Human History, Present, and Future in the Light of Spiritual Science
Berlin, 1 February 1912
It is a prominent trait of the human being
to want to orient himself in the human development to get a
certain view of the position of his own personality within the
present life. The human being has often to put questions to
himself how the past was from which everything developed that
surrounds us in the present, which life guilt we have incurred
and which life work we have accepted, what according the course
of the human development may originate from his desires and
longings, from his hopes and ideals for the future. It is
certainly healthy to put these questions. Since the human being
differs thereby from the other, earthly beings that he
recognises the position that he has got within the development
not only as such from its conditions and from its causes, but
that he can also influence it from the consciousness of his
task. We realise this way that for the purposes of modern time
the consideration of the human development accepts a form that
starts from the mentioned viewpoints.
We realise, for example, that at the
beginning of the modern cultural direction Lessing (Gotthold
Ephraim L., 1729–1781) writes his
Education of the Human Race
as the ripest document of his mental development. He
tries to show there that a certain continuous plan exists in
the development of humanity. One can distinguish an old period
in which humanity had to follow moral impulses and commandments
which were given from without, while the continuous education
by the spiritual-divine forces intends that humanity gets
around more and more to grasping the good as an own impulse of
its being to do the good from the mere concept
— doing
the good for the sake of the good.
We also realise how Lessing comes from such
a consideration to the necessity to accept repeated lives on
earth for the human soul because for him the human development
is advancing. So that for him the question had to arise: if a
human soul lives in a former period and takes up certain
impulses during it, how does it comply with the sense of human
development if this soul had died for the development forever
when it dies? Only thereby he could connect a sense with the
development while he said to himself, the soul returns
repeatedly to the life on earth and in these lives, the soul is
educated by the leading powers to the summit of development.
This is Lessing's basic idea when he was stimulated to his
Education of the Human Race.
Then we see again how from
a profound insight of nature and human being Lessing's
successor, Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744–1803), tries to
show humanity as a whole in his
Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind
(1784–1791) and to show how in certain times other
factors have worked on the human being than in later times, so
that Herder also realises a sensible plan in the development of
humanity. Actually, the deeper human consideration of the
following times has never again left the ideas that Lessing,
Herder and others stimulated. But the trait of the nineteenth
century which was only directed to the outer appearance also
seized history, so that that what one has thought and reflected
about the continuous plan of human development stayed more in
the background with those who directed their attention upon the
spiritual, while the official science of history was not
courageous enough to investigating the real effective forces
and factors in the human development.
Of course, spiritual science tries again to
recognise the concrete, actual sense of human history. However,
there one has to say that in various fields prejudices tower up
repeatedly which are not due, indeed, to the present research
results, but to the present thoughts about these research
results. This happens in particular if one wants to investigate
the big laws of human history and that what should arise as a
force for the present and as hope and as ideals for the future.
One likes very much to regard the nature of the human being as
something that could have experienced no inner development in a
certain respect, but that it has been, actually, always in such
a way as it is today.
At most, one admits that the present human
being has experienced a development his animal nature. One traces back them either really
up to those prehistoric men whom we have dug out of prehistoric
graves or other places of finding, who show less perfect
figures than the civilised humans of today who show such only
with the outer physical form. One can trace back the descent of
the human being hypothetically even further and believes to
have something in any animal form from which the human being
could have developed. The fact that a sensible consideration of
the usual history already shows that the human soul life has
changed since millenniums very much, one wants to pay little
attention to it in the present, and one hardly admits that
three, four, five millenniums before our calendar the whole
spiritual condition was quite different from that in the
present. One has to mention one fact only at first that should
just strike those who academically consider the development of
the human soul whose basic significance one does not properly
appreciate.
Today one speaks of the fact that the human
being has to think logically that he has to connect his
concepts, his mental pictures logically with each other, nay
that he can only judge in logical way. With it one proves that
one has the view that the formation of mental pictures is
subjected to inner logical laws, and that one can reach truth
as it were only by logic. But now one also knows from the
historical development that the Greek philosopher Aristotle
founded this logic as science only few centuries before our
calendar.
One may say: if one really knows the
spiritual development of humanity, one has also to realise that
the human being became aware of the logical laws, actually,
only after the time when the Greek philosopher Aristotle had
brought these laws into a certain form. Would it not be a
matter of course and appropriate that one thinks about such a
fact and asks himself, how does it happen that the thinking
about logical laws has come into the human development only in
a certain age? —
If one thought appropriately about this
fact, one would come to the result which absolutely corresponds
to truth that the human beings have developed their
consciousness relatively late in such a way that they could
realise the logical laws in their souls. So the logic
originated only in a certain time because before the whole
constitution of the human soul was in such a way that it could
not become aware of the logical laws. Humanity has developed
only gradually to logical thinking, has developed towards the
Greek-Roman age.
However, the present human being has if he
does not want to get involved with the deeper results of
spiritual research, only one possibility to gain a mental
picture of that which is, actually, a consciousness that is not
filled with logic laws. If the human being wants to form a
mental picture of a pre-logical consciousness by the outer
materialistic observation of nature, it can happen only in such
a way that he turns to the instincts of the animals.
What can he learn from these instincts of
the animals? I have repeatedly drawn your attention to the fact
that it would be quite impossible to speak of the animal
instincts in such a way as if in the life and activity of the
animal realm logic, inner reasonableness did not exist.
Everything that happens in the life of the animal realm makes
us aware of this reasonableness. We see that insects live under
certain conditions that make it to them impossible to get to
know the circumstances under which their descendants have to
develop in the first time of their existence. Although the
full-grown insect lives in quite different conditions than the
caterpillar needs them, still, we realise that the insect lays
its eggs with big wisdom where then the hatching caterpillar
finds the proper conditions. There we see that reason really
works in it. Everywhere we see reason and logic in the realm of
animals prevailing with which we cannot speak of the fact that
they have something of it in their consciousness. If we see the
miraculous dens of the beavers and other performances of the
animals, if we look at the whole instinctive life of the
animals and see, for example, that animals feel treacherous
weather, earthquakes, volcano eruptions and other elementary
events partly long ahead and behave according to them
— but this
is only a metaphor, because it happens by the reason prevailing
in the animals that they “foresee” such
things — we have to say, the instinctive life of the animals
shows that the animals are enmeshed in a kind of logic and
reason that everywhere objective reasonableness and objective
laws interweave the environment.
Thus, the human being can get an idea how
that what happens by him can still happen in another way. It
needs not only to happen beccause the human being if he wants
to do this or that says to himself, this is my goal, it has to
look that way, and the tools have to look that way. But
something similar can develop without doing these conscious
considerations out of other forms of consciousness, out of
subconscious forms in the world coherence as human conscious
reasonableness develops in the human being. Spiritual science
now points to the fact that our kind of reasonableness has
developed only gradually that by no means the human being was
an animal being with only animal instincts before but a being
which had a form of consciousness different from the present
logical consciousness but also different from the animal
instinct. If you look at this what I have already said here
about the possibility to develop slumbering forces of the human
soul and about a kind of clairvoyant consciousness, then we can
turn our view to the possibility to educate ourselves to forms
of consciousness different from the today's only logical
consciousness that sets itself only reasonable
goals.
I have drawn your attention to the fact
that by meditation and concentration someone who wants to
become a spiritual researcher and wants to behold deeper into
the undergrounds of the soul has to attain another
consciousness, so that spiritual research aims at another kind
of consciousness that is developed educationally from the
present form. Such a clairvoyant consciousness can perceive in
the spiritual world independently from the body and its senses.
It becomes also apparent that in former times humanity had a
form of consciousness different from the present logical,
intellectual one. Our present consciousness has only developed
since the Greek-Roman age. The human being had to be educated
for it at first. We have now exceeded the Greek-Roman period,
and today spiritual-scientific research shows that the form of
our consciousness can be further developed to higher forms. The
hypothetical idea may arise from it at first that that
consciousness which Aristotle brought as it were in laws has
developed again from other forms of consciousness, so that we
would discover other forms of consciousness, of the soul life
going back in human history.
Those who believe to stand on the firm
ground of science, but stand only on their own prejudices
cannot yet search such different forms of the soul life. Since
they cannot imagine that at the starting point of humanity,
with the primeval human beings a consciousness existed
different from the instinctive consciousness like that of the
present animals. But if we trace back the development of
humanity not only up to a point where the human being would
have been an animal and would have developed animal forms only,
but if we trace back him to that point where he existed only as
a wholly spiritual being, then one can no longer look for such
forms of consciousness which are similar only to the animal
instinct. Then we come to such forms of consciousness that
correspond to an old human form that we have to imagine more
and more as a spiritual-mental one, the further we go back. So
that we have to imagine the human development in such a way
that also the soul life was involved more and more in the
material. Thus, we have to ascend in the development of
humanity to forms of consciousness that correspond to a more
spiritual inwardness.
Now not only the facts of spiritual
research but also the outer facts show that we get to another
kind of soul-life the farther we go back, even to prehistorical
times explorable in historical way as it were. We do no longer
find such mental pictures as we develop them today, by which we
reflect the outside world if we go back beyond the Greek-Roman
age. Not without good reason the Western historical
philosophers have always begun their histories of philosophy
with Thales five to six centuries before the Christian calendar
because they recognised that one can generally only speak of a
reasonable, logical reflection of the world. Only our present
has managed to break this. Today where one measures everything
with the same yardstick, one also wants to begin the history of
philosophy far in the oriental thinking not paying attention to
the fact that the soul conditions of experiencing the things
was quite different within the pre-Greek cultures than it has
become later from the Greek culture on. It needs the
superficiality of the “profound” beholders of the
East, for example, of Deußen (Paul D., 1845–1919, German
Orientalist and Sanskrit scholar) to lead the history of
philosophy beyond Thales. This can happen only if one has no
notion of the development of the human soul, and that the
oriental spiritual life has contents different from that what
begins from the Greek-Roman age on for the inner life of human
history. If we examine what faces us in ancient times, we have
to say, the human being felt pressured more or less into
thinking vividly about the world, not in the intellectual forms
in which we live today, but in thought structures facing us as
myths. That faces us as Imaginations what the human being takes
up in his soul to get any explanation of the world. Images are
contained in the myths. The strange appears that we find images
on the bottom of all cultures very soon if we go back to the
pre-Greek times, and the farther we go back, the more a kind of
Imaginative worldview faces us.
Someone attains a kind of Imaginative
knowledge as the first level of clairvoyant knowledge who makes
his soul an instrument of spiritual research by that
self-education which I have characterised in my book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?
Someone who opens
himself to this Imaginative knowledge which presents itself
again in a kind of images in his soul, says to himself, if I
compare this Imaginative knowledge to the miraculous
imaginations of the Greek and pre-Greek myths, something faces
me that, on the one side, is the same or similar, but, on the
other side, is totally different.
If the modern spiritual researcher rises to
Imagination, he keeps his logical thinking in his Imaginations
that reflect the spiritual processes that are behind the
sensory phenomena, he keeps it and aims almost at the logical
thinking.
That means that he brings all connections
of reason, the whole character of the present consciousness
into it and an Imaginative knowledge would not be right which
could not give some indication in what way the images are
connected, in what way everything forms a whole within the
Imaginative world. Just in this respect, I made a rather
strange experience quite recently. In my book
Occult Science. An Outline.
you find the attempt to show not only the
human development on earth Imaginatively, but also the former
embodiments of our earth in other, preceding heavenly bodies.
You find everything that was shown in this respect represented
in such a way that it corresponds to the logical consciousness
and the facts of sensory life. Now a theologian who had read
this book said to me once, what I have read there is absolutely
logical and rational, so that one could deign to remember that
the author got around to writing this book completely out of
the today's cultural life only by logical conclusions.
— This
made me wonder and I said to myself, then the whole
representation has not come about maybe by clairvoyance but by
mere logic. —
He said this, although he had to admit that
he could not find by his own logic what is given in this book
as knowledge. One meets this fact often today that such
representations are put up by mere logic, even if the results
are pieced together from trains of thought to make them
comprehensible. However, everything that you read in the
Occult Science
is not found by logical conclusions. It is hard to find
these matters by logic. However, after they have been found,
they are interwoven with logic. They are found of course also
not without logic, but not at all on the way of logical
conclusion, everything does
absolutely correspond to Imaginative knowledge.
I have given this as an example what one
can aim at by self-education of the present consciousness as a
kind of Imaginative knowledge that can lead us to the
undergrounds of the things. If we compare such a knowledge to
myths and legends, we have found that it is important to
recognise these clairvoyant experiences that the human beings
had in the undergrounds of natural existence. However, it was
necessary that they were cleverer than the human beings of the
logical epoch were to be able to express what they investigated
by such tremendous images. Since compared with some myths of
nature or creation is that what our modern science is often
only bungle and dilettantism, because an Egyptian or Babylonian
myth about the work of good and evil outranks the modern
monistic interpretation of the world. One feels in the thoughts
of those human beings that they lived together with the forces
of nature that the modern human being visualises laboriously in
mental pictures. However, one realises that neither mind nor
usual imagination but Imagination formed the myths, as they
appear great and full of sap evenly in a certain respect with
all peoples on earth. Only not that Imagination about which we
talk spiritual-scientifically but an Imagination that was still
free of the intellectual element. It was an original
clairvoyant, not yet completed Imagination, no mere
imagination. It did not resemble something animal even if it
was dark and dreamlike, but it was not yet impregnated with
logical thinking. Thus, we see the peoples intimately connected
with that what prevails in the depths of the beings and
expressing the immediate co-operation with the everlasting
existence without applying logic in the great tremendous
pictures of the myths. That is not academic in the modern
sense, but it was the science of ancient times.
In this sense, we come to the rise of our
present intellectual human attitude in the Greek-Roman culture.
We see another kind of soul life preceding it which
— because
it was not yet logical because it was still dreamlike, but at
the same time was more intimately connected with the spiritual
basic facts of any working — could now vividly
express this working. Hence, one can maybe find no other word
that characterises the being of the immediately preceding
culture of the Egyptians or Chaldeans than with the term
culture of revelation. Against it, we can characterise the
Greek-Roman culture in such a way that it experiences a kind of
gradual dusk of the old culture of revelation. Indeed, in the
older time of the Greeks, the revelations still arose vividly
from the things, but then, in particular with Socrates, the
intellectual culture dawned, and those things gradually
disappeared which originated from the old culture of
revelation, so that the human being made that the contents of
his soul life which presents itself to him by his
senses.
Before the human being had looked at the
things, so that he saw the rushing spring that he saw what
happened in wood and meadow. Everywhere he turned his glance to
the things, but from every plant something emerged that spoke
spiritually to him like a revelation. He formed this then in
the images, for example, of the nymphs et cetera. What worked
in the depths of the things what was shown to the old dreamlike
clairvoyant consciousness disappeared gradually and a full,
wholehearted recognition of that what the human being perceived
with his senses replaced it. The culture of perception appeared
where the human being positioned himself with that what he is
and what he perceived in the world. He grew fond of it because
of his whole physical organisation in such a way that Hellenism
was like penetrated by the saying which is delivered to us by a
great Greek who says there, I prefer to be a beggar on earth
than a king in the realm of shades.
In the old culture of revelation, one could
not have said this way. This was only possible when the world
had advanced up to the culture of perception, to that what the
senses see and what the intellect develops on basis of the
senses as an intellectual view, because one only knew that
behind the sensory world a spiritual world exists. One could
speak only that way after this spiritual world had disappeared
which is behind the sensory world.
One also felt this dawning of a quite new
age. In the Greek-Roman epoch one felt the impulse that
prompted the human being to produce an intellectual culture
from himself.
Once one felt secure in a being of
revelation to which one felt spiritually related. But now one
felt that one entered into a new element where one was on his
own. For that who observes the finer nuances of historical
development this trait becomes especially clear. It becomes
even clearer if we think that, indeed, such a life in a culture
of revelation showed to the human being that he was secure as a
spiritual being within the spiritual world, which he perceived
clairvoyantly, but that at the same time he was less aware of
his ego. Only a people of the culture of perception could
completely shift for its own personality. Hence, in the
Greek-Roman age with the possibility of processing the
perception internally with this intellectual element, the
reflection of the human being about his ego arises at the same
time, which at first one experienced only in the mind as a
concept, as an idea, as something invisible within the usual
reality. Hence, one less appreciated the ego in the ancient
times. Someone who investigates the ancient cultures deeper
always recognises that the old myths and legends speak of gods,
and if the human being did his work, he was aware that a god
worked with this activity, another god with that activity, and
motivates him. —
The human being felt penetrated with
spirit, but not yet with an ego. The human being attains the
ego-consciousness only by the intellectual culture.
Even in the language development, we can
prove that something gradually appeared that did not exist in
the cultures of revelation where the human being considered
himself as a vessel of the gods. The Greek had to experience
the big tragedy at first that his view darkens and he had to
say to himself, this is the tragic. I prefer to be a beggar on
earth than a king in the other world that is uncertain to
me. — However, it has become uncertain only in the
Greek-Roman age. Because still in this strange age the old
mysteries played a role, one could think about this transition
of the soul still mythically while a quite new consciousness
came into being.
What would have the human being said who
already thought quite intellectually at that time if he had
turned his glance to this important point of human history
where the soul was torn out from the old culture of revelation
to be educated to the ego-consciousness? He would have said to
himself, in ancient times the human being was in the body in
such a way that he beheld the spiritual-mental
everywhere. — He did not behold an ego in this
spiritual-mental, but he beheld the spiritual beings outranking
him and would have said to himself, they live in my actions;
they live in my perception, in my life, everywhere. — Now, the
human being turned his glance to the world, and asked himself
in this time of transition, “who I am?” The answer
to this question fulfilled him with shudder, so that he had to
say to himself, I do no longer receive the answer that gods are
penetrating me, but I feel penetrated with an isolated ego.
A human being would have said this to
himself who was penetrated with the intellectual consciousness.
However, someone who would still have brought over something
from former times who would have imagined from the point of
view of the ancient consciousness would have said, the river
god Cephissus and a nymph had a son, called Narcissus. This
appears in the human soul as a picture. Narcissus saw himself
in a spring in the Mount Helicon. One had forecast to him that
he must die when he sees himself. That means, the human ego
loses its connection with the divine when he realises his
connection with the divine. There Narcissus sees himself and is
condemned with it to death. The transition of the old culture
of revelation is described to that of perception only in
another way.
Somebody who would have imagined the
transition to the new consciousness still in the way of the old
consciousness would have said to himself, if the human being
once looked at the environment, he beheld spiritual-divine
forces everywhere, indeed, with his old Imaginative view. This
old Imaginative consciousness gradually disappeared, and what
last remained, actually, were the worst forces of the
spiritual, spiritual beings that worked outdoors. The human
being who imagined the new in the old kind became aware of them
as Gorgons. There the new human being, Perseus, rises,
mutilates the Gorgons, the Medusa, that means that
consciousness which existed like the last rest, shown as
Medusa's head with poisonous snakes in place of hair. Then it
is shown how from the mutilated Medusa two beings originate:
Chrysaor and Pegasus.
I am no friend of the allegorical-symbolic
interpretation of myths. I mean it — also not in the
sense of an allegorical-symbolic interpretation
— in such
a way that someone who has experienced the rise of the new to
which humanity should develop with the old consciousness has
still clairvoyantly beheld the birth of Chrysaor and Pegasus by
Medusa. What did he behold? Chrysaor is the image that the
human being received as an instalment for the lost old
clairvoyance. Pegasus is the personification of imagination.
Since the imagination is caused because the old Imagination
disappeared, and the human beings do no longer have the power
to enter the new epoch with a force of the old consciousness.
They replace the old Imagination which beheld the spiritual
reality by something that does not go into the spiritual
reality but into the everlasting working of the human soul and
that wants to show the new constitution of the human soul.
Pegasus is nothing but the ego-culture. This develops further.
Hence, we hear how that what has led to the ego-culture,
Chrysaor, marries Kallirrhoe. Geryoneus originated, the modern
intellectual culture of which the Greek felt that it led the
human being from the old clairvoyant culture, but that it had
to do this, because he would never have been able to attain the
self-consciousness otherwise. Again the figure of Chrysaor has
something tragic in itself, it characterises what the
intellectual culture experiences. Someone who felt this the
deepest, the poet Robert Hamerling (1830–1889), said about this
intellectual culture, we see the conscious intellectual culture
developing in the course of the human evolution from the
ancient unconscious mythical culture. However, this culture
leads like every development to its death. If the mere
intellectual culture advanced in its way only
— Hamerling and everybody who is able to assess the
peculiar intellectual culture — recognises that it
would dry out, would extinguish any liveliness and
energy.
While spiritual science draws the attention
to the fact that the intellectual culture must not remain an
intellectual culture, it shows that humanity had to get
necessarily to the intellectual culture to develop the
ego-consciousness, but that it can get again to something that
can be more than an intellectual culture. What does the
intellectual culture give to the human being? It gives a
picture of the world. What does the human being care about
today in particular? Take the highest ideal which people have
in mind that the concepts do not all deviate from the outer
reality. They call everything impossible that does not comply
immediately with the sensory-material reality. However, for
spiritual research the intellectual culture is not only
something that can depict reality but something that can
educate the soul that brings up the forces of the soul. The
humanity of the future will thereby get again to an Imaginative
culture by which it is connected with the spiritual backgrounds
of the things.
Thus, the intellectual culture is the
necessary element to form the human ego in the course of human
history. We see that the old clairvoyance had to be blunted by
the intellectual culture, so that the ego flashes and can
settle in those incarnations which the soul had in the
Greek-Roman culture, and which it has and will still have for
some time. Then we realise how in the future a new Imaginative
culture is kindled with which humanity again is taken up in the
spirit and in the spiritual life. Thus, the present is
connected with the past, and the present teaches us what has to
develop for the future. The consciousness of this
transformation of the consciousness faces us greatly at a place
of human history. However, I would like before to draw your
attention still to the fact that with the old culture of
revelation also a certain epoch of humanity was reached. The
culture of revelation is completely penetrated with an old
Imaginative life. If we went back even farther, we would meet
an old culture which points everywhere in the Near East not to
the culture which is described in history as the Persian one,
but to a much older one from which the Persian culture
originated. This older culture for their part followed again
the ancient Indian culture. That is why we find the ancient
Persian and the ancient Indian cultures as the precursors of
the culture of revelation.
If we survey these cultures, we find the
language that had arisen from the spiritual, but from the not
yet conscious spiritual that is not penetrated with reason and
logic. As even today the child learns speaking, before it
learns thinking, humanity learnt speaking before thinking. From
the deep undergrounds of the Imaginative consciousness, not
from the animal instincts, a language developed from a
clairvoyant consciousness that was still a higher one than the
revelation consciousness of the ancient Egyptian culture.
Beyond the ancient Indian culture the element of language
developed. The language is a pre-conscious creation of the
human mind. This points back to even older times in which the
language gradually developed from a still subconscious
spiritual activity.
Then we see that ancient Indian culture
maturing which we admire just because we can call it a culture
of unity in the best sense of the word. This is not the culture
of the Vedas. These are an echo of the real ancient Indian
culture only and originated not much longer before our
Christian calendar than we live today after its beginning. One
may characterise this ancient Indian culture while one says,
the ancient Indian did not yet generally feel the difference of
the material and the spiritual when he looked at nature. He did
not yet see the spiritual separated from the material, he did
not see at all the colours and the forms as we do today, but
for him the spiritual bordered directly on the material. He saw
the spirit as real as he saw the outer material colours: a
culture of unity. He still saw the spiritual just as the
material.
Hence, he felt the supreme spirit
everywhere in the things that one later called Brahman, the
world soul that one felt prevailing everywhere. However, this
culture, which faces us in primeval times as a starting point
of human history, did not enable the human being to be active
in the material, to develop his forces in the material really.
Hence, in the north in the area of the later Persian empire
another culture spread out which was completely penetrated by
the attitude that the human being belongs, indeed, to the
spiritual world, but has to work on the material here on
earth.
The ancient Persian people were a diligent
working people compared to the ancient Indian people. They
wanted to combine with the spiritual forces to impress the
spirit in the material configuration of the earth by own power
and work. Hence, the Persian felt united with his god of light
and said, he penetrates me, because the human being lost the
connection with the divine only in the time of the culture of
perception, in the Greek-Roman epoch. The spirit of light,
Ahura Mazdao, lived in the ancient Persian. Against it, he
considered that which he had to overcome as the resisting
matter, as interspersed with the forces of opposition, Ahriman,
the dark spirit. Thus before the revelation culture that is
connected with the Persian which we can call the culture of
Mithra enthusiasm. We can imagine Ahura Mazdao who is
symbolised by the sun in the following way: while later the
human being still felt spirit-filled, and even later
ego-filled, an enthusiasm in the spirit existed in these
ancient Persian times, really an existence in God and a working
of God by the human being. The ancient Ahura Mazdao culture was
an enthusiastic culture preceding the culture of
revelation.
One can observe such a thing just by
spiritual science wonderfully as the poet especially feels, for
example, when Robert Hamerling imagines something similar at
the end of his writing
The Atomism of the Will.
He does not yet recognise spiritual-scientifically but with elementary
intuitions that humanity has developed from an elementary
connection with the spiritual forces of nature, that humanity
formed language and myths on this elementary level. However,
the intellectual culture is destined to lead the human being to
a point where he completely realises his ego, his central
spiritual-mental essence.
Another culture pointed to that
magnificently. At that time, one pointed to it when one knew
prophetically: a time comes, when that lives consciously in the
human being —
but it develops only in his innermost
core — what lives and weaves in the world as the highest
spiritual-divine. However, this time must be expected, it will
come. Then something enters in the human being that penetrates
his core spiritually. The spiritual forces approach as it were
to prepare this impetus of the human ego. However, we are not
yet allowed to speak of that now which still exists in the
human being in such a way, as if the highest divine-spiritual
already penetrates him. The divine is still unpronounceable.
The ancient Hebrew culture felt that way; it felt the
ego-culture, the intellectual culture approaching, while it
possibly said to itself, the God who lives in the human soul
can be characterised only with an unpronounceable name.
— Hence,
their view of the unpronounceable name of Jahveh. Jahveh or
Jehovah is even a substitute with the unpronounceable name of
the divine, because what was composed with these letters,
indeed, is not to be vocalised, is not to be pronounced,
because as soon as one pronounces it, it becomes something
different from that what develops only in future as the
spiritual being of the human being. The human being had to
descend to the sensory-material world in the course of
development, whereas he rises to the spiritual again in future
times.
Then the Christian culture entered with
necessity into that age which has produced the ego-culture. It
regards the Christ impulse as that by which the human ego
receives the impulse to settle in the spiritual in future again
as the human being has once descended from the spiritual.
Someone who can realise why Plato, Socrates and others were
possible only in Greece, and why at that time the
ego-consciousness emerged in a determining point, also
understands why the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place just
in the Greek-Roman culture as the main focus of the whole human
development. Only someone who does not think about these
connections and does not know what human consciousness means
and how it changes can also not realise how the Christ
impulse — characterised from another viewpoint in the previous
talk — positions itself in the course of human development
from the past through the present to the future. Just in the
ancient Hebrew culture, the being of that appears what appears
in the human ego. Now one can go into the details if one
surveys history that way. Philosophers often stated that the
Greeks said, any philosophy begins with marvelling.
Yes, it has to begin with the astonishment,
as well as it has appeared in Greece. We can prove this if we
look at history and at present in the right light. There
something of the old clairvoyant consciousness has remained
that does no longer work in such a way as it worked once. This
is the dream. The dream is the last, decadent heirloom of the
old clairvoyance, because already the conditions of the
ego-consciousness work on it. What does the dream lack? Pursue
the visions how they surge up and down, you will realise that
one thing is absent. We would never accept the way they come
and go in the awake consciousness. Why? Because the human being
cannot be astonished in the dream, because astonishment appears
only with the ego-consciousness in the culture of perception,
and because something is contained in the dream that comes from
times without ego-consciousness. The Greeks gave what appears
as an ego-worldview with a miraculous characteristic saying, it
begins with marvelling. However, the dream still lacks another
thing. While dreaming we can do the most unbelievable things,
and never conscience torments us. Conscience belongs to the
ego-consciousness. It appeared only when the ego-consciousness
developed. One can prove this, while one compares, for example,
the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides. With Aeschylus there is
never talk of conscience, but with Euripides the conscience
already plays a role. Conscience appears together with the
ego-consciousness in the human development, and the dream lacks
conscience, it is only an heirloom of the old clairvoyant
consciousness.
We realise, while human history changed into the present, how
from the old clairvoyant consciousness — from which
language and myths have arisen — the intellectual
consciousness gradually develops which is now at a climax
of its development.
That is why spiritual science appears
anticipating the necessary forces for the future in our time.
It has to point to the fact that humanity has not to die away
as awfully as Robert Hamerling may show the killing of a mere
intellectual culture, but that the intellectual culture opens a
new way of familiarising ourselves again with the spirit.
Spiritual science knows what a poet and philosopher of modern
time expresses so wonderfully at the end of his work where he
pronounces his pain about the intellectual culture that has
darkened the old elementary being together with the world
undergrounds, but let the ego arise. There the poet says,
“The divine kingdom, the golden age that is set in the
legends at the world end to be aimed at, only means the
withdrawal of any life into the spirit that can be also carried
out individually.” Thus, a work of Robert Hamerling
closes in hope for the future that any life develops back to
the spirit as any human life arises from the spirit. Past,
present, and future move together, so that the
ego-consciousness is in the middle, in the present, which he
did not have before. However, he will keep this
ego-consciousness as an heirloom and take it with him into
spiritual heights, so that we can speak again of a spiritual
age of humanity. No oppressive future ideal arises if we
understand human history spiritual-scientifically. How are we
put in life that often is so full of suffering and pains how
can we relate to the world goals in our ideas? We can answer
this big human question in such a way in particular from
spiritual science with certainty which gives us vitality and
confidence for all human future at the same time, as the poet
about whom I have just spoken answers it anticipating and with
imagination.
In 1856, he inserted nice words in his
Venus in Exile
that touch past, present, and future of
humanity, which, indeed, he did not yet speak out of the
consciousness of spiritual science. But that what the human
soul expected and is renewed later in another form faces us in the
old myths and legends so wonderfully. What spiritual science
can say reasonably, the poetic mind expressed it in an
anticipating way:
Why did I throw myself in the abyss of earthly being,
Threatened by grief and death's fury,
Why do I float in the sea of coloured appearance,
Why do I swim through waves of pain to the goal?
I do not know it. One thing is only certain to me:
In my deepest inside the voice sounds
That consents joyfully to the lot of life
And shoulders this earthly destiny.
(Literal translation)
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