Lecture XII
April 18, 1916 Dornach
We speak in
the correct sense, as it were, of the spiritual forces which
are driving forward; we speak of the different hierarchies
and we know that certain of the beings of these hierarchies
remain behind. Then when they reach a later stage, in so far
as they remained behind at an earlier stage, they do not
unfold that activity which they would have unfolded if they
had progressed in the right way, but they develop an activity
which corresponds to an earlier stage of world development.
We call those beings the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings,
beings who exercise their activity for the earth, and beings
who in a normal way exercised their activity during the Moon
existence. From various points of view, we have mentioned
what the significance is of the inter-weaving of such
Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings in the whole world
development.
You see, my
dear friends, centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha
occurred, there was something very immense which proceeded
from ancient India, a teaching which is indicated in the
Bhagavad Gita and in other writings of the Orient. At that
time you had something great, something full of significance,
and nothing of our spiritual science ever attempted to
belittle the immense significance of such phenomena. You can
realize this from the cycle I gave about the Bhagavad Gita in
Helsingfors where I pointed to the immensity of the deep
truths which exist in the Bhagavad Gita. It is also very good
for present day man to deepen himself in that which at that
time was very great and important for mankind. However, since
then, the Mystery of Golgotha has come over mankind and the
importance of this Mystery of Golgotha is indicated by the
fact that we divide history into two parts, that which
preceded the Mystery of Golgotha and that which came
afterwards. But the Orient does not possess this historical
concept, because it is unable to acquire a real understanding
of the Mystery of Golgotha. As far as the Orient is
concerned, you have one absolute truth which is valid for all
age, and they do not ascribe to an evolution of truth.
It is still
very difficult in our time for human beings to understand and
think about the development of knowledge. This proceeds from
the fact that we have not yet been able to completely
permeate ourselves with the meaning of the Mystery of
Golgotha. Let us assume that someone appeared in our time and
wanted to speak in the same way as the author of the Bhagavad
Gita spoke or as Buddha spoke in his time; that person would
do something which would be perfectly valid for a time dating
back centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. One could say
that if the person in question said that at that time when
the Bhagavad Gita was brought forward, then it would be a
correct deed in the evolutionary sense. However, if he
appears today and tries to speak in the same sense as the
Bhagavad Gita speaks, that is a Luciferic act and something
which really was valid for an earlier period has been brought
over into our time. A person who does that would extinguish
the whole development of the intellect, of the power of
conceptualization which has developed in the evolution of
thinking. Now, I am not speaking about something abstract,
but about all this because I want to bring a very significant
concrete phenomena to your attention. A book appeared in 1912
entitled
The High Goal of Knowledge, The Aranada Upanashad
written by a man who signs his name as Omar al
Rashid Bey. This Omar al Rashid Bey is really a very good
German. We see that this book really belongs to the centuries
before the Mystery of Golgotha and therefore today we have to
grasp it as a Luciferic phenomenon.
Now, in the
very near future a book by me will appear which contains a
great many of the ideas which I have put forth in the public
lectures over the last two winters. There will be much in
this book. However, of that which goes beyond what one can
find in ancient India, because it belongs to the world
conception idealism appropriate to the times after the
Mystery of Golgotha. As a matter of fact, my dear friends,
that which Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and the others who I have
mentioned in this book, what they have done is far superior
to that which is contained in the oriental wisdom, contained
in Brahmanism and the fact that human beings today do not
recognize it is the result of the following. Usually it is
very difficult for people to grasp the ideas in this book,
and for that reason I have written about it in my book, The
other reason is that we, in the main, do not have a talent to
appreciate and look up to knowledge in the way possessed by
the oriental. In this book entitled
The High Goal Of Knowledge
you will find not only that knowledge is
imparted, but from the beginning to the end people are made
to remember that what is being dealt with here is an elevated
knowledge, and you have to reverence this knowledge highly
and realize that it is available to specially selected people
and is known by the highest masters of wisdom who have
deigned to stoop down to enable you poor people to have this
knowledge available to you. This sort of approach is what
people like to get hold of, they think this is really good,
especially when it starts off with something like this:
“Peace and blessings be to you, oh dear
ones.”
When you
compare this with the writings of the German classical
philosophers who you will read about in this book which will
appear shortly, you will find those people who have developed
the new world conception idealism and that they put the main
emphasis an man's ability to live in the ego, to experience
the ego; for this is what it must be after the Mystery of
Golgotha. But the oriental wisdom goes not only towards being
able to experience the ego, but actually to overcoming it, to
extinguishing it. This selbstsucht, this egotism,
this searching for the self, this actually exists before the
finding of the ego. As long as a person is looking for his
“I”, so long does he develop this
selbstsucht, this egotism and in order to free
himself from this seeking for the self, this egotism, he must
find the ego. Once you have found the ego, then you are no
longer afflicted by the seeking for the self, therefore
finding the ego is the only real possibility of overcoming
this egotism. That person today who after the Mystery of
Golgotha wants to flee away from the ego and says that which
was said in ancient India, that all that is thrown back out
of the ego into the seeking of the ego, that person is really
fostering egotism. Hence, such books make an egotistical
impression on us today, an impression which shows us that
those very people want to draw away from the world, and do
not really want to seek for their immortal part; they do not
in reality want to seek for the spiritual, but want to
withdraw from the reality of the spiritual in order in an
egotistical way to try in their own dreamingness try to seek
for knowledge. This is egotism of knowledge and this egotism
of knowledge which does not notice itself is the worst form
of egotism. Hence the book entitled
The High Goal of Knowledge
written by Omar al Rashid Bey, who really is a
very good German, is reproducing all that ancient Indian
stuff which is the worst type of egotism.
Before the
Mystery of Golgotha when the ego had not entered into the
development of mankind through Christ, then the way that the
oriental spoke was not too dangerous, but to speak in that
way today is to try to push the ego away and you really get
sucked in by Lucifer and do not notice that you get, into an
egotistical state of mind. This same book furthermore states:
“The person who seeks for salvation in this world
remains a victim of this world.” Now, on the other hand
we say that since the Mystery of Golgotha, the person who
does not seek for his salvation in the spiritual of the world
but wants to draw himself from the world, actually falls
victim to the world, he falls a victim to that part of the
world which is dreaming in him. We say that after the Mystery
of Golgotha, the person who unites himself with the eternal
nature of this world and seeks the eternal within the time
aspect, does not fall a victim to this world. One can take
every sentence in this book and reverse it and then you will
find the right thing. I have noted the following in the
margins of this book: The person who flees from the ego falls
a victim to the search for the ego, since the search creates
the “I” for itself. The finding of the ego frees
you from the searching for the ego, frees you from egotism.
That person who is able to see through this world can win
this world, whereas the book itself says: “Whoever is
not able to lift himself out of this world lives and falls a
victim to this world.” Today, after the Mystery of
Golgotha we say that the person who today is able to see
through this world is the person who can become a victor over
this world. You can see from all this how such a book is a
very Luciferic book. These people are trying to teach
something in the present which really was valid thousands of
years ago; hence we can call it Luciferic.
The person who
has vision permeated with reality is passed by by most of our
contemporaries; they are not able to come to terms with
people who are trying to share reality with them. A person
who, from a certain point of view, could be called a real
seer is Robert Hammerling, the great modern poet of Central
Europe. Now I will not speak of Robert Hammerling's poetry
nor about his philosophy in general. You can read about that
in the book I have recently written. What I would like to
bring to your attention is Hammerling's seer vision, how he
really is able to see through what is happening in this world
and therefore wrote the great satire entitled
Homunculus
shortly before his death.
Homunculus
typifies the people of today who say
everything that exists is subject to and stands under
mechanistic materiality; also all spiritual phenomena and
experiences are subject to mechanistic materialistic laws of
force and substance. Hammerling responds to this question
with a real artistic poetical power in so far as he presents
a person to us such as Homunculus which mankind must become
if they consider the world purely in this materialistic
way.
Now this
Homunculus achieves a great deal. The brain, in a certain
sense, is really a mechanical tool and can itself be produced
out of mechanical action; therefore the brain can produce a
very, very strong wisdom. So Homunculus, Hammerling is very
wise and is able to know what exists in the world and
combines it all together, he founds a universal newspaper and
becomes a billionaire. You can do that sort of thing in a
world in which the spiritual is neglected. But he goes
further. He produces a school of apes, because naturally
materialistic Darwinism has the idea that man descended from
apes. Therefore, all they have to do is handle the apes in a
very pedagogical way and naturally they would turn into men.
This school of apes is a very fine chapter in Hammerling's
Homunculus.
He also shows the type of people who
write rubbish in their articles. In the 1880's Hammerling
really had a good sense of seership and wrote his
Homunculus
out of the reality of his seership.
Homunculus finds a soulless woman and Homunculus, whose
knowledge is not accessible to soul and spirit, becomes the
typical man without a soul.
Hammerling had
an inkling that in the future people would come along and
say: “Thank God we have overcome all this Goethean
classicism and everything connected with it. We have overcome
this belief in homo sapiens, this belief of the wise man who
can find something in his spirit and therefore establishes
human ordering. However, we know that all of human ordering
is purely conditioned by external economic relationships;
therefore man depends only upon these external economic
relationships and fortunately we have overcome this ancient
classicism which emphasizes and looks upon men as men of
wisdom, as homo sapiens and replaces that by homo economicus.
Actually today we have a real homunculism which Hammerling
prophesied in the 1880's. We have homunculism in our
philosophical world conception; Homunculus becomes not only a
billionaire; he establishes a universal newspaper; he writes
the book
The Renewal of Austria Political Programs
by Dr. Karl Renner. Hammerling was a seer. He could visualize
what was going to come. It is very important for us to
realize that and to obtain an understanding of the greatness
of such an artistic creation as
Homunculus.
The greatness of such a creation consists in the fact that
without spiritual science, Hammerling said to himself: What
would happen to the human being if he considered that all he
has is a physical body? Therefore he depicted Homunculus as a
person who, in the main, brought nothing with him as heredity
from Saturn, Sun and Moon developments, but only has that
which Earth evolution has given him. The significant parts of
the ego, astral body and the ether body are lacking.
Therefore we can understand Hammerling's
Homunculus
correctly precisely from the point of view of spiritual
science.
The last time I
told you that the science of the spirit brings together three
things in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha. First
Jesus as He is incarnated as Zarathustra in the Solomon Jesus
Child and how he brings through this Solomon Jesus Child that
which mankind has experienced through its historical
development since he himself has passed from incarnation to
incarnation. I have told you about the Nathan Jesus Child who
has within him that which was actually predestined for the
earth but never went through this earth evolution; it was
held back. I have showed you how the Nathan Jesus Child was
completely described in the Koran to the point where it says
that the Nathan Jesus Child actually spoke when he was born.
The Christ Being incarnates in the Nathan Jesus Child with
the Solomon Jesus Child, the Christ Being Who comes from
beyond the super-earthly, Who draws into the personality of
this Solomonic Nathanic Jesus in the 30th year so that we can
recognize in Christ a union of the spiritual worlds external
to the earth with that which has occurred upon the earth. And
I have brought to your attention the fact that it is
necessary in our time to become able to understand the
concept of the immensity of the greatness of the Jesus
figure, and with that the greatness of the Mystery of
Golgotha, since our time has certainly developed the
intellect, the intellectual thinking in its 5th
post-Atlantean period. However, the spiritual comprehension
of the would has to be added to this intellectual thinking.
Then it will be possible to understand the Mystery of
Golgotha again as it was understood many, many years ago but
understood now in a very advanced way. I might say that
before the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could
have been acquired, that which was inserted into human
understanding through the Ahrimanic powers had to occur. As a
matter of fact, I can say that all the good spirits are
really waiting for mankind to understand the Mystery of
Golgotha; yet in spite of that people are fighting against
this understanding. They do not want to enter into the
understanding of this Mystery of Golgotha and therefore deny
it in an unconscious way. They also unconsciously deny the
figure who stands in the centerpoint of this Mystery of
Golgotha. You know that when a very intellectual person tests
the Gospels in a critical way, he finds contradictions in
them which show that these refer at the most to the fact that
a good man lived in Nazareth. He says that a reasonably
intelligent man cannot believe that other things are
contained in the Gospels, only a weak-minded person can say:
I follow the Christ Jesus.
I would like to
bring a book to your attention entitled
The Fool in Christo Emanual Quint,
a novel by Gerhard Hauptmann
which contains what I have just indicated to you. Now, I am
not going to say that Gerhard Hauptmann had not written a
very fine drama at an earlier time, however our time is ripe
for that which this great poet of the present applies as a
weak mind in order to represent Christ. I know very well that
many will come to me and say: You are condemning this
Fool in Christo Emanual Quint
by Gerhard Hauptmann because you are looking at it from the religious
or philosophical aspect and do not have any understanding for
the purely esthetic. But I might say this: From the purely
esthetic point of view, this work is just an imitation, a
very bad reproduction of Dostoevski's
Brothers Karamasov.
I prefer to read Dostoevski and I advise
everyone to read him rather than reading this weak imitation
of his work which Gerhard Hauptmann has written. (Rudolf
Steiner reads portions from this book to show that it
resembles the things found in the
Brothers Karamasov,
but not in an artistic way.)
This book,
The Fool in Christo Emanual Quint
by Gerhard Hauptmann is highly praised by the critics and they
say that because of its popularity many editions will have to be
printed, also it will be translated into many languages. Both
young and old will appreciate it; it will become a classic.
It really is a novel of the religious battles of our age in
which a person who was a son of the people rises up to become
a son of God. Every religious person will be able to
appreciate what is involved in this novel. This can be an
example of how we are permeated by sick thought and this is
why I emphasized time and again in the course of the winter's
lectures how one of the functions of the spiritual science is
to make our thinking healthy, to enable our thought forms to
be constructed along the correct paths. When one abstractly
states that today the classical time of homo sapiens is
passed and that we must put homo economicus in its place, then
you should be sufficiently awake to see that this man is an
idiot even though he does not think so. He thinks he is the
great culture bringer of our age who is solving the great
riddle of our life. So much around us is trying to prevent
people from developing the sort of thinking that deals with
reality. You will be able to find what I mean when I say
“Thinking according to reality” when you read my
book in which these ideas are clearly presented. The book
which will appear shortly.
Remember that
we have Emanuel Kant who has written the book
The Critique of Pure Reason
in which he makes very clear
that everything is only an appearance, that one can never
arrive at the reality of the thing in itself behind the
phenomena. We also have a
Critique of Language
who wants to foster the fame of this
Critique of Language.
You get all sorts of journalists who consider it to be the
monumental world of the present time; whereas it is nothing
more than frightful philosophical dilettantism. Fritz
Mauthner cannot advance to a single real concept. All he can
do is to say that the word has nothing in it. All the word is
is just a gesture, a pointer. Mauthner does not have the
slightest inkling of language of words. He criticizes the
word, believes that people themselves have created words and
that the words are really hiding reality. Indeed, you cannot
criticize reality because you are criticizing the word. I
will try to make this clear to you through a drastic
example.
Just think what
this Fritz Mauthner does. He has written
Critique of Language
which comprises three thick volumes, a
Dictionary of Philosophy
comprising two think
volumes in which he has gathered together the concept of
existence, the concept of knowledge, and so on. All of this
is handled according to the words: Where words proceed from;
where words first appear; how one word changes from one
language into another. And in so far as he does all this
describing of how the word changes itself from one language
into the other, then he believes that he can say something
about these things. I will try to make this clear with a
drastic example. Let us assume that Fritz Mauthner traveled
through Austria and found a word which has been formed there,
the word Boehmishe Hoffrat — Bohemian privy counselor.
This word is used all over Austria; every other person is a
Boehmishe Hoffrat. What would this critic of speech, this
Fritz Mauthner make out of this word using his method?
Naturally he would look under ‘B’ in his
philosophical dictionary, analyze the word Boehmishe in an
orderly way and discover that it is a part of the concept
berman. Then he would look under the letter ‘H’
to find Hoffrat and would then take that concept and analyze
it in an orderly fashion and in this way he tried to discover
the reality of what Boehmishe Hoffrat means. However, the
singular fact is that in Austria, a Boehmishe Hoffrat is
neither a Bohemian nor is he a privy counselor. On the
contrary, most of the Boehmishe Hoffrate in Austria are
neither one nor the other. It is only an accident when one is
a privy counselor or a Bohemian. In Austria, a Boehemishe
Hoffrat indicates a person who is an intriguer, who has the
talent for displacing those above him, climbing the ladder
into their place at the top. It has nothing to do with the
Bohemian nor with the privy Counselor. A person can be an
office attendant born in the Steimark and still be a
Boehmishe Hoffrat. So you see how words are formed and how
they relate to reality. All words are formed that way. When
you want to seek the reality behind words, then you find very
little of it behind the word Boehmishe Hoffrat if you do not
have the ability to penetrate deep within the words and find
out how there content was arrived at and what the word
signifies.
You see, my
dear friends, our present age has reached this degree of
confusion and people have arrived at a point in their
confusion where they look on a book such as Fritz Mauthner
has written as an epoch making creation. It is not really
without significance to know that the tasks of people arise
out of works in which the fantasy of human beings is poisoned
as is done by Gerhard Hauptmann in his book
The Fool in Christo Emanual Quint.
It is not really an arbitrary
thing when the thinking of the human being is confused by a
book such as Fritz Mauthner's
Critique of Language
or something like it. These are the outflow of the
intellectual pride which places itself against acquiring a
real understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, that
understanding which is so necessary for the present time. I
might say the following: Just as the crucifixion had to enter
for Christ Jesus, so also must the concept of Christ as it
appears at the present time in mankind also be crucified. And
this concept of Christ is crucified through books such as
The Fool in Christo Emanual Quint
by Gerhard Hauptmann. Surely Gerhard Hauptmann feels himself
especially clever because he points to the fact that bishops,
pastors and officials have thrown out the fool, Quint when he
came and announced that he was Christ. But Hauptmann in an
eloquent way adds that eventually this fool could actually be
Christ, then the people would have thrown Christ out.
There is so
much of what is happening in the present time which prevents
people from penetrating to the threefold understanding of the
Christ, to the historical Christ, to the Zarathustra Child in
which the Christ Being entered, to the earthly Christ,
namely, to the Nathan Jesus Child who, however has not worked
into the earth; to the Christ understanding, to that Power
which descended out of the spiritual heights and has
fructified all earth life. This threefold understanding must
be acquired, my dear friends. It will be acquired when
spiritual science is able to permeate through all the egotism
and pride of those who say that they have reached the highest
goal of knowledge. In spite of all that, there will be people
who are able to enter to an understanding of this threefold
Christ. When we come together again, I will be able to attach
something else to what I have said today.
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