LECTURE II.
Dornach, 30th January 1921.
The
ideas which we have drawn from various sources concerning man's
inclination to the Luciferic nature on the one hand, and to the
Ahrimanic on the other hand, have shown us how essential it is
for him to find a balance between them. Both tendencies, the
Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, are false paths and man must find
the equilibrium. Now a question may arise which is a
difficult problem of knowledge and conscience for modern
humanity. The question is this: how does one find this
equilibrium, this state of balance, so that one need not
succumb to the Luciferic danger or to the Ahrimanic?
The
answer to this question must be given in different ways for the
differing periods of human evolution; for we must know how in a
particular epoch men are drawn more to the one or the other
side. We have a general idea of what attracts man to the
Luciferic tendency or the Ahrimanic, but we must bring it once
more definitely to mind in relation to our own age.
Since the beginning of the Fifth post-Atlantean period, that
is, since the fifteenth century, both the intellectual life and
the social life among civilised peoples have essentially
changed in comparison with earlier times. Intellectual
life has increasingly acquired a character where the human
being himself is definitely excluded from a world-conception.
Man examines nature, and the greatest progress has been made by
modern mankind in natural science. But the characteristic
element is this, namely, that the actual knowledge of the
human being has not only made no advance through the knowledge
of nature, but has in a certain sense been cast out of human
knowledge. Man has an excellent knowledge of everything else in
the world, but he no longer knows himself. He has studied
the stages in the animal kingdom, has founded his evolutionary
theory on this, and believes that he understands how the
different orders have evolved from the most elementary to the
more perfect. He then adds man to the sequence, applying to the
human being all that he has learnt about the animals. People
arrive at nothing new that would explain the being of man, they
seek the elements of explanation within the animal world
and simply say: Man is just the highest stage. Nothing
particular is said about the human being; he is just the
highest stage. And this includes all human characteristics and
is said with an instinctive obviousness. The result is
that there is absolutely no real knowledge of man.
This particular sort of knowledge prevails not only in the
various sciences but has already become accepted in the widest
circles throughout the world. It has become something that the
man of today absorbs with his newspaper reading. And if he does
not absorb it with his newspaper, then in some other way, for
in fact it is already inoculated into children at school. This
character of modern science has more and more become general
property and it fills people with ideas and concepts that
constitute their general state of mind. Man reaches a certain
consciousness of the world but in this consciousness he himself
is omitted, That is the one thing.
The
other is modern social life. You need only study the social
life that obtained in times that preceded the fifteenth
century. The world was filled, so to say, with judgments that
were derived from an ancient and honoured social wisdom, and
were the property of all men in common. One did not judge for
oneself what was good or bad. Nor had one any doubt about it,
for one grew up in a social order that possessed a common
judgment on good and bad, whether it had reference
to the people or to religion. Man decided whether he should do
this or that out of this common judgment, out of something
hovering authoritatively over the social order.
Much of what was at one time far more intensely established in
the social order of humanity, we have today merely in our
language, and since our language has in many respects become
phrases we have it in the phrase. Just recollect in how many
cases and to what an extent people are accustomed to use the
little word “one” — “one” thinks
so, “one” does this, “one” says this,
and so on, although in most cases it is merely a phrase and
means nothing at all. The little pronoun “one”
really has meaning only in the speech which still belongs to a
people in which the separate member has not become such a
strong individuality as in our time, in which the words of a
single person express with a certain right a common
judgment.
The
contents of the human soul which are gradually being given by
the character of modern science and which have led man to
forget himself in his world-conception, lead to the
Ahrimanising of mankind in our age. And in social life that
which leads man out of a life in common, which, for example, in
industry has led him from the old interdependent life of the
Guilds to the modern free economy, this leads to the
Luciferising of man. Yet both are entirely necessary; both had
to arise in the evolution of humanity. For in the earlier
knowledge which man gained and which formed the constitution of
his soul, man himself was always contained. In earlier times
one could not gain knowledge of nature, for example, without at
the same time gaining knowledge of man. One could not
gain knowledge about Mars without at the same time
getting to know in what way Mars has significance for human
life. One could not gain knowledge about gold without gaining
certain facts about man.
All
that was human at that time has been thrust out. In this way
one came to a pure concept of nature, freed from everything
pertaining to man. This concept of nature had then to be the
foundation for modern technics.
Modern technics can only furnish the great triumphs of recent
times when it contains nothing but what a man can survey with
his pure intellect. Look at any machine, look at any
organisation of modern technical life, apart from the actual
social life, and you will see that everything is organised in
such a way as to exclude the human being from what is actually
involved. Modern technology had therefore to have recourse to
the expedient, although not conscious of it, of using merely
the corpse of nature.
When we construct a machine, we break up the material that will
form it, just as nature breaks up the human being when it makes
a corpse out of the still animated organism. Everywhere in our
mechanism we have the corpses of nature's existence. But man is
not born from this corpse of nature of which our mechanical
world consists, the world we have
gradually produced as technics. He is born out of the nature
that lives, that is alive even to the mineral kingdom. To
this nature we have added in modern technics another nature, a
corpse of nature, After the geological strata of the earth have
been formed (see diagram, blue, orange) we have, as it were,
superimposed a topmost geological stratum (green) over them,
which consists of our machines and no longer contains anything
of living nature. We work in the dead part of nature inasmuch
as we have added modern technics to what was formerly there.
This is something that makes a shattering impression on a man
who considers it in its full extent, particularly when he
realises how detached modern mankind has made life, not only
through external mechanical technics, but through the technical
mode of thought.
Consider something like the end of the war which took place
between China and Japan towards the close of the
nineteenth century. What took place after the conclusion
of peace as the necessary settlement? The Chinese Minister
wrote an immense sum in millions on a cheque. This cheque was
taken to a bank. Some subordinate official accepted it and
purely through Banking procedure the cheque was the occasion by
which the Japanese envoy in China received the vast sum of
millions which the Chinese Minister wrote upon the cheque.
Something took place there in a corpse-like — externally
of course — one might say, in a shadowy corpse-like
manner. Nothing else has been brought about by it except that
the credit of millions which the Chinese Empire up to then had
had at the Bank of England had passed over to Japan through the
writing and delivering of the cheque. What would it have meant
if one had wanted by old procedure to pay these millions of
war-damages which were simply credited to Japan through a
cheque from China? I will even take the mildest form —
paying in cash. What would it have meant if the whole of this
money, supposing Chinese money to be what it is now, or was a
short time ago, had had to be sent over from China to Japan?
Thus, where one still has to do with realities the simplest
form shows one what modern life has become relatively rapidly
in the last third of the nineteenth century. Man's whole mode
of thinking has been taken hold of by such things and has
familiarised itself quite naturally. Intellectualism, which in
fact Ahrimanises humanity, has become a matter of course.
On the other hand, man has had to experience in social life what
has been experienced. Just as he could not have come to pure
natural science without intellectualism, he would not have come
to the consciousness of his freedom without what he has gone
through in the social life. Man has been hollowed out through the
nature of modern science. He no longer knows anything of himself,
he cannot understand the being of man. But on the other hand there
has arisen in him the greatest strain and tension, the great demand
upon his being to act from his own original impulse, for man is to
act as a free being.
If
one wants a symbol for what has really come about one can only
say this: Man has increasingly lost the fulness of his being
and become a total cipher, a blank in his own eyes. For modern
natural science contains nothing of man. He has become
gradually a total cipher and now in the cipher the impulse of
freedom must stream out (see diagram).
That is the discord in modern man. He is to be free, that is,
find the impulses of his nature and his actions within himself,
but when he tries to penetrate to where these impulses are to
arise and understand them, he finds a blank, a cipher, he is
inwardly hollowed out. It is necessary for this to have come
about, but it is also a necessity for modern humanity to come
out beyond it again. For in this freedom lies the Luciferic
danger unless one finds the equilibrium, and in the modern
scientific life lies the Ahrimanic danger if one does not reach
the state of balance.
How
does one come to the state of balance? Here we must indicate
something that might be called “the Golden Rule” of
modern Spiritual Science — that is good. Science had to
arise in modern evolution, but it must be widened. It needs a
knowledge of the human being, and this can alone be brought
through Spiritual Science. It is no knowledge of man to
dissect him and take the brain and the liver and the
stomach and the heart, for then one only gets what is also to
be found in the animal kingdom but in a somewhat other form.
All that is of no real value for the knowledge of man as such.
Only the knowledge of man gained from Spiritual Science has
value. The moment one knows that the human being with his
actual ego is rooted in the will, that his will-filled ego
represents his actual earthly spirituality and that this in the
earthly realm makes use of the metabolism, one has an essential
fact from which one can proceed to study the human metabolism
and its specification throughout the organism. One comes from
the spiritual element to an understanding of the human
bodily nature. One must learn to know the rhythmic system and
how it is expressed in the shaping of the course of the breath,
the course of the blood, and one must break with the
superstition that the heart is a pump which somehow drives the
blood through the organism like a flood. One must learn that
the Spirit is at work in the blood-circulation and that
therefore rhythm there lays hold of the metabolism, causes the
blood-circulation and then, in the course of human development,
in the very embryo, plastically moulds the heart out of the
blood-circulation, so that the heart is formed out of the
blood-circulation, out of the spiritual. If one then learns to
know how in the nerves-senses-system the life of concepts
breaks down again the metabolic process, if one recognises the
nerve as something that is left behind from the conceptual life,
then one sees into the human being in a way in which one cannot
penetrate the animal, for in the animal all these things are
quite different.
The
materialist imagines that here is a nerve (see diagram, red)
and this nerve produces something as a picture. No, that
is not the reality. In reality the conceptual life
proceeds, and while it proceeds it destroys the organic matter,
creates, as it were, a groove of waste matter within the nerve
(black). That is a deposit created by the life of concepts,
something excreted from the organism. And the nerve is
the excretory organ for the conceptual life.
In
the materialistic age people have used a materialistic
comparison — that the brain excretes thoughts as the
liver excretes gall. That is nonsense, for the reverse is true.
The brain is excreted by the thoughts, separated off
continually and continually replaced by the metabolic organism.
A modern scientific man will not be able to find anything right
in such an idea; he will say that it all refers equally to the
animal, the animal has a brain and such and such organs, and so
on. This shows. however, an ignorance of himself; anyone who
speaks like this of man and animal makes the same mistake as a
legislator would make if he had all the razors to be found at
all the barbers of a town carried to the restaurants, since he
connected with a knife solely the idea of eating and concluded
that an instrument formed in a certain way could only have one
purpose.
The
important point is to recognise that the organ in man does not
fulfil the same service as in the animal; moreover the whole
mode of observation which I have just employed in its most
elementary elements has not at all a similar meaning in the
case of the animal. It is precisely the knowledge of what man
possesses out of the spiritual as material organs that is so
immensely important; this concrete self-knowledge is the
essential point. All the idle talk and chatter of the various
mysticisms of today which proclaim that man must grasp himself
inwardly, all this dreaming is nothing; it leads not to a real
self-knowledge but only to an inner pleasant feeling of
wellbeing. Man must study with patience and industry how
his different organs are plastically formed out of the spirit.
Genuine science must be based on the spiritual. One must take
man as he stands before us and imitatively model him
plastically, as it were, out of the spirit. That is the one
thing.
While humanity lives today as it does, letting
authoritative sciences issue from the various
establishments, there exists in the spiritual worlds a
sacred decree; external science must be supplemented by
the science of the knowledge of man' It will be disastrous for
mankind if it receives only external science, The Mysteries
existed in ancient times in order not to let anything harmful
approach man, but that is not compatible with the modern
spirit. Mankind therefore in its conscious members must care
for what was formerly cared for by outside powers. Those
personalities who have come to understand something of these
things must take care that the different sciences cannot cast
their shadows, by confronting the shadows, which would darken
humanity, with the light of a real, genuine, concrete self-
knowledge of man. Sciences without this self-knowledge are
harmful, for they Ahrimanise humanity-, Sciences with the
counterpart of human self-knowledge are beneficial, for they
lead mankind in reality to what it must reach in the
immediate future. There should be no science which in one
respect or another is not brought back to the human being.
There should be no science which is not followed up right into
the inmost being of man, where, if it is thus followed up, it
first acquires its true meaning.
Thus, through this actually concrete self-knowledge one arrives
at the equilibrium that the sciences have destroyed.
Present-day man is for the most part not in the least
interested in what sort of being he is in the world. If he
wants to be particularly profound he lets himself
“prattle” about being some sort of little god or
the like — without having any real idea of the god. It is
of little interest to him, however, how his individual human
form is formed out of the whole universe.
The
social life becomes Luciferic if it leads purely to the
promotion of freedom inside that which has become nil, blank.
Man will not be a nil to himself if he comes to a real
self-knowledge, for then he will know how the whole structure
of the universe creates an image of itself in what is within
his skin, how every human being carries inside his skin a
product of the whole world, The impulse of freedom is brought
to equilibrium in the social life if we learn what underlies
the world as spirit, if we get beyond the merely material view
of the world which is characteristic of the development of
knowledge during recent centuries.
Man has been lost. The outer world has become empty of
man. In external astronomy we observe the sun, the planets, the
fixed stars, the comets; they seem to pass through space as
some kind of objective bodies. We seek their laws of motion.
There is nothing there of man. Read my
“Occult Science”
and bring before your mind the description given
there of world evolution. Directly you read of Old Saturn you
are reading nothing described by modern astronomy, but at once
you read of what appears as the first rudiments of the human
being. In the description of Saturn is contained all that
existed as the first rudiments of humanity during the Saturn
evolution. With the history of world evolution you follow at
the same time the whole of human evolution. Nowhere do you find
there a world devoid of man. What you yourselves are is to be
found described stage for stage in the evolution of the world
itself.
What is the consequence? If you go into what modern science
gives you about some sort of ancient mist which then
conglomerated into a ball from which our present world is
supposed to have arisen, but in which the human being cannot be
found, you have nothing human in it at all, it all remains
purely intellectual. You find something there that can interest
your head, but it does not grip your whole nature. Your whole
human being can only he gripped by a knowledge which contains
this human being. In fact it is only the indolence of modern
man, who, when he takes in something, is not at all accustomed
to develop feelings and will-impulse as well. If someone reads
this evolution of Saturn, Sun, Moon to the Earth and then
further reads the perspective for the future, it is indolence
if, in spite of its all being given in pure concepts, he does
not feel stimulated in his feelings, if he does not feel; There
I stand in the world, there I am together with this whole
world, there I know myself to be one with this whole world!
This knowledge of oneself as being one with the world
distinguishes the knowledge of the world given through
Spiritual Science from the view of the world that obtains
today. But let that permeate the men of today in whom it is
lacking, let men be filled with the consciousness of belonging
to the whole world, then a social spirit can emerge that can
lead men forward. Whereas what has arisen and could indeed lead
to the claiming of freedom, but gives no feeling of
responsibility, this has only brought men to the point of
producing the chaos in which we are now living. Luciferising
can only be prevented if men recognise their position in the
cosmos, if they penetrate not only the physical nature of the
cosmos, that which is given to the senses, but the spiritual
element as well, feel themselves as spirit in the spirit of the
universe. This realisation of man's connection with the
spiritual world gives rise to real social feeling, it enables
man to fructify the social life on earth.
What the feeling of freedom has produced in man's social life
has led above all to Luciferising, though modern men may feel
nothing of it. But in the spiritual world in which we are all
the time rooted, there stands again a sacred decree
which proclaims to man: You must not allow the impulse of
freedom to remain without a feeling of the cosmos! Just as the
knowledge of man must be added to the external sciences, so
must cosmic feeling be added to what has evolved as social life
in our time.
These two, knowledge of humanity and feeling with the whole
universe, give man equilibrium. And this he can find if in the
most modern sense he really grasps the Christ-Mystery, grasps
it as Spiritual Science can give it to him. For there we speak
of the Christ as a cosmic Being Who has descended to earth out
of the infinities of the universe. We learn to feel cosmically
and must only seek to give this feeling a content. This we can
do only through Anthroposophy, otherwise the Christ-concept too
is empty for us. The Christ-concept becomes phrase unless it
becomes something through which we understand the cosmos
itself, humanly.
Just feel how from a universe that contains the Sun described
by modern Astronomy and the spectral-analysis described by
modern Physics — feel how from such a universe the Christ
could not have descended to earth. One who adheres merely to
this description of the cosmos as knowledge, can attach
no meaning at all to any true, real Christ-Being. Such a Christ
remains empty or becomes such as Harnack imagines. To learn to
know and to feel the Christ today as Cosmic Being one needs the
history of evolution that looks for man through the
Saturn, Sun, Moon periods. There, where the human element is
within the cosmos, one finds also the knowledge which permits
the Christ to come forth from the cosmos. And if one learns to
know how man's material part, what lies within his skin, is
created out of the spiritual, then one learns to know him in
such a way that one learns to know the Mystery of Golgotha, the
incarnating of the Cosmic Christ in the individual man. Such a
human being as modern science — from mathematics to
psychology — can describe would find it impossible to
imagine that the Christ had in any way incorporated in him. In
order to understand this one must come to real self-knowledge.
There is no Christianity today which can be accepted by the
modern mind except through the self-knowledge and the cosmic
knowledge of man which are given by Spiritual Science.
The
nature of these connections can be discovered throughout our
anthroposophical literature, and they should be compared with
what is essential in our time for the progress of
mankind. What people have received up to now in various ways
from education and custom, they like to have on the one hand as
a sort of shadowy abstract knowledge for Sunday, but would then
prefer to regard the rest of life as quite apart from this
knowledge — not basing their life on it. Any deeper need
of the soul is met by the Sunday pulpit, any external
requirements, by the State. Both are accepted traditionally and
no thought is given as to where one must come if this
traditional acquiescence were to continue.
I
have constantly and from very many aspects pointed out the
gravity of our time. Today I wished to indicate how the whole
course of scientific life must not be pursued further
unless every science is illumined by self-knowledge, and how
social development must not be tolerated unless a cosmic
feeling is introduced, a conception of the universe in which
the human being is present in the conception itself. It
is characteristic of Anthroposophy that when we study it we
perceive the whole universe in the single human being and when
we contemplate the world we find that everywhere it contains
man.
Such things are no doubt reminiscent of Inspirations and
Imaginations which humanity has had in the past, but they are
not renewals of an external kind, they are drawn forth from the
consciousness to which mankind is actually summoned today out
of the spiritual world itself. What man sees around him in this
physical world does not simply happen of itself. Man is
standing within the spiritual world just as he stands as
physical organism within the physical world. And something is
happening, something is going on in this spiritual world in
which he stands. According to what man is has he a meaning for
the events of the spiritual worlds.
Let
us suppose that someone only considers what goes on around him
in the physical world; at most he pays a certain heed to
a traditional faith which, however, has no relation to the
world and only talks abstractions, and that this man now
engages in traditional science, He can pursue this science,
empty as it is of man, he can fill his soul with it as millions
and millions today cram themselves with it more or less
consciously. In this way, however, men stand
likewise in a world of the Spirit, for cramming ourselves full
with this science is of significance too for the spiritual
world. What significance has it for the spiritual world? If
that goes on in the same way then Ahriman reaps his
reward. For he is the spirit who slinks eagerly round modern
educational establishments and would like to keep them as they
are; for that serves his interests. The Ahrimanic being, this
cold ossified, bald-pated Ahriman — to speak figuratively
— slinks round our modern educational centres and would
like them to remain as they are. He will certainly lend his
assistance if it is a matter of destroying something like this
Goetheanum.
On
the other hand, in the social life in which men establish their
earthly claims without a feeling of the cosmos, and inasmuch as
they only speak of these earthly claims without being
penetrated, inflamed and inspired with the cosmic consciousness
— here actually the Luciferic beings come into their own.
There we see how Lucifer lives. I cannot here use the picture,
which is a picture but yet is born actually from genuine
Ahrimanic concepts, the picture of the ossified, slinking,
bald-pated Ahriman, who slinks round educational
institutes and wants to preserve them as they are. This picture
would not apply to the nature of Lucifer. But another picture
would apply: Let opinions be expressed out of mere egoism, with
no feeling of the cosmos, even with good will and well-meant
social intentions, then the true nature of Lucifer breaks out
from what is being expressed. With the social demands that are
promoted in the world without cosmic feeling, man spits out of
himself what then becomes the beautiful Lucifer. He
lives in men themselves, in their stomachs, ruined through the
social mis-instincts — understood spiritually — in
their ruined lungs, there lives the Luciferic source. It wrests
itself free, man spits it out of his whole being and hence our
spiritual atmosphere is filled with this Luciferic nature
— filled with social instincts that do not feel the
connection of man with the cosmos. The bald Ahriman, lanky,
skeleton-like, haggard, slinking round our abstract
culture on the one hand, on the other hand that which
extricates itself slimily out of man himself and assumes the
semblance of beauty by which man is deluded, these are pictures
— but they are the realities of our time. And only
through self-knowledge and only through a feeling of the
connection of man with the cosmos does man find the balance
between the ossified and the semblance of beauty, between the
bony Being and the slimy Being, between that which slinks round
him and that which wants to extricate itself out of him. And
this equilibrium must be found. The fruit of the culture, the
civilisation of modern times, is, in fact, nothing else than
what one could call the marriage between the bony and the
slimy. Man is living his life in such a way that civilisation
is entering on the Spengler-prophesied downfall. As a matter of
fact, Spengler could only describe the world in the way he
does, for he has before him the world that has arisen out of
the marriage of the bony with the one covered with slime. But
man must find the equilibrium.
The
times are grave, for man must become man. He must learn how to
get rid of the bony as well as the slimy and become man, become
man in such a way that the intellect is permeated by the heart
and the heart warmed through by the intellect. Then he will
find the equilibrium. And then in fact man will neither sink
into — speaking spiritually — slimy mysticism nor
bald-pated science, but will open himself to what is man, what
I perhaps may call, after having characterised it, the
Anthroposophical. That stands in the middle, the truly human,
the Anthroposophical, it stands really in the midst between
these two opposites into which civilisation has gradually come.
The Anthropos is in truth when he really manifests his being,
neither the ossified nor the slimy; he is the one who holds the
balance between the intellect and the heart. That must be
sought for.
What must be grasped today out of the very depth of human and
cosmic existence, you will understand when you think over the
two pictures which I have set before you, purely as pictures.
They are meant as pictures, but as pictures that point to true
realities.
We
will speak further of this.
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