Spiritual
Science and Denomination
Berlin,
20 November 1913
Before I change over to the single results
of spiritual science in this series of talks, I want to
contemplate on one of many misunderstandings that this
spiritual science experiences.
You can repeatedly hear that objection
among others that spiritual science allures the human being
from his denomination, from his religious life. Why one should
not fear that in the present, just if spiritual science wants
in the real sense to be the continuator of natural sciences as
they have developed for three to four centuries in our
intellectual life. How should one not fear this, because wide
circles of our present educated people just hold the view that
a worldview that is built on the firm ground of natural
sciences cannot be concerned with those requirements of the
religious life? Many people hold the view that someone who
works his way up in the present to that height which gives the
human beings the “true science,” must free himself
from that what one has called religious confession for long
times. In many circles, one thinks that religious mental
pictures, religious feeling, and religious thinking correspond
to a level of childish development of humanity, whereas we have
now entered into the mature age of human intellectual
development that is called to remove the old religious
preconceptions and to change over to purely scientific ideas
and a worldview based on them.
Considering the present human beings, one
finds such a mood, as I have just characterised, with many
people. A historical overview of the latest phase of the
cultural life, of the last times of the nineteenth century can
also cause the impression that I would like to characterise in
the following way. The religious human beings who worried about
the religious sense felt constrained from a certain viewpoint
to save the field of religious life from the attack of the
modern scientific life. This continues until our days. Numerous
writings set themselves the task to explain the necessity of
the religious life for the human soul from philosophical or
other points of view with respect to the scientific way of
thinking and worldviews. However, I would have to explain a lot
if I should point to the bases that entitle to such statements
as they have been made. For example, I could point to the
attempts of the theological school of Ritschl (Albrecht R.,
1822-1889) and Herrmann (Wilhelm H., 1846-1922) showing that with
single thinkers something lived that slumbered in the hearts of
many people. I point to this
school not to characterise it or
that at which Ritschl and his followers aimed. To a lesser
extent, I would like to give the contents of the view of
Ritschl and Hermann but rather the mood from which it
developed.
One recognises Ritschl as a deeply
religious thinker who felt called to protect the religion
against the attack of scientific knowledge. How did he try to
accomplish this? He tried to accomplish it, saying that science
as it has developed during the last three to four centuries
shows how the human intellect has penetrated into the mysteries
of the material outside world. Looking at this, Ritschl said to
himself, one can squeeze nothing out of all that what the human
soul should squeeze out as religious truth and religious
confession. Hence, Ritschl and his followers look for another
source of the religious confession. They say to themselves,
religion is always endangered if one wants to support it with
that knowledge, as it is standard in natural sciences, and
always one faces the impossibility to squeeze out anything from
the scientific way of thinking that could inspire and penetrate
the human soul. Hence, one must refuse finally to add something
to the religion that is an object of science. But for it there
is an original religious life in the human soul which has to
keep itself completely separate from any invasion of science
and that it may come —
if it develops and revives
internally —
to autonomic experiences, to internal facts
which connect the human soul with the contents of the religious
confession.
Thus, this school tries to save the
religious confession, purifying it from any invasion of the
scientific. If the soul renounces to have something in the
religious life that could look similar even at a distance to
that what is achieved scientifically and unfolds this
self-purified life in itself, then that appears internally what
signifies its connection with the divine primal ground of
existence. Then it feels that it carries internally, as a
mental fact, its connection with the divine in
itself.
However, if one goes deeper into such
attempts that control many, in particular theological thinkers
even today, one sees immediately: concerning the human soul
life one can get a somewhat often-distilled mysticism out of
his soul in a way. But if it concerns of getting really
religious truth, then such a school of thought feels
constrained to fill the soul from anywhere with contents
because the soul must be, otherwise, completely doomed to a
narrow mystic life. Therefore, this Ritschl school takes up the
Gospel again on the other side, takes up the truth which is
provided by the Gospel and leaves a deep abyss between its
demand to develop the religious truth only from the soul and
that what the soul takes from the outside by the revelations of
the Gospels. Yes, an even deeper abyss can arise, and the
followers of this school themselves noted this saying: every
human being is able to come in a certain connection with the
divine if he abandons himself impartially to that what lives in
his soul, and speaks to his soul. Your soul is connected with
something divine-spiritual. However, the single souls cannot
come to such internal experiences as Paul or Augustine had
them. Hence, one has to receive such experiences also from the
outside. Briefly, at the moment when such a direction which
wants to attain the religious confession only by the religious
feeling intends to pronounce as thought how the soul is
connected with the divine, then it is forced to annihilate its
own principle! We would be led to the same inconsistent views
if we let the religious-philosophical views of the nineteenth
century pass by, as they have developed until our
time.
However, it is typical that many serious
thinkers in the fields of religious research struggled only for
a concept, for an idea, for a definition of religion, and that
one cannot even find an adequate concept from what a religion
emerges as religion in the human soul, from which impulses of
the human soul it originates. This is something that is
enmeshed in a wide net of polemic with the serious religious
researches of the nineteenth century, and until our time. There
some people speak of the fact that the human beings advanced
from a certain kind of revering nature to suppose something
divine behind the natural phenomena and then to revere this
divine in nature. Other researchers think that the religious
need originated from that what one may call soul cult. The
human being saw, for example, the human beings dying who were
dear to him, and he could not imagine that their innermost
essence had passed; thus, he transported them into a world in
which he revered them. Such researchers mean that ancestor
worship, soul cult is the origin of the religious
feeling.
Then the human beings advanced further,
transferred what they felt and revered also to nature, so that
the apotheosis of the natural forces originated from the fact
that one assumed the souls of ancestors only as living on, but
one raised such revered ancestor souls to the divine and made
them rulers of natural forces and worlds. — The third current
whose opinion in particular the religious researcher Leopold
von Schroeder (1851-1920, German Indologist)
pronounced clearly that an impulse manifests in the human
nature. Just the investigation of the most primitive peoples
confirm to assume that behind all phenomena a good being lives
who watches over the good in the world: One sees the
development of this impulse in the different religions and
religious confessions.
One can argue against any such view that it
does not go well with anything that one — if one simply has an
understanding of the religious life and the religious
confession —
has to call religion according to this
understanding, because spiritual science wants to introduce
itself as something new in the human development. It would be
less useful if I discussed all these views of the bases, of the
origin and being of the religious confession. For I have to say
if one looks at all these discussions one question is not
satisfactorily answered: what about the religious confession
within the entirety of the human nature, the human personality?
Hence, I will also proceed this time in similar way as I have
proceeded last time with the consideration of
“antisophy.” I tried just from the
spiritual-scientific point of view to show first how antisophy
is founded in the human nature, and that one has not to be
surprised, if it appears there or there. I try also to describe
the reason of religion in the human nature in order to show how
spiritual science that goes into the entirety of the human
nature or at least wants to go, places itself in life that
wants to be carried by a religious confession.
Spiritual science is less destined because
of its whole predisposition and nature to get itself into
controversial discussions; it is destined above all to describe
how the matters are and to leave everybody free which relation
this spiritual science can have to the single branches and
currents of the human soul life. Hence, it should also not be
my task today to discuss the religious confession as such
spiritual-scientifically, but to show what spiritual science
wants to be, and what a religious confession can be and then to
leave it to everybody to draw conclusions concerning the
relation of both.
Spiritual science is based on the fact that
the human soul is able to transform itself and outgrow the
usual looking of the everyday life and also the usual views of
the outer science and to soar a particular kind of knowledge.
Spiritual science requires that investigations form the basis
that come from a soul that has become independent concerning
its experiences of the physical body. If such a soul
experiences itself and the world, it gets observations that do
not concern the sensory world but the spiritual world. The
spiritual researcher transports himself by the specified
exercises, which I discuss in the following talks, with his
soul into the spiritual world. Then he is in the spiritual
world and talks about the beings and processes of the spiritual
world. One attains this projection into the spiritual world in
different stages, as I have described them in my book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher
Worlds?. We have to characterise
these stages somewhat just for this consideration.
If by such an increase of attention, as I
have suggested it in both previous talks, the human soul
becomes able to experience independently from the
physical-bodily, it experiences first that one can call the
whole soul contents which the soul attains an Imaginative
world. It is an Imaginative world not because this world is
mere imagination, but because that what the soul experiences in
itself appears like from the sea of the inside being and is at
first a completely saturated spiritual imagery. It would be
wrong if anybody regarded this imagery as a manifestation of
the spiritual world; for this imagery, this Imaginative world
testifies at first nothing else than that the inner mental has
increased so that it can experience ideas, sensations, inner
impulses not only referring to external sense impressions but
that an imagery comes forth from its own laps. This imagery
that one experiences in particular by an increase of attention
is, so to speak, at first only a means to penetrate into the
real spiritual world. Since as this imagery appears one can
never say whether a picture corresponds to a spiritual reality
or not; but there something else must be added that is attained
again by an increase of devotion, so that now from another
side, namely from the spiritual world, contents flow in these
pictures.
Because of his further development, the
spiritual researcher can say about such a picture:
spiritual contents flow in; by this
picture, which has arisen in your soul, a being or a process of
the spiritual world reveals itself. As you look at the outer
colours as expression of the outer sensory processes and
beings, you can look at this world because the spiritual world
soaks up in it as a picture of the spiritual world. You must
reject other things. —
One learns to experience this imagery with
reference to the spiritual world as the letters in the usual
life. As the letters express something only if one joins them
to words that are meaningful, the pictures of the spiritual
world are manifestations of a spiritual world when they become
means of expression for a world in which the soul of the
spiritual researcher is able to transport itself. Indeed, a
complete erasing of the Imaginative world takes place. Since
the pictures transform themselves, combine themselves in
various way. As the compositor takes the letters from the
letter case and forms words, the imaginations are confused as
it were in the spiritual percipience and become means of
expression of a spiritual world if the spiritual researcher
rises to the second stage of higher knowledge that one can call
the inspired knowledge, the knowledge by Inspiration. Within
this inspired knowledge, the objective spiritual world fits
into these pictures. Nevertheless, in this Inspiration
you attain the outside of the spiritual processes and beings
only. You have to submerge in the things, so to speak, to come
really into the spiritual world, must become one with the
things of the spiritual world. This happens in the stage of
Intuition, the third stage of spiritual knowledge.
Thus, the spiritual researcher rises by
Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition in the spiritual world.
With Intuition, he stands in the spiritual world in such a way
that his own spiritual self has become independent of all
bodily and is immersed in the spiritual beings of the world, as
far as he is able of it. With it, I have characterised the
relation of spiritual research to the spiritual, a life in the
spiritual world, feeling one with the beings and processes of
the spiritual world and an experience of the spiritual. One has
to understand this as the characteristic feature of spiritual
science.
Now it concerns the following: if such
spiritual science originates, how can one imagine its relation
to the religious confession?
This will arise as a result if we consider
the human soul and the human personality in its entirety. There
something appears to us that one could call the climax of soul
development, I would like to speak of this climax of soul
development today.
Indeed, the human soul develops in the real
life inside; one would like to say, in four stages. So that no
misunderstanding emerges, so that the belief could not
originate, as if the word climax means that the one or other
stage is nobler or higher, I want only to say that one can
distinguish four different stages of the soul about the value
of which I state nothing. There we have the stage of the
sensory experience of the outside world at first.
Indeed, in the sensory experience of the outside world,
the human being is in the whole world process, and one cannot
consider the human being different from being in the middle of
the material world.
Concerning this view one experiences quite
odd things today. When those who are now beyond their first
half of life were young and perhaps pursued philosophical
studies, the proposition by Kant and Schopenhauer was a given
that “the world is my representation.” I have
already drawn your attention to the fact that the quite usual
experience, as trivial as it sounds, must upset this sentence.
Since one has to say, if you want to place yourself into
reality, in spite of all explanations that one has done in this
field and which are based on nothing but on misunderstanding:
the healthily experiencing human being must make a distinction
between his idea and his perception. If there is no difference
between idea and perception, if the whole tableau of the
outside world is my idea or representation, the human being
must feel a piece of hot iron of 500° C which he only
imagines also if he puts it on his face as a real piece of iron
of 500° C. The human being must stand while he perceives
with his senses, within the current of the outside world. Now
one can experience that philosophers try to restore
— as for
example Bergson (Henri B., 1859-1941) — what one called
naivety in our youth. One called it “naive realism”
if one saw the human being immediately standing in the stream
of the material world. Bergson tries to show again, exactly the
same way, as if philosophy begins with him that this view is
the right one that one must imagine the human being as a
sensorily perceiving being in the world of sensory
laws.
There one stands sensorily perceiving in
the world, and the typical is that the single senses perceive
separate worlds, a world of colours and light, a world of
tones, a world of the differentiations of heat, a world of
hardness and softness and so on. The single senses are on this
first stage of the human world experience in the stream of the
world process. There we get a worldview on the way of
perception. This worldview accompanies us through life; with
this worldview, we are active, we act under its impression, it
controls us, and we control again a piece of the world from
this worldview. Thus the human being himself is as it were a
piece of this world process, feels, experiences himself, and
gets his worldview this way.
One can call the second stage of this world
experience the stage of aesthetic experience, no matter whether
it appears in the artistic creating or in the artistic feeling
and looking. If one wants to realise only cursorily what
aesthetic experience is, one must say that primarily the
aesthetic feeling is an inner experience compared with the mere
sensory one.
If one perceives light and colours, one is
given away by the eye to light and colours; if one perceives
tones, one is given away by the ear to the world of tones; you
are given away as it were partially to the outside world and
stand with a piece of your being in the world. However,
everybody who has reflected about the artistic creating or
about the enjoyment of art, about the aesthetic feeling knows
that the aesthetic feeling is substantially more internal than
the mere sense-perception; and secondly it is more extensive,
while it originates from the uniform of the human nature.
Hence, it is not sufficient for the aesthetic feeling that we
see a sum of colours or hear a sum of tones; enthusiasm, the
inner joy of the aesthetic experience must be added. If I only
perceive, I perceive colours and I try to get a picture of the
sensorily given things; if I look aesthetically, my whole
personality lives with it. What goes over into me from a
picture that has artistic contents seizes me completely. Joy,
sympathy or antipathy, desire, exaltation flow through me;
however, these seize the whole person. We hear in the course of
the talk that to such an experience that is internalised even
if it is attached to things of the outside world, to pieces of
art or the nice nature the second member of the human nature is
necessary. Even if one regards such an assumption as
unacceptable in our present cultural life, the assumption
justifies itself. If the human being faces the outside world
with his senses, if he lets the stream of the outer events
approach him, then he witnesses as an aesthetic looking person
something that is internally connected much more with him, with
his being. He experiences with that what we call the aesthetic
human body or the aesthetic human being that is not bound to a
single organ, but penetrates the whole human being as a
unity.
The human being frees himself in the
aesthetic enjoyment from this sensory world. The epoch of
Goethe had more an idea of this relief than our time has. Our
time is the time of materialism, of naturalism. It feels it
already as something wrongful if the human being looking at
pieces of art wants to separate himself from the outer
sense-perception; hence, one forbids as it were such artistic
creating in the modern naturalism that gets free from the outer
sensory looking.
However, the Goethean epoch, in
particular Goethe and Schiller themselves, did not accept as
real art what is only an imitation of nature what puts
something before us that is already in nature, but it demanded
that that what art should be the human being has to seize
deeply and to transform internally. However, it still has
another idea. Goethe pronounces it especially nicely when he
walks through Italy where his ideal to study the old art came
true. After he had studied Spinoza's God at home with Herder
(Johann Gottfried H., 1744-1803, theologian, philosopher) and
others, he wrote home: “The lofty pieces of art were
produced at the same time as the highest natural works by human
beings according to the true and natural laws. Everything
arbitrary collapses: there is necessity, there is God.”
It is the same attitude when Goethe says once, art is a
manifestation of secret physical laws that could not become
obvious without it.
He says elsewhere that the artist does not
deal with speculative fiction, but he comes almost by looking
at the outer bodily into the artistic field. Hence, Goethe and
Schiller talk of truth in art and connect the experience of the
artist with the experience of the recognising human being. They
feel that the artist separates himself from the outer nature
that he is closer, however, in his experiences to that what
works spiritually behind all natural phenomena. Hence, such
human beings speak about something true in this aesthetic
experience. Goethe says once very nicely when he discusses an
aesthete, whom he admired, Winckelmann (Johann Joachim W.,
1717-1768) that art is a continuation and human conclusion
of nature, “because — while the human
being is put on the summit of nature — he regards himself
as a complete nature again which has to produce a summit once
more in itself. Therefore he increases penetrating himself with
all perfection and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and
meaning and he finally ascends to the production of a piece of
art.”
It would lead too far if I
wanted to show now again how the human being, separating
himself from the outer view of nature in the aesthetic view,
internally squeezes something true, how, indeed, for someone
who can experience aesthetically it has a deep meaning once to
say facing a picture, a drama, a sculpture or a piece of music:
this has inner truth —
or the other time: it is untruthful without
meaning that it imitates nature. It is something that is deeply
founded in the human nature to speak about artistic truth in
aesthetics. There is truth and fallacy in this field that only
does not consist in the fact that one imitates the outer nature
badly.
Nevertheless, one comes — if one advances to
the aesthetic looking —
from the field of that view which is called
real in the usual sense to the field of fantasy, to an imagery.
The imaginative world of art compared to the Imaginative world
of the spiritual researcher presents itself in such a way that
the world of fantasy looks like a real silhouette, indeed, but
like a silhouette. However, the Imaginative world of the
spiritual researcher is saturated with new reality. The
imaginative world of art is that what withdraws from the
immediate sensory view and keeps a connection with the human
soul, a connection that is not identical to that with the
sensory world. Hence, art is that what lifts the human being in
free way out of servile absorbing the views of the sensory
world.
Art is that what detaches the human being
from the sensory world and gives him the consciousness for the
first time: you experience, even if you do not let flow the
sensory world into yourself; you stand in the world, even if
you detach yourself from the world in which your body is put
sensorily. —
This attitude gives the human being a
feeling of his determination that he is not bound only to the
physical world in his development. However, it is really in
such a way, as if in art the imaginative life appears like in a
silhouette. The imaginative life is much more saturated with
life than the life of mere fantasy. This would be the second
stage in the climax of the human soul development.
Now the third stage of this climax can be
characterised by the fact that the human being internalises
himself even more. In art he has moved from the outside
inwards, has gone adrift from the outward appearance. Now it is
conceivable that the human being refrains of the outer
experience completely, lives wholly internally, does not let in
what he imagines like in art, impregnates it with that what he
has perceived but does not let any perception in himself. There
he would be still farther away from the sensory world with his
completely isolated, completely emptied inner life. The outer
world would be dark and silent round him. There is a longing
for anything in his soul, however, nothing is there if not from
another side anything could come into this soul. Even as the
material world approaches us from the outside if we offer our
senses to it, the spiritual world is coming up to meet us
internally if we let nothing into our soul in the described way
and are there, nevertheless, waiting in the wake condition.
What we can experience there can only convince us of our true
human being; this shows us only in our true independence, in
our true inwardness.
Religious ideas of all times testify that
something comes from the outside. If the human being moves from
sense perception to the aesthetic view, he moves as it were in
the normal life to a stream of oblivion. He swims over this
stream into his inwardness. If contents are added to his
inwardness by another world, these contents are the religious
contents. By these contents, the human being can know that
there is a world after the sensory world. It can be reached by
no outer senses, also not by such a processing of the sensory
impressions, as it happens by fantasy, but lets flow in
— excluding the whole life of fantasy — purely inner
devotion from the invisible what carries now the soul
spiritually from the inside. It goes without saying that the
human being feels as a part of the extrasensory, spiritual
world, as it is a given to him that the percipience of outer
colours require objects if he perceives such
colours.
I have now to draw your attention to
something very important at this point. There were times in
which it would have appeared as absurd to say: I feel
something, but this feeling is not stimulated by a
divine-spiritual world as it appears to the modern human being
absurd that he feels warmth putting out his hand and does not
say: there is an object which burns me. For the complete human
soul life, it is healthy if one feels such a thing to say that
a spiritual world projects in us as it is healthy if anything
burns us to point to a burning object.
Here is now something that becomes clear to
us if we consider views that have not completely become known
but these views live already on the ground of the souls. The
view spreads more and more by natural sciences that everything
that the human being experiences is only his mental pictures. I
have already pointed to that. It is already commonplace among
the physical scholars: what I perceive as colours exists only
in my eye; what I hear as tones is only in my ear; everywhere
outdoors only moved atoms exist.
How often one can read that
— if I
perceive a colour —
ether waves vibrate outdoors with that and
that velocity; there is outdoors moved matter only! It is of
course an inconsistency if one denies colours and yet to assume
matter! Today, hence, there are already the so-called immanence
philosophers who say that everything that we perceive is only a
subjective world. It would be conceivable, but this still lies
in the future that one says: the fact that I perceive light and
colours with my eyes, is certain. However, it is impossible to
know about something that induces light and colours. The fact
that I perceive tones with my ears is certain; but it is
impossible to know something about that what produces the
tones. What those say in this field who want to be the
scholars, many people advancing to the materialistic view
already say since centuries about the inner experiences. As
today the biased philosopher says, I have the colour which I
perceive only in my eye; I do not know what induces it,
humanity says to itself in general, I have my feeling in
myself; in which way it is caused, however, by the spiritual
world, about that one can know nothing.
Since centuries, since millennia one no
longer refers the inner experiences because of a prejudice to
something objective that would be something spiritual in this
case as certain philosophers do not want to refer the
impressions of the outside world to real processes of the outer
life. However, a healthy human soul life feels with its
feelings in the world of the spiritual as it feels its colour
sensations in the sensory world. As it is absurd for the
healthy soul life to believe that the colour speaks only from
the eye, it is absurd for a healthy soul life to state that the
feeling speaks only from the soul that a divine-spiritual world
outside us does not stimulate. This healthy feeling of the soul
corresponds to the third member of the human nature that
leaves — as we will show — the physical body in
sleep and is inside during the waking state: We called this
member the astral body of the human being. Our etheric body
provides the aesthetic views for us; our astral body
experiences itself religiously. This part of our nature must
experience itself religiously. It is no miracle that the human
organism can deny the religious truth very easily; since the
usual human experience is so organised that this astral body if
it leaves the physical body in sleep becomes unaware. It has no
experiences then for itself, but again when it submerges in the
physical body when it perceives with the physical organs.
Hence, own experiences of the astral body can only appear in
the physical life like from dark, unknown
undergrounds.
Thus, the religious experiences appear like
from dark, unknown undergrounds in the usual human life that
proceeds in the sensory world in the waking state. However, if
the spiritual researcher strengthens his soul in such a way
that it experiences itself consciously and independently from
the physical body with that what remains unaware in the normal
life during sleep, then this soul settles in that what lights
up as religious contents and experience like from dark, unknown
undergrounds of the soul. The religious experiences thereby
justify themselves just in the spiritual-scientific view. What
remains unknown to the human being if he returns in sleep into
the bosom of spiritual life, and what he would experience there
if he were conscious during sleep, this appears, stimulated by
the outer life, in the religious feeling. In the
spiritual-scientific research, however, it appears as an
immediate view. Hence, the religious feeling of the everyday
life becomes the spiritual view in the spiritual-scientific
knowledge. Except in the world of the sensory in which we live
with our physical body, we also live in the world of the
spiritual. This world of the spiritual remains invisible at
first for the outer human organisation. Nevertheless, the human
being still lives in this world of the spiritual, and it would
be absurd to believe that only that existed what the human
being can see in the physical life. If he strengthens his soul
life in such a way that he can behold the spiritual round
himself, he just beholds the beings and processes of the
spiritual world that stimulate, otherwise, only what ascends
like from unknown depths as religious life. In his spiritual
experience, the spiritual researcher attains the view of those
beings and processes of the spiritual which remain usually
unknown to the religious life but which have to send their
impulses into the religious life and penetrate the human being
with the feeling of his connection with the spiritual world.
However, there we also realise that we must go into the human
nature concerning the religious life. We come, so to speak,
into the subjective of the human nature.
If we take this into account we also
realise — because this subjective is much more manifold than the
outer bodily —
how in a higher measure that what comes
from the spiritual world is dependent on the subjective nature
of the human being as the outer physical reality is dependent
on his outer nature. Indeed, we know that our worldview changes
if our eyes see better or worse; we also know that there is,
for example, colour blindness; but the outer bodily nature is
more monotonous with all human beings than the inner individual
nature. Hence, that will even more differ what becomes
internally discernible, and it cannot appear as religious
confession that is spread over the whole world if one only
figures the matter out. The spiritual world, which is
everywhere the same, appears in such a way that it is coloured
according to the predisposition, the particular states of the
human organisation. The human beings differ especially in their
confessions according to the differences of climate, race, and
the like.
Thus, we survey the earth, and in the
course of the historical development, the different religions
appear gradated according to the different individual of the
soul life. If we consider the religious confessions as nuanced
by the human nature but being rooted in the same spiritual
world in which all human beings are rooted with their astral
bodies, we do not have the right to attribute
“truth” only to one religion. On the contrary, we
have to say that these different religions are that what can
ascend like from unknown undergrounds in the human soul. They
are due to a particular manifestation of the spiritual world by
the human astral bodies.
Now here one finds that the spiritual
researcher ascends in the climax of the human soul development
to the fourth stage where Intuition takes place. On this stage,
the real experience of the full human inwardness appears only,
but in such a way, that the human being is with his inwardness
now really beyond his physical senses and lives in the
spiritual world. He experiences the uniform spiritual world
there, no matter how he is organised as a human individual on
earth. The fact that we are this or that particular human being
with feelings coloured this or that way is due to the fact that
the mental-spiritual lives together with the physical. Thereby
that individualises itself what we are. As a spiritual
researcher, however, we become independent of the physical
body. If we completely perceive beyond the physical body, we
perceive the uniform spiritual world in which the human being
is every night if he sleeps but unconsciously. The spiritual
researcher has strengthened his soul life so that the still low
forces that let the human beings be unaware in the spiritual
world have gained strength with him, so that he is aware in
that world in which the human being is unaware during sleep.
Then he experiences the spiritual beings and processes, which
send their impulses in the human astral body, which one can
experience, however, in their true being only if the human ego
has become completely independent. Then one experiences what
those human beings have indicated as the greatest who tried to
penetrate from their point of view into these depths of the
human being. Goethe for example tried to show this in the
marvellous poem The
Mysteries where the different
experiences, which the human being can have with the religions
spread over the globe, are represented in twelve persons. They
have joined in a cloister-like building to experience together
what they have brought with them as individual confessions from
the most different areas of the earth, from the different
climates, races, and epochs, and what they now want to bring
into mutual effect.
This happens under the guidance of a
thirteenth who shows us that a uniform spiritual forms the
basis of the different religious confessions. Goethe explains
that a miraculous organism is poured out over the earth in the
religious confessions which nuance themselves according to
races and epochs, and that with the ascent to the real
spiritual world one beholds that what lives in the single
religious confessions in a great united whole. Thus, he
anticipates as it were what just spiritual science should
perform concerning the religious confessions: the fact that
they should be recognised in their inner essence. Since
spiritual science experiences the spiritual directly in
spirit.
If one wanted to speak, for example, about
the Christian religion from the viewpoint of spiritual science,
one would have to show how the contents of the Christian
religion are recognised by spiritual science, could even be
recognised, even if there is no tradition nor any
document — I state this now hypothetically. We assume for a moment
that nothing that is included in the Gospels would exist. The
spiritual-scientific researcher positions himself beyond all
these documents at first; then he would perceive if he observed
the historical course on the spiritual field how humanity
experiences a descending development of the inner experiences
from the primeval times up to a point which lies in the
Greek-Roman epoch, and how for an ascending development an
impulse had to come. We call it the Christ impulse, which
positioned itself in the human development, which is a unique
impulse, as there can only be one centre of mass of a balance.
From the spiritual knowledge, the whole position and function
of the Christ being in the world would arise. Then one would
approach the Gospels with such knowledge, would find these or
those sayings in them as Christ appeared like out of uncertain
depths, and positioned himself in the human development.
However, one can recognise him if one advances to Inspiration
and Intuition in the spiritual-scientific research. The
religious life becomes visible from a uniform primary source
before the spiritual-scientific view where it rises to
Intuition.
Thus, in the climax of the human soul
development it becomes obvious that Intuition is the life in
the ego as the religious life is the life in the astral body as
the artistic view is the life in the etheric body, and as the
sensory percipience is the life in the physical body. As true
in this climax expresses itself how the human nature is, as
true it belongs to the whole human life that the human being
unfolds a religious life; and as true this climax, this
four-membered human soul development exists, as true the
spiritual-scientific experience attains that directly what is
experienced in the religious life from unknown depths. Hence,
for an impartial judgement spiritual science can never be an
enemy of a religious confession. Since it shows the primal
source, the basic nature of the religious confessions. It shows
also how these confessions originate from a uniform spiritual
primordial ground, —
even if the attention must be drawn
repeatedly to the fact that this view is poles apart from those
abstractions and dilettantism which speaks of the equality of
all religions and the equivalence of all religious
confessions. Since these stand on no
other point of view concerning their logic, as if one only
always wanted to emphasise: the snail is an animal, and the
deer is also an animal, and one must always look for the
“same” everywhere.
It is only religious-philosophical
dilettantism to speak about an abstract equality of all
religions; since the world is developing. Someone who surveys
the development from the spiritual world also realises that the
single religious confessions tend in their different
manifestations to subsume all religious confessions in
Christianity. Christianity loses — by its unique
position arising from the Jewish monotheism — nothing of its
cultural task in the world by the fact that these things are
considered spiritually.
However, I have still to say one thing if
one wants to have some completeness representing the relation
of the human being to the religious confessions. If we face the
outside world, we face it with our physical body. We as human
beings can only take a rather indirect share of the relation of
the physical body to the whole physical-material outside world.
Without our complete witness, the relation of our body to the
whole universe is regulated. How much can the human being do if
this relation is confused to recover it by means of a remedy
and the like? How much is in the relation of the human being to
the cosmic outside world that the senses can provide for us in
which he does not share immediately? When, however, the human
being begins positioning himself with his inside in the
spiritual universe, everything in him witnesses what flows from
this spiritual universe into him. Hence, the inner experiences
assert themselves immediately if the human being becomes aware
of his relation to the spiritual universe. He feels supported
by this spiritual universe, and he feels his relation to it in
such a way that he says to himself, there I am, I stand in the
spiritual universe, and I want to feel the existence in this
universe in my consciousness! The religious life becomes with
it an inner experience in a sense quite different from the
experience of the material universe by the physical body. The
religious experience becomes inner experience. It expresses
itself as admiration, adoration, feeling that one gets the
spiritual as grace. This is the reason why this religious life
expresses itself preferably in the feeling of the human being.
There we get the reason why one can say: the religious
confession is rooted in the feeling first of all. However, one
must ascend to the knowledge why it appears in feeling.
Spiritual science reveals what is felt what is there as
spiritual processes and beings. Hence, we enter, while we
penetrate religiously into the spiritual life, the emotional
life of the human being, we enter into a region where he
searches his hopes for his humanity in order to stand firmly in
the world. Hence, the entry into the spiritual world on the
detour of the religious is nothing else than that one arrives
at it on the way of feeling. This becomes clear in particular
to someone who learns to recognise how necessary it is that the
human being, although he rises in spiritual science to
knowledge that is valid for all, has to go as a preparation for
the objective spiritual experience through his subjective
emotional life. He has to experience it with all its joys and
sufferings, its disappointments and hopes, its fear and
anxiety.
I believe that anybody may say that my
explanations have lacked what forms just the emotional element
in the religious confession that warms up and fulfils the human
soul. Nevertheless, someone who considers the whole attitude
that is generated by spiritual science inevitably understands
that the spiritual researcher simply puts the things, and the
things themselves may produce the feeling. He would feel it as
something unchaste if he captivated the feeling by his word
like suggestively. Every soul should feel in freedom. Spiritual
science has to put the things as they arise from the spiritual
research.
I wanted today to discuss on basis of the
four-membered human nature and of the climax of the soul
development to which extent spiritual science can just
illuminate and light up the reasons of the religious
confession. The religious confession is rooted in the human
nature. True spiritual science will never be an enemy of the
true religious experience necessary to the human being. The
fact that the human being experiences everything that he
experiences spiritually in the same way as spiritual research
experiences it with its methods will become apparent by various
explanations in the following talks; and the fact that the
objections against spiritual science, which are done from
scientific side or from religious confessions, are unfounded.
One will realise this if one considers the single results of
spiritual science. Today, however, I wanted to show, not
polemicizing against a single religious confession, how the
religious confessions relate to the wealth, to the entirety of
the human nature. As spiritual scientist one feels just in
harmony with all those who have expressed their conviction in
the course of the human development as it is revealed in
spiritual science. I want to remind of Goethe once
again.
Even if spiritual science did not yet exist
as science at Goethe's time, his whole mood was, nevertheless,
a spiritual-scientific, theosophical one. He intended and felt
what originated from it in the spiritual-scientific sense.
Hence, he felt that that science which dives in the things must
find the spiritual and, hence, cannot be strange to religion.
Therefore, he also felt that the human being if he frees
himself in the art from the outer nature does not free himself,
nevertheless, from that what forms the spiritual basis of
nature. Goethe was convinced that one experiences the phenomena
of the world with science and art in such a way as the
religious human being must also experience them who feels his
inside being rooted in the spiritual world. Hence, Goethe
means, nobody can be irreligious who possesses science and art.
If one faces the world with true science, one learns to
recognise it wholly spiritually and can experience himself as
positioned only in the spiritual world. If one finds the truth
by art, the soul must experience this truth and become devout
gradually, that means it experiences religiously what forms the
basis of the world as spirituality. That is why, he also
realised that area of the outer life where it cannot be
different for someone who understands the things really than
that in this area of the outer experience the divine can be
felt immediately. Kant (Immanuel K., 1724-1804, German philosopher)
still supposed that the so-called “categorical
imperative” is necessary for the moral life: if the
categorical imperative can speak in the soul, duty can settle
in the human life. This is in such a way, as if from a world in
which the human being does not live this imperative speaks to
the soul. Goethe did not feel this way. However, he realised
that someone who experiences his duty, experiences God who
settles in his soul in the duty. Goethe's view was that someone
experiencing the duty lovingly experiences God immediately in
the moral life. Morality is an immediate experience of the
divine in the world.
However, if one can feel God pulsating in
moral through his soul, one is not far away from the point
where he can experience Him in other regions. For Kant it was
still a risky “adventure of reason” to experience
the divine immediately. However, Goethe answered to him:
“If we rise to a higher field of moral by faith in God,
virtue and immortality and approach the first being, then it
may be the same case in the intellectual that we make ourselves
worthy — looking at the
perpetually creative nature — of the spiritual
participation of her productions. I had striven only
unconsciously and out of an inner desire tirelessly for that
archetypal, typical, I was even successful in constructing a
natural representation, nothing could hinder me to pass the
adventure of reason courageously, as the old man from King's
Mountain (= Königsberg, place of Kant's birth and death)
calls it.” Kant called the immediate experience of a
spiritual world an “adventure of reason.” Goethe
already stands at the point where he wants to pass the
“adventure of reason” courageously. However, he is
convinced that one cannot enter the spiritual world different
from revering, adoring — that is with religious mood.
True religion opens the gates of the spiritual world. Hence,
Goethe thinks that someone who already experiences quite
scientifically or artistically brings religious mood with him
and can experience the spiritual world. Therefore, spiritual
science feels in harmony with Goethe. To sum up, we can also
apply the confession that he pronounced with few words to the
today's consideration what one can call
“spiritual-scientific creed:” who possesses real
science who has real art stands in life in such a way that he
has the best preparation for the experience of a spiritual
world. However, someone who has neither science nor art should
try to arouse that longing in his soul by which he can attain
religious adoration, and then he can enter the spiritual world
by the detour via the religious mood. Goethe expressed this
exactly with the words:
Who owns science and art
Has religion too,
Who does not have both,
Have religion!
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