Lecture 4
History and Repeated Earth-Lives
Berlin, 16th July, 1918
I want to
continue the observations I have begun concerning the
progress of the human soul through its various earth lives,
and to continue them in such a way as to make the experiences
referred to useful as regards our judgment of the immediate
present. To-day I would like to dwell more on the external
side of things, and in the next lecture more on the inner
side.
We have traced
the path of the human soul in its repeated earth-lives
through the three epochs most vitally concerning us —
the Egypto-Chaldean, the Graeco-Latin, and our own, during
which the human soul — looked upon as a self, as an
individuality — experiences sonething different in each
incarnation. Now we need only call up before our minds what
will happen to those souls who go through earthly incarnation
in our own time, to return after a more or less normal
period, as will happen with most people, though not with
everyone. It has often been pointed out, and last time it was
repeated, that souls incarnated at thn present time will come
back knowing with certainty, in some form or other —
and (this I described more closely last time) through their
own inward exerience — the fact of repeated
earth-lives. This momentous step will be accomplished in the
next age; souls will advance from their present ignorance to
knowledge of reincarnation; but something else needs
emphasis.
Remember that I
laid stress on an important epoch which began with the
seventh or eighth century before the Mstery of Golotha. In
the earlier centuries of this epoch many souls were able, in
the old clairvoyant fashion, to look back on their earlier
earth-lives; but because they looked into a time when the
sentient soul was specially developed, what they saw was the
connection of human beings with the outer world. They gained
a clear picture of man's proceedings in the outer world, and
what happened to him there. To be sure, this will not be so
in the next epoch to ours, when the retrospect will be more
directed towards aspects of the soul. It will be less
concerned with actions and experiences in space, less like a
realistic picture, and more of a looking back into the life
of the soul.
I mention this
again so that you may see what very, very different
experiences souls have in their successive earth lives. And
of course the question must press upon each one of you
— how has the outside world come to believe that during
the course of history, human beings have not greatly changed?
Taking the current presentations of history (some of which,
but not all, are well-intentioned), we find over and over
again that each goes back to a certain point of time, to
which the historical accounts and documents extend, but they
take for granted that the structure of the human soul has
been the same all along. They grant a certain development,
but they do not think of it in nearly as radical a way as we
must do, in the light of the conclusions of spiritual
science. The question forces itself on every one of us:
— How is it that there is no proper awareness of
“the metamorphosis of the human soul”?
If now we
consider historical events from the point of view of
spiritual science, we see that for a long time man has really
been held back from knowledge of himself, rather than led
towards it. To discover how the human soul changes from one
incarnation to another is possible only when self- knowledge,
real self-knowledge, takes root; but this has been driven
back through events which we still have to appraise.
Significant examples of this forcing-back process could be
found in recent history. A certain fraternity, known to you
all, that of the Freemasons, believes — honestly in the
case of many of the brethren — that they can lead
members of their circle to self-knowledge. They have various
symbols of which it is evident, when they are approached with
spiritual scientific knowledge, that they are profound,
fraught with meaning; all really designed to lead to
self-knowledge; but they do not do so. If one reads the
official records of Freemasonry, it is remarkable to find the
“enlightened” supposing that to understand their
craft it is necessary to go back only to the eighteenth or
seventeenth century. Yet what is contained in their symbols
has been entirely concealed since the seventeenth century,
changed into something to be looked at and shared — but
which it is not felt necessary to understand. To approach
these Masonic symbols with a capacity for understanding them
would provide a path to self-knowledge, for they are all
designed to that end. The real development of Freemasonry,
however, has taken another path, — that of concealing
self-knowledge, and by admitting only an outward explanation
of the symbolism, to make self-knowledge impossible. Hence we
can really say, from the standpoint of truth, that the
development of modern Freemasonry is fundamentally that of a
fraternity for making incomprehensible the symbols to be
found within it. It is as though the unconscious purpose was
precisely to make the symbols incomprehensible, for the very
time over which the new Freemasonry has extended, (as regards
the “enlightened”, not the mystical side),
coincides with the greatest dread of self-knowledge in men's
minds. There is much talk about it; man must seek “the
divine within him”, “his higher self”,
etc.; but that is all mere talk. It all tends to block up,
not to open, the way to real self-knowledge; and we must ask:
Whence comes this aversion, this terror? We will consider
this from its outer side to-day.
It is apparent
in a very remarkable way, not only in the limited realm of
Freemasonry, but over the whole range of modern culture. We
see how modern culture — notably in the spreading of
Christianity — really takes the line of concealing and
suppressing self-knowledge; a line of extraordinary interest
and significance. Few people to-day take the trouble to
compare the best available accounts of widely separated
centuries, and fewer still reflect on the real character of
what is described.
You can make an
experiment, not very revealing but interesting all the same,
by taking such a work as “The Life of
Michelangelo” by Herman Grimm, which deals in fact
mainly with Michael Angelo's period, the environment from
which he emerged. Try to realise what the world would be like
if one lived in the time which Grimm describes, and try to
compare it with the world of to-day. The difference is
tremendous! Yet that will not mean much, for the centuries in
question are not very far apart. Something else emerges if
one gives real thought to studying the epoch —
including its preparatory stages and its after-effects
— in which the great transition to modern times was
accomplished. Looking back at the three great epochs which
Spiritual Science shows us in our Present earth-cycle, we
find that the third ends about the seventh or eighth century
B.C., and the fourth with the beginning of the fifteenth
century A.D. At this point there lies, not far behind us, an
important, significant transition in the soul-life of
civilised humanity. Usually it is hardly touched upon in
history — and why? There, too, is the dread of
self-knowledge, and also of knowledge of the human soul. An
interesting example of the time antecedent to the change can
be found in accounts of a personality such as St. Bernard Of
Clairvaux. St. Bernard, perhaps the most outstanding
personality of the twelfth century, and indeed of the age
with which the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation
came to an end, manifested a structure of soul which after
the fifteenth century was no longer possible in Europe.
Nowadays it is very hard to describe this, because the
preconditions for forming the right conceptions are
altogether lacking; but I advise you to read accounts of the
life of St. Bernard so as to see the impression he made on
other people. Reading these accounts, one says to oneself: By
the side of these, what are the Gospel stories of Miracles?
The few sick folk healed by Christ Jesus himself —
according to the Gospels — are a trifle compared with
the astonishing wonder-working activities of St. Bernard! The
number of people of whom it is said that he made the blind to
see and lame to walk, is beyond all comparison with the
number of similar cases reported in the Gospels. The accounts
of the impression made by his preaching gives one the feeling
that what he said acted as a widespread, intensely active
spiritual aura. In the words of this man there lived a
reality of which we can have no conception at the present
day. If one tried to describe all the effects produced by his
personality, people would simply not believe it for there is
no possibility nowadays of giving an adequate idea of how he
was then regarded. To penetrate to the inner structure of his
soul, is, as I have said, difficult to-day, because, even in
our own circle, the conditions for it are wanting. However, I
might hint at one thing: —
In this
personality there was an amazing devotion to the spiritual
world, an absolute absorption in it. If anyone to-day
undertakes something and it fails, he naturally begins to
doubt whether he was right to embark on it. A personality
such as St. Bernard was never doubtful, because he had always
taken counsel with his God in the spiritual worlds before he
undertook or advised anything. Through all the failures he
experienced in the Crusades, when everything he had advised
went wrong, he never doubted for a moment that his thoughts
were absolutely correct, and that the discrepancy between
what really happened in the outer world and what he had
conceived under the influence of the spiritual world would in
some way be cleared up and accounted for.
In choosing out
such a personality, one is speaking of a single, outstanding
figure; but what I have been saying is not restricted to him.
It is the signature of the whole age — in no
way confined to him. It is the signature of the epoch which
began in Europe about the third or fourth century A.D., and
lasted until the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth. Of
course within this age something further was being prepared,
but this came to expression, as a deep influence, stamping
itself on its time, only after the fourteenth or fifteenth
century. The third to the fifteenth centuries was the time of
an even more concentrated power of Faith, the age in which
the events of the time came to pass under its impress.
In this
connection I must beg you to recollect what I always request
in these lectures — it is particularly important in
passages such as these. I choose my words in such a way that
other words cannot be substituted for them. If these
carefully chosen words are replaced by others, from that
moment your description is no longer historically accurate. I
said, “It was the age when the power of Faith-was
established”: If that be changed into “It was the
age when Piety was established”, that would represent
something entirely untrue, not my meaning at all. It was the
Power of Faith I referred to in describing Bernard.
He was also without doubt a pious nan, but that may belong to
a man's personal character. What in those days worked and
lived in outer events was the influence of Faith. The power
of Faith is indeed to be found in every age, but it is not always
decisive in the making of history. Our present age will be
superseded by one in which Faith will again play a
significant though sporadic part, but it has not yet come to
that. Superstitious belief in medicine for instance, take
grotesque forms in the future, and Faith will have a great
part to play in that, but things have not yet gone so far. In
humanity to-day, a hazy somnolence as regards historical
events plays the chief part. Now we can put the question: How
did it happen that this power of Faith became such an
important historical impulse in Europe — the very
impulse which significantly ushered in what arose in the
fifteenth century as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, in which
we are now living?
First of all
it was something apparently quite external which laid the
foundation for the advent of the power of Faith: I mean, the
circunstances which brought about the fall of the Roman
Empire. The dominant historical-impulses from the third or
fourth century up to the fifteenth, took the place of the
impulses of the Roman Empire. Of course there were very many
impulses which contributed to the fall of the Empire but one
very substantial one was that during the course of Roman
history money gradually flowed away towards the East. With
the extension of the Roman Empire the Legions had to be moved
further and further to the borders of the huge Empire; the
men's wages had to be paid in money — not in kind, as
was possible while the Empire was smaller. Therefore, with
the extending Empire, money-wealth was gradually diverted to
the East; and an essential characteristic of Europe from the
early part of the third and fourth centuries onward, was its
shortage of money — of coinage, that is. Many
other things are, involved in this, and it is important to
look at them with a sound eye for reality, not with mystical
enthusiasm.
The art of
making gold, alchemy, was partly conditioned in Europe by the
outflow of gold to the East; men believed that if gold could
be made, crated, they could once again be rich. A frequent
reason for alchemy, as it was cultivated in the first
centuries of the Middle Ages, was the shortage of coinage due
to the extension of the Roman Empire. Linked up with this was
the eruption into the impoverished Roman Empire, at that
period, of the peoples from the north. With their pagan
ideas, pagan culture and pagan experiences, they understood
little of the Roman social structure, which had gradually
become more and more powerful under the influence of money.
The Romans had found things very uncomfortable after the
diversion of money to the East, but these conditions suited
the invading German races very well.
The spread of
Christianity coincided with this condition of the Roman
Empire. It is a fact, though one no longer recognised, that a
profound spiritual perception lived in the spreading waves of
Christianity throughout those early times. There is an
incurable fear to-day, especially in theological circles, of
the sc-called “Gnosis”. Many a time on asking why
people in such circles dislike, and even fear, Spiritual
Science, one receives the answer that “it lead to a
revival of the Gnosis”; that is quite a sufficient
reason for rejection! the Gnosis (though of course
in our age it would have to make its appearance in a
different guise from what it was in the early centuries of
Christianity) is nothing else than a positive
knowledge of the spiritual world, the human capacity
to attain to vision of spiritual realms, as sight in the
physical world is gained by the senses. One can meet people
to-day who make fun of the disputes there used to be as to
whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Son,
or is connected in some other way with the Father and the
Son. Nowadays people unite no conceptions with these ideas,
but they did in those times. Anyone who writes the history of
the first Christian centuries out of true knowledce, will see
that in these origins of dogmas the spirit was active,
although men can no longer find it now. A deeply significant
spiritual outlook was carried on the advancing waves of
Christianity, and it lasted on into the ninth century. A
study of the details of this spreading Christianity shows that
the later opinion, according to which the religious outlook
should be concerned only with the strengthening of faith and
should meddle as little as possible with tie particulars of
the spiritual world, arose from a certain way, a right way,
of regarding the nations from whom the new Europe was to
arise. They were pagan peoples — peoples moreover, who
had not come far in connected thinking or in the forming of
ideas which lead into the spiritual world; they were strong,
forceful, primitively sound men, but not exactly men of a
disposition to form very defined conceptions of anything
spiritual.
So, in order
that Christianity might spread, it was made suitable for
these peoples. Because they were not great thinkers, more was
made of the “heart”, of the power of faith. So we
find that in the tenth century all spiritual vision had more
or less disappeared from Christianity; everything was centred
in faith — and what was then regarded as faith, what was
meant by the term, had gradually become the soul-content of
man. Souls then lived in a different atmosphere from that of
to-day. One needs to realise what was then experienced
through legends. I will relate one simple legend, a
thoughtful one, which in those days was known everywhere. It
runs thus:
Saint Bernard
occasionally rode on an ass. He had a monk with him. This
monk suffered from what we call epilepsy. He was constantly
falling. St. Bernard saw this when the monk accompanied him
to lead his ass; so he besought his God that in future the
monk might never have an attack of epilepsy without knowing
of it beforehand. The legend goes on to say that the monk
lived for twenty years, but every time he had an attack, he
knew it was coming so he could stay in bed, and not bruise
his limbs by falling.
This is a
simple, unpretentious tale, but it worked deeply and was told
everywhere. Men felt strong in soul in experiencing the
supporting power of true faith, and they lived in the aura of
such an experience.
Now it would
not have been possible for this power of faith to establish
itself in this way if Europe had not been to some extent
isolated during the centuries I have described. Money had
flowed Eastwards; and for this reason, trade had
gradually ceased. Europe was for a time limited to
agriculture. The fact that a third of the soil of Europe
should have passed over in the course of these centuries to
the upholders of the power of faith — that is, into the
possession of the Church — is highly symptomatic. It is
as though the whole content of the fourth post-Atlantean
period (interrupted only by the Roman element) had been
condensed into this power of Faith. But in the course of this
strengthening of faith one thing was lost — progress in
a genuine Christ-consciousness. We must not forget
that Christ was known in the highest sense during the first
Christian centuries by those who knew how the Christ-Figure,
the Christ-Being, stood in relation to all the forces of the
Spiritual world. For those who were first affected by the
Christ-Figure, the ground of their emotion was that they
gazed up into a spiritual world, and in a sense perceived as
it were the approach of the Christ-Figure to the Earth
through the aeons, and could connect the Event of Golgotha
with all that happened in the Cosmos. This was the grasp of
the Event of Golgotha which led those who first interpreted
it to explain what had happened on earth as the outcome of
event in the worlds of great cosmic happenings.
I know very
well that this is otherwise represented now, but when it is
said, “We must go back to the plain, simple conceptions
of Christ Jesus prevailing in the early centuries”,
that is to speak accords to personal fancies, from a wish to
conceal the greatness of the Christ-idea and the profound
insight of those early centuries into the Mystery of
Golgotha. That is why the favourite idea was brought out:
everything was made simple, designed to show that Christ
Jesus was no more than “the simple man of
Nazareth”. It is less surprising to find this view
among young people. Older people, at any rate, ought to know
that in these matters a significant change has taken place in
our time. I have often heard that it is said “These
things as presented in Spiritual science we simply cannot
understand; they are so very difficult! If only there were
not these hindrances!” Thirty years ago the simple
country people would have understood such subjects well, but
in course-of the last few decades a great change has come
about. Older people may still know something of how certain
writings, such as those of Böhme and Eckartshausen,
which most strenuously endeavoured to open a way into the
concrete realities of the spiritual world, were then accepted
by the souls of simple peasants. Our spiritual life,
unfortunately, has become superficial, under the influence of
the bourgeois mind and the increasing repetition of its
favourite idea — that truth must be
“simple”, meaning that truth must be easy for
everyone to grasp in a comfortable way without much
reflection. Certainly, there are not many traces left
nowadays — even in simple minds — of the fact
that in the early centuries of Christianity it was possible
to bring lofty spiritual truths before quite simple people
when Christ Jesus was spoken of. this implies that what
occurred in the subsequent centuries was, in a sense,
directed primarily to concealing the knowledge of Christ from
Man, to keeping, it at a distance from him.
In these
matters we must not look at what we imagine, but at the
reality. One of the deepest demands of our age is
that we should learn to face reality. Here is an example. I
once gave a lecture in Colmar on the subject of
“Christianity and Wisdom”;
two Catholic ecclesiastics were present. Naturally, they had never
heard anything like it before, and on that account they came to
me after the lecture, for what I had said did not seem to them
so very wicked. It might have seemed so only if some of their
superiors had previously spoken about it, and then they would
probably have heard nonsense. They only made one objection.
They said: “What you say is all very well; it is
excellent to talk in this way about the spiritual world, but
people understand none of it. We talk in such a way
that people can understand it.” I said: “You
know, reverend sirs, that neither you nor I ought to lay down
the law as to how we should speak to people. Our favourite
theories are of no consequence; for of course, according to
them, the way in which you speak will please
you and the way in which I speak will
please me, but that is not the point. What matters
is the duty laid upon us by the time we live in: — - not
to answer such questions as you have just raised according to
our favourite theories, but to let reality itself give the
answer. And this is not far to seek. I ask you, since you
believe that you speak to everybody, does everybody go to
church to hear you?" As truthful men they could only answer:
“Many stay away.” Then I could say: “That
is the answer of reality! I speak for those who
remain outside, who have also the right to find the way to
Christ Jesus.” Let the question be asked of reality, of
the age, not of man's own self, because the answer one can
get from oneself is clearly known to one It seems very
simple; but to learn to grasp the obligation laid on us by
our age is not a simple matter. Only after deep counsel with
himself can a man recognise what really lies behind this.
Mankind's real
need to-day is just this: to become objective, to learn to
live with the facts of the world. If we understand how to
grasp the impulse which is meant by this, we shall come to
terms with the truth that gradually, under the influence of
the course of events through the centuries, the higher
knowledge, the upward gaze into the connection between the
Mystery of Golgotha and cosmic events, has been quite lost in
Europe. Christ has been put at a distance — from the
European soul; He has been reduced to what men were willing
to grasp and imagine. The important thing, however, is that
men should grasp reality, not merely what they would like to
grasp. We often hear it said: “Man should seek his God
and he will find Him within. He must unite himself with his
inner divine self, then he will find Him”. People are
particularly shocked when Spiritual Science is impelled to
declare: “If we rise into the spirit from the
world in which we live, we find the
“Hierarchies”,
a richly-membered hierarchical
spiritual world, even as here below we find a richly-membered
physical world. It is certainly easier and more comfortable
to say, “Let each draw near directly to the one Christ:
everyone can find Him.” But it does not matter what men
imagine; the point is that they should recognise what is
really to be found in the spiritual. What do those find who
so often say, “I have found an inner connection with my
God?” What they call “God,” when they speak
like this is in fact often the nearest Spiritual Being
belonging to the hierarchy of the Angels, the Guardian Angel,
who is thus revered as the “highest being.” To
say we “believe” we have found God, means nothin;
what is necessary is to understand the reality of this inner
experience. When anyone believes himself to be permeated
inwardly by a divine being, he is generally permeated only by
a member of the Hierarchy of Angels, or else by his own
Ego, as it was between the last death and the
present birth, as it lived in the spiritual world before
uniting with his physical body.
Is it not
interesting, that there is one word of which the
origin is unknown? Search dictionaries, and you will discover
fine explanations of all sorts of words. Yet for this one
word the most learned dictionary-makers can find no origin;
they do not know what it means even philologically —
and this is the word, “God.” It is the word whose
meaning is unknown. Very significant and very suggestive! For
what people are often really talking about, when they speak
so constantly about their “God,” is their own
Angel, or simply their own Ego in the time between the last
death and present birth. What is thus actually experienced
— (I am thinking only of genuine, honest experiences)
— is real enough. The
point is not to succumb to the illusion that people are
praying to “one God.” People have only
one word for the experience of their Angel, or
indeed for their own ego, whether embodied or not.
It is not
uncommon for someone to have a vague foreboding that through
Spiritual Science he will get behind the veil of what is
constantly referred to as an “experience of God,”
and this hinders the spread of Spiritual Science, for
Spiritual Science is inherently inclined to reveal the truth
behind the immensely significant fact to which I have just
referred. The whole historical trend from the third to the
tenth — indeed to the fifteenth — century, tends
more to the concealment of the mysteries of Christ Jesus than
to their becoming manifest. This is not a criticism, but
simply a characteristisation; and if people are not in a
position to take it in objectively, they will never
understand the powers ruling the age that begins with the
fifteenth century, the age of the
“Consciousness-Soul.” This age, I might say,
“thunders in,” and everything in the spiritual
world tends to bring out the Consciousness Soul, with its two
poles, the material and the spiritual. It is from this point
of view that the course of historical development must be
scrutinised. Let us picture, for example, how the frame of
mind which appears at a higher stage in St Bernard, as the
fruit of a strengthened, consolidated faith, produced the
European tendency to put Jerusalem in the place of Rome, to
found an anti-Roman Christianity with its centre in
Jerusalem. For this impulse lay at the root of the Crusades.
Godfrey de Bouillon was no emissary of the Roman Pope; on the
contrary, he seized on the Crusades in order to build in
Jerusalem a bulwark against Rome, to make Christianity
independent of Rome. It was an idea which held sway for
several centuries. Henry the Second, the Saintly, gave it out
in the form of “a Church Catholic but not
Roman”.
We see how the
faith of Europe sends its aura into the regions where the
Romans had sent their gold! In the East the Crusaders came
into contact with money and its results; with Roman gold on
the one hand, with Oriental Gnosis on the other. This aura
under which the Crusades arose must be taken into
consideration. It is entirely the aura of European faith
— that is the one tone, the one colouring the picture.
Let us set against this colouring — if it were to be
painted, it would have to be in this one colour —
another picture of the dawn of the Consciousness Soul. How
should this be represented?
Consider
Dandolo, Doge of Venice (1120–1205), formerly in
Constantinople and blinded there by the Turks, who was the
incarnation of the Ahriman-spirit, and, in spite of his
blindness, was the ruler Venice — that Venice which
imported the Ahrimanic element into the spirit, as I have
described. It was a moment of great significance in the history
of the world when this Doge conquered Constantinople, and led
over the original spirit of the Crusades into the later ones.
How did it happen? In this way.
The Crusaders
originally went to the East in quest of the holy places and
relics, wishing to bring them under the mantle of their
faith. That was their aim they wanted to bring the relics
back reverently to Europe. They wished to establish a real
link between their faith and the events of he Mystery of
Golgotha. When Venice intervened, what became of the relics?
They were all collected, but in reality everything was made a
business transaction! Under the influence of Venice, the
relics were gradually treated as stocks and shares; they rose
and rose in value. The capitalist aura spread through
Dandolo, the incarnation of the Ahriman-spirit!
We ask
ourselves — how did Venice succeed in reversing the
earlier trend of events? Venice led trade back from
the East to Europe; she rekindled commercial life, which had
been impossible before. The question must arise: How could
Venice become so powerful in the realm of commerce, while
Europe was fundamentally so poor?
Commerce was
carried on by barter. During the first part of the
period of which I have been speaking, Europe was cut off from
the East, to which, to begin with, she had given her coinage.
In the absence of money, barter was substituted. Over and
over again the historical fact of the way in which
Venice came into this field must be insisted upon. We can
prove that Venice drove a great bargain for the possession of
Alexandria and Damieta, in order to barter her goods for the
Oriental wares she coveted. What was it that Venice sold?
One thing can easily be proved by documentary
evidence, and many others could be added to it: investigation
in this direction could be carried far. The Venetian wares
were men! Thousands of men! The new trade with the
East was begun with human beings — men were sold to the
East; and anyone who follows up what became of them arrives
at a remarkable result, of which outer history as yet knows
but little. From these bartered men sprang the strongest of
the warriors with whom the great military expeditions from
Asia into Europe were successfully undertaken. The choicest
troops of the Asiatic tribes which later fell upon Europe
consisted of the descendants of the men sold into slavery to
the East by Venice and other Italian States.
It is really
necessary to look behind the scenes of world-history, and not
to cling to the legends so often retailed to mankind as the
“history of the world.” These legends must
ultimately suffer the fate of being dismissed as school-girl
tales, even though written by Ranke. The times we live in are
much too serious for us to refrain from emphasizing what must
be learnt; and the most important thing gained from these
maters will be the acquirement of a judnment which will
awaken man's consciousness — so that he will no longer
remain asleep to current tendencies. A monstrous thing
happens in our present time, but men do not, and will not,
see it; they prefer to look at everything in a disguised and
confused way. If here or there a note is struck, sounding
from the depths of human development, it is repulsed with
phrases drawn from superficial journalism or newspaper
articles, which are as far as possible from profitable
truth.
To-day I wished
to draw your attention from an external point of view, to
something belonging to the period in which, during the
fifteenth century, the transition was accomplished from the
Mind-Soul to the Consciousness-Soul It is most desirable that
such ideas should sink into men's souls; they are needed
— needed in all domains of life. People talk a great
deal nowadays about the ways in which the structure of the
community will develop in the future. This very morning I
read an article by a man who esteems himself exceptionally
clever, who believes he has really grasped the truths of
political economy from their foundations. The profound fact
he gives out in his argument is that the community, the
communal life, must be comprehended as an
“organism.” Something really significant is
supposed to have been advanced when it is said that the life
of the community must be looked upon as an organism, not as a
machine. Thus is the most dreadful Wilsonism rife amongst us!
I have often said that the very essence of
“Wilsonism” is its inability to conceive of the
life of the community except as an “organism.”
Men must eventually learn to employ higher concepts than
this, in contemplating the social structure. It can never be
understood as an “organism:” it is an affair
of the soul, of the spirit. The Spirit works in
every human social community. Our age has become
poverty-stricken in conceptions. We can found no social
policy unless we steep our minds in spiritual knowledge for
only there can we find the “meta-organism!” which
transcends the mere “organism.”
Everywhere we
find unwillingness to penetrate directly into the spirit; but
it must be done, or incalculable effects will follow. On this
subject, if you remember, I pointed out how, in the
seventeenth century, Johann Valentine Andreae wrote the story
of the “Chemical Marriage” of Christian
Rosenkreuz, which contains much that springs from impulses
connected with the transition in the fifteenth century. The
story is told as having occurred in that century.
It is very
interesting to notice that Johann Valentine Andreae wrote it
as a youth of seventeen, when he was still unripe in external
intelligence, and repudiated it in his later yenrs. Andreae,
the pious theologian of later years, wrote everything
possible in opposition to it. The interesting fact is that
Andreae's life shows no glimmer of understanding the meaning
of what he wrote in the “Chemical Marriage”. The
Spiritual worlds desired to reveal to mankind something
connected with the entire experience of that age.
Recently I
visited, a castle in Central Europe, where there is a chapel
in which the ideas of the transition-period of the new age
are symbolised. Primitive paintings adorn the well of the
staircase, and what do they represent? The “Chemical
Marriage” of Christian Rosenkeuz! The way leads through
the Chemical Marriage to a Chapel of the Grail. Then began
the Thirty Years' War, after which the “Chemical
Marriage” was written down, but its meaning was lost in
the waves of conflict.
The lesson to
be learnt from this is that the same thing never happens
twice. The spiritual development which has been required of
humanity since the fifteenth century must make its appearance
little by little. In the next lecture we will speak of this
from a deeper aspect.
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