IV
HE LAST two lectures concentrated on artistic feeling and creation. I
wished to call attention to the fact that anthroposophical contemplation
leads to a particular manner of beholding the world, which must lead, in
turn, to an inner vitalization of the arts, present and future. At the end
of yesterday's lecture I stressed the fact that, by gaining a direct
relation to the spiritual, a person can acquire the forces necessary
for the creation, out of his innermost core, of true art. It has always
been so. For true art stands beside real knowledge on the one hand,
and on the other, genuine religious life. Through knowledge and religion
man draws closer to the spiritual element in thought, feeling and will.
Indeed, it is his inward experience of knowledge and religion, during
an earth life, that brings about a sense of the validity of all that
I discussed during the last two lectures. Looking at the physical
surroundings akin to his physical body, he comes to realize that
physicality is not the whole of his humanness. In all artistic and
religious ages he has recognized this truth, saying to himself: Though
I stand within earth existence, it contradicts that part of my human
nature which was imaged forth from worlds quite different from the one
in which I live between birth and death.
Let us
consider this feeling I have just described in respect to cognition.
Through thinking man strives to solve the riddles of existence. Modern
man is very proud of the naturalistic knowledge which, for three or
four centuries, now, while marvelous relationships in nature were traced
out, has been accumulating. But, precisely in regard to these relationships,
present-day natural science must say to itself on reflection, with all
intensity: What can be learned through the physical senses leads to
a door which locks out world mysteries and cosmic riddles. And we know
from anthroposophical contemplation that, to pass this door, to enter
the realms where we may perceive what lies behind the outer world, we
must overcome certain inner dangers. If a human being is to tread the
path leading through this door, he must first attain, in his thoughts,
feelings and will, a certain inner steadiness. That is why entering
this door is called passing the Guardian of the Threshold. If real knowledge
of the spiritual-divine foundation of the world is to be acquired, attention
must be called not only to the dangers mentioned, but also to the fact
that no person penetrates this door in the state of consciousness brought
about between birth and death by merely natural conditions.
Here we
should consider the tremendous seriousness of cognition. Also the abyss
lying between the purely naturalistic world and the world we must seek
if we would enter our true home and discover what bears a relationship
to our inmost being. For in the merely naturalistic world we feel ourselves
strangers in regard to this inmost being. On entering physical existence
at birth, inevitably we carry with us our eternal-divine being; but
if its source is to be recognized, we must first become aware of the
abyss lying between earth life and the regions of cognition which we
must enter in order to know our own being.
An understanding
of cognition highlights, on the one hand, the gravity of the search
for a true relationship with the spiritual world; on the other, it helps
us to recognize that, if earthly existence were immediately satisfactory,
if what modern naturalism dreams to be the case were so, namely, that
man is merely the highest pinnacle of natural phenomena, there would
exist no religious human beings. For in such circumstances man would
have to be satisfied with earthly existence.
Religion aims at
something entirely different. It presents a reality which reconciles
man to earthly existence, or consoles him beyond earthly existence, or
perhaps awakens him to the full meaning of earthly existence by making him
aware that he is more than anything which earthly existence implies.
Thus the
anthroposophical world-conception is capable of giving a strong impetus
to cognition as well as to religious experience. In the case of cognition
it stresses the fact that one must travel a road of purification before
passing the gate to the spiritual world. On the other hand, it stresses
the truth that religious life leads far beyond the facts observable
by a person with only ordinary earthly consciousness. For Anthroposophy
recognizes that the Mystery of Golgotha, the earth-life of Christ Jesus,
though placed among historical events comprehensible to the senses,
can be comprehended in its fulness only supersensibly.
Fortunately
the abyss on the edge of which man lives, the abyss opening out before
him in religion and cognition, can be bridged. But not by contemporary
religion, nor yet by a cognition, a science, derived wholly from the
earth.
It is
here that art enters. It forms a bridge across the abyss. That is why
art must realize that its task is to carry the spiritual-divine life
into the earthly; to fashion the latter in such a way that its forms,
colors, words, tones, act as a revelation of the world beyond. Whether
art takes on an idealistic or realistic coloring is of no importance.
What it needs is a relationship to the truly, not merely thought-out,
spiritual. No artist could create in his medium if there were not alive
in him impulses springing from the spiritual world. This fact points
to the seriousness of art, standing alongside the seriousness of cognition
and religious experience. It cannot be denied that our materialistically
oriented civilization diverts us, in many ways, from the gravity of
art. But any devoted study of true artistic creation reveals it as an
earnest of man's struggle to harmonize the spiritual-divine with the
physical-earthly.
This became
evident at that moment of world-evolution when human beings were faced
in all seriousness with the great question of art; became evident in
the grand style during the time of Goethe and Schiller. A glance at
their struggles will corroborate this statement. Much that is pertinent,
here, has already been quoted in past years, in other connections. Today
— to provide a basis for discussion — I shall cite only a
few instances.
During
the eighteenth century there emerged a guiding idea which Goethe and
Schiller themselves accepted: namely, the differentiation between romantic
and classical art. Espousing classicism, Goethe tried to become its
nurturer by familiarizing himself with the secrets of great Greek art.
His Italian journey was fulfilment of his longing. In Germany, that
northern land, he felt no possibility of reconciling, artistically,
the divine-spiritual hovering, before his soul and the physical-sensory
standing before his senses. Greek art, so abundant in Italy, and now
deeply perceived, taught him the harmonization he lacked when he left
Weimar for Italy. The impression he makes in describing his experience
is — I must coin a paradoxical expression — at once heroic
and touching.
In art
Goethe was a classicist in the sense (if we use words which satisfactorily
express his own idea) that he directed his gaze primarily toward the
external, the sensory-real. But he was too profound a spirit not to
feel a discrepancy between the sensory and that which derives from other
realms, home of his soul. Sense-evidence should be purified, elevated
through shaping, through an appropriate treatment. Thus Goethe the artist
distilled from natural forms and human actions an element which, although
presented imperfectly in the sensory-physical, could be brought to
clarity without infidelity to the physical. In other words, he let the
divine-spiritual shine through purified sensory forms. Always it was
his earnest endeavor not to take up the spiritual lightly in his writings,
not to express the divine-spiritual offhandedly. For he was convinced
that romanticism can make only a facile, all-too-easy introduction of
the spiritual into the physical; not deal with it comprehensively and
effectively.
Never
was it his intention to say: The gods live; I resort to symbolism to
prove my conviction that the gods live. He did not feel thus. On the
contrary, he felt somewhat as follows: I see the stones, I behold the
plants, I observe the animals, I perceive the actions of human beings.
To me all these creations have fallen away from the divine-spiritual.
Nevertheless, though their earthly forms and colors show a desertion from
the divine-spiritual, I must, by my treatment, lift them to a level where
they can reflect, out of their own natures, that same divine-spiritual.
I need not become unfaithful to nature — this Goethe felt —
just purify seceded nature by artistic fashioning; then it will express
the divine-spiritual. This was Goethe's conception of classicism; of
the main impulse of Greek art, of all true art.
Schiller
was unable to go along with this viewpoint. Because his gaze was directed
idealistically into the spiritual world, he used physical things as
indicators only. Thus he was the dayspring of post-Goethean romantic
poetry. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the reversal of method.
For romantic poetry, as opposite pole to the classicism striven for
by Goethe, despaired, as it were, of elevating the earthly-sensory to
the divine; being satisfied to use it only as a more or less successful
way of pointing to the divine-spiritual.
Let us
look at the classicism of Goethe, composer of these beautiful lines:
Who possesses science and art
Possesses religion as well:
Who possesses the first two not,
O grant him religion.
(“Wer Wissenschaft and Kunst besitzt,
Hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion.”)
Goethe,
permeated by a conviction that every artist harbors the religious impulse,
Goethe, to whom the trivially religious was repulsive because there
lived in him a deep religious impulse, took the greatest pains to purify
artistically the sensory-physical-earthly form to a point where it became
an image of the divine-spiritual. Let us look at his careful way of
working. He took up what was robustly earthly without feeling any necessity
of changing it greatly to give it artistic form.
Consider,
in this respect, his
Goetz von Berlichingen.
He treated the
biography of this man objectively and with respect while dramatizing
it, as demonstrated by the title of the first version: Geschichte
Gott friedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, dramatisiert (History
of Gottfried of Berlichingen of the Iron Hand, Dramatized). In
other words, by changing only slightly the purely physical, he led it
over into the dramatic; wishing, as artist, to part with the earth as
little as possible; presenting it as a manifestation of the
spiritual-divine world order.
Take another
instance. Let us see how he approached his
Iphigenie,
his
Tasso.
He conceived these dramas, shaped their subject matter, poetically.
But what happened then? He did not dare to give them their final form.
In the situation in which he found himself, he, Goethe, who was born
in Frankfurt and studied in Leipzig and Strassburg before going to Weimar,
he, the Weimar-Frankfurt Goethe, did riot dare to finish these dramas.
He had to go to Italy and walk in the light of Greek art to elevate
the sensory-physical-earthly to a level where it could image forth the
spiritual. Imagine the battle Goethe went through in order to bridge
the abyss between the sensory-physical-earthly and divine-spiritual.
It was like an illness when he left Weimar under cover of night, saying
nothing to anybody, to flee to an environment in which he could master
and elevate and spiritualize, as never in the north, the forms he worked
with. His psychology is deeply moving. As I said before, it has about
it something that might be called heroic-touching.
Let us
go further. It is characteristic of Goethe — the paradox may strike
you as peculiar — that he never finished anything. He began
Faust
in one great fling, but only the philistine Eckermann could induce him,
in his old age, to bring this drama to a conclusion, and then it was
only just barely possible for the author. For Goethe to bring his
Faust
to artistic form was a tremendous struggle which required the help of
somebody else. Then take
Wilhelm Meister.
After its inception,
he did not wish to finish. It was Schiller who persuaded him to do so.
And if we scrutinize the matter, we might say: if only Schiller had
not done so. For what Goethe then produced was not on the same level
as his first sketch which would have remained a fragment. Take the second
part: episodes are assembled. The writing is not all of a piece; it
is not a uniform work of art. Now observe how — as in
Pandora
— Goethe strove to rise to the pinnacle of artistic creation by
drawing his figures from the Greek world which he loved so much.
Pandora
remained a fragment, he could not complete it; the project was too vast
for him to round it out. The serious, difficult task of the artist weighed
upon his soul, and when he tried to idealize human life, to present
it in the glory of the divine-spiritual, he could complete only the
first part of the trilogy, the first drama:
Die Natuerliche Tochter.
Thus in
every possible way Goethe shows his predilection for the classical;
always endeavoring, in his works, to purify the earthly physical to the
point where it could spread abroad the radiance of the divine-spiritual.
He struggled and strove, but the task was such that, apprehended deeply
enough, it surpassed human forces, even Goethe's. We must say, therefore,
that precisely in such a personality the arts with their grave
world-mission appear in their full grandeur and power. What appeared,
later, in romanticism is all the more characteristic when considered
in the light of Goethe.
Last Thursday
was the hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of Ludwig Tieck, who was born
on May 31, 1773, and died on April 28, 1853. Tieck — unfortunately
little known today — was in a certain respect a loyal pupil of
Goethe. He grew out of romanticism, out of what at the University of Jena
during the nineties of the eighteenth century was regarded as as the
modern Goethe problem. In his youth he had experienced the publication of
Werther
and of the first part of
Faust.
At Jena, together with Novalis,
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, he struggled to solve the riddles of the
world. In his immediate environment Ludwig Tieck felt the breath of
Goethe's striving toward the classical, and in him we can see how spiritual
life was still active at the end of the eighteenth, and during the first
half of the nineteenth, century. With Schlegel, Tieck introduced Shakespeare
into Germany; and as a personality he illustrates how Goethe's tremendous
efforts were reflected in certain of his prominent contemporaries. Tieck
felt the grandeur and dignity of art as a mighty cultural ideal. He
looked about; he did not gather his life experiences in a narrowly circumscribed
spot. After sitting at the feet of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel at the
University of Jena, he journeyed through Italy and France. Then, after
becoming acquainted with the world and philosophy, he strove, in a true
Goethean manner, artistically to bridge the abyss between earthly and
heavenly existence.
Of course
he could not compete with Goethe's power and impetus. But let us look
at one of Tieck's works:
Franz Sternbald's Wanderungen
(Franz Sternbald's Journeys),
written in the form of
Wilhelm Meister. What
are these Sternbald journeys? They are journeys of the human soul into
the realm of art. The question pressing heavily upon Sternbald is this:
How can I raise sense-reality to the radiance of the spiritual? At the
same time Tieck — whose hundred-and-fiftieth birthday we ought
to be celebrating — felt the seriousness which streams down upon
art from the region of cognition and that of religious life. Great is
the light which falls, from there, upon Ludwig Tieck's artistic creations.
A novel which he wrote comparatively early in life bears the title
William Lovell;
and this character is under Tieck's own impression (received
while sitting at the feet of Schelling and Fichte in Jena) of the extreme
seriousness of the search for knowledge. Imagine the effect of such
teachings upon a spirit as receptive as Tieck's. (Differently, though
not less magnificently, they influenced Novalis.) In his younger years
Tieck had passed through the rationalistic “free spirit” training
of Berlin's supreme philistine Nikolai. It was therefore an experience
of the very greatest importance when he saw how in Fichte and Schelling
the human soul relinquished, as it were, all connection with outer physical
reality and, solely through its own power, endeavored to find a path
through the door to the spiritual world. In
William Lovell
Tieck depicts a human being who, entirely out of the forces of his own
soul, subjectively, seeks access to the spirit. Unable to find in the
physical-sensory the divine for which Goethe constantly strove through
his classical art, William Lovell seeks it nevertheless, relying entirely
on his own forces, and thereby becoming confused, perplexed in regard
to the world and his own personality. Thus William Lovell loses his
hold on life through something sublime, that is, through the philosophy
of Fichte and Schelling. In a peculiar way the book points out the dangers
of cognition, through which, of necessity, men must pass. Tieck shows
us how the cognitionally-serious can infuse the artistically-serious.
In his
later years Ludwig Tieck created the poetic work:
Der Aufruhr in den Cevennen
(The Uprising in the Cevennes).
What is his subject
matter? Demonic powers which approach man, nature spirits which lay
hold of him, possess him, drive him into religious fanaticism, and cause
him to lose his way through the world. Oh, this Ludwig Tieck certainly
felt what it means, on the one hand, to be dependent solely upon one's
own personality and, on the other, to fall prey to elementals, gods
of the elements. Hence overtones of gripping power in Tieck's works;
for example in his
Dichterleben
(Life of the Poet)
in which
he describes how Shakespeare, as a thoroughly poetic nature, enters
the world, how the world puts obstacles in his path, and how he stumbles
into pitfalls. In
Dichterleben
Tieck discusses a poet's birth
and all that earthly life gives him on a purely naturalistic basis. In
Tod des Dichters
(Death of the Poet)
which deals with the
last days of the Portuguese poet Camoens, he describes a poet's departure
from life, his path to the gate of death. It is deeply moving how Tieck
describes, out of the seriousness of the Goethe age, the beginning and
end of an artist's life. What was great in Tieck was not his own personality,
but rather his reflection of Goethe's spirit. Most characteristic, therefore,
is his treatment of those “really practical people” who want
to stand solidly on the earth without spiritual impulse in artistic
presentation. Oh, there exists no more striking satire on novels about
knights and robber barons than Tieck's
Blaubart
(Bluebeard).
And, again, no more striking satire on the mawkishly emotional trying
to be artistic than Tieck's
Der gestiefelte Kater
(Puss-in-Boots).
The woeful excess of sentiment which mutters of the divine-spiritual (a
sentimentality illustrated by the affected Ifliand and babbling Kotzebue)
he sends packing.
Ludwig
Tieck reveals how the Goetheanism of the first half of the nineteenth
century was mirrored in a receptive personality; how something like
a memory of the great ancient periods played into the modern age; periods
in which mankind, looking up to the divine-spiritual, strove to create, in
the arts, memorials of the divine-spiritual. Such a personality represents
the transition from an age still spiritually vital, at least in memory,
to an age blinded by a brilliant natural-scientific world-conception
and less brilliant life-practice; an age which will never find the spirit
without the impetus which comes from direct spiritual perception,
which is to say, from imagination, inspiration and intuition, as striven
for by Anthroposophy.
Look,
from this point of view, at the tremendous seriousness ensouling these
writers. Not only Goethe but many others despaired of finding their
way into the spiritual world through contemporary cultural life. Goethe
did not rest until, in Italy, he had acquired an understanding of the
way the Greeks penetrated the secrets of existence through their works
of art. I have often quoted Goethe's statement: “It seems to me
that, in creating their works of art, the Greeks proceeded according
to nature's own laws, which I am now tracing.” Clearly, he believed
that in their art the Greeks received from the gods something which
enabled them to create higher works of nature, images of divine-spiritual
existence. The followers of Goethe, still under his direct influence,
felt compelled to return to ancient times, at least to ancient Greece,
to attain to the spirit.
Herman
Grimm, who in many ways still felt Goethe's living breath (I mentioned
this in my last article in
Das Goetheanum),
said repeatedly
that the ancient Romans resembled modern human beings; though they wore
the toga, walked like moderns; whereas the ancient Greeks all seemed
to have had the blood of the gods flowing through their veins. A beautiful,
artistically felt statement! Indeed, it was only after the fifteenth
century (I have often mentioned this) that man entered into materialism.
It was necessary. We must not berate what the modern age brought. Had
things stayed as they were, man would have remained deterministically
dependent upon the divine spiritual world. If he was ever to become
free, his passage into a purely material civilization was an historical
necessity. In the book
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
I have described modern man's attitude in this respect. But the evening
glow of the ancient spiritual life was still lighting up the sky in
Goethe's time, indeed, right up to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Therefore his longing for Italy, his hope of finding there, through an
echo from ancient Greece, something unattainable in his own civilization:
the spirit. Goethe could not live without having seen Rome and a culture
which, however antiquated, still enshrined the spiritual in the
sensory-physical.
He was preceded in
this mood by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a kind of personification
of that evening-glow of ancient spiritual life. Goethe's appreciation
of Winckelmann comes out in his marvelously beautiful book on this man
and his century: a glorious presentation of the strivings of a personality
longing for the spirit. Through this book one senses what Goethe felt
vividly: that Winckelmann went to the south, to Rome, to find in ancient
spirituality the spirit he missed in the present and restore it. Winckelmann
was intoxicated by his search for spirituality: Goethe could feel that.
And his book is superb precisely because he was permeated with that
same longing. In Rome both men sensed, at last, something of the breath
of ancient spirituality. There Winckelmann traced the mysteries of art
to remnants of Greek artistic impulses and absorbed them into his soul;
there Goethe repeated the experience. Thus it was in Rome that Goethe
rewrote
Iphigenie.
He had fled with his northern
Iphigenie
to Rome in order to rewrite it and give it the only form he could consider
classical. Here he succeeded. Which cannot be said of the works written
after he returned home.
In all this
we see Goethe the artist's profoundly serious struggle for spirituality.
Only after he had discovered in
Raphael's
colors and
Michelangelo's
forms the results of what he considered genuine artistic experience
could his own search come to fruition. Thus he represents the evening
glow of a spirituality lost and no longer valid for modern man.
Permit
me, now, to make a personal remark. There was a certain moment when
I felt deeply what Winckelmann said when he traveled south to discover
the secrets of art, and how Goethe followed in his footsteps. At the
same moment I could not but feel strongly that the time of our surrender
to the evening glow had passed; we must now search with all our might
for a new unfolding of spiritual life, must give up seeking for what
is past. All this I experienced at the destiny-allotted moment when,
years ago, I had to deliver some anthroposophical lectures about the
evolution of world and man in the very rooms where Winckelmann lived
during his Roman sojourn; the very rooms where he conceived his thoughts
about Italian and Greek art, and enunciated the comprehensive ideas
which filled Goethe with the enthusiasm expressed in his book on
Winckelmann. Here in Winckelmann's quarters the conviction permeated
me that something new must be stated on the path to spiritual life. A
strange connection of destiny.
With this
personal remark I conclude today's observations.
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