Lecture 6
Problems of the Time (I)
Berlin, July 30, 1918
To-day we will
go rather further in outlining the connections we have tried
to understand in the course of our recent studies.
The present
time, with its many diverse currents, spiritual and material,
is extremely difficult to understand; and the effort ends
only in perplexity unless we make up our minds to recognise
the causes as lying far, far back in the womb of history. Let
us look back, as students of Spiritual Science, at the
so-called fourth post-Atlantean period.
This begins, as
we know, somewhere about the year 747 before the Mystery of
Golotha, and closes with the beginning of the fifteenth
century, about 1413 A.D. (The figures are of course to be
taken approximately, as always in matters of this kind.)
Within this period, as we observe it, we can perceive certain
forces, connected with and related to each other, but
differing fundamentally from all others working in previous
and subsequent epochs. This period, in which the development
of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul in man's being took
place, can be divided into three smaller ones: the first,
between the year 747 B.C. (which is the real date of the
founding of Rome), ends about 27 B.C.; the second runs from
27 B.C. until about the end of the 7th century; (693 A.D.);
the third and last from 693 to 1413 A.D. Since this date,
since about 1413, we have the time which brings forth, in its
own characteristic way, soul-forces already known to you to
some extent. Just as this fourth Post-Atlantean epoch can be
clearly distinguished from the three preceding ones (the
ancient Indian, Persian, and Egypto-Chaldean) and must also
be sharply distinguished from what followed it and what is
still to come, so within it the growth is marked by
noticeable moments, if we consider its progress through these
three shorter periods.
From 747 to 27
B.C. the peoples inhabiting the countries around the
Mediterranean come chiefly into prominence. We see a distinct
form of soul-life developing among them. History hardly
mentions it, because history has no neans of creating the
ideas and conceptions which would fit it to deal with the
really characteristic features. This epoch, which I have
marked off, can be characterised by saying that it is the
time when, for inner reasons of human evolution as a whole,
the souls of men emancipate themselves from their connection
with the universal Spiritual world. If we look back into
Egyptian and Chaldean times, during the epoch of the
Sentient-soul, we find in human consciousness a decided sense
of kinship of the soul with the Cosmos. The Sentient-Soul in
man's nature was then able to perceive that man is a member
of the whole cosnos. We cannot rightly estimate what is
characteristic of the Egyptian, Chaldean or Babylonian
stages, unless we take into account the fact that man at that
time actually experienced a feeling of kinship with the
spiritual Cosmos. Just as the fingers on our hand feel
themselves part of us, as it were, so the Egyptian or
Chaldean felt himself to be a member of the spiritual Cosmos.
A crisis, a veritable catastrophe, overtook mankind in the
8th century before Christ, and in respect of this feeling of
kinship with the Cosmos human souls had owed their former
feeling of belonging to the Cosmos to the atavistic,
dream-like clairvoyance. They did not perceive as we do
to-day. In the act of sense-perception they also perceived
what profane science ignorantly calls “Animism”
— the spiritual, the divine; and through this they felt
themselves as belonging to the Spirit of the universe.
This
relationship disappeared. The consequences were, on the one
hand, numerous phenomena of decadence, but on the other, the
whole marvellous culture of Greece, whose civilisation was
founded on what man experiences when, as man, he begins to
stand alone in the universe. We owe this civilisation to the
fact that man no longer felt himself a member of the cosmos,
but a totality as man, a being complete in himself.
He had in a sense taken his own place in the cosmos, had
begun to live a life of his own. If Greek civilisation had
retained the soul-constitution for instance, of the Ancient
Indian period, with its feeling of connection with the
cosmos, it is impossible to imagine that this beautiful Greek
civilisation could ever have arisen. All the splendour and
glory displayed by Greek civilisation, unequalled elsewhere,
developed in the time between the eighth and the first
centuries before Christ. Humanity had withdrawn into the
citadel of the soul, of the human soul in the true sense.
This was the time when humanity began to move towards the
Mystery of Golgotha. We must not forget that there is always
something in the Mystery of Golgotha which cannot entirely
dawn on human understending, even super-sensible
understanding. There will always be something unconprehended.
It is beyond the power of human conceptions, human feelings,
human experiences, fully to grasp what was achieved by the
entrance of the Christ into earthly evolution. Therefore the
Mystery had, in a sense, so to take place that while it was
in progress, human civilisation was not ready fully to share
in it; it had to tale its course separately, side by side
with ordinary human experience. That is fairly evident, even
from history. How much did human civilisation around the
Mediterranean notice of what happened in the far-off Jewish
province of Palestine, with regard to Christ Jesus? How
little did it enter into the consciousness of civilised
humanity, even that of Tacitus, who was writing only a
century after the Mystery of Golgotha!
On the one hand
we have the current of human civilisation, and on the other
the stream which brought with it the Mystery of Golgotha: the
two run their course side by side. This could happen only
because man, civilised man, at the time of the Divine Event,
was severed from the Divine, was living a life which had no
direct connection with the Spiritual. Thus on the earth
itself there took place a spiritual event, which went its way
side by side with human civilisation. Such a juxtaposition of
outer civilisation with a Mystery-Event is unthinkable in any
earlier period. It never had happened before, because in
earlier times human civilisation knew and recognised itself
as being in connection with happenings in the realm of the
Divine-Spiritual. It is very distinctive, very rremarkable,
that the secular culture which ran parallel with the Mystery
of Golotha was remote from it; man had severed himself from
it.
In the second
period, which lasted from about 27 B.C. to 693 A.D.,
mid-European civilisation was not of a kind to enable secular
culture to come to an understanding of the Mystery of
Golgotha. This may sound very strange, considering that
Christianity had made itself at home in this secular culture
and had spread over the civilisation of mid-Europe; but its
expansion took place in the way I have described. The Mystery
of Golgotha was isolated, was alone. Certainly, it was
accepted as outer dogma to this extent: Christ had come, had
called Apostles, had accomplished this or that for humanity,
had said this or that about man's relation to the Divine. All
this was readily accepted in its outer application by secular
culture, but this outer recognition does not alter the fact
that in reality all those who accepted Christianity in these
early centuries were far removed from an inner
understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. With the help of
the Gnosis, or of all that had been carried over as treasures
of wisdom from the ancient pagan world, they might have come
near to facing the question: “What really happened in
the Mystery of Golgotha?” They did not do so. They
declared everything heresy which might have led to an
understanding of it, and tried to accomplish the impossible,
to put into trivial forms what never could be confined within
such forms, what could be the object only of wisdom's highest
aspiration — the Mystery of Golgotha.
Hence the
organisations fostered during the early centuries of
Christianity were not such as to help people to unite
theyeselves with the Mystery; their effect was to encourage
in the human soul something very remote from a genuine inner
feeling of understanding and partaking in it. The
“Church” was an organization rather for the
non-understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Anyone who
follows up what the various councils, and more especially the
intrigues of the Church, strove to accomplish, will find that
all thse efforts went towards getting certain dogmatic ideas
accepted, and towards inducing people co think of everything
connected with the Mystery of Golgotha as law in no real
relationship to the life of the human soul. All this led up
to a certain point, which can be described, somewhat
radically, in the following way. Men tried to accommodate
themselves, here on earth, to certain ideas concerning the
Mystery of Golgotha and its effects; but the most important
thing was not the extent to which they could come to know
about it and to absorb it into their souls. It was that they
should be able to adopt this belief: “We grasp the fact
that the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished on its own
account, independently of us, and Christ will take care that
we are saved!” This tendency gained ground until the
reality of spiritual events was relegated to a region quite
outside the soul; sacred, spiritual events were not to be
thought of as connected with what took place in any human
breast; the two were to be as widely separated as possible.
Within, this tendency lay the germ of a purpose —
unexpressed of course, but active subconsciously —
which emerged clearly for the first time at the Council of
Constantinople in 869. The aim was to keep the human spirit
away from any individual, personal concern with the
spiritual, (which was restricted to the Mystery of Golgotha),
and therefore from any inclination to understand the Mystery
in terms of personal experience. It was to remain
incomprehensible. So the Church was able to include more and
more people of a purely secular frame of mind, who came to
believe that the super-sensible was beyond the range of the
human soul, and that human thinking should confine itself to
the objects and activities of the physical world. No forces
were to be developed out of the human soul which could lead
to an independent understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.
In certain decrees of this eighth Council of Constantinople
it is clearly stated that European humanity might not —
because the forces of the human soul were not equal to it
— reflect on the realm wherein the life appertaining to
the Mystery of Golgotha had taken its course.
In this middle
period of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, lasting from 27
B.C. until 693 A.D. something was accomplished which may be
described as the confirming of humanity in the belief that
all human knowledge and experience is adapted, only for the
palpable “this life”; the impalpable,
supersensible realm the “beyond” as it is called,
must be always withdrawn from their ken, inaccessible to
direct perception. The entire history of those centuries can
be understood only by keeping this cardinal fact in mind: The
whole policy of the Catholic Church was directed to bringing
men to the belief: “The soul can know only the things
of this life; as regards the super-sensible, thou must
approach this in a way which has nothing to do with thy
intelligence or personal knowledge”. The effect of this
was that after the close of this epoch, in the eighth and
ninth centuries, a sort of obscurity descended on European
humanity as regards the connection of the human soul with the
super-sensible. And certain later phenomena, among which that
of Bernard of Clairvaux is typical, can be explained only by
the fact that such men remained in a sense beyond the
physical, in “the other world”, their souls
absorbed in what is inaccessible to rational human
understanding. This enthusiasm for something which
undoubtedly lies beyond all human comprehension must be seen
in the entire disposition of soul in a Bernard of Clairvaux,
if he is to be understood. In his personality we find many
traits which are great and powerful in the it effects, for
what is capable of a more or less distorted activity is
equally capable of a beautiful, great and glorious one.
Bernard had characteristics which clearly show him to be a
product of that disposition of soul which developed in
Western civilisation in the way I have described, during
these particular centuries. Many other men resembled him; he
is just a typical figure — as, for instance, when he
spoke to his followers (who were very numerous) of all that
would be bestowed on humanity by the “Crusade” he
contemplated. Then came the failure of the whole attempt. How
did this devout man speak of the failure? Somewhat this way:
If everything, everything goes wrong, may the blame be on
me alone, not on the Divine, which must be always
right. Even when such a man was convinced of his connection
with what he conceived of as the Divine-Spiritual power
behind events, he separated the one from the other and said:
“Lay the sin at my door: Providence is
something that takes its own course in a realm beyond and
apart from that of the human soul.
So, at the
beginning of the third period of the fourth post-Atlantean
epoch of civilisation, something akin to a darkening
descended on humanity — best expressed by saying; that
man's horizon no longer extended to the idea of a connection
with spiritual currents and impulses. In philosophy of the
centuries between the eighth and 15th one finds always the
same aim — to prove that human ideas and concept should
in no case attempt to grasp the course of spiritual reality,
that spiritual reality can only be, and must be, a matter of
Revelation, left to the teaching office of the church.
— this was reduced to a convenient formula!
Thus had the
power of the Church been built up. This power of the Church
did not derive purely from theological impulse, but from the
fact that man was banished to the physical life of the senses
as regards the use of his own forces of knowledge and mental
powers, and was not allowed to think of a knowledge of the
super-sensible. Hence arose a conception of belief
which was not in existence in the early centuries (although
it is sometimes antedated), but developed later. It took this
form: “Concerning the Divine-Spiritual only faith is
possible — not knowledge.” This division between
the “truth of Faith” and the “truth of
knowledge” was actually made against certain
significant historical backgrounds, which should be studied
in connection with the things I have indicated.
We have been
living since the 15th century, approximately since 1413 A.D.,
during a period (this will become evident in the third
millennium), in which we are concerned in part with the
heritage of all that has happened under such influence as I
have described. On the one hand stand of the legacies from
those days; on the other we have to deal with something
coming to view in this, the fifth post-Atlantean period
— something entirely new. In the fourth
period, when we look back at it, we see that there was then a
kind of severance of the human soul from the
Divine-Spiritual, a banishment to purely external physical
sense-transactions. That was the new thing in the fourth
period. It did not exist in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, as I
have already pointed out. We now have to deal with an
analogous novelty in our own epoch, and humanity's task,
— having entered on an age in which self-consciousness
must play an ever greater and greater part — is to
distinguish between what is a legacy from time past, and what
is newly added to it from our own time. Let us first look at
the inheritance, legacy.
We have seen
that it consists in man having been constrained to develop
his soul-life apart from the super-sensible. Moreover there
is another result of this, the more clearly to be seen the
closer the events of history are surveyed; indeed, a
searching review shows the facts to be unquestionable,
admitting of no doubt whatsoever. This fact is that man,
confining his soul-force to the sense-perceptible, was
willing to be severed from the super-sensible, and finally
— since the 15th century — arrived at rejecting
the super-sensible altogether. The eighth Council of
Constantinople in 869, is characterized by the wish to keep
man and a super sensible apart; and from this separation,
sponsored deliberately by the Church, spraying the rejection
of the super-sensible — the believe arose that the
super-sensible might be only a matter of imagination and have
no reality. If one investigates the Genesis of modern
materialism from an historical, psychological point of view,
the Church must be held responsible for it. Of
course the Church is only the outer expression of deeper
forces working in man's evolution, but to notice how one
thing arises from another enables one to understand the
course of events. In the fourth post-Atlantean age, the
orthodox man would say: “The human faculty of knowledge
is adapted only for understanding what is connected with the
realm of the senses. The super-sensible must be left to
revelation, which may not be contested; to speak against
revelation is heresy and can lead only to
delusion.”
The modern
Marxist, a modern Social Democrat, true scion of this view
— which is nothing but the consequence of the
Catholicism of earlier centuries — says: “All
knowledge worthy of the name is concerned only with
sense-perceptible, physical events; there is no
‘Spiritual Science’ because there is no such thing
as spirit. ‘Spiritual’ Science is, at best,
Social Science, the science of human communities”. Of
course this tendency has come to fruition differently in
various parts of the civilized world, but the differences are
no more than nuances.
Hence, from the
ninth century onwards, in the central and western countries
of Europe, it becomes necessary to ensure that human
soul-life should occupy itself with the super-sensible by
“believing” in it, but should know of it
only through revelation. The races and peoples of Central
Europe were such that they had to be handled carefully; they
could not be treated in the same simple way. To say to
people: “Your human capacities are limited to eating
and drinking and things of the outer world; the super-sensible
is beyond you” — that could not be done in
Western Europe; but it was done in Eastern Europe, and that
is the reason for the cleavage between the Eastern and
Western Churches. In Eastern Europe, people really were
confined to the sense-world; that was where their capacities
had to unfold. That which finally led to the Orthodox
religion was to be developed in the Heights of
Mystery-experience, quite untouched by anything to do with
the senses. What man brought forth out of his human nature
was set sharply apart from the true spiritual world, which
lived only in the ritual that hovered loftily above
mankind.
What was it
that had to develop there? In varying shades, the point of
view, the perception, better reality belonged only to the
physical world of the senses. One might say that forces
towards which man adopts an attitude of repression, do not
develop, but atrophy. If, then, humanity was restrained for
centuries from spiritually grasping the super-sensible, the
power of doing so was bound in the end to disappear
completely. It is what we find in the modern socialistic
views of life, whose misfortune consists — not in their
Socialism! — but in the fact that they entirely reject
the spiritual-super-sensible, and are therefore obliged to
confine themselves to a social structure which takes account
only of the animal side of man's nature. This was prepared
for by the paralyzing of man's super-sensible forces; hence it
follows that men are driven into saying: “Care for our
salvation shall not in any way make us unite our soul's
knowledge experience with the stream that lives a life on its
own — The stream which includes the Mystery of
Golgotha”. — With what is this connected?
With the fact
that in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the Luciferic forces
were especially active. They severed man from the cosmos,
because their aim is invariably to isolate man in
selfishness, to cut him off from the whole spiritual
universe, as well as from the knowledge of his connection to
the physical one. Hence, when this severance was at its
height, there were no natural sciences. This was Lucifer's
doing. The activity which separated sense-knowledge from
dogma regarding the super-sensible, was therefore a Luciferic
one. Over against it stands the Ahrimanic influence; and
these two are the great adversaries of the human soul. The
fact that the super-sensible forces of humanity have been
allowed to atrophy — leading to a purely animal form of
Socialism, now due to break over humanity in a devastating
and destructive way — is to be traced to Luciferic
forces. The new influence, developing in our age, is
of a different nature, more Ahrimanic. The Luciferic element
would isolate man, cut him off from the
spiritual-super-sensible, and lead him to experience the
illusion of being a totality in himself. On the other hand,
the Ahrimanic element inspires man with fear of the
spiritual, keeps him away from it, fosters in him the
illusion that the spiritual cannot be attained by mankind.
The Luciferic keeping away of man from the super-sensible
might be described as of a more educational, cultured kind,
whereas the Ahrimanic, founded on fear of the spiritual, is
more ‘natural,’ arising in the age which began
with 15th century. And as the Luciferic severance from the
spiritual came especially to expression under the cover of
Orthodox Christianity of the East, so the Ahrimanic fear, the
holding back from the spiritual, makes itself felt especially
in the culture of the West, and particularly in the element
of American civilization.
Such truths may
be unpalatable today, but they are truths nevertheless, and
we get very little farther by generalizing — however
mystically or theosophically — about the connection of
the human with the Divine, or whatever it may be called. We
can progress only by recognizing the reality as it is. We can
reduce our chaos to order only if we recognize the true
characteristics of the different currents running
side-by-side. These various currents, springing from their
several assumptions, spread out locally, and so everything is
confused in the hodgepodge called “modern
civilization”. What I am now speaking of as
“Americanism” (as collective concept,
not applying to individual Americans), is fear of
the spiritual, the longing to live only on the physical
plane, or at most in what improves into that plane as coarse
Spiritualism and such-like, which is not in the real sense,
spiritual at all. The mark of Americanism is fear of the
spiritual; it is by no means confined to America, but there
it lives as a social characteristic, not simply a human one.
Above all it is predominant in all science. Science has
increasingly been founded on “fear of the
spiritual”. Nothing in science is called
“objective” unless it excludes as far as possible
living conceptions engendered in the inwardness of the soul.
No idea, no conception, engendered in the inwardness of the
soul, is permitted to intrude into the observation of nature.
This is allowed to embrace only what is dead, not
the living that is spirit-inwoven. If, in the manner
of Hegel, Shelling or Goethe — those genuine
representatives of Mid-European thought — anyone
introduces the “concept” into observation of
nature, he is at once thought to be on the road to
uncertainty, for no objective reality is ever expected to be
attained through spiritual comprehension or experience. It is
assumed that this means bringing in personal bias; that an
experiment ceases to be objective directly anytime anything
subjective enters into it. That is Ahrimanic. Science is
universally “American” in so far as it clings to
the fundamental axiom, “Everything subjective must be
banished from an observation of Nature” . This is the
fundamental result of the earlier severance from the
spiritual in the fourth post-Atlantean period.
Thus a new
element is added to this legacy — a new element which
will make itself felt more and more as a destructive force
alongside all that has to develop fruitfully — and
consciously — in the future. It is essentially of an
Ahrimanic nature; it is fear of the spiritual, and it brings
havoc and disintegration into human civilization.
At the
transition from the fourth to fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and
during the fifth epoch, these impulses became more and more
noticeable. With the discovery of America, and the
transplantation into America of European ways, fear of this
spiritual life appeared there, too; but on the other hand
there arose what might be called a tension in human souls,
for the native forces of the people in Europe were such that
they could not fail to some extent to trace their own
connection with the spirituality of the universe. A tension
arose at the passing of the forth into the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch of civilization, during the centuries in
which what is known as “modern history” takes
shape. Then came this tension caused by the suppressed
spiritual element in the breast of man. Certain people
decided that a barrier had to be put up against it, partly
because they understood very well what was left of the old
inheritance, and partly because they had a very pertinent
grasp of the newly approaching Ahrimanic element. This was
the genesis of that spiritual current — a much more
influential one than most people think, as I mentioned from a
different point of view in my last lecture — which
tries to perpetuate this keeping of the human soul at a
distance from the super-sensible: in other words Jesuitism.
Its inner principle is to do everything possible in human
evolution to keep man at a distance from any real, conscious
connection with the super-sensible. Naturally, this was
facilitated by presenting the super-sensible dogmatically as a
realm into which human knowledge could not penetrate. But the
Jesuit movement knows very well how to reckon with the other
side; it wants no such inner relation between modern science
and Americanism. In that respect Jesuitism is great: it
recognizes the importance of physical science and makes a
deep study of it. Jesuits are great spirits in the round of
physical, material science, for Jesuitism reckons with the
elemental tendency of mankind to fear the spiritual, a fear
which must be overcome by leading human nature towards the
spiritual world; and accounts on being able to impose this
fear on society by saying to people, in so many words:
“You cannot and shall not approach the spiritual; we
are trustees of the spiritual and we will purvey it to you in
the proper way.”
These two
currents of thought, Americanism and Jesuitism, play into one
another, as it were. This is not something to take casually;
and all such matters we must look for the deeper impulses
which are active in human evolution. If we try to identify
the forces which have brought about the present catastrophe,
we shall find it remarkable cooperation between Americanism
— in a sense here given — and Jesuitism. And from
a wider point of view we see, on the one hand, how the
inheritance from earlier times still influences our mental
life, and on the other, the advent of something new. If we
specify these two impulses as the Luciferic and Ahrimanic, we
describe precisely the opposition towards that which must be
introduced into the development of mankind for its salvation
as true spiritual life. Anyone who approaches with inner
sympathy such a figure as Bernard of Clairvaux, who in a
certain sense inclines towards the Luciferic, will take
account of the following attitude: “Human knowledge is
after all directed only towards the physical-material;
therefore we direct the soul to seek the divine-spiritual in
the fervor of elemental experience.” This is what
kindles enthusiasm in a temperament of that kind. We might
say that what lives in human souls as a tendency towards this
virtual side, lives on in our own time, but there is also the
other tendency — towards the dark and somber side. The
12th century had its Bernard of Clairvaux: ours have such
figures as Lenin and Trotsky; as in the former century there
was an active inclination towards the super-sensible, so now
we find hatred for it, although expressed in different words
and substance. That is the dark reverse side of those times:
there the pouring of the human soul into the Divine mould,
here the pouring of man's being into an animal mould, on
which alone the social structure is to be built.
These matters
can be understood only if one has a clear grasp of one fact,
which is far away from present-day comprehension. Our time is
credulous in respect of theories, taking the content of ideas
and programms as gospel, as I have often remarked. It is
reality that counts, not theories and programms. The
modern follower of Marx, at the turn of the 19th and 20th
centuries, before the world-war, would of course have said:
“This is what Marx teaches, Engels teaches, Lassalle
teaches, and that is all one needs for salvation.” He
was concerned only with the “content” of ideas
and programms. In reality it is never a question of that, for
ideas are never carried into life in accordance with their
content, but by means of forces which are quite distinct from
it. No one knows the truth unless he knows that ideas often
have so little to do with reality that may arise
independently of their content. A splendid programme can be
devised, established on a sound scientific basis, fervently
longed for as the Marxists longed for theirs, but all to no
purpose. For an age as unspiritual as ours, this is playing
with fire. Men believe that they are working to realize the
content of their ideas, but anyone who knows how things
happen in life knows that the reality is quite different. If
ideas are not derived from spiritual knowledge they may enter
into cultural life as sheer monstrosities — and this
applies to the ideas of Marx, which are intended to banish
the spirit. However find they may be, they become abortions.
It is no use asking in the morning: “Why has it grown
light through what has happened on the earth?” One has
to turn away from abstract ideas and say: “Daylight has
come because the sun is shining”. In going out beyond
the Earth one sees the reason for the daylight. Similarly, if
we want to understand “to-day”, we must look away
from what is happening in the immediate present to what took
place in a time long past. Bolshevism cannot be understood
except by recognizing it as an after-the fact of the Eighth
Ecumenical Council of 869 A.D. You cannot understand it
except as a result of the atrophy of the forces which man
once had for apprehending the super-sensible world. In order
really to understand the happenings of the outer world, in
order to confront them, we must perceive this inner
connection. For anyone observing the relations of events in
history it is the most fearful thing to see how movements
which set out to reform the world are concerned only with the
“subject-matter” of ideas, and refuse to reckon
with their reality, which exists quite independently of
whether there content is beautiful or not. Suppose a child is
born, a beautiful child; his mother may be charmed. Mothers
are sometimes charmed, even when their children are not
beautiful! He becomes a good for nothing, a ne'er-do-well,
perhaps even a criminal. Is it therefore untrue to say that
he was a beautiful child? Have people no right to say that he
was? Does his childish beauty contradict the unforeseen
things in his life? Just so there have been in many circles
men with admirable ideas through which they wanted to reform
the world, and these men were admired; yet the ideas became
abortions! For ideas themselves are but dead things; they
must be animated by being received into the vigorous life of
the Spirit.
In reading
modern socialistic publications one finds — if certain
differences are left out of account — a great
similarity between them and writings which express the
standpoint of the Catholic Church, although the latter are
differently expressed and deal with different realms. For
instance, I recently read to you out of a certain brochure.
Notice the kind of thought it expresses, it's thought-forms; compare
what is said there with the rabid tendencies, whether
cultured or not, which led gradually to Bolshevism; compared
with the beginning of a publication byKautsky or Lenin;
you'll find the same thoughts. One is the development of the
other. Nowhere does one get a stronger feeling of Catholicism
than in reading certain dogmatic socialist utterances. But
something which Catholicism forbids — philosophizing
about certain things — has become a passion, a
principle: the principle of declaring that all learning comes
from the bourgeoisie, and all spiritual development from
class-warfare. This principle is the effect of the Catholic
principle. Bolshevism may perhaps, in the form of its
inception, have only a short existence: but all mankind will
have to reckon long enough with what stands behind. Anyone
who knows how it all hangs together would not be surprised
that Bolshevism should have donned in the place where this
way of thinking, in the bestial course it is followed,
proceeded under cover of the Orthodox religion, so that the
two streams were entirely separate.
We must fathom
all these things if we want to be conscious of the necessity
for approaching the spiritual life in the right way. Mystical
talk about it is out of place to-day. What is needed to-day
is to apply spiritual knowledge so as to look into reality
and to discover the connections belonging to it; because from
such knowledge alone in the correct grasp of the world's
events arise; never from a past inheritance, or from fear, or
from this elementary new thing I have described, which can
but lead deeply into chaos. In this animalised Socialism we
see displayed one result of what developed in the fourth
post-Atlantean epoch. It has a Luciferic element in it; the
Luciferic “Original Sin” is within it. But what
is now developing is the penalty for that general incapacity
of human faculties for turning to the super-sensible. These
faculties have become truly impotent, and hatred and
rejection of the super-sensible arise in their place. There is
not merely hatred and original sin, but punishment for the
forsaking of the super sensible. (This applies to much that is
happening today).
The impulses
active in human evolution take on various nuances, and events
can be understood only in this light. The peoples of the
Italian and Spanish peninsulas have come under the sway of
Christianity, in the course of its expansion, as well as the
peoples of modern France and the British Isles. We know
something of what has been unfolded amongst them. We know
that on the Spanish and Italian peninsulas the Sentient-Soul
has blossomed forth, on French soil the Intellectual or
Mind-Soul; here in Mid-Europe the Ego; and in Eastern Europe
in the same way a civilization of the Spirit-is to be looked
for, to be active only in the future and at present existing
in germs which are now entirely hidden. Good mankind but look
at Western Europe and understand its riddles through
Spiritual Science. For instance, the characteristics of
Italian regions (not those of single individuals, which of
course grow out everywhere beyond the common norm) develop
differently from those of French or British humanity. This
last is so constituted that the nature of the people has a
special connection with the Consciousness-Soul. Through
living in the Consciousness-Soul man is banished to the
physical plane, although not so strongly in the British Isles
as in America. The result is that man, caught off first from
the super-sensible by ecclesiastical developments, will be led
back to union with the Cosmos; but it is only to the outer
Cosmos that he is led by the Consciousness-Soul. Therefore
the British people, as Britons, find their union with the
cosmos only through economic principles. British thought is
essentially economic, framed on economic lines.
Anyone who grasps the connection of the Consciousness-Soul
with the physical world will see this necessity; also that
the French national character (not that of individuals),
having an affinity with the Intellectual or Mind-Soul,
develops chiefly political thinking and feeling;
while the Italian and Spanish in the same way have the
sensuous side of the mind developed, because the
Sentient-Soul is directly connected with the nature of the
people. I can only outline this, but it gives an idea of what
lies in the characters of the peoples themselves.
If we look on
the German essence, developing as it has in the midst of such
a tragedy, we see that the Ego dwells within it. The whole of
German history becomes clear if we consider this fact, which
is disclosed from the super-sensible world. The Ego of man is
the principle that is least externally developed; it has
remained a man's most spiritual member. Thereby the German,
inasmuch as he is connected through the Ego with the
spiritual world, is linked with it in the most spiritual way.
He cannot achieve any connection with the cosmos
economically, politically, or sensuously; he can achieve it
only in so far as it manifests in the soul-life of single
individuals — as the Ego invariably does — and is
then poured out over the people. It comes to expression most
characteristically in what may be discerned as the essence of
Goethe's genius, of Herder's and Lessing's, as something
detached, a state higher than the physical-sensible.
Hence comes a certain estrangement from the latter realm, a
feeling of not really belonging to matter, when the
physical-sensible alone is in question; hence the great
amount of “Americanism”, and of the elements
which I prefer not to particularise, poured out over Germany
during the last decades, have alienated it from the original
activity destined for its national Soul.
In a yet higher
way Eastern Europe will be connected with the spiritual
through its national characteristics — and will develop
a still higher civilization and a spiritual sense, as a
reaction from what is now taking shape there. But that is a
matter of the future; it is not yet in evidence and must
first evolve out of the animal character in which it is still
confined.
The Western
countries of Europe are directly connected by a lawful
inheritance, so to speak, with the fourth post-Atlantean
epoch. Something more recent, but opposed to
“Americanism”, lies hidden in the German nature;
a certain relation to the spiritual world, sought inwardly in
the spiritual itself. The German Soul following its own
peculiar nature, has no fear of the spiritual; rather an
inclination towards it, such as is to be found, albeit in a
higher form, in Goetheanism. — This is plain speaking,
of course; but you know that these things are brought forward
from knowledge — not from Chauvinism, nor said to
please anyone here. You saw in the last lecture that I
understand how not to speak flatteringly. One thing, however,
must be said: within the German soul — though this is
often forgotten in Middle Europe, there is a dormant relation
of the human spirit to the super-sensible world which must be
cultivated, and which is the exact opposite of everything
else now manifesting on the earth. Could we but have
recognized this, if only, alas, the last decades had not
brought Americanism and Russian thoughts into this realm, how
differently the impulse of science in Middle-Europe would
have developed! You know for my other lectures that a science
of soul and spirit might have flowed from Goetheanism —
but it remained a disregarded impulse! Has it really been
grasped at all? Not yet — although within its depths
lies the true being of Germany, which is, as you will have
gathered, a stranger to the others, for they are still to a
great extent animated by the legacy of the old, as well as by
the new. In Middle-Europe alone has something developed which
has more or less emerged from the old and the new.
By many
indications we see that Goetheanism is untouched by
materialistic science. (Goethe is praised, of course, but an
ex-finance Minister — Kreuzwendedich — is made
President of the Goethe Society!) What exists in the true,
inner element of the German nature will be experienced in
other realms as a continual reproach. The easiest way to
protect oneself against what by nature one cannot
acknowledge, is to slander it. We must look frankly at this.
Such a living reproach can be invasively described as
“delinquency”. This is a subjective way of
escaping from the reproach. Here we touch upon an important
psychological fact. The slander will spread further and
further, rooted in the uncomfortable feeling that the special
relationship of this Ego to the Spiritual does exist. It is
necessary, however, to see clearly in these domains, not to
shun a clear view of them, as is done to-day. Had we not so
much conventionalism and Americanism amongst us, we should
discern that German Goetheanism and Americanism are two
opposite poles, and we should know that to regard these two
currents of the present day with an unprejudiced mind is the
only correct attitude to maintain. We should reject all
exaggerated patriotism and look facts fully in the face.
Then we should
abjure the apotheosis of Americanism in which we have so long
and old son, and perceive that this particular element will
become more and more active is a real, deep-seeded evil,
because fear of the Spiritual is its main characteristic.
Those who say otherwise are short-sighted, not judging things
in their real setting. Everything arising from the political
attitude of the French, from the economic rigidity natural to
the British, or from the elemental sensationalism — the
so-called “sacred egoism”of the Italian people
— all this, in view of the great events now playing
their part, is but trivial compared to the especially evil
element arising from Americanism.
There are three
currents which through their inward relationship had the
greatest power of destruction in human evolution, due to
their having absorbed the inherited and the new, in different
ways. First among them is what I call Americanism, which
tends to produce greater and greater fear of the spirit,
making the world a mere opportunity for living in the
physical. It is quite different when Britain wants to make
the world into a kind of commercial mart. Americanism would
make it a physical dwelling equipped with all possible
comfort, in which man can lead an agreeable and wealthy
life. That is the political creed of Americanism, and whoever
does not detect it is blind to the facts and merely shuts his
eyes and ears. Man's connection with the Spiritual is bound
to die out under such an influence. In these forces of
Americanism lies what must actually bring the earth to an
end, destruction dooming it at last to death , because the
Spirit will be shut out from it.
The second
destructive element is not only that of Catholicism, but
all Jesuitism, which in essence is virtually allied
to Americanism. If the latter is the cultivation of the
impulse to build up fear of the spirit, so the former seeks
to awaken the belief that one should not seek contact with
the spirit, which it deems impossible; it wishes Spiritual
blessings to be dispensed by those who are called into the
teaching office of the Catholic Church. This influence seeks
to atrophy forces in human nature which incline to the
super-sensible.
The particular
indications of the third stream can be seen arising in a
terrible form in the East: a social state based on a purely
animal, physical socialism. Without plastering it with
dogmas, we call it “Bolshevism”, and it will not
easily be overcome by mankind.
These are the
three distinctive elements in the modern development of
humanity. To bring knowledge to bear upon them, so that the
events of the present day may be met in the right way, it is
possible only through Spiritual Science.
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