Thus he gropes his way out of Manichaeism, precisely out of
that part of it which must be called its most significant part,
at least in this connection. Augustine gropes after something
spiritual which is free of all sensuousness. And in this he
finds himself exactly in that era of human soul-development in
which the soul had to free itself from the contemplation of
matter as something spiritual and of the spiritual as something
material. We entirely misunderstand Greek philosophy in
reference to this. And because I tried for once to describe
Greek philosophy as it really was, the beginning of my
“Riddles of Philosophy”
seems so difficult
to understand. When the Greeks speak of ideas, of conceptions,
when Plato speaks of them, people now believe that Plato or the
Greeks mean the same by ideas as we do. This is not so, for the
Greeks spoke of ideas as something which they observed in the
outer world like colours or sounds. That part of Manichaeism
which we find slightly changed, with — let us say —
an oriental tinge, that is already present in the whole Greek
view of life. The Greek sees his idea just as he sees colours.
And he still possesses that material-spiritual,
spiritual-material life of the soul, which does not rise to
what we know as spiritual life. Whatever we may call it, a mere
abstraction or the true content of our soul, we need not decide
at the present moment; the Greek does not yet reckon with what
we call a life of the soul free from matter; he does not
distinguish, as we do, between thinking and outward use of the
senses. The whole Platonic philosophy ought to be seen in this
light to be fully understood.
We
can now say, that Manichaeism is nothing but a post-Christian
variation (with an oriental tinge) of something already
existing among the Greeks. Neither do we understand that
wonderful genius who closes the circle of Greek philosophy,
Aristotle, unless we know that whenever he speaks of concepts,
he still keeps within the meaning of an experienced tradition
which regarded concepts as belonging to the outer world of the
senses as well as perceptions, though he is already getting
close to the border of understanding abstract thought free from
all evidence of the senses. Through the point of view to which
men's souls had attained during his era, through actual events
happening within the souls of men in whose rank Augustine was a
distinctive, prominent personality, Augustine was forced not
just only to experience within his soul, as the Greeks had
done, but he was forced to rise to thoughts free from
sense-perceptions, to thoughts which still kept their meaning
even if they were not dealing with earth, air and sea, with
stars, sun and moon; thoughts which had a content beyond the
sense of vision.
And
now only philosophers and philosophies spoke to him which spoke
of what they had to say from an entirely different point of
view, that is, from the super-spiritual one just explained.
Small wonder, then, that these souls striving in a vague way
for something not yet in existence and trying with their minds
to seize what was there, could only find something they could
not absorb; small wonder that these souls sought refuge in
scepticism. On the other hand, the feeling of standing on a
sound basis of truth and the desire to get an answer to the
question of the origin of Evil was so strong in Augustine, that
equally powerful in his soul lived that philosophy which stands
under the name of Neoplatonism at the end of Greek philosophic
development. This is focused in Plotinus and reveals to us
historically what neither the Dialogues of Plato and still less
Aristotelian philosophy can reveal, namely, the course of the
whole life of the soul when it looks for a greater
intensiveness and a reaching beyond the normal. Plotinus is
like a last straggler of a type which followed quite different
paths to knowledge, to the inner life of the soul, from those
which were gradually understood later. Plotinus must appear
fantastic to present-day men. To those who have absorbed
something of mediaeval scholasticism Plotinus must appear as a
terrible fanatic, indeed, as a dangerous one.
I
have noticed this repeatedly. My old friend Vincenz Knauer, the
Benedictine monk, who wrote a history of philosophy and who has
also written a book about the chief problems of philosophy from
Thales to Hamerling was, I may well say, good-nature incarnate.
This man never let himself go except when he had to deal with
Neoplatonism, in particular with Plotinus, and he would then
get quite angry and would denounce Plotinus terribly as a
dangerous fanatic. And Brentano, that intelligent Aristotelian
and Empiric, Franz Brentano, who also carried mediaeval
philosophy deeply and intensely in his soul, wrote a little
book: Philosophies that Create a Stir, and there he
fumes about Plotinus in the same way, for Plotinus the
dangerous fanatic is the philosopher, the man who in his
opinion “created a stir” at the close of the
ancient Greek period. To understand him is really
extraordinarily difficult for the modern philosopher.
Concerning this philosopher of the third century we have next
to say this: What we experience as the content of our
understanding, of our reason, what we know as the sum of our
concepts about the world is entirely different for him. I might
say, if I may express myself clearly: we understand the world
through sense-observations which through abstraction we bring
to concepts, and end there. We have the concepts as inner
psychic experience and if we are average men of to-day we are
more or less conscious that we have abstractions, something we
have sucked as it were out of things. The important thing is
that we end there; we pay attention to the experiences of the
senses and stop at the point where we make the total of our
concepts, of our ideas. It was not so for Plotinus. For him
this whole world of sense-experience scarcely existed. But that
which meant something to him, of which he spoke as we speak of
plants and minerals and animals and physical men, was something
which he saw lying above concepts; it was a spiritual world and
this spiritual world had for him a nether boundary, namely, the
concepts. While we get our concepts by going to concrete
things, make them into abstractions and concepts and say:
concepts are the putting-together, the extractions of ideal
nature from the observation of the senses, Plotinus said
— and he paid little heed to the observation of the
senses: “We, as men, live in a spiritual world, and what
this spiritual world reveals to us finally, what we see as its
nether boundary, are concepts.” For us the world of the
senses lies below concepts: for Plotinus there is
above concepts a spiritual world, the intellectual
world, the world really of the kingdom of the spirit. I might
use the following image: let us suppose we were submerged in
the sea, and looking upward to the surface of the water, we saw
nothing but this surface, nothing above the surface, then this
surface would be the upper boundary. Suppose we lived in the
sea, we might perhaps have in our soul the feeling: This
boundary would be the limit of our life-element, in which we
are, if we were organized as sea-beings. But for Plotinus it
was not so. He took no notice of the sea round him; but the
boundary which he saw, the boundary of the concept-world in
which his soul lived, was for him the nether boundary of
something above it; just as if we were to take the
boundary of the water as the boundary of the atmosphere and the
clouds and so on. At the same time this sphere above concepts
is for Plotinus what Plato calls the “world of
ideas” and Plotinus throughout imagines that he is
continuing the true genuine philosophy of Plato. This
“idea-world” is, first of all, completely a world
of which one speaks in the sense of Plotinism. Surely it would
not occur to you, even if you were Subjectivists or followers
of the modern Subjectivist philosophy, when you look out upon
the meadow, to say: I have my meadow, you have yours, and so
and so has his meadow; even if you are convinced that you each
have only before you the image of a meadow, you speak of the
meadow in the singular, of one meadow which is out there. In
the same way Plotinus speaks of the one idea-world, not of the
idea-world of this mind, or of another or of a third
mind. In this idea-world — and this we see already
in the whole manner in which one has to characterize the
thought-process leading to this idea-world — in this
idea-world the soul has a part. So we may say: The soul, the
Psyche, unfolds itself out of the idea-world and experiences
it. And the Soul, just as the idea-world creates the Psyche, in
its turn creates the matter in which it is embodied. So that
the lower material from which the Psyche takes its body is
chiefly a creation of this Psyche.
But
precisely there is the origin of individuation, there the
Psyche, which otherwise takes part in the single idea-world,
becomes a part of body A, and body B, and so on, and through
this fact there appear, for the first time, individual souls.
It is just as if I had a great quantity of liquid in one mass,
and having taken twenty glasses had filled each with the
liquid, so that I have this liquid, which as such is a unity,
thus divided, just so I have the Psyche in the same condition,
because it is incorporated in bodies which, however, it has
itself created. Thus in the Plotinistic sense a man can view
himself according to his exterior, his vessel. But that is at
bottom only the way in which the soul reveals itself, in which
the soul also becomes individualized. Afterward man has to
experience within him his very own soul, which raises itself
upward to the idea-world. Still later there comes a higher form
of experience. That one should speak of abstract concepts
— that has no meaning for a Plotinist; for such abstract
concepts — well, a Plotinist would have said: “What
do you mean — abstract concepts? Concepts surely cannot
be abstract: they cannot hang in the air, they must be
suspended from the spirit; they must be the concrete
revelations of the spiritual.”
The
interpretation therefore that ideas are any kind of
abstractions, is therefore wrong. This is the expression of an
intellectual world, a world of spirituality. It is also what
existed in the ordinary experience of those men out of whose
relationships Plotinus and his fellows grew. For them such talk
about concepts, in the way we talk about them, had absolutely
no meaning, because for them there was only a penetration of
the spiritual world into souls. And this concept-world is found
at the limit of this penetration, in experiencing. Only when we
went deeper, when we developed the soul further, only then
there resulted something which the ordinary man could not know,
which the man experienced who had attained a higher stage. He
then experienced that which was above the idea-world —
the One, if you like to call it so — the experience of
the One. This was for Plotinus the thing that was
unattainable to concepts, just because it was above the world
of concepts, and could only be attained if one could sink
oneself into oneself without concept, a state we describe here
in our spiritual science as Imagination. You can read about it
in my book,
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It.
But there is this difference: I have treated the
subject from the modern point of view, whereas Plotinus treated
it from the old. What I there call the Imagination is just that
which, according to Plotinus stands above the
idea-world.
From this general view of the world Plotinus really also
derived all his knowledge of the human soul. It is, after all,
practically contained in it. And one can be an individualist in
the sense of Plotinus if one is at the same time a human being
who recognizes how man raises his life upwards to something
which is above all individuality, to something spiritual;
whereas in our age we have more the habit of reaching downwards
to the things of the senses. But all this which is the
expression of something which a thorough scientist regards as
fanaticism, all this is in the case of Plotinus, not something
thought out, these are no hypotheses of his. This perception
— right up to the One which only in exceptional cases
could be attained — this perception was as clear to
Plotinus and as obvious, as is for us to-day the perception of
minerals, plants and animals. He spoke only in the sense of
something which really was directly experienced by the soul
when he spoke of the soul, of the Logos, which was part of the
Nous, of the idea-world and of the One. For Plotinus the whole
world was, as it were, a spirituality — again a different
shade of philosophy from the Manichaean and from the one
Augustine pursued. Manichaeism recognizes a sense-supersense;
for it the words and concepts of matter and spirit have as yet
no meaning. Augustine strives to reach a spiritual experience
of the soul that is free from the sense and to escape from his
material view of life. For Plotinus the whole world is
spiritual, things of the senses do not exist. For what appears
material is only the lowest method of revealing the spiritual.
All is spirit, and if we only go deep enough into things,
everything is revealed as spirit.
This is something which Augustine could not accept. Why?
Because he had not the necessary point of view. Because he
lived in his age as a predecessor — for if I might call
Plotinus a “follower” of the ancient times in which
one held such philosophic views, — though he went on into
the third century, — Augustine was a predecessor of those
people who could no longer feel and perceive that there was a
spiritual world underneath the idea-world. He just did
not see that any more. He could only learn it by being told. He
might hear that people said it was so, and he might develop a
feeling that there was something in it which was a human road
to truth. That was the dilemma in which Augustine stood in
relation to Plotinism. But he was never completely diverted
from searching for an inner understanding of this Plotinism.
However, this philosophical point of view did not open itself
to him. He only guessed: in this world there must be something.
But he could not fight his way to it.
This was the mood of his soul when he withdrew himself into a
lonely life, in which he got to know the Bible and
Christianity, and later the sermons of Ambrosius and the
Epistles of St. Paul; and this was the mood of his soul which
finally brought him to say: “The nature of the world
which Plotinus sought at first in the nature of the idea-world
of the Nous, or in the One, which one can attain only in
specially favourable conditions of soul, why! That has appeared
in the body on earth, in human form, through
Christ-Jesus.” That leapt at him as a conviction out of
the Bible: “Thou hast no need to struggle upward to the
One, thou needest but look upon that which the historical
tradition of Christ-Jesus interprets. There is the One come
down from heaven, and is become man.” And Augustine
exchanges the philosophy of Plotinus for the Church. He
expresses this exchange clearly enough. For instance, when he
says, “Who could be so blind as to say: 'The Apostolic
Church merits no Faith” the church which is so faithful
and supported by so many brotherly agreements that it has
transmitted their writings as conscientiously to those that
come after, as it has kept their episcopal sees in direct
succession down to the present Bishops. This it is on which
Augustine, out of the soul-mood described, laid the chief
stress: — that, if one only goes into it, it can be shown
in the course of centuries that there were once men who knew
the Lord's disciples, and here is a continuous tradition of a
sort worthy of belief, that there appeared on earth the very
thing which Plotinus knew how to attain in the way I have
indicated.
And
now there arose in Augustine the effort, in so far as he could
get to the heart of it, to make use of this Plotinism to
comprehend that which had through Christianity been opened to
his feeling and his inner perception. He actually applied the
knowledge he had through Plotinism to understand Christianity
and its meaning. Thus, for example, he transposed the concept
of the One. For Plotinus the One was something experienced; for
Augustine who could not attain this experience, the One became
something which he defined with the abstract term
“being”; the idea-world, he defined with the
abstract concept “knowing,” and Psyche with the
abstract concept “living,” or even
“love.” We have the best evidence that Augustine
proceeded thus in that he sought to comprehend the spiritual
world, with neoplatonic and Plotinistic concepts, that there is
above men a spiritual world, out of which the Christ descends.
The Trinity was something which Plotinism made clear to
Augustine, the three persons of the Trinity, the Father, the
Son, the Holy Ghost.
And
if we were to ask seriously, of what was Augustine's soul full,
when he spoke of the Three Persons — we must answer: It
was full of the knowledge derived from Plotinus. And this
knowledge he carried also into his understanding of the Bible.
We see how it continues to function. For this Trinity awakens
to life again, for example, in Scotus Erigena, who lived at the
court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century, and who wrote a
book on the divisions and classification of Nature in which we
still find a similar Trinity: Christianity interprets its
content from Plotinism.
But
what Augustine preserved from Plotinism in a specially strong
degree was something that was fundamental to it.
You
must remember that man, since the Psyche reaches down into the
material as into a vessel, is really the only earthly
individuality. If we ascend slightly into higher regions, to
the divine or the spiritual, where the Trinity originates, we
have no longer to do with individual man, but with the species,
as it were, with humanity. We no longer direct our
visualization in this bald manner towards the whole of
humanity, as Augustine did as a result of his Plotinism. Our
modern concepts are against it. I might say: Seen from down
there, men appear as individuals; seen from above — if
one may hypothetically say that — all humanity appears as
one unity. From this point of view the whole of humanity became
for Plotinus concentrated in Adam. Adam was all humanity. And
since Adam sprang from the spiritual world he was as a being
bound with the earth, which had free will, because in him there
lived that which was still above, and not that which arises
from error of matter — itself incapable of sin. It was
impossible for this man who was first Adam to sin or not to be
free, and therefore also impossible to die. Then came the
influence of that Satanic being, whom Augustine felt as the
enemy-spirit. It tempted and seduced the man. He fell into the
material, and with him all humanity.
Augustine stands, with what I might call his derived knowledge,
right in the midst of Plotinism. The whole of humanity is for
him one, and it sinned in Adam as a whole, not as an
individual. If we look clearly between the lines particularly
of Augustine's last writings, we see how extraordinarily
difficult it has become for him thus to regard the whole of
mankind, and the possibility that the whole fell into sin. For
in him there is already the modern man, the predecessor as
opposed to the successor; there lived in him the individual man
who felt that individual man grew ever more and more
responsible for what he did, and what he learnt. At certain
moments it appeared to him impossible to feel that individual
man is only a member of the whole of the human race. But
Neo-Platonism and Plotinism were so deep in him that he still
could look only at the whole of humanity. And so this condition
in the whole man, this condition of sin and mortality —
was transferred into that of the impossibility to be free, the
impossibility to be immortal; all humanity had thus fallen, had
been diverted from its origin. And God, were He righteous,
would have simply thrown humanity aside. But He is not only
righteous, He is also merciful — so Augustine felt.
Therefore, he decided to save a part of mankind, note well, a
part. That is to say, God's decision destined a part of mankind
to receive grace, whereby this part is to be led back from the
condition of bondage and mortality to the condition of
potential freedom and immortality, which, it is true, can only
be realized after death. One part is restored to this
condition. The other part of mankind — namely, the
not-chosen — remains in the condition of sin. So mankind
falls into these two divisions, into those that are chosen and
those who are cast out. And if we regard humanity in this
Augustinian sense, it falls simply into these two divisions:
those who are destined for bliss without desert, simply because
it is so ordained in the divine management, and those who,
whatever they do, cannot attain grace, who are predetermined
and predestined to damnation.
This view, which also goes by the name of Predestination,
Augustine reached as a result of the way in which he regarded
the whole of humanity. If it had sinned it deserved the fate of
that part of humanity which was cast out. We shall speak
to-morrow of the terrible spiritual battles which have resulted
from this Predestination, how Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism
grew out of it. But to-day I would add as a final remark: we
now see how Augustine stands, a vivid fighting personality,
between that view which reaches upward toward the spiritual,
according to which humanity becomes a whole, and the urge in
his soul to rise above human individuality to something
spiritual which is free from material nature, but which, again,
can have its origin only in individuality. This was just the
characteristic feature of the age of which Augustine is the
forerunner, that it was aware of something unknown to men in
the old days — namely individual experience. To-day,
after all, we accept a great deal as formula. But Klopstock was
in earnest and not merely the maker of a phrase when he began
his “Messiah” with the words: “Sing, immortal
soul, of sinful man's salvation.” Homer began, equally
sincerely: “Sing, O Goddess, of the wrath. ... “:
or “Sing, O Muse, to me now of the man, far-travelled
Odysseus.” These people did not speak of something that
exists in individuality, they interpreted something of
universal mankind, a race-soul, a Psyche. It is no empty
phrase, when Homer lets the Muse sing, in place of himself. The
feeling of individuality awakens later, and Augustine is one of
the first of those who really feel the individual entity of
man, with its individual responsibility. Hence, the dilemma in
which he lived. The individual striving after the non-material
spiritual was part of his own experience. There was a personal,
subjective struggle in him. In later times that understanding
of Plotinism, which it was still possible for Augustine to
have, was — I might say — choked up. And after the
Greek philosophers, the last followers of Plato and Plotinus,
were compelled to go into exile in Persia, and after they had
found their successors in the Academy of Jondishapur, this
looking up to the spiritual triumphed in Western Europe —
and only that remained which Aristotle had bequeathed to the
after-world in the form of a filtered Greek philosophy, and
then only in a few fragments. That continued to grow, and came
in a roundabout way, via Arabia, back to Europe. This
had no longer a consciousness of the idea world, and no
Plotinism in it. And so the great question remained: Man must
extract from himself the spiritual; he must produce the
spiritual as an abstraction. When he sees lions and thereupon
conceives the thought “lions” when he sees wolves
and thereupon conceives the thought “wolves,” when
he “sees man and thereupon conceives the thought”
man these concepts are alive only in him, they arise out of his
individuality. The whole question would have had no meaning for
Plotinus; now it begins to have a meaning, and moreover a deep
meaning.
Augustine, by means of the light Plotinism had shed into his
soul, could understand the mystery of Christ-Jesus. Such
Plotinism as was there was choked up. With the closing by the
Emperor Justinian of the School of Philosophy at Athens in 529
the living connection with such views was broken off. Several
people have felt deeply the idea: We are told of a spiritual
world, by tradition, in Script — we experience by our
individuality supernatural concepts, concepts that are removed
from the material How are these concepts related
to “being?” How so the nature of the
world? What we take to be concepts, are these
only something spontaneous in us, or have they something
to do with the outer world? In such forms the questions
appeared; in the most extreme abstractions, but such as were
the deeply earnest concern of men and the mediaeval Church. In
this abstract form, in this inner-heartedness they appeared in
the two personalities of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.
Then again, they came to be called the questions between
Realism and Nominalism. “What is our relationship to a
world of which all we know is from conceptions which can come
only from ourselves and our individuality?”
That was the great question which the mediaeval schoolmen put
to themselves.
If
you consider what form Plotinus had taken in Augustine's
predestinationism, you will be able to feel the whole depth of
this scholastic question: only a part of mankind, and that only
through God's judgment, could share in grace, that is, attain
to bliss; the other part was destined to eternal damnation from
the first, in spite of anything it might do. But what man could
gain for himself as the content of his knowledge came from that
concept, that awful concept of Predestination which Augustine
had not been able to transform — that came out of the
idea of human individuality. For Augustine mankind was a whole;
for Thomas each separate man was an individuality.
How
does this great World-process in Predestination as Augustine
saw it hang together with the experience of separate human
individuality? What is the connection between that which
Augustine had really discarded and that which the separate
human individuality can win for itself? For consider: Because
he did not wish to lay stress on human individuality, Augustine
had taken the teaching of Predestination, and, for mankind's
own sake, had extinguished human individuality. Thomas Aquinas
had before him only the individual man, with his thirst for
knowledge. Thomas had to seek human knowledge and its
relationship to the world in the very thing Augustine had
excluded from his study of humanity.
It
is not sufficient, ladies and gentlemen, to put such a question
abstractly and intellectually and rationally; it is necessary
to grasp such a question with the whole heart, with the whole
human personality. Only then shall we be able to assess the
weight with which this question oppressed those men who, in the
thirteenth century, bore the burden of it.
|