Lecture V
Paganism, Hebraism, and the Greek Spirit, Hellenism
11th January, 1919
Wishing to bear in mind
the importance for the present time of penetrating into the world in
accordance with Spiritual Science, we should not fail to notice that
this penetration, as we may have gathered from the various studies made
here, will bring with it an essential increase in man's understanding
of the Mystery of Golgotha. And it may be said: whoever in his whole
soul, his whole heart and not just by ordinary intelligent reflection,
unites himself with the knowledge gained by anthroposophical research,
when in any other way he is connected with modern culture, will have
repeatedly to ask himself what attitude to the Mystery of Golgotha is
taken by anyone to a certain degree changed through knowledge derived
from this anthroposophical research? From very various points of view
we have surveyed this most important of all events for mankind. Today
we will try to look at it in such a way that we shall be striving to
follow the stream flowing from this mystery down into the most recent
times. The fruitfulness of anthroposophical knowledge can be shown in
a certain sense by its success, or at any rate its ability to succeed,
in rightly understanding in a similar way what has happened both in
the world and in mankind up to the present. Whereas human observation
otherwise generally recoils in fear from having recent history permeated
by what is spiritual.
In contemplating the Mystery
of Golgotha we shall have our attention drawn above all to the impossibility
of this Mystery of Golgotha being grasped, being understood, if we wish
to start out from a material study of world events. It is only when
we try to grasp a spiritual event spiritually that we arrive at area
understanding of the eatery of Golgotha. It is true that you may say
the Mystery of Golgotha is for all that like other historical events
a physical event of the physical world. But only recently I have pointed
out to you that knowledge at the present time, when sincere, cannot
say this. It cannot recognise the Gospels as historical records in the
same sense as other historical records, neither can it accept in the
same sense as historical records the few highly contestable historical
notes which, in addition to the Gospels, we have about the Mystery of
Golgotha. These cannot indeed be taken like the historical accounts
about Socrates or Alexander the Great, about Julius Caesar, the Emperor
Augustus and people of this kind. And I have often emphasised that just
what creates the special relation of Spiritual Science to the Mystery
of Golgotha is that Spiritual Science will establish the Mystery of
Golgotha as a reality at the very time when every other method of mankind,
all other paths of mankind, will be found to lead to nothing when trying
to draw near to the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality. For the Mystery
of Golgotha must be understood spiritually as a spiritual event. And
it is only through spiritual understanding of the Mystery at Golgotha
that the external reality of this Mystery of Golgotha can be grasped.
(see The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind)
Now what is of most significance
in the Mystery of Golgotha? In spite of all the so-called liberal theology
of Protestantism the most significant part of the Mystery of Golgotha
is the thought of Resurrection. The saying of Paul is still undoubtedly
true: “And if Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain and
your faith is also vain”. In other words, it is necessary for
Christianity, true, real Christianity, to have the possibility of understanding
that Christ Jesus went through death and overcame this death after a
certain time by livingly re-uniting Himself with earthly development.
It goes without saying that in relation to its inner law this belongs
only to the spiritual worlds.
Now I have also pointed
out to you something that, when looked at purely from the point of view
of reason, might break our hearts because it represents one of these
contradictions there must always be in life, which logic would always
like to clear away—the Christ was put to death. The most guiltless
One who ever trod the earth was put to death through the guilt of man.
We can gaze upon this human guilt and regard it in the way human guilt,
such great human guilt, is regarded. This is the one side of the matter.
But next we have to look at the other side and say to ourselves: And
had Christ not been crucified, had He not passed through death, it would
not have been possible for Christianity to arise. This means, the greatest
human guilt was necessary for the greatest blessing to enter the evolution
of the earth, for the evolution of the earth to acquire its meaning.
We could speak of this point in paradox—had men not taken upon
themselves the burden of that guilt, that greatest of all guilt, the
significance of the earth would not have been fulfilled. And in this
way we characterise one of those great, fundamental contradictions life
provides, which the logic of the world would do away with. For what
is logic meant for? Logic is meant to do away with contradictions wherever
they are found. Logic today however does not yet know what it is doing
by this. With the removal of the contradiction, logic kills the life
in human understanding. This is why people do not arrive at any living
understanding when they want to give merely abstract, logical form to
this understanding. And because of this a man comes to a living understanding
only when he is willing to rise above logic to Imagination, Inspiration,
Intuition.
Looked at superficially,
the Mystery of Golgotha gives this picture—that at a certain point
of time, in a little mentioned province of the world-wide Roman Empire,
the man Jesus was born, lived thirty years in the way we have often
described and was then permeated by the spirit of the Christ; as Christ-Jesus
he lived on another three years, during the last year going through
death and rising again. This event at first remained unnoticed anywhere
in the whole Roman Empire. Throughout the centuries this event worked
in such a way that the culture of the civilised world not only was absolutely
transformed but entirely renewed. This is to begin with the external
side. We penetrate to the inner side by trying to become clear how this
Mystery of Golgotha arose out of Judaism and within the midst of the
heathen world. In its religious conception Judaism has something radically
different from any heathen religious conception. It may be said at once
that Judaism and paganism exclude each other as the two poles of all
religious conception.
Let us therefore first consider
paganism. All paganism—whether or no what I want to say is, in
paganism, more or less hidden—all paganism starts out with the
idea that for human perception the divine-spiritual is in some way to
be found in nature. Pagan religion is at the same time essentially the
perception of nature. In the heathen the contemplation of nature is
always there as a more or less unconscious basis: he feels that even
man arises out of the becoming and the weaving of the phenomena of nature,
that as man he feels himself related in his whole existence in his whole
evolving, with what is there in nature and what is coming into existence
through nature. Then, to crown what he is able to gain by his perception
of nature, the heathen seeks to grasp as it were with his soul what
is living in this nature as divine and spiritual. We see this in those
ancient times by the way which man out of his own bodily nature becomes
able to grasp the divine spiritual, in visions, in atavistic clairvoyance.
In the lofty Culture of Greece we see how man tried in pure thought
to grasp the divine spiritual. But everywhere we see man as a heathen
tries to prepare a path for himself leading straight from the observation,
the contemplation, of nature to the crowning point of her edifice—the
perception of the divine spiritual within nature.
Now if one goes deeply into
the essential being of all paganism—today I can only give an outline
of these things—it will be noticed that a perception such as this
cannot bring us to a full understanding of the moral impulses in the
human race. For however hard it is sought to recognise from nature the
divine spiritual impulse, this divine spiritual impulse remains without
morality as a content. In the culturally advanced pagan religion of
the Greeks we see that the Gods cannot be said to have had much moral
impulse.
Naturally everything is
expressed in a more or less masked way, the reality clothing itself
in some kind of metamorphosis: but to all intents and purposes it is
quite possible to say that in Judaism the matter, the very basis of
the matter, shows itself as the polar ic opposite of the pagan religion.
If we would put it tritely, Judaism might be called the actual discovery
of the moral impulse in the evolution of man. The characteristic feature
of all ancient Jewish religion lies in the essential pulsing and weaving
of the Jahve Impulse into mankind in such a way that its weaving and
coming into being bring the moral too into the development of mankind.
But this caused a difficulty to enter into this Jewish religious conception
which the pagan religious conception did not have. This difficulty lay
in the inability for Judaism to arrive at an intelligent relation to
Nature. The God Jahve, Jehovah, waves and weaves through the life of
man. But when man then turns his gaze to the Jahve God who brings about
human birth, then punishes bad and rewards good actions in the course
of life, and when he next turns his gaze away from the Jahve God to
the events of nature into which man also is interwoven on earth, then
there is no doubt it becomes impossible to bring the events of nature
into harmony with the working of the Jahve God. The whole tragedy of
this impossibility of reconciling what happens in nature with the impulse
of the Jahve God is expressed in the great and powerful tragedy of the
Book of Job. In this Book of Job we are particularly shown how, purely
in the course of nature, the just can suffer, can be brought to misery,
and how in contradiction with what nature brings, the just man has to
believe in the justice of his Jahve impulse. The whole underlying tone,
however, the deeply tragic underlying tone, which might be said to ring
in the human soul of the Book of Job with a feeling of isolation, from
nature, from the cosmos, shows us what difficulty exists between the
simple conception of what the Jahve-Being actually is, and an unprejudiced
contemplation of what presents itself to the human gaze, to everything
in human life, as the course of natural events in which won is interwoven.
And yet this Jahve-God, this Jahve-impulse, what is it for those who
really grasp the Old Testament but the essential innermost being weaving
in the human soul itself? Whither is the ancient Hebrew conception driven
by being so polarically opposed to the outlook on nature prominent in
paganism?
The old Hebrew conception
is with necessity driven by all this to the idea of a being in addition
to the Jahve impulse, a being having a part in human nature as this
human nature is in the present time of world existence, namely, the
serpent of Paradise, Lucifer. Satan, a being who, opposed to the God,
the Jahve God, is obliged to play a part in what man has become in earthly
existence. A believer in the Old Testament must look upon the Jahve-God
as the innermost impulse to which he directs his veneration and devotion.
But it is not possible for him to ascribe to this Jahve impulse the
only share in bringing about man; he has to ascribe a substantial share
in man to the devil, as he was called in the Middle Ages. But it is
mere dilettantism to believe that it is very scholarly to establish
the contrast between the Jahve-God and the devil, the old serpent, as
though it were the same as, for instance, the contrast between Ormuzd
and Ahriman in the Persian religion. The basis of the Persian religion
is indeed of pagan nature and Ormuzd and Ahriman confront each other
in such a guise that we can rise by way of the perception of nature
to their essential being in the world-outlook. And the whole process
of the world struggle, represented by the Persian religion in the battle
between Ormuzd and Ahriman, is a process such as has been taken up by
the other pagan religions into their religious conceptions. What in
the Old Testament is thought of as the contrast between the Jahve-Impulse
and and the satanic impulse, on it meets us in the Book of Job, is a
moral contrast; and in this book of Job the whole picture of this contrast
is permeated through and through by a moral tone. There a spiritual
kingdom is in fact indicated, in which are the good and the evil and
this is rather different from the Kingdom of Nature. It may be said
that at the time the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching human evolution,
mankind had not come to the point of having done with these two main
streams—the pagan way to the divine and the Jewish way to the
divine. Both of these, however, had reached their highest point of development.
For it must not be forgotten, again and again we must remind ourselves,
that such a refinement of spirituality, such a height in the conceptual
life of man, as had developed in the paganism of the Greeks is unique
in human evolution. Neither has it since been reached again nor was
it there before. On the contrary, a firm, clear hold on the moral Jahve-impulse
through natural events, such as is found in the Book of Job, is also
unique and not to be discovered anywhere else. In this particular direction
the Book of Job is indeed one of the miracles of human evolution.
When the time of the Mystery
of Golgotha was coming near, mankind had arrived as it were at a dead
end. They could go no further. They had conceived, or had tried to conceive,
Nature in the old sense, on the one hand, on the other hand the moral
world in the old sense. It was impossible for them to advance. In their
outer form both had in man's view reached the highest point and there
was no higher point to be gained. And now world-evolution actually resulted
in contrasts. It does not move forward so simply, so easily, in such
a straight-forward ascending development as the modern theory of evolution
would have it. This modern theory of evolution imagines, first, what
is simple then rising in a straight line—and so on and so forth.
But this evolution is not like that; another evolution lies at the basis
of this one, in that certain evolutionary impulses reach their highest
point, but at the same time as these impulses are approaching the highest
point, others are descending to the lowest depths. There are always
these two streams flowing—the one to the highest outer development
and at the very time one is coming to this highest outer development
the other is coming to its greatest inner development. And at the same
time men have arrived on the one hand at a certain height, where the
pagan conception is concerned, and on the other hand at a certain height
in regard to the Jewish conception, what developed inwardly in mankind
on earth was only to be reached through such an event that indeed happened
historically, although outwardly it took the form, as it were, of a
world symbol.
Thus, it could only be the
death of the spirit that was to give the earth its meaning. Highest
life, as this life developed in the course of ages, highest life brought
to its zenith, at the same time inwardly, spiritually, implied the necessity
of death. Only out of death could new life then proceed. This death
on Golgotha is therefore the necessary contrast, and the greatest contrast
to the abundant life acquired at this time in the world-outlooks of
the areas and the Jews.
It is true that the matter
can be represented from the most varied standpoints. We have already
done this. But the following, for example, can also be said: the old
world-outlooks all more or less based on atavistic clairvoyance, outlooks
which were first advanced to pure thought by the Greeks—all these
ancient world-outlooks were finally aimed at discovering man here on
the earth. And particularly in Greece, and in another way in Judaism,
this is exactly what happened at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.
Going farther back in former times it is found that to a certain extent
man in that he was thinking about himself was nearer the divine not
having yet come to a conception of himself. At the time the Mystery
of Golgotha took place man had arrived at his own conception of himself.
For when such a thing comes about there arises one of those events when
in a certain measure through its on force the event changes into its
opposite.
Now if you watch a pendulum
swinging from left to right you will find the following. I have often
used this illustration. Whereas the pendulum swings here it falls back
again here through gravity; and having sunk to here through gravity,
at this point because the pendulum cord is in exact opposition to the
direction of gravity the latter cannot work; but the pendulum does not
remain still. And why? It is because by falling down, as the physicist
expresses it (and we can apply the same expression though it is not
correct spiritually) the pendulum has gathered so much inertia that
through its own inertia it swings to the other side.
This inertia is exhausted,
reduced to nil, the moment the pendulum has swung out as far to the
left as it did to the right. The agent towards the left comes about
through the pendulum's own inertia but is then exhausted. This is a
universal law in any process in the world at all, namely that something
happens and in happening nullifies the impulse to happen. And so the
moment pagan and Jewish culture had reached their zenith the force that
had brought them there was exhausted and brought to naught. And the
entrance of a new impulse into the world was needed to lead evolution
onward.
This impulse was the Christ,
for Whom in the way we know, the vessel of Jesus was prepared. So we
can put it thus, that had a man been able, at the point in our reckoning
of time which might be called zero, to see right into what was actually
taking place inwardly in mankind, he would have had to says mankind
at this moment meet the tragic destiny that the forces given them at
the outset of earthly evolution had been brought by the time at which
we have arrived to their highest development where the inner constitution
of soul was concerned, but that at the same time these forces had been
exhausted. Men were faced with the death of the culture that at the
beginning of earth evolution took the course of the impulse which the
men of old had received as mankind's heritage. Then anyone thus experiencing
mankind's fate could look to the hill of Golgotha and see the external
historical symbol, the dying body of Jesus, the dying representative
at mankind, and from the Resurrection could take hope that a new impulse
would not abandon mankind on the earth but would lead them onward. This
impulse, however, could not arise out of what it was possible up to
then for earth to give mankind. In other words looking to Golgotha and
on Golgotha experiencing the possibility of mankind's further development,
men had to aspire to something the world was not able to give. To look
up to something coming as a new impact into the evolution of the earth—this
is what had to be done, or would have had to be done at that point of
time by anyone with an intimate vision into the affairs of mankind's
evolution. This is what happened and this was the significance of it.
It is a matter of external history whether certain events have been
more or less grasped. The essential for Christianity is that this happened,
and took place as an objective fact. Christianity is not a doctrine.
Christianity is the perception of this objective event being played
out in earthly evolution.
And now let us look at the
remarkable way in which this perception of Christianity was spread abroad.
Recently I have expatiated on this fact from another point of view.
Today we will observe only how the conception of the Christ impulse,
that has come into earthly evolution, spread out over the lands of Judaism,
of Greek paganism, of Roman paganism, If without prejudice we observe
the historical development we cannot help saying—Christianity
most certainly did not take such thoroughly deep root in Judaism, but
in spite of the Gospels having been written out of the Greek spirit,
neither did Christianity take deep root in Greece, and when we come
to the Roman Empire it quite decidedly did not do so there. You need
only take what is left of the Christianity out of the Roman Empire,
namely Catholicism, and out of this Roman Catholicism merely take the
Mass, in its way great and powerful, it is true, and you will see what
a peculiar significance underlies this very spreading of the Christian
conception throughout the old Roman Empire.
For what strictly speaking
is the Mass? The Mass, as well as other ceremonies of the Catholic Church,
are indeed in their magnificence, in their incomparable greatness, taken
from the pagan mysteries. You have only to look at the Catholic ritual
and to understand it correctly, and you have in this ritual a reproduction
of the way of initiation in the old pagen mysteries. The chief parts
of the Mass—Gospel, Offertory, Transubstantiation, Communion—represent
the path of those seeking initiation in the Ancient pagan mysteries.
The Christ impulse had to be clothed in the form of the old pagan mysteries
to be spread abroad throughout the regions of the Roman Empire. You
can reed in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact how what
has been experienced in the conception of Christ-Jesus was represented
to those entrusted with the results of Initiation in the old pagan mysteries.
There we are shown how on Golgotha, on the scene of world-history, there
took place what otherwise was always presented as individual human experience
on another plane, in the secret depths of Mystery Initiation, Thus we
see that the secret of Christianity in its diffusion over the civilised
countries of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, known to us as the Greco-Latin
epoch, is steeped in pagan ritual. What was received in the Christ-impulse
as idea, lived on in the sacrifice of the Mass. To all intents and purposes
it still lives on today in the Catholic sacrifice of the Mass. For he
is an orthodox Catholic who experiences Christ-Jesus in all His mystery
when at the altar they elevate the Host, the Bread transformed into
the body of Christ. In this ritualistic action the true Catholic who
experiences the pagan form of Christianity feels what he is intended
to feel. This is not an immediate relation to Christ-Jesus; here we
have a relation in which through the form of the pagan ritual it is
sought to come on, to press on to man.
It is only when having passed
through the civilised lands of the south which imbued it with paganism
or Judaism it arrives among the barbarians of the north, that Christianity
first arises in a quite different form, a form that is intimate and
human. For this reason the prevalent attitude of these northern barbarians
to Christianity was such that they accepted it in a much more primitive
form. And for a long time these barbarian Arians (cf. R. XLVII.) of
the north, kept aloof from the complicated conceptions simply embodied
in the pagan ritual, and represented Christ-Jesus to themselves more
or less as an idealised man, as an idealised man raised to the level
of the divine, as the foremost brother of mankind, though still a brother.
The relation of the Christ to some kind of unknown God did not much
interest them; on the contrary, what interested them extraordinarily
was how human nature stood in relation to the Christ nature, what immediate
connection the human heart, the human mind, is able to have with the
ideal man Christ-Jesus, And this was bound up with the outlook concerning
the external social structure for mankind. Christ became a special King,
a special Leader of the people. How in their imagination they would
follow a leader in whom they had trust so they wished to follow Christ-Jesus
as the outstandingly illustrious Leader. Something here arose that might
be described as seeking a personal relation to Christ Jesus in contrast
to the complicated relation of the south, which could only be expressed
by the imaginative picture realised in the ritual.
Now what brought this about?
Indeed, my dear friends, these barbarian peoples to whom Christianity
penetrated in the north are the germ of what later was to arise in human
evolution as the fifth post-Atlantean period. They were not completely
men by the time the people of the fourth post-Atlantean period had already
come to a comparatively high point. They absorbed into their still primitive
human nature what can only enter a highly developed mankind in the form
of the realised imaginations of the ritual. The barbarians' hearts and
minds absorbed intimately, personally, what in a changed human nature
was received in lofty spirituality, nevertheless in the south received
only in a pagan form.
Thus we see the germ of
Christianity falling into southern hearts and into hearts of the barbarians
of the north quite differently. These northern barbarian hearts are
far less mature than the hearts of the southern peoples, and the Christ
impulse sinks into this immaturity. And we are faced by the remarkable
fact that in the whole south, throughout Christianised Judaism, throughout
the Christianised paganism of the Greeks, the Christianised paganism
of Rome, Christianity so permeated the spirit that before the coming
of the Christ impulse that was approaching man, the Christ conception
was determined and was given form in the way it was possible to form
it according to the old experiences of the soul. For these ancient people
had a significant life of soul, a life of soul, in a certain sense,
of grandiose development. The northern barbarians had a primitive, simple
soul-life, accustomed only to what was nearest the soul, to the closest
relations of a personal kind between man and man. And into these close
relations there streamed the Christ impulse. These men had no conception
at all of scientific knowledge as it was developed among the Greeks,
nor had they any political views concerning the structure of the State,
as formed by the Romans. There was nothing of this kind among the northern
barbarians. Their conceptual life of soul could be said to have been
so far disengaged. They could not think much. They could hunt, they
could fight, they could do a little tilling of the ground, they could
do something else too—well, you have only to read about the old
barbarians of the north; but they could not develop any kind of organised
science. They had no conceptual life before the coming of the Christ
impulse, conceptions could only come to the people with the Christ impulse.
Therefore it may be said that to men in the south Christ came in such
a way that He to come to had to standstill in face of the Conceptual
life which they brought to meet Him. These men of the south erected
a gateway. “You must first pass through this”, they said
to the Christ. This gateway was still what had been built out of the
old traditional conceptions. The barbarians of the north had no such
gateway, there was no barrier to admission, the Christ impulse could
enter freely. Between the people or peoples who lived their lives there
in the north as barbarians, these peoples to whom the Christ came, and
Jesus himself as the individual man to whom Christ came, there is only
a difference of degree. In Palestine Christ came to the individual man
Jesus. Then the impulse spread itself out over the southern lands; everywhere
in these southern countries was the gateway of the conceptual life,
where the impulse could not enter as it entered into the man Jesus.
In the way the Christ impulse came to the northern barbarians it could
not, it is true, enter every individual man—they were no Jesuses—but
it was able to enter the folk souls; these in a certain relation accepted
it as the Christ. And between the folk souls and the Christ a process
took place similar to the one between Jesus and the Christ. (cf. R XLVII.)
This is the inner secret
of the journey of Christianity up through the southern lands to the
barbarians of the north. But they had not progressed very far, these
northern barbarians. And even when the Christ had been able to make
a direct entry there was nothing very grand in the dwellings He could
set foot in. Primitive, the most primitive conceptions, were there.
I might say: what in the south was already highly developed had been
unfolded as if beneath the aegis of world evolution, but the evolution
of a previous stage—what was highly developed in the
south during the fourth
post-Atlantean, the Greco-Latin culture stage, in the north was still
quite embryonic, waiting on till later. Thus it may be said: we have
the fourth post-Atlantean culture stage, the fifth post-Atlantean culture
stage; (cf. R XLVII.) we know that the fourth post-Atlantean culture
stage runs from 747 years before the event of Golgotha to the year 1413
of our era after which it still goes on; we live now in the fifth post-Atlantean
culture epoch. Take any point of the fourth post-Atlantean culture stage,
let us say a point during the fifth century before the event of Golgotha,
when evolution was already advanced in the Greco-Latin countries; it
was, however, very backward among the northern barbarians. It was awaiting
the later development; the same point only arrived for them much later.
In other words, in the north, even though they finally came to a higher
stage, men were much later in arriving at the same point as was reached
earlier by men in the south. It is important to bear this in mind. For
only by remembering this do we see how the inner evolution, the inner
development, of human life takes form throughout the earth.
Only consider to what a
height this Graeco-Latin culture has come by the time the great—one
cannot call him merely a philosopher but the great man Plato arose in
this Greco-Latin culture, Plato with his raising of the human myth into
the kingdom of ideas. When he spoke of ideas, it was not to the abstract
ideas spun by modern men Plato looked up. Plato's ideas are the very
being of the spirit itself. Whoever really knows in Plato on whet heights
this old Greco-Latin culture of the fourth post-Atlantean culture period
stood. During the time the great Plato was towering above all that was
Greece, the northern barbaric culture still had much to pass through
until, for its part, it had brought forth out of its own flesh and blood,
if only for the fifth post-Atlantean period, the same as had been produced
out of Greece in the lifetime of Plato.
We may ask when it was that
the barbarian natures of the north, out of their own flesh and blood,
first worked themselves up to the heights on which Plato had already
stood at an earlier epoch? An the answer to the question is, at the
time of Goethe! What in the Greek civilisation was Platonism, is Goetheanism
for the fifth post-Atlantean period. For how many years go by, my dear
friends, in one culture period? You know that if you take 1413 years
after the Mystery of Golgotha and 747 years before, that gives us one
culture period, 2160 years, a little over 2000 years. This is about
the time that passed between Plato and Goethe, a rather long culture
period lies between these two.
And while we consider Plato,
one thing stands out concerning him that lights forth from the rest
of ancient culture in a grandiose way. There meets us what lies in Plato's
words when his philosophy ascends to religious inspiration and he says:
“God is the Good”, where he has the feeling that the perception
of nature in accordance with ideas must be bound up with the moral ordering
of the world—the divine is the good. With these words the promise
of Christianity enters Greek civilisation.
But with these words there
would also be an indication of a promise with Goethe in the north—an
expectation of a renewal of Christianity. Who could look inwardly upon
Goethe either in any way but as having within him the promise of a renewed
understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha? The boy Goethe, the seven-year-old
boy, still stood like a pagan before nature, and lived again all that
once lay in Greece. He takes a reading desk, places on it all kinds
of stones and bits of rock representing nature's processes, lights a
pastille from the direct light of the sun through a burning-glass and
thus offers his sacrifice to the great God of nature. Purely pagan worship
of nature, nothing lives in this of Christ-Jesus, in this lives the
God who can be contemplated in nature. And Goethe is sincere to the
innermost fibre of his being. Outwardly he does not acknowledge any
God, any divine Being, with whom he cannot inwardly unite himself in
all sincerity. To agree with the conception of God given him by a priest
is for him an impossibility; to learn outwardly what does not surge
up from his inmost soul is an impossibility. Thus, still in the year
1780, there springs forth from his inner being his Hymn to Nature.
that wonderful Hymn in prose to nature which begins:
“Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped
by her, unable
to step out of her, unable to get into her more deeply.
She takes us up unasked and unwarned into the circle of
her dance and carries us among till we are wearied and
fall from her arms . . . (see George Adams translation: A. Q.)
Everything is nature. We
belong to her, she drives us along with her. Even what is unnatural
is nature, The greatest philistinism has something of her genius. It
is she who places me here and she will not hate her work. The profit
is hers, the debt is hers.
This outlook itself springs
forth from his intimate inmost being because Goethe is so honestly seeking
it in the way it has to be sought by him as representative of his stage
of humanity in which there is nothing Christian. You find a wonderful
leaning towards God in the whole prose-hymn to Nature, almost
as though he were still the seven-year-old boy erecting his pagan altar
with its products of nature; but you do not find anything Christian.
For Goethe stands as the honest representative of mankind in the fifth
post-Atlantean period which for him stood as the period of waiting.
But Goethe clearly expresses that it is not possible to remain at the
stage of paganism, when on the one hand, in his morphology and his colour
theory he comes to his grandiose outlook on nature, an outlook that
is at the same time scientific. But this is also expressed from another
aspect when he has to go beyond this perception of nature, beyond this
paganism. From this point of view take the inner impulse of Faust,
take from this point of view particularly all that Goethe has secretly
introduced into his fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful
Lily, take everything about the re-birth of man expressed in this
fairy tale—and then try not just to remain on the surface but
to press on to what was living in Goethe's mind, then, my dear friends,
the idea will come to you: here in the soul of a man is living a new
Christ impulse, a new impulse for transforming mankind, brought about
by the Mystery of Golgotha, a striving after a new understanding of
this Mystery of Golgotha. For the whole fairy tale of the Green Snake
end the Beautiful Lily breathes forth this mood of expectation.
Where Plato stands in the
culture of the Greeks, Goethe stands in the fifth post-Atlantean period.
The question “Where does Goethe stand” leads us on to say:
As Plato with the definition of the Divine as the Good pointed to the
Mystery of Golgotha as a key to understanding the fourth post-Atlantean
period, in all that rings forth from his fairy tale of The Green
Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe was pointing to the fresh
understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha that had perforce to come.
This is the answer to the question of where Goethe stands. What is there
that up to most recent times one can picture as spiritualising all that
happens to mankind? The outer historical understanding that just counts
up men and events one after the other, says actually nothing at all
that can touch upon the real inner being of man. But if we look at the
inner side of what happens, if we see that at the same point as Plato
stood for the fourth post-Atlantean period, Goethe now stands for the
fifth period, then there is revealed to us the spiritual wave that up
to the present day has been creatively surging into the world. During
very recent times history for modern man has in general became thoroughly
unspiritual in the way it is grasped. Goetheaism is at the same
time a mood of expectancy in which one is waiting for a new understanding
of the Mystery of Golgotha.
We come to an understanding
of what happened as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth,
only by trying to penetrate to the depths of the events affecting mankind.
(cf. Karma of Vocation.) My dear friends, as ennobling conceptions
can be called up in the human heart if anyone tries today to renew certain
experiences that were aroused in paganism—for example if we look
up to the conception of the great Isis of the Egyptians. Certainly even
up to the time of Plato the conceptions about the Egyptian Isis as the
impulse holding sway throughout nature still resounded towards men.
If today we hear about Isis, if we hear about Isis without powerfully
experiencing anew what people felt in those times, we are left with
the mere words. If we are honest it is all mere words. If we are not
intoxicated by the sound of words simply words are there—the matter
does not grip the heart. what can modern man do if he wishes to awaking
the same conceptions within him that in ancient days were aroused in
human hearts when Isis was spoken of?
Modern men can let work
upon him Goethe's Hymn in prose to Nature. There man is spoken
to in the same way as when Isis was spoken of to those men of old. And
what sounded to those men of old when Isis was spoken of rings still
directly from the hidden depths of the cosmos.
Let us for once think what
wrong we do, wrong to world evolution as well as to our own hearts,
when we do not wish to hear in this way, when we prefer to take up a
purely external attitude, because the way in which the men of old spoke
about Isis has round it a glory of the past. When Isis was spoken of
by those ancient people there sounded forth from the words a primeval
holy secret. And language in our time ought to speak of this secret,
truly, actually speak of this secret deeply in the same way as it came
from the lips of the Egyptian Priests when they sang about Isis. We
should not fail to recognise when deep things hold sway in the new life
of spirit. In this way, too, we shall once again feel ourselves true
men when we are not prosaic in our feeling, when what is holy sounds
towards us in the way it will sound forth out of the newer impulse of
historical evolution. Then when we prepare ourselves by paganism, as
one might say, through something of the nature of the hymn in prose,
with all the widening of soul we can get from this, with all the deepening
of soul that makes itself felt within us, with all the ennobling of
soul we can experience, we shall sink deeply into what there is in many
of the scenes in Faust or in the fairy tale of The Green
snake and the Beautiful Lily, where we shall find expressed the
mood of waiting for a new understanding among the most modern people
of the Mystery of Golgotha.
This is an indication of
something about the finding of Goethe and Goetheanism that I wanted
to give you, not in the form this discovery often takes but a discovery
that really finds the Goethe spirit in the whole course of human evolution,
for the understanding of the immediate present, for the strengthening
of the impulse we need if we would take our right place today and in
the near future, in which we must take our place not sleeping—as
I have so often emphasised—but awake, if we do not want to sin
against the progress of man's evolution.
More of this tomorrow.