ILLNESS AND DEATH
Berlin, 13th December, 1906.
Today
our subject is one that undoubtedly concerns all human beings, for
the words illness and death express
something which enters in every life, often as an uninvited guest,
often too in a vexing, frustrating, frightening guise, and death
presents itself as the greatest riddle of existence; so that when
anyone has solved the question of its nature he has also solved that
other question the nature of life. Frequently we hear it said
that death is an unsolved riddle a riddle which no-one will
ever solve. People who speak thus have no idea how arrogant these
words are; they have no idea that there does exist a solution to the
riddle which, however, they do not happen to understand. Today, when
we are to deal with such an all-embracing and important subject, I
beg you particularly to bear in mind how impossible it is for us
to do more than answer the above question: What do we
understand by illness and death? Hence we cannot go into
detail where such things as illness and health are concerned, but
must confine ourselves to the essential question: How do we
arrive at an understanding of these two important problems of our
existence?
The most familiar
answer to this question concerning the nature of death, one that has
held good for centuries but today has little importance attached to
it by the majority of educated people, is contained in St. Paul's
words: For the wages of sin is death. As we have said
in previous lectures, for many centuries these words were in a way a
solution of the riddle of death. Today those who think in modern
terms will not be able to make anything of such an answer; they would
be mystified by the idea that sin something entirely moral
and having to do only with human conduct could be the cause
of a physical fact or should be supposed to have anything to do with
the nature of illness and death.
Perhaps it will be
helpful if we refer to the present utter lack of understanding of the
text the wages of sin is death. For Paul and those who
lived in his day did not attribute at all the same meaning to the
word sin that is done by the philistine of today. Paul
did not think of sin as being a fault in the ordinary sense nor one
of a deeper kind; he understood sin to be anything proceeding from
selfishness and egoism. Every action is sin that has selfishness and
egoism as its driving force in contrast to what springs from
positive, objective impulses and the fact that the human
being has become independent and conscious of self pre-supposes
egoism and selfishness. This must be recognised when we make a deep
study of the way in which a spirit such as that of Paul thinks.
Whoever is not content
with a merely superficial understanding of both Old and New
Testament records but penetrates really to their spirit, knows that a
quite definite method of thinking one might call it that of
innate philosophy forms the undercurrent of these records.
The undercurrent is something of this kind: All living creatures in
the world are directed towards a determined goal. We come across
lower beings who have a perfectly neutral attitude towards pleasure
and pain, joy and sorrow. We then find how life evolves, something
being bound up with it. Let those who shudder at the word teleology
realise that here we have no thought-out theory but a simple fact
the whole kingdom of living beings right up to man is moving towards
a definite goal, a summit of the living being, which shows itself in
the possibility of personal consciousness.
The initiates of the
Old and New Testaments looked down to the animal kingdom; they saw
the whole kingdom striving towards the advent of a free personality,
which would then be able to act out of its own impulses. With the
essential being of such a personality is connected all that
makes for egoistic, selfish action. But a thinker like St. Paul would
say: If a personality who is able to act egoistically lives in a
body, then this body must be mortal. For in an immortal body there
could never live a soul who had independence, consciousness, and
consequently egoism. Hence a mortal body goes together with a soul
having consciousness of personality and a one-sided development of
the personality towards impulses to action. This the Bible calls
sin and thus Paul defines death as the wages of
sin. Here indeed you see that we have to modify certain
biblical sayings because in the course of centuries they have become
inverted. And if we do modify them, not by altering their meaning but
by making it clear that we change the present theological meaning
back to its original one, we see that we often find a very profound
understanding of the matter, not far removed from what today we are
once again able to grasp. This is mentioned in order to make our
position clear.
But the thinkers, the
searchers after a world-conception, have in all ages been occupied
with the question of death, which for thousands of years we may find
answered in apparently the most diverse ways. We cannot embark upon
an historical survey of these solutions; hence let us mention here
two thinkers only, that you may see how even present-day philosophers
cannot contribute anything of consequence about the question. One of
these thinkers is Schopenhauer.
You all know the
pessimistic trend of his thinking, and whoever has met with the
sentence: Life is a precarious affair and I have decided to
spend my life to ponder it, will understand how the only
solution Schopenhauer could arrive at was that death consoles us for
life, life for death; that life is an unpleasant affair and
would be unbearable were we not aware that death ends it. If we are
afraid of death we need only convince ourselves that life is not any
better than death and that nothing is determined by death.
This is the pessimistic way in which he thinks, which simply leads to
what he makes the Earth-spirit say: You wish that new life
should always be arising; if that were so, I would need more room.
Schopenhauer therefore is to a certain extent clear that for life to
propagate, for it to go on bringing forth fresh life, it is necessary
for the old to die to make room for the new. Further than this
Schopenhauer has nothing of weight to bring forward, for the gist of
anything else that he says is contained in those few words.
The other thinker is
Eduard von Hartmann. Von Hartmann in his last book has dealt with the
riddle of death, and says: When we look at the highest evolved being
we find that, after one or two new generations, a man no longer
understands the world. When he has become old he can no longer
comprehend youth; hence it is necessary for the old to die and the
new again to come to the fore. In any case you will find no
answer here that could bring us nearer to an understanding of the
riddle of death.
We will therefore
contribute to the present-day world-conceptions what spiritual
science or anthroposophy, as we call it today has to
say about the causes of death and illness. In so doing, however, one
thing will have to be made clear that spiritual science
is not so fortunate as the other sciences as to be able to speak in a
definite manner about every subject. The modern scientist would not
understand that when speaking of illness and death a distinction
has to be made between animal and man; and that if the question in
our lecture today is to be understood we must limit ourselves to
these phenomena in human beings. Since living beings have not only
their abstract similarity to one another, but each one has his own
nature and individuality, much that is said today will be applicable
also to the animal kingdom, perhaps even to the plants. But in
essentials we shall be speaking about men, and other things will be
drawn upon merely by way of illustration.
If we want to
understand death and illness in human beings we must above all
consider how complicated human nature is in the sense of spiritual
science; and we must understand its nature in accordance with
the four members first the outwardly visible physical body,
secondly the etheric or life body, then the astral body, and fourthly
the human ego, the central point of man's being. We must then be
clear that in the physical body the same forces and substances are
present which are in the physical world outside; in the etheric body
there lies what calls these substances to life, and this etheric body
man possesses in common with the whole plant-kingdom. The astral body
which man has in common with the animals is the bearer of the whole
life of feeling of desire, pleasure and its opposite, of joy
and pain. It is only man who has the ego and this makes him the crown
of earthly creation.
In contemplating man as
physical organism we must be aware that within this physical organism
the other three members are working as formative principles and
architects. But the formative principle of the physical organism
works only in part in physical man, in another part is active
essentially the etheric body, yet in another the astral body, again
in a further part man's ego is active. To spiritual science men
consist from the physical side of bones, muscles, those members that
support man and give him a form sufficiently firm to move about
on the earth. In the strictest sense of spiritual science these
things alone are reckoned as belonging to the members which come into
being through the physical principle. To them are added the actual
sense-organs, where we have to do with physical contrivances
in the eye with a kind of camera obscura, in the ear with a very
complicated musical instrument. It is a question here of what the
organs are built from. They are built by the first principle. On the
other hand all the organs connected with growth, propagation,
digestion and so on, are not built simply in accordance with the
physical principle, but with that of the etheric or life body, which
permeates the physical organs as well. Only the structure
built-up in accordance with physical law is in the care of the
physical principle, the processes of digestion, propagation and
growth, however, being an affair of the etheric principle. The astral
body is creator of the whole nervous system, right up to the brain
and the fibres which run to the brain in the form of sense-nerve
fibres. Finally the ego is the architect of the circulatory system of
the blood. If, therefore, in the true sense of spiritual science we
have to do with a human organism, it is plain to us that even within
the physical organism these four members are blended in a man like
four distinct dissimilar beings who have been made to work together.
These things which jointly compose the human organism have quite
different values, and we shall estimate their significance for men if
we look into the way in which the development of the individual
members is connected with the human being.
Today we shall speak
more from the physiological standpoint of the work of the physical
principle in the human organism. This work is accomplished in the
period from birth to the change of teeth. At that time the physical
principle works upon the physical body in the same way as, before the
birth of a child, the forces and substances of the mother's organism
work upon the embryo. In the physical body from the seventh year
until puberty, the working of the etheric body is paramount, and,
from puberty on, that of the forces anchored in the astral body. Thus
we have the right conception of man's development when we think
of the human being as enclosed within the mother's body up to the
moment of birth; with birth he, as it were, pushes back the maternal
body and his senses become free, so that it is then possible for the
outer world to begin having its effect on the human organism. The
human being thrusts a sheath away, and his development is understood
only when we grasp that something that resembles a physical birth
takes place in spiritual life at the changing of the teeth. At about
the seventh year the human being is actually born a second time; that
is to say, his etheric body is born to free activity just as his
physical body is at the moment of physical birth. As before birth the
mother's body works on the human embryo, up to the change of teeth
spiritual forces of the cosmic ether in a similar way work upon the
etheric body of the human being, and about the seventh year these
forces are thrust back just as the maternal body is at the time of
birth. Up to the seventh year the etheric body is as if latent in the
physical body, and about the time the teeth are changed what happens
to the etheric body can be compared to the igniting of a match. It is
bound up with the physical body, but now comes to its own free,
independent activity. The signal for this free activity of the
etheric body is indeed the change of teeth. For anyone who has a
deeper insight into nature this change of teeth holds a quite
special place. In a human being up to his seventh year we have to do
with the free working of the physical principle in the physical body;
but united with it and not yet delivered from their spiritual sheaths
are the etheric principle and astral principle.
If we study the human
being up to his seventh year we find that he contains a great deal of
what is founded on heredity, which he has not built up with his own
principle but has inherited from his ancestors. To this belongs what
are called the milk teeth. Only the teeth that come with the change
of teeth are the creation of the child's own principle, which
physically has the task of forming firm supports. What is expressed
in the teeth is working within up to the time they change; it comes,
as it were, to a head and produce in the teeth the hardest part of
those members that give support, because it still has bound up within
it as bearer of growth the etheric or life body.
After the casting off
of this principle, the etheric body gains its freedom and works upon
the physical organs up to the time of puberty, when a sheath, the
outer astral sheath, is thrust away as the maternal sheath is thrust
away at birth. The human being at puberty has his third birth, this
time in an astral sense. The forces that were working in connection
with the etheric body now come to a culmination with their creative
activity in man by bringing him his sex maturity, with its organs and
capacity for propagation. As in the seventh year the physical
principle comes to maturity in the teeth, creating in them the last
hard organs, whereby the etheric body, the principle of growth,
becomes free, in like manner the moment the astral principle is free
it sets up the greatest concentration of impulses, desires, for the
outer expressions of life, in so far as we have to do with physical
nature. As we have the physical principle concentrated in the teeth,
the principle of growth is thus concentrated in puberty. Then the
astral body, the sheath of the ego, is free and the ego works upon
the astral body.
The man of culture in
Europe does not follow simply his impulses and desires; he has
purified them and transformed them into moral perceptions and ethical
ideals. Compare a savage to an average European, or perhaps to a
Schiller or Francis of Assisi, and it may be said that the impulses
of these men have been purified and transformed by their ego. Thus we
can say that there are always two parts of this astral body, one
arising out of original tendencies, and the other which the ego
itself has brought forth. We understand the work of the ego only when
we are clear that a man is subject of re-incarnation to
repeated lives on earth that he brings with him through birth
in four different bodies the outcome and the fruits of former
earth-lives, which are the measure of his energy and forces for the
coming life. One man because earlier he has brought things to
this point is born with a great deal of energy in life, with
forces strong to transform his astral body; another will soon grow
weak. When we are able to investigate clairvoyantly how the ego
begins to work freely on the astral body and to gain mastery over the
desires, impulses and passions, then if we are able to
estimate the amount of energy brought by the ego we might
say: this amount suffices for the ego to work on the transformation
for such and such a time and no more. For every human being who has
reached puberty possesses a certain amount of energy from which can
be estimated when he will have transformed all that comes from his
astral body, according to the forces that has been apportioned to him
in his life. What man in his heart and mind (Gemüt) transformed
and purified, maintains itself. So long as this amount lasts he lives
at the cost of his self-maintaining astral body. Once this is
exhausted he can summon-up no more courage to transform fresh
impulses in short he has no more energy to work upon
himself. Then the thread of life is broken, and this must be
broken in accordance with the measure apportioned to each human
being. The time has then arrived when the astral body has to draw its
forces from the principle of human life lying nearest to it, namely,
from the etheric body, the time when the astral body lives at the
expense of the force stored up in the etheric body. This comes
to expression in the human being when his memory, his creative
imaginative force, gradually disappears.
We have often heard
here how the etheric body is the bearer of creative imagination, of
memory and of all that we call hope and courage in life. When these
feelings have acquired a lasting quality they cling to the etheric
body. They are then drawn upon by the astral body, and after the
astral body has lived in this way at the expense of the etheric body
and has sucked up all it had to give, the creative forces of the
physical body begin to be consumed by the astral body. When these are
consumed, the life-force of the physical body disappears, the body
hardens, the pulse becomes slow. The astral body finally feeds upon
this physical body too, deprives it of its force; and when it has
thus consumed it there is no longer any possibility for the physical
body to be maintained by the physical principle.
If
the astral body is to reach the point of being free, so that it
becomes part of the life and work of the ego, it is then necessary
that in the second half of life this emancipated astral body
once the measure of its work being exhausted should consume
its sheaths just as they were formed. In this way the individual life
is created out of the ego.
The
following is given as an illustration. Imagine you have a piece of
wood and that you set it on fire; were the wood not constituted
as it is you would be unable to do so. Flames leap out of the wood,
at the same time consuming it. It is in the nature of a flame to get
free of the wood and then to consume the mother-ground from which it
springs. Now the astral body is born three times in this way,
consuming its own foundations as the flame consumes the wood. The
possibility for individual life arises through the consuming of
foundations. The root of individual life is death, and were there
no death there could not be any conscious individual life. We
understand death only by seeking to know its origin; and we form a
concept of life by recognising its relation to death. In a similar
way we learn to know the nature of illness, which throws still more
light on the nature of death. Every illness is seen to be in some way
a destroyer of life.
Now
what is illness? Let us be clear what happens when a man as a living
being confronts the rest of nature. With every breath, with every
sound nourishment and light that he takes up into himself, a man
enters into a mutual relation with the nature all around him. If you
study the matter closely you will find, without being clairvoyant,
that outside things actually form and build the physical organs. When
certain animals migrate in dark caverns, in time their eyes atrophy.
Where there is no light there can no longer be eyes susceptible to
light; vice versa, eyes susceptible to light can be formed only where
there is light. For this reason Goethe says that the eye is formed by
the light for the light. Naturally the physical body is built in
accordance with the ways of its inner architect. Man is a
physical being and outer substances are the materials out of which
in harmony with the inner architect the whole man is built.
Then will the relation of individual forces and substances give us a
very different picture. Those who have had the true mystic's deeper
insight into these matters will have particularly much to tell us
here. For Paracelsus the whole external world is one great
explanation of the human organism, and a man is like an extract
of the whole external world. When we see a plant, in accordance
with Paracelsus we may say: In this plant is an organism conforming
to law, and there is something in man which, in the healthy or the
sick organism, corresponds to this plant. Hence Paracelsus calls a
cholera patient, for example, an arsenicus, and arsenic
is to him the cure for cholera. Thus there exists a relation between
each of man's organs and what is around him in nature; we need only
take a natural substance, give it human form, and we have man. The
single letters of an alphabet are set out in the whole of nature, and
we have man if we put them together. Here you get a notion of how the
whole of nature works upon man, and how he is called upon to piece
his being together out of nature. Strictly speaking, everything in us
is drawn from nature outside and taken up into the process of life.
When we understand the secret of bringing the external forces and
substance to life, we shall be able to form a concept of the nature
of illness.
We
touch here on ground where it is difficult for educated men of today
to understand that there are many spheres in medicine which work in a
nebulous way. What a suggestive effect it has in a present-day
gathering when someone skilled in nature-healing mentions the
word poison. What is a poison and how does anything
work unnaturally in the human organism? Whatever you introduce into
the human organism works in accordance with the laws of nature, and
it is a mystery how anyone can speak as if it could work in the body
in any other way. Then what is a poison? Water is a strong poison if
you consume it by the bucketful in a short time; and what today is
poison could have the most beneficial effect if rightly administered.
It depends always on the quantity, and under which circumstances, one
takes a substance into oneself; in itself, there is no poison.
In Africa there is a
tribe who employ a certain breed of dog for hunting. But there is a
fly in those parts carrying a poison deadly to the dogs that they
sting. Now these savages of the Zambesi river have found a way of
dealing with this sting. They take the pregnant dogs to a district
where there is an abundance of tsetse flies and let these animals be
bitten, choosing the time when they are just going to whelp, with the
result that the puppies are immune and can be used for hunting.
Something happens here
which is very important for the understanding of life a
poison is taken up into a life process, where a descending line
passes over in an ascending one, in such a way that the poison
becomes a substance inherent in the organism. What is thus taken from
external nature strengthens us and is of use to us.
Spiritual science shows
us that in this way the whole human organism is built up if
we like to put it so, simply out of things that were originally
poisons. The foods you enjoy today have been made edible by their
harmful effects being overcome through a recurrent similar process.
We are all the stronger for having thus taken such substances in us;
and we make ourselves defenseless against outer nature by rejecting
them. In regions where medicine is founded on occultism, the
doctor throws his whole personality into the process. There are
cures, for example, for which the doctor administers to himself some
kind of snake poison in order to use his saliva as a means to heal
bites from that species of snake. He introduces the poison into
his own life-process, thereby making himself the bearer of
healing forces; he grows strong, and so strengthens others to resist
the poison in question.
All that is most
harmless in the organism has arisen in this way and the organism has
need of the incorporation into it of the external world
of nature; but then it must also be possible for the matter to
swing over to the other side like a pendulum. The possibility is
always there when a man is exposed to such substances and at
all times he is so exposed that the effects of the remedy are
reversed. The organism is strengthened to resist the remedy the
moment it is strong enough to absorb the substance. It is impossible
to avoid illness if we wish for health. All possibility of
strengthening ourselves against outside influences rests on our
being able to have diseases, to become ill. Illness is the condition
of health; this development is an absolute reality. It belongs to the
very nature and condition of health that a man is obliged to acquire
his strength. What survives the beat of the pendulum contains the
fruit of immunity from sickness even from death.
Whoever goes further
into these things will indeed gain some kind of understanding of the
nature of illness and of death. If we wish to be strong, if we wish
for health, then as a preliminary condition we must accept
illness into the bargain. If we want to be strong we must arm
ourselves against weakness by taking the weakness into us and
transforming it into strength. When we grasp this in a living way we
shall find illness and death comprehensible. These concepts will be
brought to mankind by spiritual science. Today this may well speak to
the understanding of many people, but when the understanding has
fully accepted the matter it will bring about in man a deep,
harmonious mood of soul which will then become the wisdom of life.
Have you not heard that
it is possible for anthroposophical truths derived from occultism to
become dangerous? Haven't we countless opponents who assert that
anthroposophy must be accepted for the strengthening of human beings
that it is not just a subject for discussion but
something which proves itself in life to be a spiritual means of
healing.
Spiritual science knows
too that the physical is built up from the spiritual. If the
spiritual forces work upon the etheric body, they work also health
giving in the physical body. If our conceptions of the world and
of life are sound, then these sound thoughts are most potent
remedies, and the truths given out by anthroposophy work
injuriously only on those natures who have grown weak through
materialism and naturalism. These truths must be taken into the body
to make it strong. Only when it produces strong human beings does
anthroposophy fulfil its task.
Goethe has answered our
questions about life and death in a most beautiful way when saying
that everything in nature is life and that nature has only invented
death to have more life. [Life
is here fairest invention, death but her artifice whereby to have
much life. Hymn to Nature.] And we might say that
besides death she has invented illness to produce greater health;
therefore she has had to make of wisdom an apparently harmful remedy,
in order that this wisdom may work upon mankind in a strengthening
and healing way.
This is just the
difference between the world movement of spiritual science and other
movements that it promotes strife and discussion when logical
proof of it is demanded. Anthroposophy is not meant simply to be
confirmed by logical argument; it is something to make human beings
both spiritually and bodily sound. The more it shows its effect on
life outside by so enhancing it that life's sorrows are transformed
into the happiness of life, the more will anthroposophy prove itself
in a really living way. However firmly people today believe they are
able to bring forward logical objections to it, spiritual science is
something which, appearing to be poison, is transformed into a
means of healing, and then works in life in a fructifying way. It
does not assert itself by mere logic. It is not to be merely
demonstrated it will prove itself in life.
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