I
Research
into the Life of the Spirit During the Middle Ages
In close connection with what I had to bring before you in the lectures
given at our Christmas Foundation Meeting, I should like, in the
lectures that are now to be given, to speak further of the movement
that is leading us in modern times to research into the life of the
spirit. I refer to the movement spoken of under the name of
Rosicrucianism or some other occult designation, and I should like to
take this opportunity of giving you a picture of it in its inner
aspect and nature. It will be necessary first of all to say
something, by way of introduction, about the whole manner of forming
ideas which had become customary round about the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh centuries A.D., and which only very
gradually disappeared; for it is even to be found here and there
among stragglers, as it were as late as the nineteenth century. I do
not want today to deal with the matter from a historical point of
view, but rather to place before your mind's eye conceptions
and ideas that you are to think of as inwardly experienced by certain
people belonging to these centuries. In point of fact it is not
generally realised that we have only to go back a comparatively short
time in history, to find that the men who were accounted to be
scholars were possessed of a world of ideas altogether different from
our own.
In these days we speak of
chemical substances, we enumerate seventy or eighty chemical
elements; but we have no idea how very little we are saying when we
name one substance as oxygen, another as nitrogen, and so on. Oxygen,
for instance, is something that is present only under certain
well-defined conditions — conditions of warmth, e.g., and other
circumstances of earthly life, and it is impossible for a reasonable
person to unite a conception of reality with something that,
when the temperature is raised by so and so many degrees, is no
longer present in the same measure or manner as it is under the
conditions that obtain for man's physical life on Earth. It was
the realisation of facts like this that underlay research during the
early and middle part of the Middle Ages; the life of research of
those times set out to get beyond the relative in existence, to
arrive at true existence.
I have marked a transition
as between the ninth and tenth centuries A.D.,
because before this time man's perceptions were still
altogether spiritual. It would never, for example, have occurred to a
scholar of the ninth century to imagine Angels, Archangels, or
Seraphim as falling short in respect of reality — purely in
respect of reality — of the physical men he saw with his
eyes. You will find that before the tenth century, scholars always
speak of the spiritual Beings, the so-called
Intelligences of the Cosmos,
as of beings one actually meets in life. The people of
that time were of course well aware that the day was long past when
such vision had been common human experience, but they knew that in
certain circumstances the meeting could still take place. We must
not, for instance, overlook the fact that on into the ninth and tenth
centuries countless priests of the Catholic Church were quite
conscious of how, in the course of their celebration of the Mass, it
happened that in this or that enactment they met spiritual Beings,
the Intelligences of the Cosmos. With the ninth and tenth centuries,
however, the direct and immediate connection with the Intelligences
of the Universe began to disappear from men's consciousness;
and there began to light up, in its place, the consciousness of the
Elements of the Cosmos,
the earthy, the fluid or watery, the
airy, the warm or fiery. And so it came about that just as hitherto
men had spoken of Cosmic Intelligences that rule the movements of the
planets, that lead the planets across the constellations of the fixed
stars, and so forth, now they spoke instead of the immediate
environment of the Earth. They spoke of the elements of earth, water,
air, fire. Of chemical substances, in the modern sense of the word,
they did not as yet take account. That came much later. It would,
however, be a great mistake to imagine that the scholars of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries — even in a sense, the
scholars of the eighteenth century — had ideas of warmth, air,
water, earth, that resembled the ideas men have today. Warmth is
spoken of today merely as a condition in which bodies exist. No one
speaks any longer of actual warmth-ether. Air, water — these
have likewise become for the modern man completely abstract. It is
time we studied these ideas and learned to enter into a true
understanding of them. And so today I should like to give you a
picture, showing you how a scholar of those times would speak to his
pupils.
When I wrote my
Outline of Occult Science
I was obliged to make the account of the
evolution of the Earth accord at any rate a little with the
prevailing ideas of the present day. In the thirteenth and twelfth
centuries one would have been able to give the account quite
differently. The following might then have been found in a certain
chapter, e.g., of
Outline of Occult Science.
An idea would have been
called up, to begin with, of the Beings who may be designated as the
Beings of the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones.
The Seraphim would have been characterised as Beings with whom there
is no subject and object, with whom subject and object are one and
the same, Beings who would not say: Outside me are things —
but: The world is, and I am the World, and the World is I. Such
Beings know only of themselves, and this knowledge of
themselves is for them an inner experience of which man has a weak
reflection when he has the experience of being filled, shall we say,
with a glowing enthusiasm. It is, you know, quite difficult to
make the man of today understand what is meant by “glowing
enthusiasm.” Even in the beginning of the nineteenth century
men knew better what it is than they do today. In those days it could
still happen that some poem or other was being read aloud and the
people were so filled with enthusiasm — forgive me, but it
really was so — that present-day man would say they had all
gone out of their minds. They were so moved, so warmed! Today people
freeze up just when you expect them to be “enthused.” Now
it was lifting this element of enthusiasm, this rapture of the soul
that came naturally especially to the men of Middle and Eastern
Europe — it was by lifting it into consciousness, by making it
alone the complete content of consciousness, that men came to form an
idea of the inner life of the Seraphim. Again as a bright, clear
element in consciousness, full of light, so that thought turns
directly into light, illuminating everything — such an idea
did men form of the element of consciousness of the Cherubim.
And the element of consciousness of the Thrones was conceived as
sustaining, bearing the worlds in Grace.
There you have one such
sketch. I could go on speaking of it for a long time. For the moment
I only wanted to show you that in those days one would have tried to
describe the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones in the true qualities of
their being.
And then one would have
gone on to say: the Choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones works
together, in such wise that the Thrones found and establish a kernel;
the Cherubim let their own light-filled being stream forth from this
centre or kernel; and the Seraphim enwrap the whole in a mantle of
warmth and enthusiasm that rays far out into cosmic space.
[Footnote: Drawings were made on the blackboard, with coloured chalks.]
All the drawing I have made
is Beings: in the midst the Thrones; in the circumference
around them the Cherubim; and, outermost of all, the Seraphim. All is
essential Being, Beings who move and weave into one another, do,
think, will, feel in one another. All is of the very essence of
Being. And now, if a being having the right sensitiveness were to
take its path through the space where the Thrones have in this manner
established a kernel and centre, where the Cherubim have made a kind
of circling around it and the Seraphim have, as it were, enclosed the
whole — if a being with the required sensitiveness were to come
into this realm of the activity of the First Hierarchy, it would feel
warmth in varying differentiations — here greater warmth, there
less; but it would all be an experience of soul, and yet at the same
time physical experience in the senses; that is to say, when the
being felt itself warm in soul, the feeling would be actually the
feeling you have when you are in a well-warmed room.
Such a united building-up
by Beings of the First Hierarchy did verily once take place in the
Universe; it formed what we call the Saturn existence. The warmth is
merely the expression of the fact that the Beings are there.
The warmth is nothing more than the expression of the fact that the
Beings are there.
A picture will perhaps make
clearer to you what I mean. Let us suppose you have an affection for
a certain human being. You feel his presence gives you warmth. But
now someone comes along who is frightfully abstract and says: “The
person himself doesn't interest me, I will imagine him absent;
the warmth he sheds around him, that alone is what interests me.”
Or suppose he doesn't even say “The warmth he sheds
around him is all that interests me.” Suppose he says: “The
warmth is all that interests me.” He talks nonsense, of
course, you will see that at once; for if the man is not there who
sheds the warmth, then the warmth is not there either. The warmth is
in any case only there when the man is there. In itself it is
nothing. The man must be there, if the warmth is to be there. Even so
must Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones be there; if the Beings are not
there, neither is the warmth. The warmth is merely the revelation of
Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.
Now in the time of which I
speak, everything was exactly as I have described it. Men spoke of
Elements. They spoke of the Element of Warmth, and by the Element of
Warmth they understood Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones — and that
is the Saturn existence.
The description went
further. It was said: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones — these alone
have the power to bring forth something of the nature of Saturn, to
place it into the Cosmos. The highest Hierarchy alone is capable of
placing such an existence into the Cosmos. But when this highest
Hierarchy had once placed it there and a new world-becoming had taken
its start, then the evolution could go on further. The Sun, as it
were, that is formed of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones could carry
evolution further. And it came to pass in the following manner.
Beings of the Second Hierarchy, Kyriotetes, Dynamis,
Exusiai, Beings that had been generated by the Seraphim, Cherubim
and Thrones, press into the space that has been formed through the working
of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, that has been fashioned to Saturn
warmth. Thither entered younger, cosmically younger Beings. And how
did these cosmically younger Beings work? Whereas the Cherubim,
Seraphim and Thrones reveal themselves in the Element of Warmth, the
Beings of the second Hierarchy form themselves in the Element of
Light. Saturn is dark; it gives warmth. And now within the
dark world of the Saturn existence arises that which can arise
through the working of the Sons of the First Hierarchy, through
Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.
What is it that is able now
to arise within the Saturn warmth? The penetration of the Second
Hierarchy signifies an inner illumination. The Saturn Warmth
is inwardly shone through with light and at the same time it becomes
denser. Instead of only the Warmth Element there is now also Air.
And in the revelation of Light we have the entry of the Second
Hierarchy.
You must clearly understand
that it is in very deed and truth Beings who thus press their
way into the Saturn existence. One who had the requisite power of
perception would see the event as a penetration of Light; it
is Light that reveals the path of the Beings. And wherever Light
occurs, there occurs too, under certain conditions, shadow, darkness,
dark shadow. Through the Penetration by the Second Hierarchy in the
form of Light, shadow also comes to pass. What is shadow? It is Air.
And indeed until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men knew what
Air is. Today men know only that air consists of oxygen, nitrogen and
so forth. When that is said, it is very much as if someone were to
say about a watch that it consisted of glass and silver. He would be
saying nothing at all about the watch. And nothing at all is said
about Air as a cosmic phenomenon when we say that it consists of
oxygen and nitrogen. We say very much, on the other hand, if we know:
Air comes forth from the Cosmos as the shadow of Light. In
actual fact we have, with the entry of the second Hierarchy into the
Saturn warmth, the entry of Light and we have too the shadow of
Light, Air. And when we have this we have Sun. Such is the way one
would have had to speak in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries.
And what follows after
this? The further evolution comes about through the working of the
Sons of the Second Hierarchy — Archai, Archangels,
Angels. The Second Hierarchy have accomplished the entry of the
Element of Light, Light that has drawn after it its shadow, the darkness
of Air — not the indifferent, neutral darkness that belongs to Saturn,
the darkness that is simply absence of Light, but the darkness that
is wrought out as the antithesis of Light. And now to this Element of
Light the Third Hierarchy — Archai, Archangels, Angels —
add through their own nature and being a new Element, an Element that
is like our human desire, like our impulse to strive after
something, to long for something. Thereby the following comes to
pass.
Let us suppose an Archai or
Archangel Being enters, and comes upon an Element of Light,
encounters, as it were, a place of Light. In this place of Light the
Being receives, through its receptivity for the Light, the urge, the
desire for darkness. The Angel Being bears Light into darkness —
or an Angel Being bears darkness into Light. These Beings are
mediators, messengers between Light and Darkness. It follows from
this that what previously has only shone in Light and drawn after it
its shadow, the darkness of Air, begins now to shine in colour, to
glow in a play of colour. Light begins to appear in darkness,
darkness in light. The Third Hierarchy create colour out of light
and darkness.
Here we may find a
connection with something that is historical, with something that is
to be found in written document. For in the time of Aristotle men
still knew, when they contemplated in the Mysteries, whence colours
come; they knew that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy have to do
with colour. Therefore Aristotle, in his colour harmony, showed that
colour signifies a working together of Light and Darkness. But this
spiritual element in man's thought, whereby he knew that behind
Warmth he has to see Beings of the First Hierarchy, behind Light and
its shadow Darkness, Beings of the Second Hierarchy, and behind the
iridescent play of Colour he has to see in a great cosmic harmony,
Beings of the Third Hierarchy — this spiritual element in man's
thought has been lost. And nothing is left for man today but the
unhappy Newtonian Theory of Colour. The Initiates continued to smile
at Newton's theory till the eighteenth century, but in that
time it became an article of faith for professional physicists.
One must indeed have lost
all knowledge of the spiritual world when one can speak in the sense
of Newton's Theory of Colour. If one is still inwardly
stimulated by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, then
one resists it. One places before men the truth of the matter, as
Goethe did, and attacks with might and main. For Goethe never
censured so hardly as when he had to censure Newton, he went for him
and his theory hammer and tongs! Such a thing is incomprehensible
nowadays, for the simple reason that in our time anyone who does not
recognise the Newtonian Theory of Colour is a fool in the eyes of the
physicists. But things were different in Goethe's time. He did
not stand alone. True, he stood alone as one who spoke openly on the
matter; but there were others who really knew, even as late as the
end of the eighteenth century, whence colour comes, who knew with
absolute certainty how colour wells up from within the Spiritual.
But now we must go further.
We have seen that Air is the shadow of Light. And as, when Light
arises, under certain conditions we find the dark shadow, so when
colour is present and works as a reality — and it can do
so, for when it penetrates into the Air-element, it flames up in this
Air, works in it, in a word is something, is no mere reflection but a
reality flashing and sparkling in the Air-element — when this
is so, then under certain conditions we get pressure,
counter-pressure, and out of the real Colour there comes into being
the fluid, the Element of Water. As, for cosmic thinking, the
shadow of Light is Air, so is Water the reflection, the
creation of Colour in the Cosmos.
You will say: No, that I
cannot understand! But try for once really to grasp Colour in
its true meaning. Red — surely you do not think that red is, in
its essence, the neutral surface it is generally regarded as being?
Red is something that makes an attack upon you. — I have often
spoken of this. — You want to run away from red; it thrusts you
back. Blue-violet, on the other hand, you want to run after! It runs
away from you all the time; it grows deeper and ever deeper.
Everything is contained in the colours. The colours are a world, and
the soul element in the world of colour simply cannot exist without
movement; we ourselves, if we follow the colours with
soul-experience, must follow with movement.
People gaze open-eyed at
the rainbow. [Footnote: A sketch of a rainbow was made on the
blackboard with chalks of the colours as seen in the sky: red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.] But if you look at the rainbow
with a little imagination, you may see there elemental Beings. These
elemental Beings are full of activity and demonstrate it in a very
remarkable manner. Here (at yellow) you see some of them streaming
forth from the rainbow, continually coming away out of it. They move
across and the moment they reach the lower end of the green they are
drawn to it again. You see them disappear at this point (green). On
the other side they come out again. To one who views it with
imagination, the whole rainbow manifests a streaming out of spirit
and a disappearing of it again within. It is like a spiritual dance,
in very deed a spiritual waltz, wonderful to behold. And you may
observe too how these spiritual Beings come forth from the rainbow
with terrible fear, and how they go in with invincible courage. When
you look at the red-yellow, you see fear streaming out, and when you
look at the blue-violet you have the feeling: there all is courage
and bravery of heart.
Now picture to yourselves:
There before me is no mere rainbow! Beings are coming out of it and
disappearing into it — here anxiety and fear, there courage ...
And now, here the rainbow receives a certain thickness and you will
be able to imagine how this gives rise to the element of Water. In
this watery element spiritual Beings live, Beings that are actually a
kind of copy of the Beings of the Third Hierarchy.
There is no doubt about it:
if we want to get near the men of real knowledge in the eleventh,
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we must understand these things.
Indeed we cannot even understand the men of still later times, we
cannot understand Albertus Magnus, if we read him with the knowledge
we have today. We must read him with a manner of knowledge that takes
account of the fact that spiritual things like these were still a
reality for him: only then shall we understand how he expresses
himself, how he uses his words.
Thus we have, as a
reflection of the Hierarchies, first Air and then Water. The
Hierarchies themselves dive in, as it were — the second
Hierarchy in the form of Light, the third Hierarchy in the form of
Colour. And with this latter event the Moon existence is attained.
And now we come to the
Fourth Hierarchy. (I am telling it, you remember, as it was
thought of in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) We today do not
speak of the Fourth Hierarchy; but men still spoke in that way in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It
is Man. Man himself is the fourth Hierarchy. But by the Fourth
Hierarchy was not meant the two-legged being that goes about the
world today, ageing year by year! To the true man of knowledge of
those times, present-day man would have appeared as something very
strange. No, in those times they spoke of original Man, of Man before
the Fall, who still bore a form that gave him power over the Earth,
even as the Angels and Archangels and Archai had power over the Moon
existence, the second Hierarchy over the Sun existence and the first
Hierarchy over the Saturn existence. They spoke of Man in his
original Earthly existence and then they were right to speak of him
as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came —
as a gift it is true, of the higher Hierarchies, but the higher
Hierarchies have held it only as a possession they did not themselves
use but guarded and kept — with the Fourth Hierarchy came Life.
Into the world of Colour, into the iridescent world of changing
colour, of which I have only been able to give you the merest hints
and suggestions, came Life.
You will say: Then did
nothing live before this time? My dear friends, you can understand
how it is from the human being himself. Your Ego and your astral body
have not life, and yet they exist, they have being. That which is of
the soul and the spirit does not need life. Life begins only with
your etheric body. And the etheric body is something external, it is
of the nature of a sheath. Thus only after the Moon existence and
with the Earth existence does Life enter into the domain of that
evolution to which our Earth belongs. The world of moving,
glancing colour is quickened to life. And now not only do Angels
and Archangels and Archai experience a longing desire to carry
Darkness into Light, and Light into Darkness, thereby calling forth
the play of colour in the planet; now a desire becomes manifest to
experience this play of colour as something inward, to feel it
all inwardly; when Darkness dominates Light, to feel weakness,
laziness; when Light dominates Darkness, to feel activity. For what
is happening really, when you run? When you run, Light predominates
over Darkness in you; when you sit and are lazy and indolent, then
Darkness predominates over Light. It is a play of Colour, an activity
of Colour, not physical, but of the soul. Colour permeated with Life,
in its iridescence streamed-through with Life — that is what
appeared with the coming of the Fourth Hierarchy, Man. And in this
moment of cosmic becoming, the forces that became active in the play
of colour began to build contours, began to fashion forms.
Life, as it rounded off and moulded the colours, called into being
the hard, fast form of the crystal. And we have come into
Earth existence.
Such things as I have been
describing to you were fundamental truths for the mediaeval
alchemists and occultists, Rosicrucians and others, who flourished —
though history tells us little of them — from the ninth and
tenth on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of whom
stragglers are to be found as late as the eighteenth and even the
beginning of the nineteenth century — always however in these
later times regarded as strange and eccentric people. Only with the
entry of the nineteenth century did this knowledge become entirely
hidden. Only then did men come to acquire a conception of the world
that led them to a point of view which I will indicate in the
following way. Imagine, my dear friends, that here we have a man.
Suppose I cease to have any interest in this man, but I take his
clothes and hang them on a coat-hanger that has a knob here above
like a head. From now on I take no further interest in the man and I
tell myself: There is the man! What does it matter to me what
can be put into these clothes? That, the coat-hanger with the
clothes, is the man! This is really what happened with the Elements.
It does not interest us any longer that behind Warmth or Fire is the
First Hierarchy, behind Light and Air the Second Hierarchy, behind
what we call Chemical Ether or Colour Ether and Water the Third
Hierarchy, and behind the Life Element and Earth the Fourth
Hierarchy, Man. — The peg, the hanger and on it the clothes. —
That is all!
There you have the first
Act of the drama. The second Act begins with Kant! One has there the
hanger and the clothes hanging on it, and one begins to philosophise
in true Kantian fashion as to what the “thing-in-itself”
of these clothes may be. And one comes to a realisation that the
“thing-in-itself” of the clothes cannot be known. Very
clever, very clever indeed! Of course, if you first take away the man
and have only the coat-hanger with the clothes, you can philosophise
over the clothes, you can make most beautiful speculations! You can
either philosophise in Kantian fashion and say: “The
‘thing-in-itself’ cannot be known,” or in the
fashion of Helmholtz and think to yourself: “But these clothes,
they cannot of themselves have forms; there is nothing really there
but tiny, whirling specks of dust, tiny atoms, which hit and strike
each other and behold, the clothes are held in their form!”
Yes, my friends, that is
the way thought has developed in recent times. It is all abstract,
shadowy. And yet we live today in this way of thinking, in this way
of speculating; it gives the stamp to our whole natural-scientific
outlook. And when we do not admit that we think in this atomistic
way, then we do it most of all! For we are very far from admitting
that it is quite unnecessary to dream of a whirling dance of atoms,
and that what we have rather to do is to put back the man into the
clothes. This is however the very thing which the renewal of
Spiritual Science must try to do.
I wanted to indicate to you
today, in a number of pictures, the nature and manner of thinking in
earlier centuries and what is really contained in the older writings,
although it has become obscure. The very obscurity, however, has led
to incidents that are not without interest. A Norwegian scientist of
today has reprinted a passage from the writings of Basilius
Valentinus and has interpreted it in terms of modern chemistry. He
could not possibly say otherwise than that it is nonsense, because
this is what it appears to be if, in the modern sense, one thinks of
a chemist standing in a laboratory, making experiments with retorts
and other up-to-date apparatus. What Basilius Valentinus really gives
in this passage is a fragment of embryology, expressed in pictures.
That is what he gives — a fragment of embryology. According to
the modern mode of thought it seems to indicate a laboratory
experiment, which then proves to be nonsense. For you will not expect
to reproduce the real processes of embryology in a retort —
unless you be like the mediaevally minded Wagner of Goethe's
Faust.
It is time that these
things were understood. And in connection with the great truths of
which I was able to speak during the Christmas Foundation Meeting, I
shall have more to say concerning the spiritual life and its history
during the last few centuries.
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