I
should like to take some of those subjects we have had here
this Summer, which have been brought up in the course of our
considerations, and to go more deeply into then. To-day,
to-morrow, and the day after, I will therefore bring forward
certain historical, and also a few objective facts; and to-day
by way of preparation, I should like to point to a few
historical facts, and from these, and especially from the
revelation of certain historical personalities, we shall
then draw conclusions upon which we can base our deeper
considerations.
In
all ages those who have been initiated into the Mysteries, have
always uttered, and correctly, a certain saying. It is this:
— “Unless a person knows how to value aright those
two streams of world-conceptions which we have mentioned:
— Idealism and Materialism, — he either falls
through a trap-door into a kind of `cellar' as regards his view
of the world, or he enters blindly along the other paths which
one traverses to reach a World-Conception.” Now the
trapdoor through which one may fall and which may very
well escape notice in the “Weltanschaumergaleben,”
has been recorded by the Mystery Initiates of all ages as the
dualism which cannot find the bridge between the Ideal —
one can also call it the “spiritually-coloured
Ideal,” — and the Materialistical, that concerned
with matter. And the blind alley into which one may stray along
the various paths of philosophy if one does not find the
balance between Idealism and Materialism, for those same
Mystery Initiates this blind alley was Fatalism.
Our
recent epoch clearly inclines on the one side to a dualistic
outlook, and on the other to a fatalistic philosophy, although
these things are not admitted nor even clearly seen.
Now, I should like to-day, to take a personality out of the
life of the twilight of the 4th Post Atlantean epoch with
reference to the life of philosophy, and give a brief sketch of
him, and his outlook! and we can then consider other
personalities more characteristic of the World-Conceptions of
our own, the Post Atlantean epoch. A very, very characteristic
personality in the Western life of thought, St. Augustine, who
lived from the year 354 to 430 of our Christian era. We will
recall certain thoughts of St. Augustine because, as you will
see from the quotes I have quoted, he lived in the twilight of
the 4th Post Atlantean epoch which case to an end in the 15th
century. We can clearly see the approach of this end, starting
from the 3rd-6th Post Xian centuries. Now St. Augustine had to
pass through the impressions of the most diverse World-Views.
We have often discussed these things. Above all, St. Augustine
passed through Manichaeism and Scepticism. He had taken all
those impulses into his soul which one gets if on the one hand,
he looks at the world and sees everything Ideal, beautiful and
good, all that is filled with Wisdom, and then on the other
hand, all that is ugly, bad and untrue. Now we know that
Manichaeism only “gets on” (this is coarsely
expressed hut it can be expressed in this way) — it only
gets on with these two streams in the Ordering of the Cosmos,
by postulating an eternal, everlasting polarity, an everlasting
dualism, between Darkness and Light, Evil and Good; that which
is full of Wisdom, and that which is filled with
wickedness.
Manichaeism only `gets' on with Dualism, (in its own way quite
correctly), by uniting certain old pre-Christian basic concepts
with its acceptance of the polarity in World-phenomena, Above
all, it unites certain ideas which can only be understood when
one knows that in ancient times the Spiritual world was
perceived by humanity in atavistic clairvoyance, and perceived
in ouch a way that men's visions of the Spiritual world were in
their very content, similar to the impressions made by the
Sense-world of perception. Now, because Manichaeism took into
itself such ideas of a physical appearance, (sinnlichen
schein) of the super-sensible, it thereby gives many people the
impression of materialising the spirit, as though it presented
the spirit in a material form. That, of course, is a mistake
which more recent views of the world have made, (as I have
explained lately) a mistake even made by modern Theosophy# St.
Augustine actually broke with Manichaeism because in the course
of his purified life of thought, he could no longer bear this
materialisation of the spirit. That was one of the
reasons which made him break with Manichaeism,
St.
Augustine then also passed through Scepticism, which is a quite
justifiable view of the world, in so far as it points man's
attention to the fact that through the mere observation of what
a person can gain from this Sense-world and his experiences
therein, he can learn nothing concerning the super-sensible.
And, if one is of opinion that one cannot stand for the
super-sensible, as such, one begins to doubt the existence of
any knowledge of the truth itself. It was doubt of the
knowledge of the Truth through which St. Augustine also passed;
and thereby obtained the strongest impulses.
Now
if one wishes to see what led St. Augustine to place himself in
Western philosophy, one must point to the apex of his
perceptions, from which radiated all the light which rules in
him, and which was also the apex of the view of the world which
he finally developed. That is the point, my dear friends; and
it can he characterised in the following ways: — St.
Augustine came to acquire that Certainty, the true Certainty
subject to absolutely no deception, which can only he acquired
by man with reference to what he experiences in his inner soul.
Everything else may be uncertain. Whether the things which
appear to our eyes, or are audible to our ears, or which make
impressions on our other Sense-organs, are really so
constructed as they appear to be to the evidence of the senses,
that one cannot know. We cannot even know how this world itself
appears, when one shuts one's Sense organs to it. That is the
way in which persons think of the external perceptible
world, who think after the way of St. Augustine. They think
this externally perceptible world, as it lies before us, can
offer no unconditional certainty, can give no unconditioned
truth; that man can gain nothing out of it on which he can
stand on a firm substantial point. On the other hand, a men is
present in what he experiences in his inner soul; quite
regardless as to how he experiences it there, he himself
experiences those ideas and feelings in his inner being. He
knows himself to be living in his own inner experiences. And
so, to such a thinker as St. Augustine, the fact is
substantiated by his own inner experiences: — that, with
reference to what man experiences in his inner soul as truth,
he gives himself over to no possibility of deception. One can
believe that everything else the world says is subject to
deception, but one cannot possibly doubt that what one
experiences in one's inner being, as one's ideas and feelings,
is the truth; that is certain. That firm basis for the
admittance of an indisputable truth, formed one of the
starting-points of the Augustinian philosophy
Again in a striking way, in the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch,
Descartes again took up that point; he lived from 1596 to 1650,
thus in the dawn of the 5th Post Atlantean epoch. His
assertion: — “I think, therefore I exist,”
which remains true even if we doubt everything else, that
he takes as his starting point, and in this perception he
simply takes the standpoint of St. Augustine.
Now
my dear friends, the fact is that with reference to any
world-conception one must always say: A cum who lives at a
particular point of time in human evolution acquires certain
views:« only those who come later can see these. One must
say that it is always reserved for those who come
afterwards to see things in a more radical, true way, than does
the person who has to utter them at a certain period of time in
human evolution. One cannot get away from this fact; and it
would be well, if especially from our Anthroposophical
standpoint, as I have often told you, if it were
recognised consciously and thoroughly, that even what is said
now, even what we acquire as ever such advanced knowledge about
Spiritual things, that must not be grasped as a sum of
absolute dogmas. We must be quite clear that those who come
after us, in future times, will see greater than we ourselves
can. On this rests the true Spiritual evolution of
mankind, and everything of a hindering nature In the
Spiritual progress of mankind rests finally on the fact that
human beings will not admit this. They like to have truths
presented to them, not as the truths for one definite epoch of
time, but as absolute timeless dogmas.
And
so, from our point of view, we can look back on St. Augustine
and shall have to say« If one stands on St. Augustine's
standpoint, one must sharply look to this. — that he
assumes uncertainty as to the truths of all external
revelations, and true certainty only in the experience of what
we carry in our souls. Now, if one gives oneself to such a
perception as that, it presupposes that, as a human being, one
has a certain courage. One would not perhaps need to mention so
decidedly what I am now going to say, unless we had to admit
the fact that it is characteristic of the world-view of our
present age that it lacks courage, the lack of courage I refer
to here is expressed in two directions. The one is this. When a
person boldly admits, as did St. Augustine, that you can only
find true certainty as regards what you yourself experience in
your inner being, then the other pole of this courage should he
there which is not there in our present age. One must also have
the courage to admit that this true Certainty concerning
reality is not to be found in external Sense-Revelation. It
requires real inner courage in one's thought to deny external
Reality in its utterances that true Certainty, which is held by
modern Materialism as absolutely secure. And, on the other
hand, it requires courage to admit that true certainty only
comes when one is truly conscious of what one experiences
inwardly. Certainly such things are said, even in our times,
and there are those who demand this two-fold courage of their
fellow-man, if they are anxious to create a world-conception,
But one has to think differently about these things to-day, if
one wishes to think exhaustively. And herein the whole
historical position of St. Augustine is revealed for modern
mankind, because one has to think differently about these
matters. To-day one must know something which neither Augustine
nor Descartes took into consideration. I hare spoken of this
where I discuss Descartes, in my hook “The Riddles of
Man.” To-day we must admit: The belief that one can come
to a satisfactory philosophy through a grasp of one's immediate
inner Being as man, as it offers itself to-day, — the
belief that one can reach a firm standpoint in one's inner
being, — is refuted every tine one goes to sleep. Every
time a person to-day passes into the unconsciousness of
sleep, from him is snatched that absolute certainty of inner
experience of which St. Augustine spoke, — the
Reality of that inner experience is snatched from
him. Every tine you go to sleep until the moment of waking, the
reality of real experience forsakes you. And the man of
our age to-day, who experiences his inner being in a different
way from that of the 4th Post Atlantean age, even from that of
the twilight of the age of St. Augustine, has to admit:
“No matter how acute a certainty is experienced in one's
inner being, yet for man's life after death, there is no
certainty at all; for the simple reason that the reality of his
experiences sinks into the realm of the unconscious, every time
he goes to sleep, and a modern human being does not even know
whether it does not pass into Unreality, and so what man
apparently experiences securely in his inner being is not made
safe from attack. That may not be theoretically refuted
perhaps, but the very fact of sleep contradicts it.”
Now
if we turn attention to what has just been said, we recognise
how, in reality, St. Augustine with a far greater justification
than Descartes later, (who, after all, only merely repeated St.
Augustine in another age) — with what right St.
Augustine could arrive at his view. Through the entire 4th Post
Atlantean epoch, and even through the age of St. Augustine,
there still lived in human beings something of an echo of the
old atavistic clairvoyance. History to-day unfortunately
notices these things far too little and really knows little of
them; but numerous were those persons throughout the whole 4th
Post Atlantean age who, from their personal experiences knew
that there existed a Spiritual life, because they beheld it.
And in the 4th Post Atlantean age — it was different in
the 3rd or in the 2nd Post Atlantean epochs — in the 4th
age they beheld it chiefly because it played into their life of
sleep. So that we may says: In the 4th Post Atlantean epoch it
was not the case for human beings, (as it became later in the
5th epoch), that their sleep transpired completely
unconsciously, Those human beings of the 4th Post
Atlantean epoch knew that, from sleeping until waking up, there
was a time in which all that they had as ideas, as feelings
from waking to sleeping, still continued to work, but in other
forms. Their waking life of truth dived down, as it were, into
a dim, but conscious life of sleep. In that age one still knew
that what was experienced as inner truth, was not only truth
but also reality, because one knew those moments of sleeping
life in which was revealed, not merely as an abstract life, but
as a real concrete life in the spirit, what one had experienced
in one's inner being. It is not a question to-day of proving
whether St. Augustine himself could say, from his own
experience, “I know myself that during the time between
going to sleep and waking, there arises an experience which is
true, even if not real inwardly.” The fact that one could
grasp such a perception, on which one could stand firm, was
still absolutely possible in the age of St. Augustine.
Now, you see, If you take what I have just said with reference
to the subjective nature of man, and generalise it over the
whole Macrocosm, you come to something else. You come to that
condition from which subjective nature in an older epoch, and
still in the 4th Post Atlantean period, has really proceeded;
that from which it really became possible. Let us speak for a
moment of the pre-Christian era. You must hear in mind that the
Mystery of Golgotha is the dividing line between those ancient
atavistic perceptions and the newer ones, which are on only
to-day in their beginning. In that pre-Christian age one could
still cling to certain living Mystery-Truth. The Mystery Truths
to which I am now referring, are those which pertain especially
to the great secret of Birth and Death. That is considered by
certain Mystery Initiates as a secret which, they think, may
not be referred to among the profane. (I have also spoken of
this in recent lectures). They consider that those secrets
should not be imparted to the world, because the world is not
yet ripe to receive then. In that pre-Christian epoch
there was in the Mysteries a certain view concerning the
connection between Birth and Death in the great Cosmic life
into which man with his entire being is inserted. In that
pre-Christian age, through those Mysteries, man turned his
attention specially to Birth, to all the processes of being
born into the world. Anyone who is acquainted with the
world-views of ancient times, knows also what emphasis was laid
on the process of Birth, — of Arising, Sprouting,
Growing; — all those processes, all those ancient views,
specially concerned themselves with this. I have often
emphasised what a gigantic contrast appeared through the
Mystery of Golgotha. I have put it in the following way. Just
think how, 600 years before the Mystery of Golgotha, Buddha,
who stands ever in the evolution of man as the conclusion of
the pre-Christian World-Conception, is led to his conceptions
because, amongst other things, he beholds a corpse.
“Death is suffering.” It becomes an axiom with the
Buddha, that suffering must be overcome, A means must be found
to be able to turn away from death. The corpse is that from
which Buddha turns, in order to come to something which for
him, though spiritualised, can be filled with Sprouting,
Growing life.
If
we now turn to 600 years after the Mystery of Golgotha, to
another part of the world, and other human beings, we see that
the vision of the Corpse of Christ on the Cross is not
something which man has to turn away from, but to which he has
to turn, which is regarded whole-heartedly as the symbol that
can solve the riddles of the Cosmos in so far as they refer to
man and his development.
There is a wonderful connection within this 1200 years. Six
hundred years Before Golgotha, the turning away from a corpse
gives an uplift to one's concept of the World; 600 years after
Golgotha there la developed a symbol, The Image of the
Crucifix, a turning towards death, towards a corpse, in
order to create those forces from that Corpse, by which one can
reach a concept of the world able to throw light on human
evolution. Among the many things which show the mighty
transformation which appeared in earthly evolution through the
Mystery of Golgotha, there is this Buddha symbol, this turning
away from the corpse; and then comes the Christ-symbol, the
turning towards the Corpse — the Corpse of that
Being Who is regarded as the Highest Being ever seen on the
Earth.
It
was really the case that in a certain connection the Old
Mysteries put the Mystery of Birth in the very centre of their
world-conception. But therewith, my dear friends, (since we are
talking of Mystery-knowledge and not merely giving forth
trivial view) therewith you have before your souls a deep
cosmological secret. Your attention is turned to that
with which is connected the life of Birth in the world's
evolution.
And
one does not come to understand this life of Birth in the
Cosmos unless one can go back to the Riddle of the Old
Moon. We know indeed that the previous incarnation of the Earth
before it became Earth was Old Moon, and in many of the
phenomena connected with our present Moon, that camp-follower,
so to speak of the Old Moon, — (you can read [about] this
in my “Outline of Occult Science”) — in
various phenomena connected to-day with the present Moon, with
this straggler, we simply have the after effects of what
occurred in the Moon-Incarnation of the Earth, at the
time which preceded our earthly development.
Now
there would be no such thing as Birth in all the kingdoms of
nature, there would be nothing born on the Earth, were it not
that the law of the Old Moon prevailed through this straggler,
which is the satellite of our Earth. All birth in the various
kingdoms of nature and man, is dependent on the activity of the
Moon. With this is also connected the fact that the Initiates
of the ancient Hebrews regarded Jehovah as the Moon-God, as a
Divine Being who arranged the process of bringing forth;
Jehovah was honoured as a Moon-Divinity. It was clearly seen
that cosmologically, behind all the processes of birth
throughout all the kingdoms, there ruled the laws of the Moon,
And so one could, I might say, symbolically utter a deep secret
of Cosmology by saying, when the Moonlight falls on the Earth,
on what is represented through this light, depends
everything connected with all the Sprouting, Growing and
`being born' on the Earth. In those pre-Christian ages one did
not turn in the highest Mysteries to the life of the Sun, one
turned to the reflected sunlight, that is, to the Moon,
whenever the secret of Birth was alluded to. And the peculiar
“Nuances” which were poured over the depths of
those pre-Christian conceptions depended on the fact that the
Initiates knew the Mysteries of the Moon.
They regarded the Sun Mysteries as something quite veiled,
something hardly bearable for a humanity not fully
prepared, because they knew that it is a deception, a maya, to
believe that through the rays of the Sun falling on the Earth
those things which Sprout and Grow are enchanted out of the
various kingdoms of nature. That is a deception, a Maya. It was
known that from the life of the Sun did not depend the process
of Birth, but, on the contrary, the decaying, decreasing life,
the process of Death. These were the secrets of the Mysteries.
The Moon causes things to be born, but the Sun causes them to
die. And, however highly for other reasons the Sun-life was
honoured in those pre-Christian Mysteries, the Sun-life was
honoured as the cause of death. The fact that beings had to die
was not to be ascribed to the Sun, the 2nd incarnation of the
Earth, but has to be ascribed to the present Sun,
which appears so magnificently on the horizon.
Well, the decay of life, the opposite of birth, is connected
with the Sun-life, but, my dear friends, there was something
else, not so important in that pre-Christian age, but very
specially important in our post-Christian age, and that
is, that all conscious life is connected with Sun-life, and
that conscious life through which man has especially to pass in
the course of his earthly evolution, that consciousness which
shines forth especially in the 5th. Post Atlantean age to which
we ourselves belong, that is most intensely connected with the
Sun-life. Only we must consider this Sun-life Spiritually, as
we have attempted to do in the course of lectures given this
Summer. For, if indeed the Sun is the creator of Death, of the
decaying life in the Cosmos and also of man, yet the Sun is at
the same time the creator of conscious life. The conscious life
was not so important in the pre-Christian ages, because it was
then replaced by an atavistic clairvoyant life, which will
remained as an inheritance of the Moon. For our post-Christian
age is has, however, become important, far more important than
life. Consciousness has become more important than life,
because only through consciousness can the goal of earthly
evolution be reached — which is, that this consciousness
should be attained in the corresponding way by the humanity on
earth. You must receive this consciousness from the giver, the
Sun, from which comes the living into Death and not the life of
Birth.
Therefore the Mystery of Golgotha appears as that power in
earthly development which has now become the most important
thing for this evolution, — the Son of the Sun, the
Christ, Who passed through the Body of Jesus of Nazareth,
— That is connected with the deepest Cosmic secrets. The
ancient Mystery Initiates said to their pupils: “Try to
recognise through your sleep-life how the Moon-forces are
playing into it. (WE know that even waking-man is
partially asleep). Try to recognise the MOON-life in your
sleep-life, for it plays into your sleep-life, as the Silvery
Moon-shine plays into the darkness of night.”
The
Christian Initiates on the contrary said to their disciples:
“Try to recognise that in your waking-life consciousness
shines; for the Sun-Forces pour into your waking-life, just as
from morning till evening the Sun shines outside in the life of
the Earth.”
You
see, this reversal was fulfilled through the Mystery of
Golgotha, and, whereas in pre-Christian ages the most important
thing was to recognise the origin of Life, it has now become
the most important thing to recognise the origin of
Consciousness, Only through learning to unite this cosmological
wisdom with what man experiences as true certainty in his soul,
which means, only by grasping Spiritual Science with one's
Inner Being, does man come to see the Spiritual Reality
concealed in that which otherwise lacks this reality in his
inner being.
Now
with those means possessed by St. Augustine, the means
possessed by those who stand on an Augustinian basis, one
cannot get very far, because every sleep refutes the real
certainty of one's inner experiences. Only when its Reality is
added to this inner experience does man come to a really firm
stand on the basis of his inner experience.
You
see, my dear friends, that which we think to-day, that which we
feel to-day in our present life on Earth, has not as yet any
reality. This is even recognised to-day, by a few
scientifically-thinking men. What we think and feel in our
inner soul is unreal at present; and that is just the
peculiarity — that what we experience most intimately,
that which shines indubitably in us as truth, without doubt
that at present has no reality. But this is really the
fruitful seed for our next earthly life. That of
which St. Augustine was speaking, and for which there is no
guarantee of its reality, that we may say, is the seed for the
next earthly life. We can say: — it is true that the
truth shines in our inner being, but it shines simply as a
gleam, (Schein). To-day it is still but a gleam, but in our
earthly incarnation that which now is gleam, and as such is
simply a germ, will become a fruit which animates our next
incarnation, as the seed of the plant this year will animate
the visible plant of next year. Only when we conquer time can
we find in what we now experience inwardly, a reality. Of
course we should not be the human being we are and that we
should be, if we experienced our inward truth as though it were
a reality like the external world. We should never become free.
There could be no question of freedom; we should not even be
personalities, we should simply be woven into an ordering of
Nature, and whatever occurred in us would occur of necessity.
We are only personalities, and especially free personalities,
because from out of the weaving of natural events there arises
as a kind of miracle, the gleam (der Schien) of those things
which we experience in our inner soul and which will only
become external reality, like that of our environment, in our
next earthly incarnation.
It
is the deceptive nature of our age to which all fantasy still
gives itself, that we do not take into consideration the fact
that what springs up inwardly as an unreality is one earthly
incarnation, becomes a concrete reality in the next. We
shall speak further on this point in the next two lectures.
We
see how from the standpoint we have acquired to-day we can look
back at the standpoint of St. Augustine, how we can understand
him, and to a certain extent can see in him what he himself
could not yet see. Thus, St. Augustine stands for us as a
specially significant figure in the twilight of the 4th
Post-Atlantean age, because with especial sharpness he points
to the one stream in world-happiness to the stream of the
Ideal; and in this stream he seeks to find a firm point. St.
Augustine sought that firm point. To-day we only want to bring
forward the historical fact.
There had not yet come to people in his age that tremendous
swing of the pendulum which came about with the Mysteries of
Birth and of Death, for only out of this Mystery of Death of
which we shall speak further tomorrow, can one find a real
substantiation of the absolute certainty of what man
experiences inwardly as Truth.
We
shall now have to make a great jump. Just as we hare
characterised what reveals itself in St. Augustine as
representative of the twilight of the 4th Post Atlantean age,
so we will take certain personalities characteristic of our 5th
Post Atlantean age, and study them according to a certain
direction. Of these I will select two.
One
of these persons in whom a certain tendency was developed which
is characteristic for the 5th age, is Count Saint-Simon, who
lived from 1766 to 1825. Another is a pupil of Saint-Simon,
Auguste Comte. who lived from 1798 to 1857. If we have
in St. Augustine a personality who, with all the means which
stood at his disposal, sought through his knowledge, to
substantiate Christianity, so on the other hand in Saint-Simon
as also in Augusts Comte, we see personalities who are led
completely astray as regards Christianity, We can best gain a
clear idea of what lived in Auguste Comte, as also in a certain
sense in Saint-Simon, if we briefly outline the chief thoughts
of Auguste Comte.
Auguste Comte is to a great extent representative of a certain
World-view in our age; and it is only due to the fact that
people trouble so little as to how certain impulses in
philosophy incorporate themselves into the life of man, that
Auguste Comte is regarded as a kind of rarity, in historical
life. These persons do not know how, perhaps not quite
everywhere, but still in countless human beings, Augusts Comte
exercises a school-masterly influence in the essential
directions of their thinking, and one may say that Auguste
Comte is representative of a great portion of the philosophical
life of the present.
Auguste Comte says that humanity has developed through Three
stages, and has now reached the third stage. If one observes
the soul-life of man through these three stages, one finds in
the first stage that the ideas of man tended mostly towards
Demonology. The first stage of evolution in the Comte sense is
the demonological stage. Human beings imagined that behind the
sensible phenomena of Nature super-sensible Spiritual beings
were active and operative; spirits were imagined everywhere in
trivial life — demons were threatening everywhere, big
demons and little demons. That was the first stage.
Then men passed on, as they developed a little further, from
the standpoint of Demonology to that of Metaphysics. Whereas
they first thought demons, elementary beings, were behind all
phenomena, they then put abstract ideas in their place. —
People became Metaphysical when they no longer wanted to
be believers in demons. Thus the second stage is that of
Metaphysics. They united certain concepts with their own
life, and thought that through those ideas they could come to
the basis of things.
But
man has now gone beyond this stage. He has entered on the third
stage, in which Augusts Comte quite in the sense of his master
Saint Simon, assumes that man no longer looks on demons, no
longer looks to Metaphysical concepts when seeking the basis of
the World, but simply to that which results as the
Sense-Reality of positivistic science. The third stage is
therefore the stage of Positivism, of Positivistic Science. The
revelations to be obtained simply through external scientific
experience should be regarded by man as leading to a
world-conception. He should explain himself in the some way as
the metaphysical explanation given about the orderings of
space, as physics explain the law of Forces, Chemistry the
ordering of Substances, or Biology the ordering of Life. Just
as everything can thus be explained by the different Sciences,
so Comte tried to present a like harmony in his great work on
Positive Philosophy. Everything which can be experienced
through the various positive Sciences is considered by Comte as
the sole thing worthy of man in the third stage. Christianity
itself he still considers as the highest development of the
last phase of Demonology, Then appeared Metaphysics, —
which gave man a number of abstract concepts. But a concrete
reality which alone can give an existence worthy of man on
Earth, that can be given by Positive Science alone, according
to Comte. And so he even tries to found a Church on the basis
of Positive Science, to bring man into such social structures
as can be grasped on a basis of Positive Science. It is very
extraordinary to see to what things Auguste Comte really came
at last. I will only bring forward a few really characteristic
features, He occupied himself a great deal with the founding of
a Positivistic Church. Now if you just take the various points,
you will at once perceive the spirit of it. This Positivistic
Church was to bring out a kind of Calendar. A certain number of
the days of the year were to be devoted, for instance, to the
memory of such people as Newton or Galileo, or Kepler; the
bearers of Positivistic Science, These days were to be devoted
to their veneration. Other days should then be devoted to the
condemnation of such people as Julian the Apostate or Napoleon.
All that was to be regulated. Life itself was to be regulated
with a great sweep, according to the basic principles of
Positivistic Science.
Now
anyone who knows life to-day, knows that no great number of
human beings would take such ideals as those of Augusts Comte
seriously although that is simply cowardice, because in truth
people do think as Auguste Comte did. If one studies the image
the Positivistic Church of Comte gives, one actually gets the
impression that the structure of his Church accords absolutely
and entirely with that of the Roman Catholic Church. Only the
Christ is lacking in the Positivistic Church of Auguste Comte,
and that is the extraordinary thing. That is just what we must
place before our souls as characteristic, — Auguste Comte
seeks a Catholic Church without the Christ. That is what he
came to, when he took those three stages into his soul; —
Demonology, Metaphysics and Positivism. And one can say he took
over all the “clothing” of Christianity, as it came
to him out of history. He considered the clothing very good;
but the Christ Himself he wished to banish out of his Church.
That is the essential point round which everything revolves in
Auguste Comte. A Catholic Church without the Christ.
That, my dear friends, is infinitely characteristic of the
dawn of the 5th Post-Atlantean age, because as Auguste Comte
thought, so a spirit had to think who had absorbed in his soul
the element of Romanism, and thought from out of this element
of Romanism, while at the same time he thoughtfully in the
sense of the 5th Post Atlantean epoch, with its so absolutely
anti-spiritual character. And so Auguste Comte and his teacher
Saint-Simon, are in the highest degree characteristic of the
dawning of our 5th Post Atlantean age. But in this 5th age many
things have yet to be decided, and therefore other shadings
appear which are still also possible. I just want to throw a
few historical lights before you to-day, on which we can then
build further.
An
extraordinary contrast to Auguste Comte is Schelling; who lived
from 1775 to 1854; and he also is to a certain extent
characteristic of the dawn of our 5th Post Atlantean age.
Of course I cannot put before you even diagrammatically the
world-view of Schelling. We have spoken often of it from this
or the other point of view — it is most manifold in
itself. I cannot even give you any idea now of its structure,
but can only point out various characteristics.
I
told you St. Augustine takes his stand in the twilight of the
4th Post Atlantean age with the purpose, so to observe the one
stream, the Ideal, that thereby he could get a firm point on
which to stand. We now enter on the 5th Post Atlantean age. In
its dawn we have such spirits as Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte
who, in a purely natural materialistic ordering, seek a firm
point in positivistic science. Thus we have two streams —
Augustine on the one aide, Auguste Comte on the other.
Schelling seeks to get behind what can be seen in the world
with the ordinary means of the 5th Post Atlantean age; he seeks
first abstractly and philosophically for a bridge between the
Ideal and the Real, the Ideal and the Material, He tried with
infinite energy to find the bridge, (You can find the essential
points of this in my book “Riddles of Man.”) He
seeks with infinite energy to bridge over that opposition and
he came at first to all kinds of abstract thoughts in the
course of this bridge-building. While he first built on the
same basis as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, he went a little further,
and attempted to grasp something in the world as real Being
— something which is both the Ideal and the Real at the
same time. Then came a time in Schelling's life in which it
appeared impossible to him, with the methods of abstractions
brought to him in the course of time out of the 5th Post
Atlantean age, to build a bridge between those two. So he said
one day: “Human beings have really only acquired on the
basis of their modern learning concepts by which they can grasp
the external ordering of Nature. But we have no concepts by
means of which we can come behind this external Nature to
that sphere where one could build a bridge between the Ideal
and External Reality,” It is extremely interesting that
one day Schelling made the following admission, He said, it
appeared to him as though the learned people of the last
centuries had concluded a silent contract tending to wipe out
everything of a deeper nature, — all that could lead one
to a real true life. Therefore he said, “We must turn to
the unlearned people.” That was the time when Schelling
started studying Jacob Boehme, and found in him that Spiritual
deepening which then guided him to his final and theosophical
period of life, from which proceeded his wonderful books the
“Freedom of Man,” “The Gods of
Samathrace,” the Kabiri Divinities; followed by his
“Philosophy of Mythology” and the “Philosophy
of Revolution.”
Now
what Schelling most sought, especially in the last period of
his life, was to understand the intervention of the Mystery of
Golgotha into the history of mankind. That he sought
especially; and while so doing it occurred to him that, with
the ideas at the disposal of modern learning, one could never
really understand the life which flows from the Mystery of
Golgotha; which means that one could never come to understand
the true life of man. Thereby Schelling — formed the
conclusion, (and that is the tendency which I want to emphasise
especially now: — we will build further on this in the
next lecture) -, which is in complete contrast to that of his
contemporary, Auguste Comte. That is the remarkable thing. We
may say that Auguste Comte seeks a Catholicism, or I might
better say a Catholic Church, without Christianity;
Schelling, with his views, sought a Christianity without a
Church. Schelling seeks, as it were, to Christianise the whole
of modern life, to permeate it with Christianity; so that
everything which human beings can Think and Feel and Will is
absolutely saturated by the Christ-Impulse, He does not seek a
separate clerical life for Christianity, especially not after
the type found in historical evolution, although he
studied this life very carefully.
Thus we have those two extremes — Auguste Comte's
thought, of a Church without Christ, and Schelling's thought,
of a Christ without a Church.
I
just wanted to place these historical views before your soul,
in order to be able to build further on these things. We have
seen one spirit who seeks a firm starting point in Idealism
— A spirit, Auguste Comte, who seeks a firm starting
point in Realism, and then a personality such as Schelling who
seeks to build a bridge between them. Both these tendencies
preceded the evolution in which we ourselves are
engaged.
We
may say the following: — we can now survey those things
which have contributed through many centuries to the life of
World-Conceptions, and then we can turn our attention to the
way in which these ideas have developed in the widest circles
of human beings. The study of Auguste Comte gives a very
important Apercu, but Comte himself could not attain this,
because he stuck so rigidly to his positivistic prejudices. But
something which can give us an important starting point
for our considerations for the next days results, when we see
in an Apercu the connection between St. Augustine, Augusts
Comte, and Schelling, I will just put this at the conclusion of
these considerations, because I should like it to have a place
in your souls. We shall then have to speak of that which is
connected in a significant way with just this. Now, as this
Apercu results from a consideration of what I have told you, I
will simply put aphoristically, without giving the foundations
for it in detail, the reason why this, which is not to be found
in Auguste Comte, is to be found in others. I have told you
that it is important not to consider the life of these
World-views individually in the abstract, but one must regard
them as incorporated into the entire life of humanity. Only
thereby does one reach a standpoint of reality, then one can
see the incorporation of these things into the collective life
of mankind.
It
was clear to Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte that they could only
come to their positivism in recent times, that it would have
been impossible in an earlier age. Auguste Comte feels it
especially strongly! he says approximately: “My mode of
thought is only possible in our Age.” That in something
which is of infinite importance in our modern Movement, and is
connected with that Apercus to which I am referring. If one
takes what Augusts Comte considers as a starting point for his
threefold division, one can say in his sense, that this
threefold division is Theology, Metaphysics, and what he calls
Positivistic Science.
It
is very characteristic that one can put this questions
“Who will most easily be a believer in any one of these
directions?” I beg you not to misunderstand what I am
saying with reference to this Apercu, not even to grasp it as a
one-sided radical dogma to be applied very roughly with
absolute certainty to our present age, but to take it as
applying to the whole evolution of man, as it must if one will
regard what I now say. One can ask: not “Who will be a
believer?” but “Who will most easily be a
believer in any one of these directions?” From a
very careful consideration, contradictory to facts as it may
seem» this results: — The one who most easily
becomes a believer in Theology (please, not a bearer, not a
theologian, nor worker, but simply a believer; I am not
speaking of religion but of Theology) is
the Soldier. The person who most easily becomes a believer in
Metaphysics is the Official, especially the legal Official. And
the person who most easily becomes a believer in Positivistic
Science is the Industrial.
It
is important if one must judge life, not to remain in the
abstract, but to look at it quite unprejudiced, and then such
questions have to be put.
I
just want this quite treated as an Apercu which results when
one intimately studies Auguste Comte, because he was conscious
that he was only completely comprehensible to the Industrials;
and only in an industrial Age could he appear on the scene with
his views. That is connected with the fact that the Industrial
is most easily a follower of Positivistic Sciences the Soldier
most easily a believer not merely of Christian but of any
Theology, and the Official most easily a believer, a follower
of Metaphysics.
|