significance the saying of St. Paul, Not I but Christ in
me.’ We stand there to begin with in our normal consciousness
and say to ourselves: ‘We do not wish this normal
consciousness of ours to work alone, we do not wish to remain alone
in this personality of ours; we wish to be permeated by the
Substantiality which since the Mystery of Golgotha is contained in
the atmosphere of the Earth, we wish to be permeated by the
Christ-substance.’ When we permeate ourselves with this
Substance we do not take out with us into the cosmos merely our own
tenuous ideas, but however far we soar into the widths of space, we
carry with us the Substantiality of the Christ, and thereby something
most remarkable comes about, which I should like to make clear to you
in terms of modern scientific development.
Modern science took
its start from the phenomena of external nature, and traced these
phenomena back to all manner of forces. Then it went on to trace what
goes on in the outer world in light and sound and so on, to
vibrations, to particles of ether in motion, even to ponderable
fragments of matter in motion, and considered it a triumph to be able
to reduce the whole world to a world of moving, whirling atoms of
ether and so on. This method has now for the most part been
abandoned, since people have seen that it leads nowhere, but the
consciousness of the general public in this respect still lags
behind, it always does remain several paces behind scientific
advance. There is still a widespread desire to explain the whole
world through the abstraction of whirling atoms, as if space were
made up of pure vibrations, pure oscillations. Of course, when we
with our ideas and with the empirical experience which one can have
of realities, meet such conclusions, the moment we approach what is
called the atomic universe, we at once feel the void; for those
thought-out atoms have no existence. Atoms there can be
within the limits of empirical reality, within the range of
microscopic investigation, wherever there is matter endowed with
light and warmth, but it is not legitimate to attempt to explain
light and warmth themselves by means of atoms or atomic vibrations;
for then one is thinking-out a theory of the universe, and a
thought-out cosmology leads to something which no longer has any real
content. There this old atomic theory has no longer any validity
whatsoever. We think it out — and yet feel it has nothing to do
with reality.
But it is quite
different when we permeate our ideas, our abstract laws, with what in
truth is the Christ Impulse; and when I speak of the Christ Impulse
you all know that I do do not mean anything that the orthodox creeds
look to; I am referring to the great macrocosmic Christ Impulse. We
must permeate ourselves with this in the Pauline sense. It is not our
abstract ideas and concepts which we bear out into the cosmos, but
what they become as our modern form of consciousness permeated by the
Christ Impulse. And here we experience something very strange. Just
as when we press outwards with a consciousness devoid of the Christ
we become emptier and emptier and more impoverished, and our
consciousness becomes finally completely dissipated, dispersed into
the cosmic void ... so, as soon as we have received the Christ
Impulse our consciousness becomes richer, fuller, the further we come
into the cosmic distances, into the widths of space. And when we have
reached the stage of clairvoyance, then is the Christ-filled soul
abundantly filled with soul-substance, so that the true grounds of
reality stand at last before us in all their might and grandeur as
super-sensible realities. Whereas without Christ our consciousness
brings us to the void, the Christ-filled consciousness brings us to
the true causes of world-phenomena and ‘world-wonders’.
Foolish as this may sound today, I ventured to say in the book
The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind
that in the future there will be a chemistry and a physics, a physiology
and a biology permeated by the Christ Impulse, and that true science,
to an extent not today dreamt of, will become permeated by the Christ
Impulse. Anyone who does not believe this has only to turn the pages
of history to discover how the rational opinion of the future is
often the foolishness of earlier times. If anyone pities us for
supposing that what is regarded as foolishness in our day will be the
reasonableness of the future, let him remember this. Foolish as it
may seem to the humanity of the present day to think of a Christian
chemistry it will in the future appear quite reasonable. When we
carry the Christ with us into our outlook upon the world, He will
give us plenitude in place of emptiness.
If we take the second
road, if in the spirit of what has been said so far we fill our souls
in the Pauline sense with the Christ Impulse, and then plunge into
ourselves, what then happens? The Christ Impulse has the quality of
working as a solvent, as a destructive influence upon our egotism. We
notice that the deeper we descend with the Christ Impulse into
ourselves, the less is egotism able to get a hold upon us. We then
press further and further into ourselves and by penetrating with the
Christ Impulse through our egotistic impulses and passions, we learn
to recognise the being of man, learn to know all the secrets of the
‘world-wonder’ which is man. Indeed the Christ Impulse
enables us to go much further. Whereas without it we bounce back like
an india-rubber ball, and do not succeed in entering into ourselves,
into the sphere of our own organisation, with the Christ we penetrate
deeper and deeper into ourselves, and at last come out of ourselves,
so to say, on the other side. So that whether we go out into the
cosmos and find the Christ-principle in the widths of space, or
whether we penetrate below into the sphere of the sub-earthly gods,
in either case we find it all impersonal and freed from ourselves. In
either direction we find something which transcends ourselves. In
cosmic space we are not dissipated, atomised, we find the world of
the upper gods; below we penetrate into the world of the true
gods.
We could represent
the two paths — the one which leads into ourselves, and the
other which takes us into the widths of space — by a circle,
and show how at last we meet ourselves outside ourselves. Both what
is of the nature of will, into which we should otherwise plunge as if
into a region of burning fire, and what constitutes the widths of
space, wherein we should otherwise vanish into nothing — these
two realms meet. Our thoughts about the world unite with the
will which comes out of the world to meet us when we
descend. Will-filled thoughts, willing thoughts! Thereby we are no
longer in the presence of abstract thoughts, but of cosmic thoughts,
thoughts which are themselves creative, thoughts which can will.
Willing thoughts — but that means divine Beings, spiritual
Beings, for thoughts filled with will are spiritual Beings.
Thus the circle is completed. Thus do we come safely through the
trials which have beset our soul, whereas otherwise we should vanish
into nothingness on account of the weakness of our own souls. Thus
when we descend into ourselves we come through our colossal egotism,
that is to say, through the soul strong in its egohood and its
egotism; in either direction we come to what of itself can certainly
lead us into tribulation, but can never tell us anything about the
world.
We have to travel
both these paths, we have to experience both obstacles, the fear
before the void, as well as the resistance of our own egotism. And as
we thus pierce through ourselves to the other side of the
will-nature, and draw near to the cosmos, as soon as we thus emerge
from ourselves, we are seized by an infinite compassion, an endless
sympathy with all beings. It is this sympathy, this compassion,
which, when the circle has been completed, unites with the cosmic
thoughts which would otherwise evaporate and which now receive
substantial content. Little by little the Christ Impulse leads us to
complete the circle, leads us to recognise what lives and subsists in
the widths of space as thoughts filled with will, which means real
thoughts, thoughts filled with being. But if in this way our
ordeals have led us on, our souls then become purified, thoroughly
penetrated by the cleansing process we have had to undergo. Because
in the downward direction we have to fight our way through what is
shown to us by the Guardian of the Threshold as the prompting to
egotism, we are also proof against all that might cause us to vanish
away in the widths of space, we are proof against the fear of the
void.
Such was the wisdom
which prevailed in the Greek Mysteries, a wisdom which leads us to
the deepest secret behind the soul's ordeals. Therefore the
Greek neophytes, the pupils of these Mysteries, were led on the one
side to fear of the infinite abyss, and to
knowledge; on the other side they were led, through the
temptation to egotism and its overcoming, to infinite compassion and
sympathy with all beings. In the marriage, the union, of
compassion with thought they experienced purification from all the
soul's trials. A faint reflection of this is shown in early
Greek tragedy, Greek drama. The first dramas of Aeschylus, and in a
lesser degree also those of Sophocles enable us to recognise what
their purpose was. The way in which the action takes place on the
stage is intended to arouse both fear and pity, and through them to
lead to catharsis, to purification. Aristotle, who held the tradition
that Greek drama portrayed in miniature those tremendous sensations
of fear and egotism, of the overcoming of fear through fearlessness,
and of egotism in sympathy, in boundless sympathy — Aristotle,
who knew that drama was a way of teaching in miniature, defined
tragedy as a representation of connected events calculated to arouse
fear and pity in the human soul and through those qualities to purify
it.
In course of time
these tremendous truths have been lost. When, from the eighteenth
century and on into the nineteenth, Aristotle began to be studied
again, a whole library was built up to explain what he had actually
meant by this. What he really meant will not be grasped until it is
understood that drama originated in the ancient Mysteries. Thus
scholarship is barely able to touch the fringe of the subject, for
despite all the labour expended on the concept of drama, very little
enlightenment on the Aristotelian definitions of fear and pity is
gained from these libraries. We see, then, that inner ordeals arise
inevitably from the development of the world and of humanity. But we
also see that these ordeals come because the soul feels impelled to
take two paths, one into cosmic distances, the other into the depths
of its own being; we see that the soul must undergo these ordeals
because in neither direction is the prospect open, but we see that it
can hope to complete the circle, to find will from the one side,
thought from the other, and thereby to reach the true realities, the
revelation of the world as willing-spirit, spiritual will.
We come at last to
the point at which the whole world is dissolved into spirit, we see
spirit everywhere, and we have to recognise everything material as
merely the outer manifestation of spirit, as the phantom, the
illusion of spirit. It is because we live in the spirit but do not
know ourselves in the spirit that we have to undergo such ordeals.
For we do indeed live in the spirit without knowing it. We see spirit
in a deceptive form, and we must press on towards the reality out of
that deception which we ourselves are, out of the dream as which we
dream ourselves; we must strip off all that still reminds us of
matter or of the laws of matter. That is a path whose end we can only
dimly surmise, but it gives us the strength to say that in the end we
shall be able to close the circle and to find in the
‘Revelations of the Spirit’ the solution of the
‘Wonders of the World’, and the compensation for our
‘Ordeals of Soul’.
Thus a real study of
Spiritual Science must never discourage us. Even when it has to be
pointed out how severe will be our inner ordeals, how they have to be
repeated over and over again, we must nevertheless say to ourselves:
‘We must get to know them, we must actually undergo
them, for it does not help us to know them in an abstract way.’
But we must also have confidence that we shall advance through these
ordeals to the revelations of the spirit. Of course anyone who could
set his mind at rest with the thought that the revelations of the
spirit are bound to come someday, and that therefore one need not go
looking for ordeals, would be the first to run into them. For
instance, if anyone were to say, ‘Since you have given us your
first Rosicrucian drama, in which we find a development of soul which
seems to show that Johannes Thomasius has already reached a certain
level, we can rely on this and dispense with the second play
The Soul's Probation
and can simply hope that the revelation
of the spirit will follow someday. What need have we to become
involved in inner ordeals?’ Anyone arguing in this way would at
once be plunged into the severest of them, for our normal
consciousness, our intellectuality makes them inevitable. Hence it is
better for us to experience every kind of trial that the soul is
capable of experiencing, better for us to get to know without
flinching every inner ordeal, so that we should understand that even
a man like Johannes Thomasius can fall into error and illusion, and
has to make progress by unexpected ways. But we must never lose
confidence that the human soul is meant to bear aloft her divine self
to the revelations of the spirit. For this is the way of the soul of
man! She confronts the world, she sees the world as maya or
the great illusion, she feels that within this maya there
lie hidden the ‘world-wonders’; wonder comes upon her as
her first trial, then the trials become more and more severe, but the
soul can keep up her strength until the circle is completed and at
last the ‘world-wonders’ find their solution, and the
‘ordeals of the soul’ their purgation in the
‘revelations of the spirit’. This is the way of the soul
of man — and yet not hers alone, for within her all the divine
hierarchies are labouring and aspiring.
This brings to an end
the task we have set ourselves in this year's course of
lectures — to evoke an idea of the connection between
‘The Wonders of the World, the Ordeals of the Soul and the
Revelations of the Spirit.’
Notes:
1. Dr. Steiner
drew on the blackboard.
2. See
Scene 5 of The Soul's Probation.
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