THE RECOVERY OF THE LIVING SOURCE OF SPEECH
Lecture given by
RUDOLF STEINER
at Dornach, 13th April, 1923.
My DEAR Friends,
If you will remind yourselves of some of the things I have said in
recent lectures, you will, I think, be able to call up a picture of
the relationship of man's faculty of speech to those Beings in
the spiritual world whom we are accustomed to assign to the Hierarchy
of the Archangels. You will remember I explained to you the
difference it makes to man whether the words he speaks are formed in
such a way as to refer only to material things, in which case speech
assumes a materialistic character, or whether in his speaking he
unfolds a certain idealism, so that every time he utters a word, the
feeling is present in him that he belongs to a spiritual world and
that the words that ring in his speaking, coming as they do from the
soul, must have some relation to Spirits. According as the one or the
other is true, so does man come, between falling asleep and
awakening, into a wrong or right relation with the Archangels. If he
allows idealism to disappear altogether from his speaking, then he
gradually loses the connection, which is so essential to him, with
the Archangels. I am reminding you of this, because I want to speak
to-day more particularly of one aspect of this relationship of human
speech with the hierarchy of the Archangels. Speech, like everything
else in evolution that has to do with man, as we have had full
opportunity of realising in our study of his being, has had its
history. What I want to bring forward does not refer to any one
language in particular. The periods of time we have to take into view
when we are studying some deep-seated change in speech are so long
that even primitive languages show the same character as civilised
ones in respect of such matters as we shall be considering. To-day
therefore we shall not concern ourselves with the differences that
exist between the several languages, but rather with those
metamorphoses which human language in general has undergone in the
course of the evolution of mankind on Earth.
If we consider the relationship man has to-day to language, we find
that the words he speaks are nearly all of them signs for things that
are round about him. As you will know, we have in the course of our
studies alluded to a more intimate relationship between word and
object. In our day however there is hardly any feeling left for this;
words are very little more than mere outward signs for the objects
indicated. Who is there who still feels, when the word Blitz
(lightning) is uttered, something of the same experience he has
when lightning actually flashes through space? To-day we are inclined
to look on the word merely as a combination of sounds that is
a sign for the phenomenon of the flash of lightning. It was
not always so. If we go no farther back than to the earlier part of
the Greek civilisation, we find that man's relation to language
was not then one of thought, where the word is for him a sign and a
symbol. The man of olden time entered with heart and soul into the
sounds of his words and into the whole way the sounds were formed and
arranged. And in the case of the languages of Northern Europe we do
not even need to go back so far before we come to a time when the
word Pflug (plough) gave man the same inner experience as did
the activity of ploughing. This has been lost, and the word has
become no more than a sign. But it is scarcely more than 1500 years
or so since words were still felt in this way in the Northern
parts of Europe. The feeling a man had when he was ploughing was
similar to the feeling he had when he heard the word which in those
days designated the plough. When anyone was listening to or speaking
a word, it was not so much his thinking that partook in the
experience as his feeling.
If now we go back into more remote ages, we find something different
again; the will takes an intense and active part in the
forming of words. But in order to study the times when man's
relationship to external Nature was pre-eminently one of will, we
must take our thoughts right back to Atlantis. For we have to reckon
with long epochs of time when we are considering the evolution of
language.
Within language lives the Genius of language. Language is not
dependent for its evolution on the decision of man. In language
lives the Genius of language. And the Genius of Language belongs
to the hierarchy of the Archangels. When man speaks — when,
that is, an atmosphere is prepared around the Earth within which can
live man's utterances articulated into speech, then that
atmosphere of speech and language is the element of the
Archangels. Hence are the Archangels the Spirits of the different
peoples — the Folk Spirits as we call them. You will know of
this from the lectures I gave on the
Mission of the Folk-Souls.
The evolution of language on Earth has thus a deep and intimate
connection with the evolution of the Archangels. We can go so far as
to say that in the evolution of speech and language we are beholding
the evolution of the Archangels themselves. For even when we are
studying something that has to do with the Earth, it is by no means
impossible in the course of that very study to come to a knowledge of
the evolution of higher spiritual Beings. We need only learn how to
relate particular facts and phenomena to particular higher spiritual
Beings, and we can arrive at a clear perception of how the continuous
evolution of the Archangels is expressed and revealed in the changes
that are to be observed in man's faculty of speech.
Now in those far-off times when an element of will came to expression
in man's speech — that is, in the later part of the
Atlantean evolution — it was not the same Beings of the
Hierarchy who lived in his language as in more recent times. The
whole relationship moreover was different. In those remote times man
was not yet so interested in the feelings aroused in him at the
sight, for example, of the blossoming of flowers or by changes in
weather. These feelings interested him, it is true, in another
connection, but not in respect of the faculty whereby the word
welled up from the depths of his soul. Whether danger threatened
him from this or that fact in Nature, summoning him to defend
himself, or whether something else had a kindly and favourable
influence and he would fain bring it into the orbit of his life, or
again whether another object of perception were good or bad for his
health, — in effect, how his will was aroused to
activity, what he was induced to do under the influence of
some fact or other, — this was the aspect of experience that
interested him, and he formed his words accordingly. So that in those
older times we find words that express how man reacts, what he finds
himself impelled to do under the influence of the world around him.
The most ancient language of all consisted almost entirely of
expressions of will. How do we account for this? It was due to the
fact that the Archangels came to language by way of Intuition.
Read the descriptions I have given in my books of the nature of
Intuition, and you will have a picture of the activity exercised by
the Archangels in the later part of the Atlantean evolution, when
they bestowed upon man the language of will.
Later, these Archangels moved forward in their own evolution. In my
little book, “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind,”
I spoke about the evolution of the Leaders and Guides of humanity who
live in the spiritual world. To-day we will extend this into a realm
to which on that occasion we gave little attention, — the realm
of speech and language. The advance made by the Archangels in their
relation to language may be described in the following way. In the
older faculty of Intuition they were standing within the world of
still higher Hierarchies, giving themselves up in devotion to these
worlds, so that together with speech they received something of the
very being of higher Hierarchies than themselves. So long as it all
depended upon Intuition, the Archangels surrendered themselves to the
next higher Hierarchy, — Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. They
were within the worlds of this higher Hierarchy, and it was the
experience of standing intuitively within this higher Hierarchy that
enabled them to put the speech-forming power into human life on
Earth.
In the next epoch the Archangels make, as it were, a step forward and
then their speech-forming power flows no longer out of Intuition but
out of Inspiration. They are not now completely surrendered to the
next higher Hierarchy. (What they did still receive through their
devotion to this Hierarchy underwent a change; it ceased to be
something they could then communicate to man as speech or language).
Now they hearken to the Inspirations of the First
Hierarchy, — Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, — and from
out of this Inspiration they pour down to Earth the speech-forming
power.
If we go back to the earliest times of Post-Atlantean evolution, or
even only as far as ancient Egypt and Chaldea, we find in every land
that the source from which the Archangels drew, in order to
communicate speech to man, is Inspiration. Language itself is
metamorphosed. Words become an expression before all else of sympathy
and antipathy, of every shade of human feeling. Instead of a language
of will, as in former times, we have now a language of feeling. We
have come to a stage where this feeling, which is called forth in man
by an external process or being is the very same as is experienced
when the sounds issuing forth from the depths of his being
are uttered by the speech organs and articulated into the word.
We have reached a significant phase in the evolution of mankind. The
Hierarchy of the Archangels is at first the receiver of Intuitions;
and the language of will, brought down as it were out of these
Intuitions, is created by these Beings. The Archangels move on
further and become the receivers of Inspiration. And what they
receive through the inspiration of Beings of the First Hierarchy,
gives rise to the language of feeling.
It was out of an extraordinarily deep perception that the well-known
scholar and writer on the history of Art, Hermann Grimm, drew a clear
line of division between the Greeks and the Romans. When we learn
history at school or at the university, we are, he said, exhorted to
take pains to understand what we learn; but as we go back over
the evolution of mankind, we can only understand history as
far back as Roman times. Cicero and Caesar we can still understand,
for up to a point they are similar to the man of the present day, —
although it must be said that the understanding generally brought to
a study of Caesar is far from being free and natural. If we were not
so thoroughly drilled and trained to it, we would never take much
interest in Caesar! We would leave it to the pupils in military
schools. Generally speaking, however, it is possible to trace a
continuous stream back from our own day to Rome. A certain element of
pedantry, which has gradually been creeping into man's life and
has to-day reached a kind of culmination, first began to show itself
in Rome. But, thinks Hermann Grimm, if we are honest with ourselves,
we cannot claim to understand Pericles or Alcibiades. We understand
them in the same way as we understand characters in fairy tales. As a
matter of fact, it is only through a deeper study of Anthroposophy
that one can come again to an understanding of the soul life of such
figures; as you know, we have sought here again and again to enter
into the whole way in which a Greek thinks and forms his ideas.
Hermann Grimm is aware of the distance that lies between the inner
life of a Greek and the inner life of a man of the present day. To
the Roman we can still feel ourselves near; then comes a great gulf.
The way the Greeks are described in the schools to-day is really
deplorable! They are made out to be just like ourselves. They were
not so at all, their whole life of soul was of a different character
altogether. We need to look round for quite other methods to describe
the Greeks. You could not have more striking evidence of this than
when the learned Wilamowitz undertakes to translate the Greek
tragedians. The whole affair is simply a disgrace. I need hardly say,
there is nothing of the Greek tragedies left in his translations, not
a trace! And yet people are immensely pleased, quite enchanted with
them. Their dramatis personae simply do not exist in the
tragedies themselves.
Hermann Grimm showed a true and sure instinct, when he said that we
come into an entirely different world when we come to Greece —
to say nothing of the Orient. It is really no more than a ridiculous
mockery for modern man to imagine he can understand anything of the
true Orient out of Deussen's translations. The first thing
necessary is to be able to comprehend the change that has come about
since then in the very being of man's soul.
And now when we come to consider our particular sphere, the sphere of
speech or language, then we find that the language of feeling
still prevailed in Greece among the philosophers up to the time
of Plato. The first philosophical pedant
[ ’Pedant’ seems to be, in this connection,
the nearest rendering for ‘Philinter.’ (Note by Translator).
] is Aristotle, the great and
universal spirit. It will surprise you that I give him these two
appellations, one after the other, but we do not understand Aristotle
unless we see in him the first philosophical pedant and at the same
time the universal spirit. He is great in a certain aspect but he is
in another aspect the first pedant philosopher, for he made out of
words categories of thought. It would never have occurred to the
Greek of an older time to take words and force them, as it
were, to yield categories of thought; he still felt the words as
something that is inspired into man, still felt the presence
of higher Spirits in speech and language.
Well on into the Greek epoch and — for the man in the street,
as we say — as late as the Mystery of Golgotha, we can still
detect in the speech-forming power of man the element of Inspiration,
as it lives in the soul of the Archangel. True, the ordinary person
lags behind the philosopher in certain respects; but in spiritual
matters he is often less behind, and in the matter of the
speech-forming faculty, he retains the Inspirations longer. Dates can
of course be no more than approximate. In one region of the earth
Inspiration lasts a longer, in another a shorter, time. In one
region, men still feel how the word pulsates in them as the blood
pulsates in the body; they feel it in the power of the breath. In the
power of the breath as it enfills and surges through the body, they
feel the presence of the Archangel, who is himself subject to
Inspiration.
Then we come into a time when it is no longer so that the Archangel
is yielding to Inspiration when he communicates to man the power of
speech, but to Imagination. And language becomes the language
of thought. Man begins to speak more out of thoughts; language
approaches the abstract. And behind this lies a fact of great
significance.
The Archangels, who belong to the Third Hierarchy, received
Intuitions from the Second Hierarchy, and Inspirations from Seraphim,
Cherubim, Thrones — the First Hierarchy. Whence do they receive
Imagination? There is no Hierarchy beyond the First! The Imaginations
cannot at any rate come to them from any one of the Hierarchies named
in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. For he tells of no
Hierarchy beyond the first. Certain Archangel Beings were therefore
obliged to turn to the past for Imaginations, to find in the
past the pictures of the speech-forming power, — for that is
what the Imaginations are. What came from an earlier time had to be
carried on into the future. There was no longer any immediate and
present flow of the speech-forming power. And inasmuch as speech now
took its source from an earlier stage, into it crept an Ahrimanic
element. This is a fact of incalculable significance. And what the
Archangels felt above them came to expression in the world of man in
a deadening of speech and language. Language became polished and at
the same time paralysed, it no longer retained the livingness it had
in earlier days.
Try to understand the significance of this change. Something enters
into the life of man that in reality requires a higher hierarchy than
the First. If we have a right understanding for this event in human
development in all its tremendous significance, we shall come to see
that a time had arrived when the Gods had to grow out beyond what is
contained in the First Hierarchy. There is one thing that up to that
time had not yet been achieved by the Gods, and was already present
here on Earth in picture. What the Gods had not yet achieved is the
passage through Death. You have often heard me speak of this.
The Gods who stand above man in the various Hierarchies knew only of
changes from one form of life into another. The actual event of death
in life had not, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, been an
experience of the Gods. Death came as a result of Luciferic and
Ahrimanic influences; it came, that is, through the agency of Divine
Beings who had either remained behind in evolution or pressed forward
too quickly. Death had no place in the life-experience of the higher
Hierarchies. It enters into their experience in the moment when the
Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha — passes, that
is, through Death, uniting Himself so deeply with the destiny of
Earth Man as to have this also in common with him, — that He
passes through Death. The event of Golgotha is accordingly more than
an event of the life of Earth, it is an event of the life of the
Gods. The actual event that took place in that moment on Earth, and
the knowledge of the Event that finds its way into the hearts
and minds of men — all this is an image of the infinitely more
lofty and sublime and far-reaching Event that took place in the
worlds of the Gods themselves. Christ's passing through death
on Golgotha is an event whereby the First Hierarchy reached up into a
still higher realm. Therefore have I always had to speak to you of
the Trinity as standing above the First Hierarchy. In reality It only
came there in the course of evolution. Everywhere there is
evolution.
And so, if we are speaking of the Hierarchies as described in
Dionysius the Areopagite, we have to say that the Archangels lose
the possibility of forming Imaginations from above. Consequently Man
loses the possibility of continuing to build and fashion his language
in a living manner. In the world of the Gods an event takes place of
which the Mystery of Golgotha is an earthly reflection. Therefore the
Event of Golgotha contains among its many implications also this, —
that as men gradually receive into themselves more and more of the
Christ Impulse, they receive again through the Christ Impulse the
living spring and fountain of language.
We have to-day the various languages that run their course like
diverging streams. And if we look at these various languages in a
free and unbiassed way, we cannot fail to observe how they carry in
them — and more especially, the farther we go Westward —
an element of death, how they tend to become mere empty husks. In
Asia things have not yet gone so far, but as we go West we find
increasingly how the languages show signs of dying.
There is only one way whereby the speech-creating power can be
quickened into life, — and that is through men coming to realise
the Christ Impulse as a living Impulse. Then the Christ Impulse can
become a power in man that can create speech. And among all the facts
to be noted if we want to form a true picture of the significance of
the Christ Impulse in the whole evolution of mankind, this must also
have place, that at the time when man went forward into freedom, he
came right out of the Divine and spiritual stream in which he had
been steeped hitherto. Had speech remained as it was in the time of
ancient Greece, man would not have been able to evolve to freedom.
That speech serves the purpose merely of a sign, — this
absurdity (for so I must call it) had to come about when the
Archangels lost the possibility of forming Imaginations from the
present and had to resort to the past. During the time since the
Christ first made Himself known to men, during all this time while He
has let the Mystery of His Being and His activity be there on record
in the Gospels, the knowledge of Christ has not come in its
fullness, the knowledge men have had of Him has not been sufficiently
spiritual, it has often been merely traditional. But when the word of
the Gospel is quickened to life by an understanding of the Christ, an
understanding that derives from the Christ Himself as He still works
on in the world, continuing to have influence always upon man, then —
and only then — will proceed from the Christ Impulse, from the
living Christ Impulse, the speech-forming power.
Let us now set down on the blackboard what I have been indicating.
Here up above, the Gods grow more and more exalted. Down below an
evolution goes on among men. On the one hand they receive more and
more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and
further forward in the direction of freedom.
And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also
reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more
of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and
further forward in the direction of freedom. And when man rises to a
higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The
Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ, Who has
found His home in the hearts of men on Earth; He enters with His
Impulse right into the Imaginations of the Archangels, and these
become alive, become quick with immediate present life.
We shall in the future have an altogether different kind of
language-forming power. A quite new kind will begin to work. I have
spoken of this from other points of view in earlier lectures.
We can describe the evolution that goes on above in the Heavens at
the same time as mankind evolves on the Earth below. And we can also
describe its copy or reflection on Earth, — the progress from
the language of will to the language of feeling and thence to the
language of thought or symbol. And we can know that amidst it all
Archangels are ascending — or shall we rather say descending
— from Intuition to Inspiration and to Imagination. We
behold first the evolution of the Archangels and all that takes place
in connection therewith among the higher Hierarchies, and when we
turn from that to man in his evolution, it is on the evolution of
language and of the word that we have to fix our attention. We will
consider one particular stream in the whole history of mankind, into
which a divine stream was interwoven. It goes back to the origin of
all things, the far beginning of all things. “In the Beginning
was the Word” where was the word in those distant ages,
when mankind had a language of the will? The Word was with God, it
had to be sought there by means of Intuition. “The Word was
with God ”.
The Archangels had to transpose themselves by means of Intuition into
the Being of the Second Hierarchy. The Being that flowed over into
Them was the Word.
“And a God was the Word”.
In the Beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And a God was the Word.
We see how intimate is the connection of that stream in evolution
which finds its culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha with the
Logos, the Word. And it is all bound up with the great cosmic event
of man's “becoming” and the passage of Christ
through death. When those great sentences were uttered: “In the
Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the
Word ” — in those days the Word was felt as moving and
weaving in the soul of man. With the Advent of the Mystery of
Golgotha came a time when Christ was present in a human body —
men beheld Him through the Word. The Word had entered into
physical man. “ And the Word became flesh ”.
Deep truths, deep facts of evolution, lie hidden in the ancient
writings, but earnest and persistent work is needed to find them
again. We must first be able to observe in the spiritual world. Above
all, we must approach these ancient writings with reverence, knowing
that we shall only be able to deepen our understanding of their
content by learning to investigate these sublime matters for
ourselves. And as we are able to enter into their deeper meaning we
enter also into spiritual life itself.
Well indeed would it be for us in this age, had we a Michael
civilisation, a culture and a civilisation fired by what I recently
called the Michael thought! This Michael thought should be alive,
above all, in the autumn time. The festival of autumn should be
filled with it. The leaves have withered and are falling from the
branches of the trees, the plants are fading away, life is being
mineralised. All the fresh young sprouting life that we saw in the
earlier part of the year is receiving death into itself, death and
decay, and is fast undergoing mineralisation. Now must the Michael
power well up from man's inner being; now must man recognise
how, just where the physical and material grows weak and faint and
tends to die away, — just there the spiritual enters in!
The Autumn Festival of Michaelmas at the end of September should
become a festival filled with life and impulse. It has to express how
man, while he stands right within the decaying processes of Nature,
grows correspondingly active in his soul. When the Michael Festival
shall have this character, then all human activity will be fructified
from it. And how sore is the need to-day for such fructification! Let
me give you an instance.
A short while ago, we heard a great deal about a resolve some people
had made to study language. Nothing came of it, nothing at all. All
manner of facts about language were collected, but the whole effort
was completely lacking in spirituality. It was really so. There you
had a group of young people, straight from school. At school of
course, they had not yet woken up, but now — they are
going to “study language”! They begin to plan it all and
think how it will be when they have gone on studying for some time; a
dazzling picture floats before their eyes of the fruit of all their
labours. Actually all the preliminary steps are there; they could
quite well have gone on to a recognition of the great miracle that
unfolds before us when we look away from the present-day language
of thought, through the language of feeling, to the
language of will, and behold there the wonderful working and
weaving of the Divine Archangels, behold too how their working and
weaving stirs even yet in the language corpses of to-day. Were the
life of the First Beginnings to flow again in language, what a
sublime greatness were there revealed!
You must understand that the Michael thought is not a thing to be
taken easily. You cannot simply say: Let us inaugurate a Michael
Festival; it will be wonderful, and we shall then be in the very
forefront of progress. The Michael thought has relation to the
strongest and deepest impulses of the human will. It must reckon with
these innermost impulses, and a Michael Festival cannot be other than
a festival which gives a tremendous urge to human life, much as in
those olden times, when man had the power to create festivals, the
institution of the Christmas Festival or of the Easter Festival gave
a new urge and impetus to the whole life of man on Earth.
Published in the Golden Blade, 1973
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