LECTURE V Dornach, April 16, 1921
Yesterday I
referred to the significant turning point in the development
of Occidental civilization in the fourth century
A.D.
I pointed out that, on the one hand, this was the time when
Greek wisdom disappeared from European culture, wisdom
through which people had tried to bring to expression the
depths of Christianity in a wisdom-imbued way. The time of
the outer expression of this disappearance falls somewhat
later, namely, when Emperor Justinian declared the writings
of Origen heretical, abolished Roman consulship, and closed
the Greek Academy of Philosophy at Athens. The guardians of
Greek wisdom thus had to flee to the Orient, withdrawing, as
it were, from European civilization. The wisdom teaching that
had extended from the East as far west as Greece and had
assumed its special form there, is one aspect of the
picture.
On the other
hand, the Mithras worship was supposed to indicate in a
significant external ritual how, with their soul-spiritual
nature, human beings were to raise themselves above all that
could be comprehended through the interplay of beings of the
planetary sphere with terrestrial forces, how the human being
could sense his full humanity. This was the object of the
Mithras cult. This Mithras worship, which was intended to
reveal to man his own being, likewise disappeared after it
had spread through the regions along the Danube and on into
central and western Europe. These two streams, one a cultic
stream, the other a stream of wisdom, were replaced in Europe
by factual narrations of the events of Palestine. Thus, one
has to say that neither a cultic worship, which would have
recognized in Christ Jesus the victor over all the human
being, was meant to bring under his control in the course of
world evolution, nor a wisdom that would have tried to grasp
the actual mysteries of Christendom in a wise manner were
able to enter Europe. Instead, the superficial narration of
the events of Palestine became popular. The concepts that
should have been found in these happenings in Palestine were
instead steeped in the flood of juristic thinking, which
replaced the investigation of cosmic secrets with the
determination of dogmas by means of majority resolutions in
Church Councils, and so forth.
This very
fact indicates that a change of great and far-reaching
significance had taken place in the fourth century
A.D.
in the development of Western civilization, and consequently
in the evolution of the whole of mankind. Proceeding from the
Orient, all the influences that had laid hold of eastern
European civilization were in a sense pushed back again
towards the Orient. Only the increasing tendency towards
abstract thinking in the Roman world maintained itself in the
Occident alongside the comprehension of the external, sensory
world of facts.
How alive the
conceptions of the Greek gods had been among the Greeks, and
how conceptually abstract the ideas were the Romans
entertained of their gods! Actually, in the later period,
what the Greeks possessed of ideas concerning the
super-sensible world was already lifeless, although quite
alive as such within itself. Yet, it was a lifeless element
in comparison to the living conceptions of the super-sensible
worlds present during the ancient Persian and Indian
civilizations, which represented a living within these higher
worlds. In those times, albeit with a purely instinctive
human perception, people lived in communion with the
super-sensible worlds just as mankind in the present communes
with the sensory world. For human beings in the ancient
Orient, the spiritual world was readily accessible. For them,
the beings of the spiritual world were present just as other
human beings, our fellowmen, live side by side with us. Out
of this living, super-sensible world, the Greeks built up
their system of concepts. In the ages before Aristotle, up to
the fourth century
B.C.,
Greek ideas were not abstract ideas
gained through external sensory observation and then lifted
up into abstraction. These Greek ideas still originated from
the living, super-sensible world; they were born of a primeval
power of vision. These living Greek ideas still imbued a
person with soul sustenance and warmth; insofar as he could
share in them, they bestowed on him the necessary enthusiasm
for his form of social order. Certainly, we must never forget
that a large part of the Greek people was denied a share in
this life of thought; this was the extensive world of the
slaves. But the bearers of Greek culture certainly
participated in a realm of ideas that was basically a
downpouring of super-sensible, spiritual powers into the world
of the earthly sphere.
In comparison
with this, the Roman world — separated from Greece only
by the sea — definitely had a quite abstract
appearance. The Romans described their gods in the same
prosaic, unimaginative ways as, shall we say, our modern
scientists speak of the laws of nature. Although this is an
indication of the significant change I have to point out
here, we confront this change in a special way if we turn our
attention to a factor in the life of soul that found only
partial realization in world history and did not develop to
its full potential.
Consider for
a moment the destiny of the ancient Greek people. It is
fraught with a certain tragedy. After its period of great
glory, Greek culture pined away and, in essence, vanished
from the stage of world history, for what replaced it in that
territory cannot be said to have been a true successor. The
Greek nation went into decline in a severe, world-historical
illness, and from its ancient ideas it produced what, I would
say, represents the dawn of all later culture. It brought
forth Stoicism and Epicureanism,
[Note 1]
systems or views of life in which the
more abstract mode of thought, characterizing the later
Western civilization, already found an early expression. But
we can see in Stoicism and Epicureanism, even in the later
Greek mysticism, that they express a decline of ancient
Greece.
Why was it
that this culture of Greece was destined to decline and
ultimately to pass away from the stream of world evolution?
[Note 2]
One could say that
this decline and death of the ancient Greek people indicates
a significant mystery in world history. With faculties of
vision handed down to them as an echo of the ancient Oriental
world view, the ancient Greeks still beheld the
soul-spiritual human being in his full light. After all, in
the earlier periods of Greek culture, every individual knew
himself to be a being of soul and spirit that had descended
through conception and birth from the spiritual worlds, that
has its home in a super-sensible sphere and is destined for
super-sensible spheres. Yet, at the same time, even in its
prime, Greece sensed its decline in world history — I
have often referred to this. It sensed that human beings
cannot fully attain to humanity on earth by merely looking up
into super-sensible worlds. It felt itself surrounded and
pervaded by the earth's forces. Hence the ancient saying:
“Better it is to be a beggar in the sense world than a
king in the realm of shades”
[Note 3]
The Greeks of earlier periods had
still beheld all the shining glory of the super-sensible
world; at the same time, by attaining full humanity in
ancient Greece, they sensed that they could not maintain this
radiance of the spiritual worlds. They felt they were losing
it and that their soul nature was becoming ensnared in the
things of the earth. Fear of death arose in them because they
realized that life between birth and death can estrange the
soul from its spiritual home. Greek culture must definitely
be described in accordance with this feeling.
Men like
Nietzsche basically had true insight into these matters.
[Note 4]
Nietzsche had the right feeling when he designated the
period of Greek development preceding the Socratic and
Platonic age as the tragic epoch of Greek culture. For
already in thinkers such as Thales,
[Note 5]
and particularly Anaxagoras
[Note 6]
and Heraclitus,
[Note 7]
we observe the
twilight of a magnificent world view which modern history
does not mention at all. We note the fear of becoming
estranged from the super-sensible world, of becoming tied to
what alone remains from the passage through life between
birth and death, namely, of becoming linked to the world of
Hades, the world of shades, which basically becomes man's
lot. Nevertheless, the Greeks preserved one thing; they saved
what appeared at its height in the Platonic idea. There
emerged amid the onset of progressive decline this world of
Platonic ideas, the last glorious remnant of the ancient
Orient, though it, too, was then fated to perish in
Aristotelianism.
Yet these
Greek ideas did appear, and Greek thinking constantly sensed
how the human ego is really something that is becoming lost
in human life. This was a fundamental experience of the
Greeks. Take the description I gave concerning ego evolution
in my book
Riddles of Philosophy,
[Note 8]
where I described that the ego was
then connected with thinking, with external perception. But
since the whole ego experience is bound up with thinking, the
human being experienced his I not so much within his own
corporeality. Rather, he felt it linked to all that lives in
the world outside, to the blossoming of the flowers, to
lightning and thunder in the sky, to the billowing clouds, to
the rising mist and the falling rain. The Greeks experienced
the ego connected to all this. They sensed with the forces of
the ego, as it were, but without the housing of this ego.
Instead, they felt, When I look out upon the world of
flowers, there my ego is attached, there it
blossoms in the flowers.
It is
justifiable to say that this Greek culture could not have
continued. What would it have become if it had continued? It
was not inherently possible for it to continue on a straight
line. What would it have become? Human beings would gradually
have come to consider themselves earth beings that are
subhuman. The actual soul-spirit being in us would have been
experienced as something that really dwells in the clouds,
the flowers, the mountains, in rain, and sunshine, a being
that occasionally comes to visit us. If the development of
Greek culture had continued in the same direction, human
beings increasingly would have felt that at night, when they
had fallen asleep, they could experience the approach of
their own ego in all its radiance and that it paid them a
special visit then. But upon waking in the morning and
becoming involved in the world of the lower senses, they also
would have felt that insofar as they are a being of the earth
they are but the outer housing of the ego. A certain
estrangement from the ego would have been the consequence of
an unbroken development of what can be noticed or sensed as
the fundamental keynote or actual basic temperament of Greek
nature.
It was
necessary that this ego, which was escaping, as it were, into
nature and the cosmos, should be firmly anchored in the inner
constitution of the human being, an organic being moving
about on the earth. A powerful impulse was required for this
to happen. It was, after all, the peculiar characteristic of
the Oriental world view that while it clearly drew attention
to the ego — precisely because of its teaching of
repeated earth lives — it also had the inherent
tendency to alienate this ego from the human being, to
deprive us of the ego. This is how it came about that the
Occident, unable to rise to the heights attained by Greece,
lacked the inner strength to assimilate the wisdom of Greece
in its full strength and allowed it instead to flow back, so
to speak, towards the Orient. The West also lacked the
strength to take possession of the Mithras cult and allowed
it to flow back to the Orient. By dint of the robust, sturdy
forces of human earthly nature, the West was capable only of
listening to purely factual narrations of the events of
Palestine and then of having them affirmed by dogmas laid
down in the Councils. At the outset, the Europeans were
confronted with a materialistic view of the human
personality.
This became
most evident in the transition in the fourth century. All
knowledge that would have been capable of producing a deeper
comprehension of Christianity gradually withdrew back into
Asia, all insight that could have brought about a cult in
which the Christ Triumphant would have appeared rather than
He who is overwhelmed by the burdens of the Cross, whose
triumph can only faintly be surmised behind the shadow of the
Crucifix. For the Occident, this ebbing away of the wisdom
and the ancient ceremonial worship was initially a matter of
securing the ego. From the robust force dwelling in the
barbaric peoples of the north, the impulse emerged that was
intended to supply the power to attach the ego to the earthly
human organism.
While this
was happening in the regions around the Danube, somewhat
south of there, and in southern and western Europe, Arabism
was transplanted from the Orient in forms differing from
those of the earlier Oriental wisdom. Arabism then made its
way as far as Spain, and southwestern Europe became inundated
by a fantastic intellectual culture. This was a culture that
in the external field of art could not achieve anything more
than the arabesque, since it was incapable of permeating the
organic realm with soul and spirit. Thus, in regard to the
cultic ceremonies, Europe was filled, on the one hand with
the narration of purely factual events; on the other hand, it
was engrossed in a body of abstract, fantastic wisdom that,
entering Europe by way of Spain, turned in filtered form into
the culture of pure intellect.
Within this
region, where the stories about the events of Palestine
referring solely to the external aspects prevailed, where
only the fantastic intellectual wisdom from Arabism existed,
there a few individuals emerged — after all, a few
isolated individuals appear now and again within the totality
of mankind — who had an idea of how matters really stood.
In their souls a feeling dawned that there is a lofty
Christian mystery, the full significance of which is so great
that the highest wisdom cannot penetrate it; the most ardent
feeling is not strong enough to develop a fitting ceremonial
worship for it. Indeed, they felt that something emanated
from the Cross on Golgotha that would have to be comprehended
by the highest wisdom and the most daring feeling. Such ideas
arose in a few individuals. Something like the following
profound Imagination arose in them. In the bread of the Last
Supper, a synthesis of sorts was contained, a concentration
of the force of the outer cosmos that comes down to the earth
together with all the streams of forces from the cosmos,
penetrating this earth, conjuring forth from it the
vegetation. Then, what has thus been entrusted to the earth
from out of the cosmos, in turn springs forth from the earth
and is synthetically concentrated in the bread and sustains
the human body.
Still another
element pierced through all the clouds of obscurity that
covered the ancient traditions. Something else was passed on
to these European sages, something that, it is true, had had
its origin in the Orient but penetrated through the cloud
cover and was understood by some individuals. This other
mystery, which was linked with the mystery of the bread, was
the mystery of the holy vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea
had caught the blood flowing down from Christ Jesus. This was
the other aspect of the cosmic mystery. Just as the bread was
regarded a concentrated extract of the cosmos, so the blood
was regarded as the extract of the nature and being of man.
In bread and blood — of which wine is merely the outer
symbol — this extract expressed itself for these
European sages. They had truly stepped forth as if out of the
hidden places of the mysteries and towered far above the
masses of the European population who could only hear the
facts of Palestine, and who, if they advanced to
scholarliness, found their way only slowly into the abstract
fantasy of Arabism. In these wise men, who distinguished
themselves by something that was like the overripe fruit of
Oriental wisdom and at the same time the ripest fruit of
European perception and feeling, there developed what they
called the Mystery of the Grail. But, so they told
themselves, the Mystery of the Grail is not to be found on
earth.
People have
grown accustomed to developing the kind of intelligence that
found its highest form in Arabism. They are in the habit of
not looking for the meaning of external facts, but are
satisfied with being told of these outer facts from the
aspect of sensory reality. One must penetrate to an
understanding of the Mystery of the Bread, which is said to
have been broken by Christ Jesus in the same chalice in which
Joseph of Arimathea caught His blood. As legend tells it,
this chalice was then removed to Europe, but was preserved by
angels in a region high above the surface of the earth until
the arrival of Titurel
[Note 9]
who created for this Grail, this sacred chalice, a temple on
Mont Salvat. Through the clouds of abstraction and narrations
of mere facts, those who had become European mystery sages in
the manner described above wished to behold in a sacred,
spiritual temple the Mystery of the Grail, the mystery of the
cosmos that had disappeared along with etheric astronomy and
the Mystery of the Blood that had vanished along with the
ancient view of medicine. For just as the ancient medicine
had fallen victim to abstract thinking, the old etheric
astronomy, too, had passed over into abstract thought.
At a certain
period in time, this whole trend of abstract thinking had
reached its prime and had been brought to Spain by the Arabs.
It was precisely in Spain where the Mystery of the Grail
could not be found outwardly anywhere among people. Only
abstract intellectual wisdom prevailed. Among the Christians,
there was only narration of bare, external facts; among the
Arabs, the Moors, there existed a fantastic development of
the intellect. Only in the heights, above this earth, hovered
the Holy Grail. This spiritual temple, this Holy Grail, this
temple that encompassed the mysteries of bread and wine,
could be entered only by those who had been endowed by divine
powers with the necessary faculties. It is not by chance that
the temple of the Grail was supposed to be found in Spain,
where one literally had to move miles away from what earthly
actuality presented, where one had to break through brambles
in order to penetrate to the spiritual temple that enshrined
the Holy Grail.
It was out of
such prerequisite feelings that the conception of the Holy
Grail developed. The invisible Church, the super-sensible
Church, which is nevertheless to be found on earth —
this was what concealed itself in the Mystery of the Grail.
It was an immediate presence that cannot be discovered,
however, by those who turn their mind indifferently to the
world. In ancient times, the priests of the mysteries went
out into the world, looked around among human beings, and
based on seeing their auras, concluded, Here is one we must
receive into the mysteries; there is another one we must
accept into the mysteries. People did not need to ask; they
were chosen. Inner initiative on the part of the individual
was not required; one was chosen and bidden to enter the
sacred mystery centers. This age was over already around the
eleventh, twelfth, and ninth and tenth centuries.
The impulse
urging a person to ask, What are the secrets of existence?
had to be grounded in the human being through the Christ
force, which had moved into European civilization. No one
could approach the Grail who passed through the outer world
with a drowsy, apathetic mind. It was said that he alone
could penetrate into the miracles, that is, the mysteries of
the Holy Grail, who in his soul felt the inclination to ask
about the secrets of existence, both the cosmic secrets and
those of man's inner being. Fundamentally speaking, it has
remained so ever since. After the first half of the Middle
Ages, however, when human beings had been earnestly directed
to pose questions, had been told that they should
indeed ask questions, a great reaction set in beginning with
the first third of the fourteenth century. By that time,
those who asked about the Mysteries of the Holy Grail had
become fewer and fewer in number, and inertia was creeping
into the souls of men. They turned their attention wholly to
the outer forms of human life on earth, to all that may be
seen, counted, weighed, measured, and calculated in the
cosmos.
Nevertheless,
the sacred challenge had already entered European
civilization in the early Middle Ages, the sacred challenge
remained: To enquire into the mysteries of the cosmos as well
as into the inner mysteries of man, namely, the mysteries of
the blood. After all, it was in a great variety of phases
that humanity has passed through what materialism with all
its forces by necessity had to bring into European
civilization. Momentous, stirring words were uttered, though
in many instances they have died away. We have to consider
how great the possibility was for momentous words to be
spoken within European civilization. What was destined for a
certain age, namely, the factual narration of the events of
Palestine, the permeation of these outer facts with Arabism,
which was accomplished by scholasticism
[Note 10]
in the Middle Ages, was indeed of
great significance for that particular age. But just as it
developed out of an age of greater wisdom and ceremonial
practices, both of which had only been pushed back to the
East, it also did not understand how to listen to the
super-sensible mysteries of Christianity, the mysteries of
the Holy Grail. All the truly compelling voices that
resounded in the early Middle Ages — and there were
more than a few of them — were silenced by Rome's
Catholicism, which was becoming more and more engulfed in
dogmatism, in the same way as the Gnosis — as I pointed
out again yesterday — was eradicated root and
branch.
We must not
form a negative judgment of the period between the fourth and
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries merely on the basis of
the fact that of the numerous voices raised, as it were, in
holy, overripe sweetness throughout European civilization
— which, for the rest was barbaric — only the
somewhat awkward voice of one man has remained who could not
write, that of Wolfram von Eschenbach.
[Note 11]
For all that, he was still great; he
was spared by the dogmatism that had gripped Europe and had
basically eradicated the powerful voices that had called amid
strife and bitterness for the quest of the Holy Grail. Those
who raised this call for the Holy Grail meant to let it
resound in the spirit of freedom dawning in the dull souls.
They did not wish to deprive the human being of his freedom;
they did not mean to push anything on him; he was to be the
questioning one. Out of the depths of his own soul he was to
ask about the miracles of the Grail.
This
spiritual life that later became extinct was truly greater
than the spiritual life opposing it, although the latter,
too, was not without a certain greatness. When what has been
described by the servants of the Holy Grail as a spiritual
path was then superseded by the earthly path of the journey
to the physical Jerusalem over in the East, namely, when the
crusade to the Grail was replaced by the crusades for the
terrestrial Jerusalem, when Gottfried of Bouillon
[Note 12]
set out to establish an
external kingdom in Jerusalem in opposition to Rome, letting
his cry, “Away from Rome!” ring out, his voice
was really less persuasive than that of Peter of Amiens.
[Note 13]
His voice sounded
like a mighty suggestion to translate into something
materialistic what the servants of the Holy Grail had
intended as something spiritual.
This, too,
was one of the paths that was taken because of materialism.
It led to the physical Jerusalem, not to the spiritual
Jerusalem, which was said to enshrine in Titurel's temple
what had remained of the Mystery of Golgotha as the Holy
Grail. Legend held that Titurel had brought this Holy Grail
down to the earth's sphere from the clouds, where it had
hovered, held by angels during the age of Arabism and the
factual narration of the events of Palestine. The age of
materialism, however, did not begin to ask about the Holy
Grail. Lonely, isolated individuals, people who did not have
a share in wisdom but dwelled in a kind of stupor, like
Parsifal, were the ones who set out to seek the Holy Grail.
But they also did not really understand how to ask the
proper, appropriate question. Thus, the path of materialism,
which began in the first third of the fourteenth century, was
preceded by that other path of materialism already expressed
in the turn to the East, the eastward journey to the physical
Jerusalem. This tragedy was experienced by modern humanity;
human beings had to and still have to undergo this tragedy in
order to comprehend themselves inwardly and to turn properly
into people asking questions. Modern mankind had to and still
has to experience the tragedy that the light that once had
approached from the East had not been recognized as spiritual
light. The spiritual light had been rejected, and instead
people set out to find a physical country, the physical
materiality of the Orient. In the Middle Ages, humanity began
to seek the physical East after the spiritual East had been
rejected at the close of antiquity.
Such, then,
was the situation in Europe, and our age today is still a
part of it. For if we understand the true, inner call
resounding in human hearts, we still are and should be
seekers for the Holy Grail. The strivings of humanity that
emerged beginning with the crusades still await their
metamorphosis into spiritual endeavors. We have yet to arrive
at such a comprehension of the cosmic worlds so that we will
be able to seek for the origin of Christ in these cosmic
worlds. As long as these cosmic worlds are investigated only
with the methods of external, physical astronomy, they
naturally cannot be conceived of as the home of Christ. From
what the modern astronomer teaches as the secret of the
heavens, which he describes only by means of geometry,
mathematics, and mechanics and observes only with the
telescope, the Christ could not have descended to earth in
order to incarnate in the human being Jesus of Nazareth.
Neither can this incarnation be understood on the basis of
knowledge about the physical nature of the human being,
knowledge that is obtained by moving from people in actual
life to the clinic, where the corpse is dissected for the
purposes of research so that views concerning the living
human being are arrived at based on the corpse.
People in
antiquity possessed an astronomy inbued with life and medical
knowledge filled with life. Once again, our quest must be for
a living astronomy, a living medicine. Just as a living
astronomy will reveal to us a heaven, a cosmos, that is truly
pervaded by a spirituality and from where the Christ could
descend, so an enlivened medicine will present to us the
being of man in a way that enables us to penetrate with
insight and understanding to the Mystery of the Blood, to the
organic inner sphere where the forces of the etheric body,
the astral body, and the ego transform themselves into the
physical blood. When a true medical knowledge has grasped the
Mystery of the Blood and a spiritualized astronomy has
understood the cosmic spheres, we shall comprehend how it was
possible for the Christ to descend from these cosmic spheres
to the earth, how He could find on earth the human body that
could receive Him with its blood. It is the Mystery of the
Grail that in all earnestness must be sought in this manner,
namely, by setting out on the path to the spiritual Jerusalem
with all that we are as human beings, with head and heart.
This, indeed, is the task of modern humanity.
It is strange
how the essence of what ought to come to pass weaves
objectively through the sphere of existence. If it is not
perceived in the correct way, it is experienced outwardly, it
is superficially materialized. Just as formerly the
Christians flocked to Jerusalem, so now large numbers of
Jewish people travel to Jerusalem,
[Note 14]
thus expressing yet another phase of
materialism that indicates how something that ought to be
understood spiritually by all of modern humanity is
interpreted only materialistically. The time must come when
the Mystery of the Grail will once again be comprehended in
the right way. You know that I have mentioned it in my
An Outline of Occult Science.
[Note 15]
It is, in a manner of speaking, woven into the text that
refers to all we must seek to discover along this path of
spiritual science. Thus, I indicated what we have to acquire
as a kind of picture and Imagination for what must be sought
in earnest striving of the spirit and with profound human
feeling as the path to the Grail.
Tomorrow, we
will discuss this further.
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