Lecture II
Artistic and Moral Experience
The understanding of the spiritual-scientific view of life not merely
with the mind but with the heart has as a result a corresponding
revolution in artistic creation and enjoyment. The forces which we
derive from this world-outlook can also flow into the understanding of
the world from the point of view of Art. We have recently tried to
indicate with our building (the Goetheanum at Dornach) at least a
small part of the spiritual-scientific impulses which can flow into
artistic forms. We would see a time, before us, if we examine closely
the experiences and feelings to be derived from spiritual science,
when the path to Art would be in many respects different from what it
has been in the past, when the means of artistic creation will be
experienced in the human soul much more intensively than before, when
colours and sounds will be much more intimately felt in the soul, when,
as it were, colours and sounds can be felt morally and spiritually in
the soul, and when in the creations of the artists we shall meet the
traces of their souls' experiences in the Cosmos.
In essentials the attitude of artistic creation and artistic
appreciation in the past epoch was a kind of external observation, an
appeal to something that affects the artist from outside. The need to
refer to Nature and to the model for outward observation has become
greater and greater. Not that in the Art of the future there is to be
any one-sided rejection of Nature and outward reality. Far from it,
but there will be a much more intimate union with the external world;
so strong a union with it, that it covers not merely the external
impression of colours and sound and form, but that which one can
experience behind the sound and colour and form, in what is
revealed by them.
In this respect mankind will make important discoveries in the future;
it will unite its moral-spiritual nature with the results of
sense-perception. An endless deepening of the human soul can be
foreseen in this domain. Let us take first of all a single point.
We will take the case when we direct our gaze to a surface evenly
covered with vermilion. Let us assume we succeed in forgetting
everything else round us and concentrating entirely on experiencing
this colour, so that we have the colour in front of us not merely as
something that works upon us, but as something wherein we ourselves
are, with which we ourselves are one. We shall then be able to have
the experience: you are now in the world, you yourself have become
colour in this world, your innermost soul has become colour. Wherever
you go in the world, your soul will be filled with red, everywhere you
live in red and with red and out of red. But we will not be able to
experience this in intensive soul-life, unless the feeling is
transformed into the corresponding moral experience, into real moral
experience. If we float through the world as red, and have become
identical with red, we shall not be able to help feeling that this red
world in which one is oneself red is pierced with the substance of
divine wrath, which pours upon us from every direction on account of
all the possibilities of evil and sin in us. We shall be able to feel
we are in the illimitable red spaces as in a judgment court of God,
and our moral feelings will be like what a moral experience of our
soul would become in all-embracing “illimitable” space. Then
when the reaction comes, when something rises in our soul one can only
describe it by saying that one learns to pray.
If one can experience in the colour red the radiation and fusion of the
divine wrath with all that can lie in the soul as the possibility of
evil, and if one can experience in red how one learns to pray, then
the experience of the colour red is enormously deepened. Then we can
also experience how red can express itself plastically in space.
We can then understand how we can experience a Being who radiates
goodness, who is filled with divine goodness and mercy, a Being such
as we long to experience in space. Then we shall feel the need of
expressing this divine mercy and goodness in a form which arises out
of the colour itself. We shall feel the need of allowing space to
recede, so that the goodness and mercy may shine forth. As clouds are
driven asunder so space is rent by goodness and mercy and we shall get
the feeling: you must make that a red which is fleeing.
Here we shall have to indicate faintly a kind of rose-violet streaming
into the fleeing red. We shall then be taking part with our whole soul
in a self-forming of colour, and with our whole soul shall feel an echo
of what those beings have felt who specially belong to our earth, and
who, when they had ascended to the Elohim-existence, learnt to fashion
the world of forms out of colours. We shall learn to experience
something of the Spirits of Form, who as spirits are the Elohim. And
we shall then understand how the forms of the colours can be realities
as is indicated in my first and second Mystery Plays, and we shall
understand a little of how the colour-surface becomes something we have
overcome, because we go out with colour into the Universe. If this is
accompanied by strong desire, a feeling can arise like that in Strader
when, looking at the picture of Capesius, he says: “I fain would
pierce this canvas through and through ...”
If you consider this you will see that an attempt has been made in
these Mystery Plays to present something of this sort really
artistically, how something appears before our soul when it attempts
to expand in the cosmic forces, when it feels one with the cosmic
spirits. That was in fact the beginning of all art. Then the
materialistic time had to come, and this old art, with its inner
divine subtlety, had to be changed into the secondary “After-Art,
Post-Art” which is essentially the art of the materialistic age,
the art which cannot create, but only imitate. It is the sign of all
secondary art, all derivative art that it can only imitate, and that
it does not create form directly out of the material itself.
Let us assume something else, that we do what we did with the red
surface, only with a more orange colour. We shall have quite different
experiences with it. If we sink ourselves in the orange surface and
become one with it, we shall not have the feeling of the divine wrath
bearing down upon us; we shall rather have the feeling that what meets
us here, though having something of the seriousness of wrath in a
modified form, is yet desirous of imparting something to us, instead
of merely punishing us, is desirous of arming us with inner power. If
we go out into the Universe and become one with the orange colour we
move in such a way that with every step we take we feel that this
experience, this living in the orange forces, gives us the impression
of becoming stronger and stronger, not merely that the judgment-seat
is shattering us. So that orange gives us something strengthening, and
does not bring only punishment with it. Thus we experience orange in
the Universe.
We feel then the longing to understand the inner side of things and to
unite it with ourselves. By living the red we learn to pray, and by
living in the orange we experience the desire for knowledge of the
inner nature of things. And if it is a yellow surface, and we do the
same thing, we feel ourselves transferred to the beginning of our
time-cycle. We feel: now you are living with the forces out of which
you have been created, when you entered upon your first
earth-incarnation. One feels an affinity between what one was during
the whole of the earth's existence, and what comes towards one from
the world into which one carries the yellow oneself.
And if one identifies oneself with green, and goes with it through the
Universe, which can quiet easily be done by gazing at a green field,
and by shutting out all else and concentrating entirely upon it, and
by then trying to dive down into it — as if green were the surface
of a coloured sea — one experiences an inner increase of strength in
what one happens to be in that one incarnation. One experiences a
feeling of inner health, but a the same time of inner
selfishness — a stimulus of the inner egoistic forces.
And if one did the same with a blue surface, one would go through the
world with the desire, as one proceeded, to overcome the egoism, to
become macro-cosmic. One would feel the desire to develop
self-surrender, and one would feel happy to remain in this condition
to meet the divine mercy. Thus one would go through the world feeling
as I blessed with the divine mercy.
So one learns to know the inner nature of colour, and as I said, we can
get an idea of a time when the preparation through which the painter
as artists will go, will mean a moral experience in colour of this
kind; when the experience preparatory to artistic creation will be
much more inward, much more intimate than it has ever been.
These are, after all, only a few indications I am giving you, which
will be developed much further in the future, and will take hold of
the souls of men and instigate them to artistic production. The
adaptation of the material culture of old to modern times has dried up
the soul and made it passive. Souls must be taken hold of and
stimulated again by the inner forces of things.
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