III
The
Time of Transition
I spoke to you yesterday of the special form in which the results of
research in the realm of spiritual knowledge were communicated in the
Middle Ages. This form was, so to speak, the last Act before a door
was shut for the evolution of the spirit of man, a door that had been
open for many centuries and given entrance by way of natural gift and
faculty into the spiritual world. The door was shut when the time
came for man, so far as his instinctive faculties were concerned, to
be placed out-side the kingdom of the divine-spiritual Will that
ruled over him. From that time forward he had to find in his own
inmost being, in his own will, the possibility to evolve conscious
freedom in the soul.
All the great moves of
evolution, however, take place slowly, gradually, step by step. And
the experience that had been attained by the pupil when the teacher
led him up into the Ether-heights and down into the deep clefts of
the Earth — even in those times it was no longer possible in
the form it had taken in the ancient Mysteries — this
experience was now, in later times, directly connected with an
experience of Nature (though not with Nature on the Earth's
surface itself) which came to man in a more unconscious form.
Think for a moment how it
was with those persons who strove after knowledge about the year 1200
and on through the following century. They heard tell how, only a
short time before, pupils were still able to find teachers, like the
one of whom I told you yesterday; but they themselves were directed
to human thinking as the means of attaining knowledge.
In the succeeding time of
the Middle Ages we can see this human thinking developing and
spreading, asserting itself in an impressive manner. It sets out on
new paths with inner zeal, with sincere and whole-hearted devotion,
and these paths are followed by large circles of knowledge-seekers.
What we may truly call the knowledge of the Spiritual, that too
continued its way. And after a few centuries we come to the time when
Rosicrucianism proper was founded. Rosicrucianism is connected with a
change that took place in the whole spiritual world in respect of
man. I shall best describe the change by giving you once again a
picture.
Mysteries in the old sense
of the word were no longer possible in the time of which I have been
speaking. There were however men who yearned for knowledge in the
sense of the ancient Mysteries, and who experienced hard and heavy
conflicts of soul when they heard how in the past men had been led up
to the mountain and down to the clefts of the Earth, and had thus
found knowledge. They developed all possible inner methods, they made
all possible inner efforts in order to rouse the soul within them,
that it might after all yet find the way. And he who is able to see
such things can find in those times, as we said just now, not places
of the Mysteries, but gatherings of knowledge-seekers who met
together in an atmosphere warmed through and through with the glow of
piety. What appears later as Rosicrucianism, sound and genuine
Rosicrucianism, as well as the debased and charlatan kinds, comes in
reality from men who gathered together in this simple way and sought
so to temper their souls that genuine spiritual knowledge might yet
be able to arise for them. In such a gathering, that took place in
most unpretentious surroundings, the simple living-room of a kind of
manor house, a few persons were once met, who, through certain
exercises half thoughtful and meditative in character, half of the
nature of prayer, done in common by them all, had developed a
mystical mood in which all shared. It was the same mystical mood of
soul that was cultivated in later times by the so-called “Brothers
of the Common Life,” and later still by the followers of
Comenius and by many other Brotherhoods. In this small circle,
however, it showed itself with a peculiar intensity, and whilst these
few men were there gathered together, making devotion, so to say, of
their ordinary consciousness, of their whole intellect, in this
intense mystical atmosphere of soul, it happened that a being came to
them, not a being of flesh and blood like the teacher whom the pupil
met and who led him to the mountains and to the clefts of the Earth,
but a being who was only able to appear in an etheric body in this
little company of men. This being revealed himself as the same who
had guided the pupil about the year 1200. He was now in the
after-death state. He had descended to these men from the spiritual
world; they had drawn him thither by the mood of soul that prevailed
in them — mystical, meditative, pious.
My dear friends, in order
that no misunderstanding may arise, let me expressly emphasise that
there is there no question of any mediumistic power. The little
company who were gathered there would have looked upon any use —
or any sanctioning — of mediumistic powers, as deeply sinful;
they would have been led to do so by certain ideas belonging to old
and honoured tradition. Just in those very communities of which I am
telling you, mediumship and all that is related to it was regarded
not merely as harmful but as sinful — and for the following
reason. These persons knew that mediumship goes together with a
peculiar constitution of the physical body; they knew that it is the
physical body that gives the medium his spiritual powers. But the
physical body they looked upon as “fallen,” and
information that came by the help of mediumship they could not but
regard under all circumstances as acquired by the help of Ahrimanic
or Luciferic powers.
In those times, things like
this were still clearly and exactly known. And so we have not to
think of anything mediumistic in this connection. There was the mood
of mysticism and meditation, and that alone. And it was the enhancing
and strengthening of this mood through fellowship of soul, that, so
to speak, enchanted into the circle, but of his own free-will, that
disembodied human being, purely spiritual, and yet at the same time
human.
The being spoke to them
thus, in a deeply solemn manner: — “You are not
altogether prepared for my appearance but I am among you discarnate,
without physical body, forasmuch as a time has come when for a short
period of Earth existence the Initiate of olden times is unable to
appear in a physical body. The time will come again when he can do
so, when the Michael period begins. But I am come to reveal to you
that the inner being of man nevertheless remains unchanged, that the
inner being of man, if it holds itself aright, can yet find the way
to the divine-spiritual existence. For a period of time, however, the
human intellect and understanding will be so constituted that it will
have to be suppressed in order for that which is of the Spirit to be
able to speak to the human soul. Therefore remain in your mystic and
pious mood of soul ... You have received from me, all of you
together, the picture, the imagination. I have, however, been able to
give you no more than a mere indication of that which will come to
fulfilment within you; you will go on further and find a continuation
of what you have here experienced!”
And now, three from the
number gathered there together, were chosen, to the end that they
might establish a special union with the spiritual world, once more
not at all through any kind of mediumistic powers but through a
development of that mystic, meditative, pious mood of soul. These
three, who were guarded and protected by the rest of the circle,
closely and intimately cared for by the others, experienced from time
to time a kind of absence of mind. They were at these times, in their
external bodily nature, wonderfully lovely and beautiful, they
acquired a sort of shining countenance, shining like the sun, and
they wrote down, in symbols, revelations which they received from the
spiritual world. These symbolic revelations were the first pictures
by which the Rosicrucians were shown when it behoved them to know of
the spiritual world. The revelations contained a kind of philosophy,
a kind of theology and also a kind of medicine.
And the remarkable thing
was that the others (it seems to me as though the others were four in
number, so that the whole was a company of seven), after the
experience they had with their brothers, beholding how their eyes
shone like the sun and how their countenances were bright and radiant
— these other four were able to give again in ordinary language
what was conveyed in the symbols. The brothers whose destiny it was
to bring the symbols from the spiritual world, could only write down
the symbols, they could only say, when they returned again into their
ordinary consciousness: “We have been among the stars, and have
found the old teachers of the secret knowledge.” They could not
themselves turn the symbolic pictures that they drew, into ordinary
human speech. The others could and did. And this is the source of a
great deal of knowledge that passed over into the literature of
theology, more particularly such as was philosophical in character
(not the theology of the Church but rather of the laity) and into the
literature of medicine. And what was thus received from the spiritual
world in symbols was afterwards communicated to small groups that
were organised by the first Rosicrucians.
Again and again, in the
time from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, there was still
the possibility in certain very small groups for experiences of this
nature. Revelations came frequently to men from the spiritual world
in this or some similar way. But those who had to translate what was
thus revealed in pictures were not always capable of doing it quite
faithfully. Hence the want of clarity in the philosophy of this
period. One has to discover for oneself what it really means, by
seeking for it again in the world of the Spirit. For those however
who have had knowledge of this kind of revelation received from the
spiritual world, it has always been possible to link on to such
revelations.
But picture to yourselves,
my dear friends, what strange feelings must gradually have come over
these men, who had to receive the very highest knowledge — for
what was given to them was so accounted — from a direction that
was growing more and more foreign, almost uncanny, to them; for they
could no longer see into the world out of which the secrets came to
them; ordinary consciousness could not reach so far. It can readily
be understood that such things easily led to charlatanism and even to
fraud. Indeed at no time of human evolution have charlatanism and the
highest and purest of revelation stood so close to one another as in
this period. It is difficult to distinguish the true from the false —
so much so that many regard the whole of Rosicrucianism as charlatan.
One can understand this, for the true Rosicrucians are
extra-ordinarily hard to find among the charlatans, and the whole
matter is all the more difficult and problematic for the reason that
one has always to bear in mind that the spiritual revelation comes
from sources which in their real quality and nature remain hidden.
The small circles gathered
by the first Rosicrucians grew to a larger brotherhood, who always
went about unrecognised, appearing here and there in the world,
generally with the calling of a physician, healing the sick, and at
the same time spreading knowledge as they went. And it was so that in
regard to very much of this knowledge, the spreading of it was not
without a certain embarrassment, inasmuch as the men who carried it
on were not able to speak of the connection in which they stood to
the spiritual world.
But now something else was
developed in this pursuit of spiritual knowledge and spiritual
research, something that is of very great beauty. There were the
three brethren and the four. The three are only able to attain their
goal when the four work together with them. The two groups are
absolutely interdependent. The three receive the revelations from the
spiritual world, the four are able to translate them into ordinary
human language. What the three give would be nothing but quite
unintelligible pictures, if the four were not able to translate them.
And again, the four would have nothing to translate, if the three did
not receive their revelations, in picture form, from the spiritual
world. This gave rise to the development within such communities of
an inner brotherhood of soul, a brotherhood in knowledge and in
spiritual life, which in some circles of those times was held to be
among the very highest of human attributes. Such small groups of men
did indeed learn to know through their striving the true worth of
brotherhood. And gradually they came more and more to feel how the
evolution of humanity towards freedom is such that the bond between
men and Gods would be completely severed were it not kept whole by
such brotherhood, where the one looks to the other, where the one is
in very truth dependent on the other.
We have here a picture of
something in the soul which is wonderfully beautiful. And much that
was written in those days possesses a certain charm which we only
understand when we know how this atmosphere of brotherhood which
permeated the spiritual life of many circles in Europe in those
times, shed its radiant light into the writings.
There is however another
mood that we find in those who are striving for knowledge, and this
mood began gradually to pervade their whole endeavours and made
people anxious. If in those times one did not approach the sources of
spiritual revelation, ultimately it was so that one could no longer
know whether these revelations were good or evil. And a certain
anxiety began to be felt in regard to some of the influences. The
anxiety spread later over large circles of people, who came to have
fear, intense fear of all knowledge.
The development of the mood
of which I speak may be particularly well studied in the examples of
two men. One is Raimund of Sabunda, who lived in the fifteenth
century, being born about 1430. Raimund of Sabunda is a remarkable
man. If you study carefully what remains to us of his thought, then
you will have the feeling: This is surely almost the very same
revelation that was communicated in full consciousness about the year
1200 by the teacher who took his pupil to the mountain tops and to
the chasms of the Earth! Only in Raimund of Sabunda of the fifteenth
century, it is all given in a vague, impersonal style, philosophical
in character, theological too and medical. The truth is that Raimund
of Sabunda had also received his revelations by way of the genuine
Rosicrucians, that is to say, by the path that had been opened by the
great Initiate of the twelfth century, whose work and influence I
described to you yesterday, and who continued to inspire men from out
of the spiritual world, as I have been relating to you today. For the
revelation that afterwards came through Rosicrucianism, as I have
often described to you, came originally from this great Initiate and
those who were with him in the spiritual world; the mood and feeling
of the whole teaching was set by him. Anxiety, however, was at this
time beginning to take hold of men. Now Raimund of Sabunda was a
bold, brave spirit, he was one of those men who can value ideas, who
understand how to live in ideas. And so, although we notice in him a
certain vagueness due to the fact that the revelations have their
source after all in the spiritual world, yet in him we find no trace
of anxiety or fear in regard to knowledge.
All the more striking is
another and very characteristic example of that spiritual stream:
Pico della Mirandola, who also belongs to the fifteenth century.
The short-lived Pico della
Mirandola is a very remarkable figure. If you study deeply the fruits
of his thought and contemplation, you will see how the same
initiative I have just described is everywhere active in them, due to
the continuation of the wisdom of that old Initiate by way of the
Rosicrucian stream. But in Pico della Mirandola you will observe a
kind of shrinking back before this knowledge. Let me give you an
instance. He established how everything that happens on Earth —
stones and rock coming into being, plants living and growing and
bearing fruit, animals living their life — how all this cannot
be attributed to the forces of the Earth. If anyone were to think:
There is the Earth, and the forces of the Earth produce that which is
on the Earth, he would have quite a wrong notion of the matter. The
true view, according to Pico della Mirandola, is that up there are
the Stars and what happens in the Earth is dependent on the Stars.
One must look up to the Heavens, if one wants to understand what
happens on Earth. Speaking in the sense of Pico della Mirandola we
should have to say: You give me your hand, my brother man, but it is
not your feeling alone that is the cause why you give me your hand,
it is the star standing over you that gives you the impulse to hold
out your hand to me. Ultimately everything that is brought about has
its source in the Heavens, in the Cosmos; what happens on Earth is
but the reflection of what happens in the Heavens.
Pico della Mirandola gives
expression to this as his firm conviction, and yet at the same time
he says: But it is not for man to look up to these causes in the
stars, he has only to take account of the immediate cause on Earth.
From this point of view
Pico della Mirandola combats — and it is most characteristic
that he does so — the Astrology that he finds prevalent. He
knows well that the old, real, and genuine Astrology expresses itself
in the destinies of men. He knows that; it is for him a truth. And
yet he says: one should not pursue Astrology, one should look only
for the immediate causes.
Note well what it is we
have before us here. For the first time we are confronted with the
idea of “boundaries” to knowledge. The idea shows itself
in a significant manner, it is still, shall we say, human in
character. Later, in Kant, in du Bois-Reymond, you will find
expressed in them: “Man cannot cross the boundaries of
knowledge.” The idea is said to rest on an inner necessity.
That is not the case with Pico della Mirandola in the fifteenth
century. He says: “What is on Earth has undoubtedly come about
through cosmic causes. But man is called upon to forgo the attainment
of a knowledge of these cosmic causes; he has to limit himself to the
Earth.” Thus we have in the fifteenth century, in such a
markedly characteristic person as Pico della Mirandola, voluntary
renunciation of the highest knowledge.
My dear friends, we have
here a spiritual event in the history of culture of the greatest
imaginable importance. Men made the resolve: We will renounce
knowledge! And that which comes to pass externally in such a person
as Pico della Mirandola has once more, in very deed and fact, its
counterpart in the Spiritual.
It was again in one of
those simple gatherings of Rosicrucians that in the second half of
the fifteenth century, on the occasion of a ritual arranged for this
very purpose, man's Star-knowledge was in deeply solemn manner
offered up in sacrifice. What took place in that ritual, which was
enacted in all the solemnity proper to such a festival, may be
expressed as follows. — Men stood before a kind of altar and
said: “We resolve now to feel ourselves responsible not for
ourselves alone nor our community, nor our nation, nor even only for
the men of our time; we resolve to feel ourselves responsible for all
men who have ever lived on Earth, to feel that we belong to the whole
of mankind. And we feel that mankind has deserted the rank of the
Fourth Hierarchy and has descended too deeply into matter” (for
the Fall into Sin was understood in this sense) “and in order
that man may be able to return to the rank of the Fourth Hierarchy,
may be able to find for himself in freedom of will what in earlier
times Gods have tried to find for him and with him, let now the
higher knowledge be offered up for a season!”
And certain Beings of the
spiritual world, who are not of human kind, who do not come to Earth
in human incarnation, accepted the sacrifice in order to fulfil
therewith certain purposes in the spiritual world. It would take us
too far to speak of these here; we will do so another time. But the
impulse to freedom was thereby made possible for man from out of the
spiritual world.
I tell you of this ritual
in order to show you how everything that takes place in the external
life of the physical senses has its spiritual counterpart; we have
only to look for it in the right place. For it can happen that such a
celebration, enacted — I will not say in this instance, with
full knowledge, but enacted by persons who stand in connection with
the spiritual world — may have very deep meaning; from it can
radiate impulses for a whole culture or a whole stream of
civilisation. Whoever wants to know the fundamental colouring and
tone of a particular epoch of time must look for that source in the
Spiritual whence spring the forces that stream through this epoch of
time.
In the years that followed,
whatever came into being of a truly spiritual nature, was an echo of
this creative working from out of the unknown spiritual worlds. And
side by side with the external materialism that developed in the
succeeding centuries, we can always find individual spirits who lived
under the influence of that renunciation of the higher knowledge.
I should like to give you a
brief description of a type of man who might be met with from the
fifteenth century onwards through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries. You might find him in some country village as a
herb-gatherer for an apothecary, or in some other simple calling. If
one takes an interest in special forms and manifestations of the
being of man as they show themselves in this or that individuality,
then one may meet and recognise such a person. At first he is
extraordinarily reserved, speaks but little, perhaps even turns away
your attention from what you are trying to find in him by talking in
a trivial manner, on purpose to make you think it is not worth while
to converse with him. If, however, you know better than to look
merely at the content of the words a man says, if you know how to
hear the ring of the words, how to listen to the way the words come
out of a man, then you will go on listening to such a one, despite
all discouragement. And if out of some karmic connection he receives
the impression that he really should speak to you, then he will begin
to speak, carefully and guardedly. And you will make the discovery
that he is a kind of wise man. But what he says is not earthly
wisdom. Neither is there contained in it much of what we now call
spiritual science. But they are warm words of the heart, far-reaching
moral teachings; nor is there anything sentimental about his way of
uttering them, he speaks them rather as proverbs.
He might say something like
this. “Let us go over to yonder fir-tree. My soul can creep
into the needles and cones, for my soul is everywhere. From the cones
and needles of the fir-tree, my soul sees through them, looks out
into the deeps and distances of the worlds beyond; and then I become
one with the whole world. That is the true piety, to become one with
the whole world. Where is God? God is in every fir-cone. And he who
does not recognise God in every fir-cone, he who sees God somewhere
else than in every fir-cone — he does not know the true God.”
I want only to describe to
you how these men spoke, men that you might find in the way I have
described. Such was their manner of speaking. And they might go on to
say more. “Yes, and when one creeps into the fir-cones and into
the needles of the fir-tree, then one finds how the God rejoices over
the human beings in the world. And when one descends deep down into
one's own heart, into the abysses of the innermost of man's
nature, there also one finds the God; but then one learns to know how
He is made sad through the sinfulness of men.”
In such wise spake these
simple sages. A great number of them possessed — to speak in
modern language — “editions” of the geometrical
figures of the old Rosicrucians. These they would show to those who
approached them in the right way. When however they spoke about these
figures — which were no more than quite simple, even poor,
impressions — then the conversation would unfold in a strange
manner. There were many people who, although they took interest in
the unpretentious wise man before them, were at the same time
overcome with curiosity as to what these strange Rosicrucian pictures
really meant, and asked about them. But they received from these wise
men, who were often regarded as eccentric, no clear and exact answer;
they received only the advice: If one attains the right deepening of
soul, then one can see through these figures, as through a window,
into the spiritual world. The wise men would give as it were a
description of what they themselves had been able to feel and
experience from the figures rather than any explanation or
interpretation of them. And often it was so, that when one had heard
these expressions of feeling in connection with the figures, one
could not put them into thought at all; for these simple sages did
not give thoughts. What they gave, however, had an after-working that
was of immense significance. One left these men, not only with warmth
in one's soul, but with the feeling: I have received a
knowledge that lives in me, a knowledge I can by no means enclose in
thoughts and concepts.
That was one of the ways in
which, during this period from the fourteenth, fifteenth to the end
of the eighteenth century, the nature of the Divine and the nature of
the Human, what God is and what Man is, was taught and made known to
man through feeling. We cannot quite say, without words, but we can
say, without ideas, although not on that account without content.
In this period much
intercourse went on among men by means of a silencing of thought. No
one can arrive at a true conception of the character of this period
who does not know how much was brought to pass in those days through
this silencing of thought, when men interchanged not mere words but
their very souls.
I have given you, my dear
friends, a picture of one of the features of that time of transition
when freedom was first beginning to flourish among men. I shall have
more to say on this from many aspects. For the moment, taking my
start from all that took place at the Christmas Foundation Meeting, I
wanted here to add something further to what was given then.
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