Lecture V
Theosophy and Tolstoy
Berlin
3rd, November, 1904
Life and form are the two
ideas which have to lead us through the labyrinth of the world phenomena.
Life perpetually changes into thousand and thousand forms. This life
expresses itself in its most manifold shaping. It could not manifest
in the world unless it appeared in new forms again and again. Form is
the manifestation of life. But everything would disappear in the inflexibility
of the form, all life would have to lose itself unless the form were
continuously renewed in life unless it became the seed again and again
to create new forms out of the old ones. The seed of the plant grows
up to the organised form of the plant, and this plant must again become
a seed and give existence to a new form. It is in nature everywhere
that way, and just it is in the spiritual life of the human being. Also
in the spiritual life of the human being and humanity the forms change,
and life keeps itself in the most manifold forms. However, life would
ossify unless the forms were perpetually renewed, unless new life emerged
from old forms.
As the ages change in the
course of human history, we see life changing in these epochs into the
most manifold forms also in the big history. We have seen in the talk
on Theosophy and Darwin in which manifold forms the human cultures and
history have expressed themselves. We have seen some of the forms in
the ancient Vedic culture of India. We have seen these forms changing
in the ancient Persian epoch, then in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian
epoch, then in the Graeco-Latin culture and, finally, in the Christian
culture up to our time. However, this is just the significant of the
mental development of our time that more and more a common life pours
forth into forms, and our age may be almost called the age of forms,
the age in which the human being is taught in every respect to enjoy
life in the form.
We see the dominance of
form everywhere. We have Darwin as the most brilliant example. What
had Darwin investigated and delivered to humanity in his theory? The
origin and metamorphosis of the animal and plant genera in the struggle
for existence. This shows that our science is oriented to the outer
form. What had just Darwin to say and explained openly? I have shown
that he emphasised that plants and animals enjoy life in the most manifold
forms that, however, according to his conviction there were primal forms
which were animated by a creator of the universe. This is Darwin's
own saying. Darwin looked at the development of the forms, of the outer
figure, and he himself feels the impossibility to penetrate into the
life of these forms. He accepts this life as given; he does not want
to explain this life. He does not at all look at it; he rather asks
only how life forms.
If we consider life in another
field, in the field of art. I want to speak only of a typical phenomenon
of our artistic life; however, I want to illuminate it in its most radical
appearance just in this regard. What a lot of dust did the catchword
naturalism not meant in the bad sense blow up in the seventies and eighties!
This catchword naturalism completely corresponds to the character of
our time. This naturalism appeared most radically with the French Zola
(Emil Z., 1840–1902, writer). How stupendously he describes the human
life! But he does not look directly at the human life, but at the forms
in which this human life expresses itself. How it expresses itself in
mines, in factories, in city quarters where the human being perishes
in immorality et etcetera Zola describes all these different configurations
of life, and all naturalists describe the same basically. They do not
look at life, but only at the forms in which life expresses itself.
Look at our sociologists
who should deliver the dates how life has developed and should develop
in future. The catchword of the materialistic historical view and of
the historical materialism became a talking point. However, how do the
sociologists consider the matter? They do not look at the human soul,
not at the inside of the human mind; they look at the outer life how
it represents itself in our economic life how in this or that area trade
and industry blossom, and how the human being must live as a result
of this external configuration of life. The sociologists consider life
this way. They say: we do not concern ourselves with ethics and the
idea of morality! Provide better external living conditions to the human
beings, then their morality and way of life progress by themselves.
Yes, in the form of Marxism modern sociology has asserted that not the
ideal forces are the most principal, but the external forms of the economic
life.
All that shows you that
we have arrived at a phase of development in which the human beings
look preferably at the form of the external existence. If you take the
greatest poet of our present, Ibsen, then you just see him looking at
this form of existence and almost falling into despair, so to speak.
For he is filled with the warmest feeling for the soul-life, for a free
life, he despairs of the forms that have come into being. I mean Henrik
Ibsen (1828–1906, Norwegian playwright and poet). He shows life
in the most different forms, he shows us how living in the forms always
causes contradictions, how the souls perish and atrophy under the pressure
of the forms of life. It is really symbolic for the oblivion of soul
and spirit finishing his poem When We Dead Awaken (1899). It
is, as if he had wanted to say: we modern human beings are enclosed
so completely in the external form of life which we have mastered so
often ... and if we awake, what shows the soul-life in the inflexible
forms of society and view of the West? This is the basic trend of Ibsen's
dramas which finds expression in his dramatic will, too.
Thus we have thrown some
sidelights on the western culture of form. Considering Darwinism we
have seen how the form culture is directed to the external mechanical
life of nature, and how our soul is clamped in completely measured forms
of life and society. We have seen how this was achieved slowly and bit
by bit, how our fifth, the Aryan race, went from the spirit of the ancient
Vedic culture, which imagined life ensouled as a result of immediate
observation, through the Persian, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian cultures,
then through the Graeco-Latin culture with its view that the whole nature
is ensouled. With the Greeks even the philosophers conceive the whole
nature ensouled.
Then there came Giordano
Bruno in the 16th century. He still finds life in the whole nature,
in the whole universe, in the whole big star world. In even later time,
life climbed down and is completely entangled in the external form.
This is the deepest level. I do not say this disparagingly, because
every point of view is necessary. The external form, what develops from
any sprout makes the plant beautiful. Our cultural life is externalised
in many respects, has attained the most diverse external form. This
must be like that. Theosophy has to understand this as an absolute necessity.
Least of all the theosophists are allowed to reprove. Just as once the
spirit-imbued and life-imbued culture was necessary, the form culture
is necessary for our age. A form culture came into being in science,
in Darwinism, in naturalism, and in sociology.
In the middle of this consideration
we have to hold still and ask ourselves: what must happen in our spiritual-scientific
sense when the form has found expression? The form must be renewed;
new, embryonic life must come again into the form! We will consider
the necessary reversal of the human mind again in the series of talks
entitled Basic Concepts of Theosophy.
Someone who considers Zola's
contemporary Tolstoy carefully and impartially at first the artist from
the point of view which I have just given will already find that with
the artist the viewer of the different types of the Russian people,
possibly of the soldier type which he described in his War and Peace
(1869) and later in Anna Karenina (1879) another keynote
prevails than in the naturalism of the West. Everywhere Tolstoy seeks
something else. He can describe the soldier, the official, the human
being of any social class, the human being within a gender or a race
he seeks the soul, the living soul everywhere which expresses itself
in them, even if not in the same way. He demonstrates the simple, straight
lines of the soul but on the most different levels and in the most different
forms of life. What is life in its different forms, what is this life
in its diverse variety? This goes like a basic question through Tolstoy's
creative work. From here he finds the possibility to understand life
also where it cancels out itself apparently where this life changes
into death. Death remains the big stumbling block for the materialistic
world view. Who accepts the external material world only, how should
he understand death, how should he cope with life, finally, because
death stands like a gate at the end of this life, fulfilling him with
fear and fright? Also as an artist Tolstoy has already advanced beyond
this point of view of materialism. Already in the novella The Death
of Ivan Ilyich (1886) you can see how artistically the most material
is overcome how there in this figure of Ivan an entire harmony is produced
in his innermost life. We have an ill human being before ourselves,
not his body is ill but his soul.
We hear it and see it in
all words which Tolstoy says to us that he is not of the opinion that
in the body a soul lives which has nothing to do with the body; but
we hear from his words that he finds the expression of the soul in the
physical expression that the ill soul sickens the body that the soul
flows through the veins of the body. We see from this form of artistic
representation how life is found. A peculiar view of death faces us
there, not as a theory, not as a dogma, but in the feeling. This idea
gives the possibility to understand death not as an end, but as outpouring
the personality into the universe, as disappearing in the infinite and
as retrieval in the great primal spirit of the world. The problem of
death is thereby artistically solved in marvellous way. Death has become
fortune in life. The dying human being feels the metamorphosis of one
life form to the other.
Leo Tolstoy as an artistic
contemporary of the naturalists was the viewfinder of life, the questioner
of the riddle of life in its different forms. That is why this riddle
of life had also to be in the centre of his soul, of his thinking and
feeling in scientific and in religious respect. He attempted to investigate
this riddle of life that way; he also sought for life except the form,
where he met it. Hence, he has become the prophet of a new epoch which
must overcome ours, an epoch which again feels and recognises life in
contrast to the configuration of natural sciences. In Tolstoy's
whole criticism about the western civilisation we see nothing else than
the expression of that spirit which represents a young, fresh, child-like
life which wants to pour it into the developing humanity which cannot
satisfy itself with a mature, indeed overripe, in the external form
expressed civilisation. This is the contrast between Tolstoy and the
western civilisation. From this point of view he criticises the social
system and the life forms of the West everything in general. This is
the point of view of his criticism.
We have seen in Darwinism
that the western science has come to understand the forms of life that,
however, Darwin said to not be able to understand anything of life which
he presupposes as a fact. The whole western civilisation is based on
the consideration of form: we look at the external form in the evolution
of the minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. Wherever you open
any book of the western science, it is the form that has priority. Remember
again what we have already thought of: that just the researchers of
the West admit that they face the riddle of life and are not able to
penetrate it. The words “ignoramus, ignorabimus” sound toward
us time and again if science should give information about life. This
science knows something how life develops in forms. However, how this
life itself behaves about that it knows nothing. It despairs of the
task to solve this riddle and says only: ignorabimus. There Tolstoy
found the right word, the right principle considering life itself. I
would like to read out a crucial passage from which you see how he represents
the point of view of life compared with all science of the forms of
life:
“The wrong knowledge
of our time” (of the West) “supposes that we know what we
cannot know, and that we cannot know what we really know. The human
being with wrong knowledge believes that he knows everything that appears
to him in space and time, and that he does not know what is known to
him by his reasonable consciousness.
It seems to such a person
that the general welfare and his welfare is the most unexplorable object.
His reason, his reasonable consciousness appears to him almost as unexplorable;
he appears to himself somewhat more explorable as animal; the animals
and plants appear as still more explorable beings, and the most explorable
thing is the dead, endlessly distributed matter.
Something similar takes
place with the human vision. The human being turns his look always unconsciously
upon the most distant objects because their colours and contours appear
to him the simplest: upon the sky, horizon, distant fields and forests.
These objects appear to him the more certain and simpler, the more distant
they are, and on the contrary, the closer the object is, the more manifold
are its contours and colours.” – “Does not the same
take place with the wrong knowledge of the human being? What is known
to him certainly his reasonable consciousness appears to him unexplorable
because it is not simple, however, what is inaccessible to him the limitless,
everlasting matter seems to him easily explorable because it appears
simple from a distance. However, this is just the opposite.”
The western scientist considers
the lifeless matter as his reliable starting point. Then he observes
how the plants, animals and human beings build themselves up out of
the chemical and physical forces; he observes how the lifeless matter
moves, conglomerates and finally produces the movement of the brain.
But he cannot understand how life comes about: because what he investigates
is nothing else than the form of life. Tolstoy says: life is next to
us, we are in it, we are life; of course, if we want to understand life
observing and investigating its forms, then we never understand it.
We only need to see it in ourselves, we only need to live it, and then
we have life. People who believe to be unable to understand it do not
understand life at all. Here Tolstoy starts with his consideration of
life and examines what the human being can conceive as his life, even
if the refined, overripe way of thinking cannot understand it along
the lines of simple thinking: if you want to understand the form correctly,
you have to look into the inside. If you want to investigate the formal
laws of nature only, how do you want to distinguish a meaningful life
from a meaningless life?
According to the same higher
principles the organisms are healthy and the organisms fall ill; exactly
according to the same principles of nature the human being falls ill
as he is healthy. Tolstoy expresses himself again characteristically
in his treatise On Life (1887): “As strong and rapid
the movements of the human being may be in the fever delirium, in insanity
or death struggle, in drunkenness, even in the burst of passion, we
do not accept the human being as living, do not treat him as a living
human being and allot the possibility of life to him only. But as weak
and immobile a human being may be if we see that his animal personality
has submitted to reason, we accept him as living and treat him correspondingly.”
Tolstoy thinks that the
outer form gets sense for us unless we study it only externally, but
if we try to directly understand what not form is what is mind only,
and what is the essential part. We cannot understand the true life if
we try only to conceive its form; but we understand the forms if we
move from life on the forms.
However, Tolstoy did not
understand his problem only in this scientific way; he understood it
also from the moral side. How do we come in our human form to this real
life, up to the lawfulness of the external form? Tolstoy got this clear
in his mind asking himself: how do I and my fellow men satisfy the need
of our own well-being? How do I satisfy my immediate personal life?
Going out from the configuration of the animal life, the human being
has no other question than: how do I satisfy the needs of the external
form of life? This is a low view. Those have a somewhat superior view
who say: the single person has not to satisfy his needs, but he has
to adapt himself to the public welfare to fit into a community. He has
not only to provide what satisfies his own external life, but he has
to ensure that this form of life is satisfied with all living beings.
We should fit into the community and subordinate to the needs of the
society. Numerous personalities, numerous ethicists and sociologists
regard this as the western ideal of the cultural development: subordination
of the needs of the single to the needs of the community. However, this
is not the highest goal Tolstoy says , because what else I have in mind
than the external form? It refers only to the outer form how one lives
in the community how one fits into it. These outer forms change perpetually.
If my single personal life is not directly meaningful, why should the
other lives be meaningful? If the personal welfare of the single human
life form is not an ideal, an ideal of the public welfare cannot originate
from the summation of many single forms of life. Not the well-being
of the single, not the well-being of all can be the ideal: this only
concerns the forms in which life only lives. Where do we recognise life?
To whom should we submit, if not to the needs dictated by our low nature,
if not to that which the public welfare or humanity dictates?
Life of the most manifold
forms is that which longs for well-being and happiness of the single
and the community. We want to understand our moral, our innermost ideal
not according to external forms, but according to that which results
as an ideal from the inside of the soul, from God who lives in it. That
is why Tolstoy resorts again to a kind of higher organised Christianity,
which he considers as the true Christianity: do not look for the kingdom
of God in external gestures, in the forms, but inside. Then you understand
your duty if you understand the life of the soul if you can be inspired
by the God in yourselves, if you listen to your soul. Do not be wrapped
up in the forms, as large and immense they may be! Go back to the original
unified life, to the divine life in yourselves. If the human being does
not take up the ethical and cultural ideals from without, but allows
rising from his soul what rises in his heart what God has lowered in
his soul, then he has stopped living only in the form, then he really
has a moral character. This is internal morality and inspiration.
From this viewpoint he attempts
an entire renewal of all views of life and world in the form of what
he calls early Christianity. Christianity has externalised itself according
to him, has adapted itself to the different life forms which have come
from the culture of the different centuries. He expects a time again,
when the form must be penetrated with new internal life when life is
seized immediately. Therefore, he does not get tired of pointing in
new forms repeatedly to the fact that it is necessary to understand
the simplicity of the soul, not the intricate life which always wants
to get to know something new. No! The fact that the simplicity of the
soul must meet the right thing that first of all the confusing of the
external science, of the outer artistic representation, the luxurious
of modern life must be connected with the immediately simple that emerges
in the soul of everybody no matter in which life form and social system
he is: Tolstoy regards this as an ideal. Thus he becomes a strict critic
of the various cultural forms of Western Europe; he becomes a strict
critic of western science. He states that this science has solidified
bit by bit in dogmas like theology, and that the western scientists
appear as the real dogmatists imbued with wrong mind. He is hard on
these scientists. Above all, he criticises the ideal, which is striven
for in these scientific forms, and those who consider our sensuous well-being
as the only goal of any striving.
For centuries humanity intended
to develop the forms highly and to regard the external possession, the
external well-being as the highest. And now we know that we do not have
to reprove this, but have to consider it as a necessity , well-being
should not be limited only to single social ranks and classes, but everybody
should take part in it. Indeed, nothing is to be argued against that,
but Tolstoy opposes the form in which this is tried to achieve by the
western sociology and the western socialism. What does this socialism
say? It takes the transformation of the outer forms of life as starting
point. The material culture should induce the human being to get a higher
level of living. Then one believes that those who feel better who have
a better external livelihood also have a higher morality. All moral
endeavours of socialisation are directed to subject the external formation
to a revolution.
Tolstoy opposes that. For
this is just the result of the cultural development that it developed
the most manifold differences of ranks and classes. Do you believe if
you develop this form culture highly that you really get to a higher
cultural ideal? You have to understand the human being where he gives
himself form. You have to improve his soul, to pour divine-moral forces
into his soul, and then he reshapes the form from the soul. This is
Tolstoy's socialism, and it is his view that a renewal of the
moral culture can never arise from any transformation of the western
form culture, but that this renewal has to take place from the soul,
from the inside.
Hence, he does not become
the preacher of a dogmatic ethical ideal, but the furtherer of a perfect
transformation of the human soul. He does not say that the human morality
increases if the external situation of the human being is improved,
but he says: just because you have taken the external form as starting
point, your dismal circumstances of life came into being. You are able
to overcome this life form again if you reshape the human being from
the inside. In sociology we have, just as in the Darwinist scientific
consideration, the last branches of the old form culture. On the other
hand, we have the incipient stages of a new life culture. As we have
the descending line there, we have the ascending one here. As little
as the old man, who has got to his determination, to his life form,
is able to be renewed completely, as rather from the growing up child
the new life form arises from internal stimulation, just as little a
new life form can arise from an old cultural nation.
That is why Tolstoy regards
the Russian nation, which is not yet taken in with the cultural forms
of the west, as that nation within which this future life has to originate.
Considering this Slavic people, which still looks at the European cultural
ideals in dull indifference today at the European science as well as
at the European art , Tolstoy states that in it an undifferentiated
spirit lives that has to become the supporter of the future cultural
ideal. His criticism is based on the big principle of evolution, on
that principle which teaches the change of the forms and the perpetual
merging of life.
In the tenth chapter of
his book On Life one reads: “And the principle which
we know in ourselves as the principle of our life is the same principle
according to which also all external phenomena of the world take place,
only with the difference that we know this principle in ourselves which
we ourselves must carry out however, in the external phenomena as something
that takes place without our assistance according to these principles.”
Thus Tolstoy positions himself
in the forever developing and changing life. We would be rather bad
representatives of spiritual science if we could not understand such
a phenomenon correctly; we would be bad spiritual scientists if we wanted
to preach ancient truth only. Why do we make the contents of the ancient
wisdom our own? Because the ancient wisdom teaches us to understand
life in its profoundness because it shows us how in the most manifold
figures the one divine appears again and again. A bad representative
of spiritual science would be that who would become a dogmatist, who
only wanted to preach what contains the ancient wisdom, who would withdraw
and would face life cold and distantly, who would be blind and deaf
to what happens in the immediate present. The doctrine of wisdom has
not taught the ancient wisdom to us, so that we repeat it in words,
but live with it and learn to understand what is round us. The development
of our own race, which has disintegrated into different forms since
the ancient Indian culture up to ours, this development is exactly described
and predetermined in that ancient wisdom. There is also spoken of a
future development, of a development in the immediate future. One says
to us that we stand at the starting point of a new era. Our reason,
our intelligence, they attained their configuration as a result of the
way through the different fields of existence. The forces of our physical
intelligence have attained their biggest triumphs in the form culture
of our time. Reason has penetrated the principles of form and masters
them to the highest degree; it produced the big and immense progress
of technology, the big and immense progress of our life. Now we stand
at the starting point of that epoch in which something has to pour out
in this reason that must seize and form the human being from within.
Hence, the theosophical
movement has chosen its motto and is dedicated to establishing the core,
the rudiment of a general human fraternisation. One must not make distinctions
of views, classes, religions, gender, and skin colour; one has to look
for life in all these forms. Our spiritual ideal is an ideal of love
which the human being experiences as the kingdom of God if he becomes
aware of his divinity. Theosophy calls the culture of intellectuality
manas; it calls buddhi what is filled with the inner being, with love,
what does not want to be wise without being filled with love. As our
race has got to the manas culture because of its reason, the next will
be now that we get to the individuality imbued with love where the human
being acts out of the higher, internal, divine nature, and neither is
wrapped up in the chaos of the external nature nor in science nor in
the social life. If we understand the spiritual ideal this way, we are
allowed to say that we understand this ideal correctly and then we are
also not allowed to misjudge a person who lives among us who wants to
give new life impulses to the human development.
How nice and congruent with
our teachings is something that just Tolstoy says concerning the view
of the human being in his directness. I would like to read out a passage
that is distinctive especially of his moral ideal: “The whole
life of these human beings is turned upon the imaginary increase of
their personal welfare. They see the personal welfare only in the satisfaction
of their needs. They call personal needs all those living conditions
upon which they have directed their reason. The conscious needs, nevertheless
those upon which their reason is directed always grow as a result of
this consciousness ad infinitum. The satisfaction of these growing needs
closes up the demands of their true life to them.”
Tolstoy says: however, the
personality does not comprise the reasonable consciousness. Personality
is a quality of the animal and the human being as an animal. The reasonable
consciousness is the quality of the human being only. Not before the
human being advances beyond the mere personality if he realises the
preponderance of the individuality over the personal if he understands
to become impersonal to let the impersonal life prevail in himself,
he leaves the culture entangled in the external form and enters a future
culture full of life.
Even if that is not the
ideal of theosophy and also not the ethical consequence which we theosophists
draw, it is a step toward the ideal, because the human being learns
to live only unless he looks at the personality but at the eternal and
imperishable.
This eternal and imperishable,
the buddhi, is the rudiment of wisdom which rests in the soul, it has
to replace the civilisation of mere reason. There are many proofs that
theosophy is right with this view of the future development of the human
being. However, the most important one is that similar forces already
make themselves noticeable in life which we have to understand really
to fulfil us with their ideals.
This is great with Tolstoy
that he wants to lift out the human being from the close circle of his
thoughts and to deepen him spiritually that he wants to show him that
the ideals are not outside in the material world, but can stream only
from the soul.
If we are right theosophists,
we recognise the development, then we do not remain blind and deaf towards
that which shines to us in the theosophical sense in our present, but
we really recognise these forces of which is normally spoken poetically
in theosophical writings.
This must be just the typical
of a theosophist that he has overcome darkness and error, that he learns
to appreciate and recognise life and world.
A theosophist who withdraws,
who faces life cold and distantly, would be a bad theosophist even if
he knew a lot. Such theosophists who lead us from the sensuous world
to a higher one, who are able to behold super-sensible worlds, they should
teach us also to be able to observe the super-sensible on the physical
plane and not to be carried away with the sensuous.
We investigate the causes
which come from the spiritual in order to completely understand the
sensuous which is the effect of the spiritual. We do not understand
the sensuous if we stop within the sensuous, because the causes of the
sensuous life come from the spiritual one.
Theosophy wants to make
us clairvoyant in the sensuous; therefore, it talks of the ancient wisdom.
It wants to reshape the human being so that he clairvoyantly beholds
the lofty super-sensible secrets of existence, but this should not be
purchased with lack of understanding for that which exists immediately
around us.
Someone would be a bad clairvoyant
who is blind and deaf to that which happens in the sensuous world, to
that which his contemporaries are able to accomplish in his immediate
surroundings and, moreover, he would be a bad clairvoyant if he were
not able to recognise that of a personality by which in our time the
human beings are led to the super-sensible. And what is the use in us
becoming clairvoyant and not being able to recognise the next task immediately
before us?
A theosophist must not withdraw
from life; he has to understand how to apply theosophy directly to life.
If theosophy has to lead us to higher worlds, we have to bring the super-sensible
knowledge down to our physical plane. We must recognise the causes which
are in the spiritual. The theosophist has to stand in life, has to understand
the world, in which his contemporaries live, and has to recognise the
spiritual causes of the different epochs of evolution.
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