Lecture XIV
Dornach, September 5, 1920
In order to
comprehend a number of things that have to be mentioned in
connection with previously presented matters, it is necessary
to recall several facts. We have seen how we are connected
with our environment, with the other realms of existence. We
have seen how our etheric body is directed toward the animal
kingdom, the astral body toward the plant kingdom and the ego
toward the mineral kingdom. We have seen how, as a result of
the work which the ego performs upon itself together with
others within the social order, there arises what we know as
the cultural development of mankind in art, religion and
science. I said yesterday that these soul contents —
art, religion and science — are basically nothing else
than what comes about through the work of the human ego upon
itself. Thus we have here one of the examples showing the
connection of the human being with social life. Art, religion
and science are really, in the widest extent, the contents of
the actual spirit realm of the social organism.
Then we have
what comes into existence through the transformation of the
astral body. As a matter of course, this transformation must
be essentially more subconscious at the present stage of
human evolution than what is accomplished in the spiritual
realm of art, religion and science; and what grows out of the
metamorphosis of the astral body is essentially what we have
to designate as the rights sphere within the social organism.
Then, even more subconsciously, we have what results from the
transformation of the etheric body because of our living in
union with our fellowmen. All that springs from this, all
that men do through the transmutation of their ether body,
belongs to the economic sphere of the social organism. Here
then we have the connections, the relationships of the human
being to what is outside him. Yesterday, too, we saw the
significance of such relationships that the human being has
to the life of the social order outside him. For, as we have
seen, he thus actually prepares the basic natural foundation
for his next life on earth. He works in a certain measure at
the creation of earthly existence itself. It would indeed be
desirable for as many people as possible to grasp the
extraordinary importance and relevance of the present moment
of human evolution.
It can be said
that until this world-historical hour the evolution of
humanity has, in general, rested on the providential care of
the forces standing above man in the higher hierarchies. As
we know, mankind achieved a certain development of the ether
body during the old Indian cultural period, a certain
development of the astral body during the Egypto-Chaldean
time, and a development of the intellectual soul in the
Greco-Latin time. Now humanity is on the point of lifting the
consciousness soul from the depths of soul existence. But
since the germ of what is to come must always be present in
the preceding evolutionary stages, what is to be the content
of the next cultural epoch — the unfoldment of the
spirit-self — is already proclaiming itself; however,
this development of the spirit-self must of necessity proceed
from man himself.
We have passed
through various earth lives. When we speak of the men of the
primeval Indian time, of the ancient Persian, the
Egypto-Chaldean and the Greco-Latin times, we are, in fact,
speaking of ourselves; for we lived under quite different
conditions in those ancient times. We lived in surroundings
of animal, plant or mineral nature prepared for us at the
instigation of our divine progenitors, who were the humanity
on the Moon, the Sun and Saturn and who, in the pre-stages of
the earth, experienced what we are experiencing today. What
constitutes content upon an earlier planetary evolution
remains as form for the succeeding one. We lived on what was
bequeathed to us by the gods, the beings of the higher
hierarchies. Now we have reached the point where the earth
would dry up and wither, if man, in a sense, did not spin out
a new thread of life from himself.
Just think how
all this was really prepared for us. Naturally, we have a
spiritual life within our social life. The people of the
Occident are proud of this social life; they are proud of
their art, religion and science. Human beings must
distinguish, however, between the Mystery of Golgotha as a
fact, and the manner in which it has been heretofore
understood through concepts obtained from religion, art and
science. We have comprehended the Christ according to the
standard of what we possessed as spiritual content in our
souls. Here in the Occident we have established something
like a continuation of the old spirituality. When anyone is
able objectively to enter upon the nature of the actual
spiritual life of Europe and its American extension, he finds
that in the end it is all an Oriental heritage. It is nothing
else. Certainly, we have changed any number of things. As I
have already pointed out in these lectures, the quite
different world view of the Orient which, once upon a time,
could magnificently grasp the causative connections between
the successive earth lives of the human being, but which
later in the Greek concept of the cosmos had become a shadow
of itself in the fatum, in destiny — all that
turned finally through the Latin Roman element into something
juristic. I have indicated how this is felt when we look at
Michelangelo's painting in the Sistine Chapel where Christ
appears in the role of World Judge, a cosmic jurist, deciding
between good and evil human beings. The world concept had
become juristic. This was not so in the Oriental world
view.
Then there was
added what results from economic thinking. Bacon was one who
actually proceeded entirely from economic thought, and all of
Europe allowed itself to be taught by him. What we possess in
our sciences, and what today constitutes the popular view of
the world permeating all European circles, is the result of
this Western economic thinking which, as I have indicated,
simply did not stop with the economic sphere, but has entered
the higher domains, the rights domain and even the cultural
domain. If individuals like Huxley and Spencer had employed
their thinking to bring order into economic relationships,
they would then be in the right place. They are out of place
when employing their particular kind of thinking for the
purpose of creating science. Yet the whole world has imitated
them.
We can
therefore say that what we possess of actual spirituality is
fundamentally only an obsolete legacy of the ancient Orient.
Later, legalistic, political thinking began in Greece and
Rome. It would simply be nonsense to believe that this could
have existed in the ancient structure of the Oriental state.
The dignified patriarchal structures, of which the early
Chinese constitution was a reflection, were not state
formations in the sense that the European understands them.
What we now possess as the rights structure did not yet exist
in Orientalism. It entered into Occidental culture, faintly
at first, by way of Greek thinking, and then quite strongly
by way of Latin thinking. Thus we must say that our entire
spiritual life basically still has a character which was
inherited from what the Oriental possessed. Bear in mind,
however, how I had to present this emergence of the Oriental
spiritual life. It arose out of man's metabolism — out
of the inner impulses of metabolism — in the Vedas, in
the magnificent poetry of the Orient. It must be sought as a
new outgrowth of the metabolism, just as blossom and fruit
issue from the tree. Anyone who can look upon the inner
relationships as they are in reality knows how to look upon
the blossoms and fruit of the tree; he will observe how the
sap rises up from the earth, ascends in the trunk, shoots out
into the branches, turns green within the leaves, becomes
varicolored in the blossoms and achieves ripeness in the
fruit. This is what presents itself to our eyes. If we then
note the result in our metabolic processes of what is drawn
up with the substance coming from the earth and taken up into
ourselves, how it is digested and burned up, how it passes
over into the blood, is refined and etherized within the
body, we see that it sprouts, flourishes and ripens just like
the vegetative process that turns to blossoms, fruits and
trees. It only changes into something else by sprouting,
flourishing and ripening through the human organs; it turns
into the poetic fruit of the Vedas, it becomes the
philosophic fruit of the Vedanta philosophy. In the Orient,
the spiritual life was considered a fruit of the earth, of
the metabolism that courses through the human being, just as
one looked upon the process coursing through the verdant,
fruit-bearing tree. What appears in the Vedas and in Oriental
poetry is intimately bound up with the essence of the earth.
It is the flower of the earth. It is nonsense when men of
today make our earth into a lifeless product, as geology
does, for instance. For not only what arises from the earth
in flower and fruit belongs to her, but also what has arisen
like a philosophical fruit in the primordial epochs of
mankind in the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy. Whoever
wishes to see nothing but stones come into existence in or
upon the earth, whoever sees her only as tillable soil,
whoever views the earth as nothing but mineral substance,
does not know the earth. For to her belongs also what she has
borne in times past as blossom and fruit through the body of
man.
Then the other
age arrived, the age in which man had already emancipated
himself from the earth. He was no longer connected with the
earth, but only with the climate and atmosphere, in which he
brought to expression his rhythmic system rather than his
metabolic system. It was the age in which the mighty
spiritual intuitions of antiquity were no longer manifest,
but in which man's concepts of rights developed.
In the more
recent age, particularly since Bacon, the human being has
begun to withdraw completely into himself, to divorce himself
from the earth, and to manifest what lives only within
himself as mere intellect within the economic thinking of the
Western world. Thus, what evolves through the human being is
differentiated over the earth.
All these are
matters to which we must pay attention at present. If we
would pay attention to these things, we must certainly bring
our soul to an inward awakening. We must seek to comprehend
what spiritual science can give us. We must confess to
ourselves that the time is past when, after having worked
hard all week, we can simply sit down and listen to an
abstract sermon about the connection of the human being with
a divine world order. Those times are over; that is
antiquated.
It is the duty
of modern humanity to comprehend quite concretely how man's
essential being is itself linked with the cosmos, how its
existence is bound up with the cosmos. Only as a consequence
of this comprehension will the human being understand the
necessity of dividing the social life into the spiritual
sphere — which is basically only a heritage from the
Orient grown more and more lifeless, for our spiritual life
today is dead — and the other two spheres. The old
Oriental of primeval times could never have grasped what is
meant when we say that we do not understand life. Today we
say that we do not understand life, for we live only in the
dead mineral realm, even though we do so with our ego, which
the Oriental did not yet do. Precisely here, life must enter.
After all, what do we mean when we strive as human beings to
accord a special place and emphasis to the spiritual sphere
within the social organism? What is it, after all, that we
desire here?
As long as the
spiritual or cultural sphere is bound up with the wholly
differently constituted rights or state structure — or
worse, with the economic life — so long will the single
human individuality be unable to contribute to the spiritual
life what this spiritual life should contain. Let us
understand one another on this particular point! With the
thinking habits of the present it is not an easy task to
understand just what matters here. In what follows I shall
attempt to make comprehensible just what needs to be grasped
in this respect.
Consider, for
instance, the case where the state enacts its school laws.
These school laws are put through either from a despotic,
tyrannical point of view or from a democratic one. How are
they made? Let us put the matter quite simply. Picture to
yourself three people sitting together. When three people sit
down together they are “terribly clever” in an
abstract sense. Three people who get together really know
everything about all things; it is not much better when
people come together as a party — they usually know
everything about all things. One knows exactly how to set up
paragraph one: how religion should be taught; paragraph two:
how German or any other language should be taught; paragraph
three: how arithmetic should be taught; paragraph four: how
geography should be taught. Wonderful paragraphs can be
worked out that should represent an ideal condition for the
educational system. Then all this can be made into rules and
regulations, and then put into effect. It is quite immaterial
whether it is done by three or three hundred people, it will
always be very clever, for people are very clever when they
construct something in abstractions. Then it becomes law. It
is something else, however, when, for instance, someone
confronts a class of fifty real children. They have quite
definite characters; they are not the wax we pretend they
are, when, with great cleverness, we formulate paragraphs
one, two and so forth. Children can be molded only as far as
their special peculiarities and abilities allow. In addition,
something else enters the picture. The teacher himself
confronts the class with his particular
capabilities. They, too, are limited. And one with experience
knows that rules can be this good in an abstract
sense (referring to larger form in drawing); the clever
teacher, however, can only apply them this well
(referring to the smaller form). In abstractions, everything
can be figured out. In reality, however, it is a question of
dealing with reality. In the educational system that is part
of the spiritual sphere, the state as such can accomplish
nothing but abstractions. These can be quite wonderful and
outstandingly good, but leave the state out of it! Take it
out of the educational system, which is a part of the
spiritual sphere! Make the educational system dependent on
the teachers themselves who are available at a particular
time. Then it will be a reality; then it will not become a
lie but something that is in accordance with the particular
age. That is what is meant by working toward realities.
Something else, however, takes its place: Paragraphs one,
two, three, ten, fifty are all dead, and the way in which
they are observed is actually something absolutely
irrational. What lives through the Body of teachers and comes
into existence in the living collaboration among real
teachers is alive. Here you have the point where life enters
into what is derived from the dead mineral. A higher sphere
is reached. We bring life, illuminated life, into the
spiritual sphere by resting it upon human individualities,
not upon paragraphs one, two, and so on. We infuse life into
the spiritual sphere; out of an ether body we permeate the
spiritual sphere around us with what is derived from the
living human being. In your own attitude of mind, what is
otherwise dead, inanimate, a machinelike thought, turns into
a living being. The spiritual sphere spreads out as something
inwardly alive over the entire earth. That is what must be
understood inwardly. One must feel how life streams out of an
undreamed-of soul depth into the independent life of the
spirit, and how we actually vivify this self-reliant
spiritual life by founding it upon the human
individuality.
You see from
this that what we draw forth from spiritual science for
everyday life has to do most intensely with realities. One
could really despair when one sees how little actual energy
and enthusiasm is generated in humanity for this vivification
of the spiritual sphere. One feels as though humanity were
imbued by the same attitude of mind as is a person who
desires to see only stillborn children brought into the
world, and who does not wish the spark of life to enter the
body that otherwise would come into the world dead. This is
how one feels about modern mankind. Humanity sits upon a dead
culture, as if stuck with pitch to comfortable seats, not
willing to rise to the enthusiasm of vivifying the spiritual
life. Enthusiasm is what we need above all else, for this
spiritual life will not be revitalized out of its dead
traditions.
Next is the
rights sphere. I said that it is born out of instincts, out
of half conscious instincts. This rights sphere was still
something semiconscious, glimmering up into consciousness,
when born out of Greek life, more particularly, out of the
Latin-Roman life, and was then elaborated upon further. Now
it is to be placed independently on its own democratic basis.
What has developed under the impulse of the rights sphere up
to now? The legal paragraphs came into being in which the
individual has such a small share that I must say there has
been hardly anything that has left such a bitter taste in my
mouth as when I had dealings with a lawyer. This has happened
repeatedly in my life. One goes to somebody who is a
representative of the law, a man learned in the law. One is
concerned with a specific case. One watches this lawyer go to
some filing cabinet. He takes out a bundle of briefs. With
much effort, he fits together what he is reading at the
moment; he himself is quite detached from the matter at hand.
One wishes to know how this case fits into the framework of
the law. He goes to his library, takes out a certain law
book, leafs through it at length, but nothing results because
in reality he is entirely unacquainted with the subject.
Nothing at all of a living, human connection is present in
such a proceeding.
A matter of
litigation once caused considerable correspondence between a
lawyer and myself; I do not wish to relate the whole affair.
In the end, it turned out that it was necessary to refer also
to a book on international law. The case had been going on
for nearly two and a half years when the good man told me
that he did not have a book on international law, and I would
have to procure it myself. He said, “You will have to
supply me with the necessary data anyway, if I am to give you
further advice!” Now, those who know me are aware that
I am certainly not boastful in such matters. I am certainly
not conceited, either. I obtained the book on international
law, and within two hours it was clear to me just how the
case stood. One need only look into matters with a healthy
mind and one finds that what otherwise might be protracted
over two years can be accomplished in two hours. This is how
far removed the human element has come from what really
exists as the system of rights, which has become entangled in
what is derived from the three members in the social
organism. We must return to a life that experiences what
holds sway in rights in the same way we experience the
external sense objects. We must be connected in a living
manner with what exists as the rights body.
The true
meaning of democracy is for the dead paragraphs to be
humanized, and for our feelings to participate in what
otherwise lies buried in the dead paragraphs. Just as life
enters the spiritual sphere through what can be born out of
spiritual science, so also will feeling enter into the rights
sphere through what is being willed by spiritual science.
What lives from man to man will then be felt.
We proceed to
the third sphere — the economic sphere. We know that
this takes place very much in the subconscious; that based on
what he has to deal with an individual today is simply not in
a position to penetrate with full consciousness into what is
at hand in the economic sphere. Associations must be formed
in which the experience of the one supplements the experience
of another. Out of associations, out of group formations, the
decisions must subsequently be made. Whereas each one of us
must individually create out of ourselves what is
commensurate with our talents in the spiritual sphere, what
is active in the economic sphere must result from a group
decision. From such group judgment, governing reason will
then emerge and hold sway in the economic life.
1. spiritual life:
life
etheric
body
2. rights sphere:
feeling
astral body
3. economic-sphere reason
ego
Reason will
reign in the economic sphere. This means that we contribute
what we have evolved in ourselves as a gift from the gods. We
contribute what we have evolved as our etheric element, what
we have developed in regard to feeling as astral body, and
what we have evolved as reason for our ego. All this we bring
to the outer world. In the economic sphere we need not yet
make the contribution as individuals; therefore we do so
through associations and groups. But what we have developed
individually in the ego — reason — becomes
something that permeates the whole economic sphere if we aim
at associations in the proper manner. Hence, we carry the
impulses existing in our ether body out into the social
order, into the spiritual life, by enlivening the spiritual
life. We carry into the rights sphere what pulsates in our
astral body as feeling, and we bear into the economic sphere
what lives in our ego as reason. As human beings, we have
attained three things in the cosmic order: etheric body,
astral body, and ego. We leave the world again with the
etheric body, astral body, and ego. We yield it up to the
world. We fashion the world order out of ourselves. Why
should it be otherwise? Among the lower animals much is
exemplified for us by the spider that spins out of herself
what must come to pass. Man must indeed become a world
creator, and must form out of himself what will constitute
his environment in the future. We bear the future in us. I
have discussed this from the most varied points of view.
Of what use is
all the philosophical talk about the reality of the world? We
should inform ourselves about the reality of the world by
looking at the realities of the future. What is to be real in
the future is borne today within us as ideality. Let us
fashion the world so that it will be real. This must not live
in us merely as theory; it must be a feeling in us, an
innermost life impulse. Then we shall simultaneously have a
cognitive relationship and a religious relationship to our
environment. Out of this innermost impulse, an, too, will
become something quite different in the future. It will turn
into something that unites with immediate life. Our very
existence will have to shape itself artistically. Without
that, we will inevitably drift into the philistinism of a
Lenin, a Trotsky, or a Lunatsharsky.
[ Note 89 ]
It is only the Spirit
created by man out of himself that can save us from this
morass; and if the life of rights is not to succumb to utter
desolation, we must permeate it with feeling, and we must
permeate the economic life with reason.
There was a man
who looked back at the way and means the world developed and
he said, “All that is real is rational, and all that is
rational is real.” He, however, looked back to what the
world had become through the old gods; he did not look to the
future. It was Hegel, of whom I spoke here on August 27th,
his 150th birthday. Today, we are at a point where the world
is irrational, and where man must make it rational once more.
We must realize this, and this knowledge must pass into
thinking, feeling and will. There is only one social reform:
People must realize what part mankind must play in the
shaping of the world order.
This is what we
ought to repeat to ourselves each morning and night so that
we will understand anew what nonsense it is to speak of the
eternity and preservation of matter. Everything surrounding
us as substance will pass away. What dwells in us as ideals
will replace the vacuums brought about by the destruction of
matter. The ideals that live within us for the time being
will occupy the empty spaces as future reality.
In this way the
human being must feel a bond with the world order. In a new
way he must experience Christ's words, “Heaven and
earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
[ Note 90 ]
One who understands this utterance knows that it is a genuinely
Christian saying. For Christianity starts from the
destructibility of matter and external energy, whereas the
recent natural scientific world outlook mocks Christianity by
promulgating the conservation of matter and energy. Indeed,
heaven and earth — meaning all matter — will pass
away and all energy cease to be, but what forms within the
soul of man and dwells in the word will be the world of the
future. That is Christianity.
This newly
understood Christianity must eradicate the anti-Christian
attitude of the modern materialistic world outlook, which
fantasizes about the conservation of things transitory
— matter and energy. Things have gone so far that the
tenets of Christianity, namely, eternity of the spirit and
the avowal of the transitory nature of matter, are considered
sheer insanity as compared to the firmly established phantasm
of the conservation of matter and energy. It has gone so far
that we lie when we still allege to be Christians, while we
lend a hand to the dissemination of an anti-Christian world
outlook. One who holds fast to modern natural science's basic
views on matter would only be honest if he could recant
Christianity. Above all, in reality, representatives of
Christian confessions, ministers and pastors, who make their
compromises with modern natural science, are inwardly quite
certainly the worst enemies of Christianity. There is no
other way but to begin to see these matters clearly and
honestly. We must definitely speak about these things more
and more in full earnestness. Without this, there will be no
progress. All talk of reforms of which any number of
organizations and reform movements chatter today is mere
fantasy; it is only grist to the mill of those who bring
about the decline. The only hope for renewal can come from
grasping the living spirit, the living spirit that has to
find its source in the creative human being and which, in
turn, becomes the foundation for the reality of the future,
not just of some ideal future, but that of the cosmic
future.
In all truth,
not until modern humanity accepts this metamorphosis of
modern thinking with the same ardor with which world outlooks
were once accepted in former times, not until then will
decline transform itself into ascending progress. One wishes
that what is thus being stated would not only be comprehended
conveniently by concepts; one wishes that it would be grasped
by the feelings and that it would pulse through the will.
For, unless it is sensed and felt, unless it pulses through
the will, all talk of emerging from this catastrophic age
remains so much talk into the wind. Most people are unaware
of the terrible way in which we are sailing into the decline
that now is taking hold already of the physical environment.
The physical, however, is always the consequence of the
spiritual. The physical of the future will be the consequence
of the spiritual we harbor in our souls today. The physical
of the present is caused by the spiritual of the past, and
the most recent physical conditions are brought about by the
most recent past spiritual activities of mankind.
When we hear
today that out of about 600 school children in Berlin an
average of much more than one hundred do not have shoes and
socks at present and no hope of getting them; when we are
told that many more than a hundred and fifty of these 600
children have parents who cannot even purchase rations for
them and who no longer receive a warm breakfast before going
to school; that in the course of the last school year over a
hundred of these children died of tuberculosis — just
add this up for yourselves! — then, my dear friends,
you have material occurrences. These physical occurrences are
the external expression of the spirituality that has been
nurtured in mankind during the past few centuries. One must
ask today: Do people wish to go on cultivating social
movements, women's movements and any number of other reforms
while continuing the thoughts that have borne such fruit? Or
are they willing to create and draw from a new source? This
question should place itself in shining letters before our
souls as we experience and feel the point in time at which we
now stand.
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