Copernicus and His Time in the Light of Spiritual Science
Berlin, 15 February 1912
There are people who regard the deed of
Copernicus as the biggest of the cultural revolutions which
humanity has ever experienced as far as the historical memory
reaches. One has to admit that the impression and the influence
of this spiritual revolution was so significant for any outer
thinking of the human beings that, indeed, hardly something
more effective can be compared with it. One can bring to mind
also easily what it had to mean to
the world of the sixteenth century, the earth on which one believed to stand firmly resting
in the universe, not only to have to retrain
the relation of the own residential place,
of this planet, of the sun, of the whole universe. The human
beings literally lost the ground of their view. What they had
regarded as firm up to then that the sun and the whole starry
heaven circles around this firm earthly residential place, and
everything that is spread out in space exists only because of
this earthly residential place, one had now to assume that the
earth is something that hurries with big speed through the
cosmic space. They had to imagine the sun as something that
does not move in relation to the earth and the earth even as
something moving.
Even if the time is relatively short, since
this spiritual wave descended upon humanity, one does not at
all realise today, which change of thinking was necessary to
submit to the new way of thinking in this area. But it is also
necessary to realise that hardly any idea of humanity seized
the whole human education and culture in such relatively short
time and settled down that we have to think today that the
human being has to learn the Copernican world system as one of
the most elementary teachings and knowledge already as a child
at school. If one looks at its significance and effectiveness,
it becomes twice interesting to ask oneself: how does this
progress position itself generally in the whole development of
the human spirit?
In the last talk, I have spoken about
Human History, Present, and Future in the Light of Spiritual Science.
What appeared to us as the biggest event of human
development presents itself just in a nice special case if we
look at the action of Copernicus. What happened, actually, at
that time in the sixteenth century when already after the death
of Copernicus his great work
On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres
appeared before the educated world?
Copernicus had yet believed that it complied with his position
as a Catholic canon so that he dedicated it to the pope, and
was, still, on the index of the forbidden books of the Catholic
Church up to 1821.
Only from the whole attitude of his time
one can understand the action of Copernicus, actually, only if
one takes the fact into account that in the centuries up to the
appearance of Copernicus in the cultural life, Aristotelism
prevailed in science. Since those medieval thinkers and
researchers who preceded Copernicus stood on the ground of that
what Aristoteles had produced as a scientific spirit centuries
before the Christian calendar. As far as these philosophers and
researchers of the Middle Ages were Christian, they connected
the Christian doctrines harmoniously with that what they had
taken up as a scientific way of thinking from
Aristotle.
The teaching of Copernicus is a break in a
certain respect, one would have to say, not with the teaching
of Aristotle, probably, but with that what had arisen from
Aristotle by the Christian researchers. These called Aristotle
a precursor of the Lord, of Christ the things of the natural world order. For them the
whole worldview disintegrated into two parts: in a part which
could originate only from the Christian revelation, from the
tradition of the scriptures. This part dealt with that what is
generally inaccessible to the human reason but only to faith.
They took the second part of their worldview from Aristotle,
and they penetrated everything with Aristotelian attitude that
the human being can attain by research and science. If one sees
Aristotle having an continuous effect on the intellectual
culture of the Middle Ages that way, and if one sees him then
replaced by Copernicus and his great successors Kepler,
Galilei, Giordano Bruno and others, then one has to ask
oneself, how was the original Aristotle, and how was his
teaching which the Christian scholars of the Middle Ages
regarded as Aristotelian?
If one becomes engrossed in the
comprehensive, magnificent work of Aristotle, one realises that
Aristoteles has summarised the reflections of the preceding
culture epochs. But they face us with Aristotle in a strange
way. Of course, in this context I cannot dwell on the teachings
of Aristotle, I would like to draw your attention only to one
thing that is necessary just for spiritual science to
understand the action of Copernicus and the character of his
age.
With Aristotle, you find that logically and
reasonably processed and brought in ideas what he had taken
over from old times. If you only wanted to refer to that which
his reason could understand, we would realise that the ideas of
human reason cannot enclose everything that we find in the
teachings of Aristotle. There we find the idea that universe
and nature are ensouled, are spirit-filled. He pronounces
distinctly that not only the human physical body, but also the
spiritual-mental of the human being are born out of the
universe. The human body because the matter is spread out in
the universe. But the spiritual-mental has arisen from
the universe because he imagines the universe as spirit-filled,
as ensouled. What we see in the stars is for Aristotle not only
an accumulation of matter, but also the material embodiment of
a soul being, and the passage of a star through the universe is
for him not only the result of mere mechanical or physical
forces, but also the expression of the will of the star's
spirit or the star's soul.
If one goes deeper in detail, one
everywhere finds something quite peculiar shining through. With
his wholly logical, abstract explanations, one finds an old
knowledge shining through which was still delivered to the
Greeks, and which Aristotle brought in rational ideas. One can
understand Aristotle only properly if one takes that as a
basis, which I have said in the last talk, the whole human
development proceeded in such a way that humanity originated
from a consciousness different from the present one which is
organised mainly to the intellect. — Against it there was
on the bottom of every human soul a kind of innate clairvoyance
in olden times which we can achieve by instruction today as I
have explained it in the book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?
Humanity has developed from this
clairvoyant knowledge which existed in ancient times and which
became weaker and weaker in the course of human development.
Humanity could behold in that which is deeper in the things
than that which only the senses and the reason can understand.
Everywhere one finds an original knowledge hidden on the bottom
of human cultures, a knowledge by Intuition, Inspiration, and
Imagination. But this original knowledge had to get lost
gradually, because only on this condition humanity could
develop the intellectual culture.
The main concern of scientificity and
scientific worldviews could develop only because the old hazy
clairvoyant knowledge gradually changed into our knowledge.
Since the old clairvoyant consciousness lacked our logical
thinking completely. What one knew at that time what the
originally clairvoyant human soul gained was continued up to
the Greek times. This old knowledge of humanity still shines
strangely through with Plato, the teacher of Aristotle. We find
this old knowledge in the form as the modern human being can no
longer attain it for himself, for example, in the Oriental
cultures, mainly in the ancient Indian culture. It is
interesting to realise that in the Indian culture from the
ancient culture of humanity, which was able to behold in the
spiritual world, something similar originates as we find it
with Aristotle. In the Indian culture something arises at last
that the human beings gained as it were by the education for
millenniums, by the internalisation up to the logical thinking
which has now to get to a world explanation without
clairvoyance purely by itself. We realise that this old culture
maintains its knowledge, but educates the soul in such a way
that that which is delivered is grasped in logical, reasonable
ideas. With the Indian culture, we see the interesting fact
that the humanity of the East stops on that level beyond which
it does not get, a level that resulted since centuries before
our Christian calendar.
With Aristotle, we see that the logical
culture, the intellectual culture assuming another character
while it develops from the old clairvoyant knowledge. We
realise that still the teaching of the ensoulment of the world
sounds through. But while humanity develops from the old
clairvoyance the culture of the thinking, the logic arises with
Aristotle as a kind of separate science that can become now
again the instrument of a quite different disposed
research.
If we compare Aristotle and the Indian
culture, we have to say: the Indian culture comes to a dead
point, it comes as it were to a dead end where the thought
always when it wants to recognise something positive has to
turn back to the ancient culture and its clairvoyant
results.
Against it, with Aristotle we see the
ancient culture ending, indeed, that, but the thought is so
maintained that it can seize something else. One does not
understand Aristotle properly if one does not see his whole
philosophy related to his psychology. Since for Aristoteles it
would be absurd that the human soul was only a function, a
result of the activity of the human body. He was clear in his
mind that the physical body is gifted if the human being enters
the world directly from the spiritual world with the
spiritual-mental essence. He would never have believed that the
human being arises only from heredity, but he derived the
spiritual-mental from that what he called the world of God from
which he let the most significant inner core of the soul
arise.
Just as little, Aristotle let the
spiritual-mental essence of the human being stop at death, but
he was clear in his mind that that what lives in us and works
and uses the body as tool lives on after death. However, he was
also clear in his mind that the physical life is by no means
superfluous or useless, but that the soul must submerge
necessarily in the physical life because it can only there
attain that what it has to bring into the spiritual world after
death. It is interesting how Aristoteles imagined the destiny
of the human soul core as bound to the destiny of the life,
which it experienced here between birth and death. He lets it
be bound to the life on earth so that the soul relieved of its
body lives on after death in the spiritual world, but has to
look back at a world in which it was. While it turns the
spiritual view down, it sees its former physical body. It
realises the good or bad, nice or ugly, clever or silly
actions, sensations, or thoughts he had in life. Thus the soul
is bound in this retrospect of the physical life to this view,
while that what of it lives in the spiritual world is dependent
from its corporeality.
There Aristotle had the sombre idea that
the soul experiences for all eternity what it has
— bound to
the physical body —
to experience. Since Aristotle was too far
away from the original, human culture that still knew something
of repeated lives on earth. That is why he could not show how
the soul appears after death in a new human body again and uses
the sight of its last life on earth during its existence in the
spiritual world so that it transforms the experiences of the
previous life on earth and uses them as an opportunity to
compensate in a new life on earth what it did wrongly or
imperfectly. Concerning the imperfect the only consolation is
that the soul gets a new stimulus to make the defects more
perfect in the next life. Aristotle did not know this because
he did not recognise that at his time the human culture had
come to that point where the human being did research by the
instrument of the brain that exists only between birth and
death. Only that way Aristotle could become the founder of the
logical, scientific thinking while he clouded the view of
repeated lives on earth and the life in a spiritual world for
his time. He did not go so far of binding the spiritual-mental
to the bodily, although he had lost the view of the repeated
incarnations of the spiritual-mental. The fact that this is in
such a way is proved in particular in a book that has just
appeared and belongs quite certainly to the best works of the
literature on Aristotle if it is not generally the best about
the worldview of Aristotle. The book that I recommend very much is
Aristotle and His Worldview
(1911) by Franz Brentano (1838–1917).
I would just like to read out the words of
this excellent expert of Aristotle to show what he writes about
the destiny of the soul after death out of a deep penetration
with the whole way of Aristotelian thinking: “But how? Is
the idea of retaliation not completely shattered?
— One
could mean it, and then it would be explained, why Aristotle
did not refer to retaliation in the beyond in the ethics in
contrast to Plato. That is not the case. We remind of the
difference to which I drew the attention with the spirits of
the spheres in the comparison with the godhead. Similar
differences exist also here, and if the dead look at the world
and feel intertwined into it with their lives on earth, then
the one recognises himself as identical with someone who
accomplishes good actions, and another with someone who
accomplishes shameful actions. This knowledge, which they
attain, is at the same time an everlasting, glorifying, or
condemning Last Judgement, a Last Judgement that takes place as
such in front of everyone for all eternity. Should one not
regard this as retaliation and as completely adequate to the
true merit?”
We realise here at the same time that not
only the religious confession, but also the science of
Aristotle have assumed an everlasting connection of the soul
with this one life on earth. Here we have an explanation why
one has also spoken of everlasting reward and punishment so
stubbornly where the medieval doctrine wants to be scientific.
As an old tradition, Aristotle had his spiritual view and his
conviction that something spiritual penetrates the human being
and lives in him. His mission was to lead out the old culture
from a spiritual culture.
Now not a deep understanding, but strictly
speaking only the outer tradition of Aristotle remained the
whole Middle Ages through beyond Copernicus; one swore on the
works of Aristotle. Everywhere one taught at the schools what
one had found in them. But the instrument of reason
matured, hidden to outer observation, in the human
souls. What Aristotle had to tell of the old spiritual
teachings of wisdom was misunderstood and interpreted
sophistically, so that those who came then, Kepler, Galilei,
Giordano Bruno, could not help scrapping that what one had
taken over of the belief in Aristotle. What Aristotle had
delivered as contents got lost. But an inner soul culture
developed, the culture of the intellect, of the reason. Reason,
thinking is empty in itself if it has no object of research. We
still find the old spiritual wisdom with Aristotle as the
object of research. But it gradually disappeared. The Middle
Ages had, so to speak, only for that more talent which one can
see with the senses and understand with the intellect.
Copernicus was that man who now turned the glance to the world
in such a way that he understood the world coherence in space,
as this could be understood with the mere outer reason at first
that summarised by logic and mathematics what spread out in
space. Because the spiritual original culture was anxious,
above all, to understand the human being, as he is on earth, in
relation to his spiritual-mental and in relation to his origin
from the spiritual-mental of the world, the old teachings
considered the outer spatial conditions only a little.
The old teaching simply accepted the
sensory appearance, because it did not give something to
understand space and time but to recognise what lives in the
depths of the human soul and is born from the spiritual-mental
depths of the universe. Only when the reason felt alone with
the thought, it got the urge to understand the outer reality.
We can characterise the age of Copernicus even better with
someone who is even greater than Copernicus is although he did
not work in the scientific area so impressively on humanity as
Copernicus did.
Imagine a spirit who is put into the
fifteenth, sixteenth centuries when the greatness of the old
spiritual culture had disappeared from the general
consciousness longtime ago when in the human soul the
possibility developed to grasp the outer sensory reality
greatly with the forces of the strong human personality. If we
imagine a human being who is just endowed with this tendency we
have the older contemporary of Copernicus, the genius Leonardo
da Vinci (1452–1519) who was able to grasp the immediate
sensory reality in such a depth that his Communion in Milan,
even if it is disfigured, still takes our deep fancy. Leonardo
da Vinci is a person who created this completely from the
depths of his soul as an artist; he was not only a painter and
sculptor, but also an engineer and architect, he was
scientifically active in a comprehensive sense. His scientific
records have a great effect on us if we study them. He is the
greatest representative of the time that developed to the
sixteenth century; he was a man in whose inside largely and
immensely all forces had become fertile which Aristotle had
directed to the consideration of the world. What was abstract
with Aristotle became immediate, lively, spiritual reality with
Leonardo da Vinci. He also faces us that way where he grasps
the world as a scientist.
The canon Copernicus is also endowed with
that what humanity could learn as culture, as self-education
from Aristotle. He investigated in all silence, during four
times nine years, as he himself says, not some outer
facts — this is the typical that he did not investigate outer
facts —, but that he accepted that what the senses, the outer
reason knew about the outer facts of the solar system. That who
appears compared with Copernicus as
“half-advanced,” Tycho de Brahe (1546–1601), seems
virtually pioneering with the investigation of sensory facts,
whereas Copernicus contributed nothing to the investigation of
outer facts. What did Copernicus really achieve? Someone who
intensely studies his writings knows that he did not apply the
culture which humanity could gain by Aristotle to the old
spiritual culture like Aristotle, to the knowledge of the
spiritual-mental of the human being and of the universe but to
the outer sensory reality.
Let us grasp the inner relation of the
stars to the sun not in such away as the medieval science and
Aristotelism have grasped it, but let us assume that the sun is
in the centre, and that the planets circle round it. What would
result from this assumption? Copernicus possibly asked himself.
He could say to himself, we have obeyed a methodical, a logical
principle of Aristotle more than those do who want to explain
the sense-perceptible in their way. They have to assume complex
movements of the single planets, and put up laws that
constitute the solar system at last. But an old principle that
can make sense to the human beings just by the logic of
Aristotle says that we should never use a complex thought if a
simple thought can explain the world coherence.
Copernicus used the simplest thought, not
by a special intention. Because he took the view to summarise
the outer sensory facts, he put the sun in the centre of the
system and let the planets circle round it. That which one
could only explain in complex way once, the place of a star,
when it was seen, arose easier. Thus, Aristotle gave the
impulse, although those did not understand him who believed to
be true Aristotelians in the Middle Ages, which brought
humanity on that level on which it grasped the idea inside
Copernicus to apply the idea of simplicity to the outer
universe.
That which Aristotle still applied to
spiritual wisdom originated from the old culture of the
humanely mental for science. But that what has originated from
the old spiritual culture as an instrument begins spreading
over the sensory world and surveying it lawfully. If then we
realise how the action of Copernicus keeps on working in
Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno, even still in Newton, it
becomes clear to us everywhere that the age of
Copernicus gave humanity the mission to add
the culture and science of the sensory world to the old
spiritual culture and science.
However, it was also necessary for it that
the human habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and willing were
directed to the immediate physical outer reality. This also
appears in a strange way that it combines with the action of
Copernicus. We still see souls like Leonardo da Vinci and those
who belong to him arising from the Renaissance culture, which
breaks with the medieval avoidance of nature and which brings
joy of the immediate reality to the human beings. This was
necessary to be able to understand the outer reality also
immediately with the scientific reason with Galilei, Kepler and
Copernicus.
It is interesting to realise that it
becomes more difficult to the human beings, so to speak, in one
area and easier in the other area to familiarise themselves to
the quite new way of thinking and to apply the new mental
pictures to the universe. We realise too that it becomes
difficult to humanity to accept the outer reality at first as
the basis of an intellectual culture in the origin of the Faust
legend in the sixteenth century that also has a historical
background. There we realise that the human beings felt the new
thinking as something by which they lost the old coherence with
the spiritual of the world. As far away that what is connected
with the Faust figure seems to be from the feeling that the
human being is torn out from the spiritual culture and is a
slave of all mistakes and errors that arise from his
personality. Nevertheless, it is reflected in the popular
education of the sixteenth century as the consciousness, while
it tells about Faust that he laid the Bible behind the bank for
a while and became a worldly man and doctor The latter
represented a researcher in the outer nature. It is interesting
to observe that a naive person like Copernicus felt: you have
only brought the thought of simplicity on the solar system up
to the inward-looking human soul.
As a devout man, he had to say to himself,
recognising the laws of the universe in their true form, I
contribute, actually, to the knowledge of the divine thoughts
working in the world. —
In his naivety, he could believe that it
was right to dedicate his work to the pope. But friends had
kept him from publishing his work, so that he received the
correction of the first sheet only on his deathbed, because he
believed that it was not right to keep it longer from fear.
Now, but we realise the peculiar that the time culture had to
position itself to it. The work was published only after his
death. The publisher weakened what Copernicus wanted to say in
a preface in which he said in a careful way that this work would be not something that
counts on the facts of the world directly, but it would be a
possible hypothesis among other hypotheses. Now we have to be
clear in our mind that the action of Copernicus is the starting
point of a cultural epoch within which we still are, because it
is a straight progress from Copernicus to our days. But that
peculiarly presents itself which in his naivety Copernicus
regarded as well founded on the Christian faith. It appears in
a peculiar way what he did at that time if we compare it to
that what was connected with it in the course of the centuries.
One knows it well. Copernicus
himself still escaped from any persecution because he saw his
world-revolutionising work only on his deathbed. Those who kept
on working in his sense Galilei, Giordano Bruno, experienced
another destiny. This is known to all world. We realise exactly
here what arises from the action of an ingenious human being,
how everything that becomes later common property of humanity
can only assert itself by opposition. Really, one has to
confess that one feels it as something quite peculiar if one
looks at the action of Copernicus as a necessity just in such a
way, as we have done it today — and realises now
that this action keeps working as, but also the opposing
attitude keeps on working.
If one looks at the time of Copernicus in
this cultural-moral sense, the following arises. He himself
believed that this action did not at all contradict his
confession that he believed to have as a man devoted to his
church. Since when the action of the Copernicus took place, and
the culture of the outer sensory world seized humanity, there
still enough existed of the culture of the old times with which
humanity connected that what is spread out in the universe as a
spiritual and formed the contents of the Aristotelian
teachings. It would be not at all possible at the time of
Kepler, Galilei, also of Newton, to count as a reasonable
person if one stated that possibly only from the cooperation of
the material processes the human soul rises in its activity, as
the flame comes into being from the material processes of the
candle. Just for the greatest spirits, this would not have been
possible. Although his doctrine worked so world revolutionising
later, Copernicus remained firmly founded on the belief in the
spirit working in the universe.
Kepler, his great successor, still worked
as an astrologer beside that he was a great astronomer. This is
important for the characteristic of the age of Copernicus that
Kepler worked as an astrologer. Only from this viewpoint one
has to consider that he was convinced — although he inserted
three principles named after him in science — that something
spiritual-mental works in all mechanical processes of the
universe, so that one could get to know something of the human
destiny from the constellations of the stars.
Galileo also felt that the human soul was
embedded in the spiritual-mental of the world. Since Galilei
was of the view that one was not allowed to stop at a science
of paper but has to advance to a science of reason after
Copernicus and after he had invented his telescope with which
he had discovered the Jupiter moons and the fact that the Milky
Way was composed of single star formations. Galilei was, as
others of his time, an opponent of Aristotle but only of the
misunderstood Aristotle. Against it, he was penetrated by that
what one can call culture of thought, internalisation of the
thought up to the logical conception of the outer reality. But
he had never become estranged to the idea that the human mind
can understand by logic at successive times what is spread out
in space and time. But compared with this human reason, which
can recognise the secrets of the universe successively by the
consideration of that what the senses perceive, Galilei saw the
divine spirit working and interweaving in the world and of
which he felt reverentially that it pre-thinks the universe in
one single moment and does not after-think it as the human
being does. So for Galilei the divine spirit formed the basis
of all world phenomena which the world thought creates within
one moment on its own terms whose image the world is which then
the human mind and intellect can maybe understand successively,
at least through many ages.
For the age of Copernicus, the
consciousness was not yet lost generally that the human soul is
based on the spiritual-mental of the universe. Even with
Newton, we still recognise that he imagines — although he believes
to have explained the forces of the outer universe as
mechanical ones by the principle of gravitation
— that the
spiritual-mental of the human being is so firmly based on the
spiritual-mental of the universe that he became an interpreter,
a commentator of the Apocalypse at the same time. Just the
principal documents of this age were still filled with that
what had, indeed, disappeared of the old science which still
went on sounding with Aristotle, and which knew that the
spiritual-mental is connected inside the human being with the
spiritual-mental in the universe outdoors. The old knowledge
had disappeared, but the traditions were still there to which
one could dedicate himself quietly, because in the human heart
something lived that wanted to dedicate itself to them quietly.
Nevertheless, something different was the habitual ways of
thinking. We see the thought on its own becoming impoverished.
Where these spirits wanted to advance to an understanding of
the spiritual-mental life, Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno,
Newton, all traditions still could live in their souls. But if
they wanted to understand the soul life with the principles
attained with their reason, these soul forces turned out to be
incapable, even if they were alive ever so much. As to the
shine of a past old wisdom Galilei tended to the reason of his
God, as he believed it, and as it existed in the tradition of
his faith.
However, those who wanted then to look for
a lawful connection of the human soul with the spiritual-mental
of the world in similar way, as they had looked at the time of
Copernicus for a lawful connection of the earth with the stars,
the spatial universe, faced the impoverishment of thought put
on its own. With one of the most enthusiastic spirits of the
Copernican age, with Giordano Bruno, we see this impoverishment
of the thought that had brought itself to interpret the world
in the sense of Copernicus. He points to the fact that where
one had supposed the so-called “eighth sphere”
behind the fixed star sphere according to the previous view
nothing exists everywhere but worlds as the earth is, it is
only a small world in the big one. One has only to remember his
miraculous and astute worldview that breaks down a lot of that
what had remained to humanity from old times, and then one
recognises that just Giordano Bruno wants to enliven the
consciousness of the spiritual coherence of the human soul with
the spiritual world. He is clear in his mind that if one looks
at a physical being like the human being, one has to imagine
that it arises from a spiritual universe that the spiritual of
the universe concentrated in a human body as it were to extend
again at his death and to concentrate later again. He imagines
the repeated lives on earth this way. But his thought does not
become full of contents, not internally rich.
The thought that had showed its momentum
and its fertility towards the outer world shrinks with Giordano
Bruno and later with Leibniz (Gottfried L., 1646–1716) whom we
can consider as a successor of Giordano Bruno to that which
both called a monad. What is a monad? Something of which one
imagined that it is born from the spiritual world. As to
Leibniz even a monad includes something like a reflection of
the whole universe. But this view did not bring more than the
dry abstraction that the monad is a reflection of the universe.
Thus, one may admire the strength of Leibniz's philosophy as an
effect of the action of Copernicus. But if we penetrate into
his philosophy that imagines the world composed of monads, we
realise that it cannot say a lot about the human soul, because
it is surely only a little if one says that the soul is a
reflection of the universe. We see nothing but abstract
descriptions, if we look at the philosophy which goes back
directly to the action of Copernicus. Strictly speaking, this
philosophy remains poor. The old spiritual science of Aristotle
which had the traditions of the old culture and an uncertain
consciousness of it still speaks of the human being as composed
of different members of his being, It understands him as a
harmonious arrangement, relates the different members to the
different outer states and facts, still connects what drops
from the human being at death with that which comes from a
spiritual world and goes to a spiritual world, and gets
concrete mental pictures full of contents about the spiritual
in the soul that way.
We still see a real science with divine
contents with Aristotle. We still see the spiritual described
as one really describes something spiritual today again. But it
shrunk to the miserable monad in the age of Copernicus. The
same Giordano Bruno who finds the most enthusiastic words where
he points to the greatness and infinity of the universe finds
the poorness of the monad for the soul only. Now a few
concepts, pieced together, should show the human soul, its
conceptualised being.
There we realise how the ages work how the
human missions work. Humanity would never attained its today's
culture unless Copernicanism had come, but we realise at the
same time how spiritual science had to become impoverished
inevitably at first. Now only in our time, we realise that
something appears that will show again that now, after the
human thought wanted to be only an instrument of understanding
the outer sensory world for a while, this human thought also
becomes means to get to an inside world exceeding the mere
thought. Since wherefore the thought was used since Copernicus
up to now? It was used for understanding the outer sensory
world; it was the instrument of the outer facts, which the eyes
see and which can be grasped, with the instrument of the brain.
The thought had to offer an objective, clear image of the
sensory world. After this kind of soul condition has hardened,
the thought may now become again something else, something that
educates the human soul in itself. The human being must no
longer use the thought only as an image of the outer reality,
but he has to separate it in such a way that it does not depict
the outer reality, but works if the soul excludes all
appearance in meditation and concentration, so that the thought
becomes internally creative, and that the soul gets contents
different from the contents of the shrivelled monad.
In the Copernican age the thought received
its mission to be an image of the outer reality, it will go
over to preparing the soul, will bring up inner hidden forces
from the depths of the soul by which this can look at that
which forms the basis of the old Aristotelian culture. These
will be no old, traditional thoughts that are the most fertile
ones. No, these will be the thoughts that are found by the age
of natural sciences. Just the thoughts that are built up on the
age of Copernicus bring out those soul forces, which let the
soul behold itself and then the spiritual-mental of the
universe. Now the human soul has to develop the thought for the
other mission to take the thought as a means of education of
the soul for a culture of the higher self, for a beholding in
the spiritual world.
We stand at this turning point today, and
this turning point in the human culture has to take place. If
we understand the necessity by which the age of Copernicus came
into being, we can also understand the necessity that the time
has to change into a new one in which the thought exceeds
itself and in which we get to the nature of the soul if we no
longer talk about the soul in abstractions, but in real
descriptions of its actions, qualities, and characteristics. If
one considers spiritual science in such a way, those will not
maybe come to their own who run after everybody today who
states anyhow that he knows anything of spiritual
science.
We live not only in a critical age today
but also in an age where many people without examining run at
once after every prophecy et cetera. Just as today a part of
humanity is too much critical, the other part is too much
gullible and takes everything as a revelation of spiritual
worlds. Real spiritual science wants to have to do nothing with
what arises from such a need. Since it is not possible today
that spiritual science can bring the human beings to an
understanding of our age unless one tries to understand the
lawfulness of humanity and of the evolution generally. Hence,
it also happened when once a spirit, Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim
L., 1729–1781), intended to survey the development of humanity
in the same way as Copernicus had surveyed the principles of
space that he got to the hypothesis of the repeated lives on
earth. How will it be then with those who take spiritual
science seriously?
Just there we can also learn a lot from
Copernicus. I have already stated once what Galilei experienced
with a real follower of Aristotle. One of his friends believed
due to the no longer understood Aristotle that Aristotle had
taught that the nerves of the human being originate from the
heart. Galilei who stood on the ground of real sensory
observation said to the person concerned, I want to lead you to
a corpse and show you that Aristotle was not right, because the
nerves of the human being originate from the brain. — Really,
this follower of Aristotelism also looked at the corpse and
said then, if I look at nature, it seems to me, as if the
nerves originate from the brain, but from Aristotle I know that
the nerves originate from the heart, and if nature contradicts
Aristotle, I believe in Aristotle and not in nature. This is no
fairy tale; this is a fact that shows that the big facts have
to be accepted in the human culture in spite of all
opponents.
Hence, we must not be surprised if anything
appears in our time that one could characterise in the
following way. Anybody could want to show to another with the
whole development of the child that not everything that the
human being bears in himself can originate from mere physical
heredity. This could happen in such a way that he says to the
other. have a look at everything that spiritual science has
said about this field. — Then there one could
imagine that somebody of the quite clever people would answer,
yes, if you spiritual scientists talk in such a way, it seems,
as if from a former life on earth that came over which appears
as effect with the adolescent human being. But monism says it
different. If the spiritual observations contradict monism, I
believe in monism and not in the spiritual
observation.
Maybe such a thing could also recur in our
time like that what took place when the age of Copernicus
appeared in humanity. Many people could say today, we have to
regard the teaching of repeated lives on earth as a hypothesis
that explains the human life reasonably, but we cannot yet
convince ourselves of it. Indeed, one says that those who have
developed the inner beholding behold the soul in a state where
it belongs to a lawful spiritual world that it reaches beyond
birth and death. But what does it avail us who cannot observe
the human soul going through the repeated lives on earth and if
we must accept the teaching of the repeated lives on earth as
hypothesis?
Someone who could say this from a
materialistic-monistic way of thinking would give evidence of
the fact that he is not yet so far as the Catholic Church is
with the Copernican teaching with which it was also not yet
careful some decades ago. Since as what had people to regard
the Copernican teaching? Copernicus had done nothing but
grasping a thought as simply as possible and had taken it as
basis of the phenomena. With this thought, he had worked hard
for a proof, not by investigations, of that what takes place.
If one takes his thought, one can say, that's right.
The same applies completely to those today
who cannot do the way to the spiritual beholding of the human
soul and its immediate nature or do not want to do it. Since
spiritual science shows that everything that presents itself as
human destiny, as human work and as laws of this work is only
explicable if one accepts the principle of the repeated lives
on earth and of karma. It is shown that today one can have the
same certainty the spiritual-mental
of the human being as Aristotle could have certainty by his
logic compared with the contents of his teaching that came from
the old wisdom, and as the followers of Copernicus had
certainty of his teaching in relation to the outer phenomena in
space.
In 1543, the work of Copernicus was
published. In 1851, a real proof of the Copernican teaching was
possible only because then Foucault (Léon F., 1819–1868)
showd the rotation of the earth on its axis with the pendulum
experiment which showed the rotation of the plane of
oscillation of a long and heavy pendulum. From the constancy of
the pendulum rotations one could find inner evidence of the
Copernican teaching only in 1851.
Thus, it happens with outer facts. In
relation to reincarnation the human being can start the way any
time which leads him to the spiritual beholding, and which
shows where from the living comes which goes from life to life.
The inner evidence that was given for Copernicanism only after
centuries can be offered for reincarnation any time. But as
little as it was necessary for the acceptance of the principle
of reincarnation and karma that somebody has this spiritual
beholding as it was for the acceptance of Copernicanism that
the inner evidence would have already been given with
Foucault's pendulum experiment. I said, someone who would
reject the teaching of reincarnation and karma because of the
given reasons would turn out to be even more intolerant than
the Catholic Church was which did not wait until 1851 to
withdraw the work of Copernicus from the List of Prohibited
Books, but it withdrew it already in 1821.
However, we who stand on the ground of
spiritual science can learn with Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei,
and Giordano Bruno, how that what has to settle in the human
culture will settle in spite of all opposition. Since today the
attitudes that opposed Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, Giordano
Bruno and others are also there, even if by those who regard
spiritual science as daydreaming, as speculative fiction, as
follies, although they belong to the “enlightened”
people. Indeed, they do not write or print a List of Prohibited
Books, but they ban spiritual science as the Catholic Church
banned the teaching of Copernicus.
Indeed, they can brace themselves against
the human progress, but they cannot prevent it. Those who call
spiritual science daydreaming have to withdraw their edicts
just as the edicts against Copernicanism were withdrawn.
Spiritual science, filled with its truth, can wait for the year
“1821” of the materialistic monists, and it will
wait. It waits while speaking to those who understand already
before that spiritual science opens their eyes again towards
the spiritual worlds with which the innermost being of the
human nature is connected in such a way that the human soul
gives itself hope, confidence, and strength.
The soul can say to itself about the connection of its forces
with the universe what I tried to express in my second mystery play
The Soul's Probation
the feeling together with the spiritual of the universe:
In your thinking cosmic thoughts do live,
Within your feeling cosmic forces play,
Within your will cosmic beings work.
Abandon yourselves to cosmic world thoughts,
Experience yourself through cosmic forces,
Create yourself anew from cosmic will.
End not at last in cosmic distances
By fantasies of dreamy thought beguiled;
Begin in farthest spirit-realms
And end in the recesses of your soul.
The plan divine then shall you recognise
When you have realised your self in you.
(Somewhat changed translation by H. Collison and others)
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