III
From Man's Living Together with the Course of Cosmic Existence
Arises the Cosmic Cult.
Dornach, December 29, 1922
THE object of the lectures I gave here immediately
before Christmas was to indicate man's connection with the
whole Cosmos and especially with the forces of spirit-and-soul
pervading the Cosmos. Today I shall again be dealing with the
subject-matter of those lectures but in a way that will
constitute an entirely independent study.
The
life of man, as far as it consists of experiences of outer
Nature as well as of the inner life of soul and spirit, lies
between two poles; and many of the thoughts which necessarily
come to man about his connection with the world are influenced
by the realization that these two polar opposites exist.
On
the one side, man's life of thinking and feeling is confronted
by what is called ‘natural necessity.’ He feels himself
dependent upon adamantine laws which he finds everywhere in the
world outside him and which also penetrate through him,
inasmuch as his physical and also his etheric organisms are
part and parcel of this outer world. On the other hand, he is
deeply sensible — it is a feeling that is bound to arise
in every healthy-minded person — that his dignity as man
would not be fully attained if freedom were not an integral
element in his life between birth and death. Necessity
and freedom are the polar opposites in his life.
You
are aware that in the age of natural science — the
subject with which I am dealing in another course of
lectures* here there is a
strong tendency to extend the sway of necessity that is
everywhere in evidence in external Nature, to whatever
originates in the human being himself, and many representative
scientists have come to regard freedom as an impossibility, an
illusion that exists only in the human soul, because when a man
is faced with having to make a decision, reasons for and
reasons against it work upon him. These reasons themselves are,
however, under the sway of necessity; hence — so say
these scientists — it is really not the man who makes the
decision but whatever reasons are the more numerous and the
weightier. They triumph over the other less numerous and less
weighty reasons, which also affect him. Man is therefore
carried along helplessly by the victors in the struggle between
impulses that work upon him of necessity. Many representatives
of this way of thinking have said that a man believes himself
to be free only because the polarically opposite reasons for
and against any decision he may be called upon to make, present
such complications in their totality that he does not notice
how he is being tossed hither and thither; one category of
reasons finally triumphs; one scale in a delicately poised
balance is weighed down and he is carried along in accordance
with it.
Against this argument there is not only the ethical
consideration that the dignity of man would not be maintained
in a world where he was merely a plaything of conflicting
yes-and-no impulses, but there is also this fact, that the
feeling of freedom in the human will is so strong that an
unbiased person has no sort of doubt that if he can be misled
as to its existence, he can equally well be misled by the most
elementary sense-perceptions. If the elementary experience of
freedom in the sphere of feeling could prove to be deceptive,
so too could the experience of red, for instance, or of C or C
sharp and so on. Many representatives of modern natural
scientific thought place such a high value upon theory
that they allow the theory of a natural necessity which is
absolute, has no exceptions and embraces human actions and
human will, to tempt them into disregarding altogether an
experience such as the sense of freedom!
But
this problem of necessity and freedom, with all the phenomena
associated with it in the life of soul — and these
phenomena are very varied and numerous — is a problem
linked with much more profound aspects of universal existence
than are accessible to natural science or to the everyday
experience of the human soul. For at a time when man's outlook
was quite different from what it is today, this disquieting,
perplexing problem was already a concern of his soul.
You
will have gathered from the other course of lectures now being
given here that the natural scientific thinking of the modern
age is by no means so very old. When we go back to earlier
times we find views of the world that were as one-sidedly
spiritual as they have become one-sidedly naturalistic
today. The farther back we go, the less of what is called
‘necessity’ do we find in man's thinking. Even in early Greek
thought there was nothing of what we today call necessity, for
the Greek idea of necessity had an essentially different
meaning. But if we go still farther back we find, instead of
necessity, the working of forces, and these, in their whole
compass, were ascribed to a divine-spiritual Providence.
Expressing myself rather colloquially, I would say that to a
modern scientific thinker, the Nature-forces do everything;
whereas the thinker of olden times conceived of everything
being done by spiritual forces working with purposes and aims
as man himself does, only with purposes far more comprehensive
than those of man could ever be. Yet even with this view of the
world, entirely spiritual as it was, man turned his attention
to the way in which his will was subject to divine-spiritual
forces; and just as today, when his thinking is in line with
natural science he feels himself subject to the forces and laws
of Nature, so in those ancient times he felt himself subject to
divine-spiritual forces and laws. And for many who in those
days were determinists in this sense, human freedom, although
it is a direct experience of the soul, was no more valid than
it is for our modern naturalists. These modern naturalists
believe that necessity works through the actions of men; the
men of olden times thought that divine-spiritual forces, in
accordance with their purposes, work through human actions.
It
is only necessary to recognize that the problem of freedom and
necessity exists in these two completely opposite worlds of
thought to realize that quite certainly no examination of the
surface-aspect of conditions and happenings can lead to any
solution of this problem which penetrates so deeply into all
life and into all evolution.
We
must look more deeply into the process of world-evolution
— world-evolution as the course of Nature on the one side
and as the unfolding of spirit on the other — before it
is possible to grasp the whole meaning and implications of a
problem as vital as this; insight can indeed only come from
anthroposophical thinking.
The
course of Nature is usually studied in an extremely restricted
way. Isolated happenings and processes of a highly specialized
kind are studied in the laboratories, brought within the range
of telescopes or subjected to experiment. This means that
observation of the course of Nature and of world-evolution is
confined within very narrow limits. And those who study the
domain of soul and spirit imitate the scientists and
naturalists. They fight shy of taking into account the
whole man when they are considering his life of soul.
Instead of this they specialize in order to accentuate some
particular thought or sentient experience with important
bearings, and hope in this way eventually to build up a
psychology, just as efforts are made to build up a body of
knowledge of the physical world out of single observations and
experiments conducted in chemical and physical laboratories, in
clinics and so forth.
Yet
in reality these studies never lead to any comprehensive
understanding either of the physical world or of the world of
soul-and-spirit. As little as it is the intention here to
disparage the justification of these specialized investigations
— for they are justified from points of view often
referred to in my lectures — as strongly it must be
emphasized that unless the world itself, unless Nature herself
reveals to man somewhere or other what results from the
interworking of the details, he will never be able to build up
from his single observations and experiments a picture of the
structure of the world that is confirmed by the actual
happenings. Liver cells and minute activities of the liver,
brain-cells and minute cerebral processes can be investigated
and greater and greater specialization may take place in these
domains; but these investigations, because they lead to
particularization and not to the whole, will give no help
towards forming a view of the human organism in its totality,
unless from the very beginning a man has a comprehensive,
intuitive idea of this totality to help him in forming the
separate investigations into a unified whole. In like manner,
as long as chemistry, astro-chemistry, physics, astro-physics,
biology, restrict themselves to the investigation of isolated
details, they will never be able to give a picture of how the
different forces and laws in our world-environment work
together to form a whole, unless man develops the faculty of
perceiving in Nature outside something similar to what can be
seen as the totality of the human organism, in which all the
separate processes of liver, kidneys, hearts, brain, and so
forth, are included. In other words, we must be able to point
to something in the universe in which all the forces we behold
in our environment work together to form a self-contained
whole.
Now
it may be that certain processes in the human liver and human
brain will not for a long time to come be detected with enough
accuracy to be accepted by biology. But at all events, as long
as men have been able to look at other men, they have always
said: The processes of liver, stomach, heart, etc. work
together within the boundary of the skin to form a whole.
Without being obliged to look at each and all of the separate
details, we have before us the sum-total of the chemical,
physical and biological processes belonging to man's
nature.
Is
it possible also to have before us as a complete whole the
sum-total of the forces and laws of Nature that are at work
around us? In a certain way it is possible. But in order
not to be misunderstood I must emphasize the fact that such
totalities are always relative. For instance, we can group
together the processes of the outer ear and then have a
relative whole. But we can also group together the processes in
that part of the organ of hearing which continues on to the
brain and then we have another relative whole; taking the two
groups together, we have another, greater whole, which in turn
belongs to the head, and this again to the whole organism. And
it will be just the same when we try to comprehend in one
complete picture the laws and forces that come primarily into
consideration for man.
A
first complete whole of this kind is the cycle of day and
night. Paradoxical as this seems at first hearing, in this
cycle of day and night a number of natural laws around us are
gathered together into one whole. During the course of a day
and night, processes are going on in our environment and
penetrating through us which, if separated out, prove to be
physical and chemical processes of every possible different
kind. We can say: The cycle of the day is a
time-organism, a time-organism embracing a number of
natural processes which can be studied individually.
A
greater ‘totality’ is the course of the year. If we review all
the changes which affect the earth and mankind during the
course of the year in the sphere surrounding us — in the
atmosphere, for example — we shall find that all the
processes taking place in the plants and also in the minerals
from one Spring to the next, form in their time-sequence
an organic whole, although otherwise they reveal themselves to
us and also to different scientific investigations as separate
phenomena. They form a whole, just as the processes taking
place in the liver, kidneys, spleen and so forth form a whole
in the human organism. The course of the year is actually an
organic whole — the expression is not quite exact but
words of some kind have to be used — the year is an
organic sum-total of occurrences and facts which it is
customary in natural science to investigate singly.
Speaking in what sounds a rather trivial way, but you will
realize that the meaning is very profound, we might say: if man
is to avoid having to surrounding Nature the very abstract
relationship he adopts to descriptions of chemical and physical
experiments, or to what is often taught today in botany and
zoology, the time-organisms of the course of the day and the
course of the year must become realities for him —
realities of cosmic existence. He will then find in them a
certain kinship with his own constitution.
Let
us begin by thinking of the cycle of the year. Reviewing
it as we did in the lecture before Christmas, we find a whole
series of processes in the sprouting, growing plants which
first produce leaves and, later on, blossoms. An incalculable
number of natural processes reveal themselves from the life in
the root, on into the life in the green leaves and in the
colored petals. And we have an altogether different kind of
process before us when we see, in Autumn, the fading, withering
and dying of outer Nature.
The
cosmic happenings around us form an organic unity. In Summer we
see how the Earth opens out all her organs to the Cosmos and
how her life and activities rise towards the cosmic expanse.
This applies not only to the plant world but to the animal
world too in a certain sense — especially to the lower
animals. Think of all the activity in the insect world during
the Summer, how this activity seems to rise up from the Earth
and is given over to the Cosmos, especially to the forces
coming from the Sun. During Autumn and Winter we see how
everything that from the time of Spring onwards reached out
towards the cosmic expanse, falls back again into the earthly
realm, how the Earth as it were gradually increases her hold
upon all growing life, brings it to the stage of apparent
death, or at least to a state of sleep — how the Earth
closes all her organs against the influences of the Cosmos.
Here we have two contrasting processes in the course of the
year, embracing countless details but nevertheless representing
a complete whole.
If
with the eyes of the soul we contemplate this yearly cycle,
which can be regarded as a complete whole because from a
certain point it simply repeats itself, recurring in
approximately the same way, we find in it nothing else than
Nature-necessity. And in our own earthly lives we human beings
follow this Nature-necessity. If our lives followed it
entirely we should be completely under its domination.
Now it is certainly true that those forces of Nature which come
especially into consideration for us as Earth-dwellers are
present in the course of the year; for the Earth does not
change so quickly that the minute changes taking place from
year to year make themselves noticeable during a man's life,
however old he may live to be. — So by living each year
through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, we partake with our
own bodies in Nature-necessity.
It
is important to think in this way, for it is only actual
experience that gives knowledge; no theory ever does so. Every
theory starts from some special domain and then proceeds to
generalize. True knowledge can only be acquired when we start
from life and from experience. We must not therefore consider
the laws of gravity by themselves, or the laws of plant
life, or the laws of animal instinct, or the laws of mental
coercion, because if we do, we think only of their details,
generalize them, and then arrive at entirely false conclusions.
We must have in mind where the Nature-forces are revealed in
their cooperation and mutual interaction — and that is in
the cyclic course of the year.
Now
even supervisial study shows that man is relatively free in his
relation to the course of the year, but Anthroposophy shows
this even more clearly. In Anthroposophy we turn our attention
to the two alternating conditions in which every human being
lives during the 24 hours of the day, namely, the sleeping
state and the waking state. We know that during the waking
state the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the
Ego-organism form a relative unity in the human being. In the
sleeping state the physical and etheric bodies remain behind in
the bed, closely interwoven, and the Ego and the astral body
are outside the physical and etheric bodies.
If
with the means provided by anthroposophical research — of
which you will have read in our literature — we study
the physical and etheric bodies of man during sleep and during
waking life, the following comes to light. When the Ego and the
astral body are outside the physical and etheric organism
during sleep, a kind of life begins in the latter which is to
be found in external Nature in the mineral and plant kingdoms
only. And the reason why the physical and etheric organisms of
man do not gradually pass over into a sum-total of plant or
mineral processes is simply due to the fact that the Ego and
astral body are within them for certain periods. If the return
of the Ego and astral body were too long delayed, the physical
and etheric bodies would pass over into a mineral and
vegetative form of life. As it is, a tendency to become
vegetative and mineralized commences in man after he falls
asleep, and this tendency has the upper hand during sleeping
life.
If
with the insight afforded by anthroposophical research, we
contemplate the human being while he is asleep, we see in him
— of course with the inevitable variations — a
faithful copy of what the Earth is throughout Spring and
Summer. Mineral and vegetative life begins to bud in him,
although naturally in quite a different way from what happens
in the green plants which grow out of the Earth. Nevertheless,
with one variation, what goes on during sleep in the physical
and etheric organism of man is a faithful image of the period
of Spring and Summer on the Earth. In this respect, the
organism of man of the present epoch is in tune with external
Nature. His physical eyes can survey it. He beholds its
sprouting, budding life. As soon as he attains to
Inspiration and Imagination, a picture of Summer
is revealed to him when physical man is asleep. In sleep,
Spring and Summer are there for the physical and etheric bodies
of man. A budding, sprouting life begins. And when we wake,
when the Ego and astral body returns, all this budding life in
the physical and etheric bodies withdraws and for the eye of
seership, life in the physical and etheric organism begins to
be very similar to the life of the Earth during Autumn and
Winter. When we follow the human being through one complete
period of sleeping and waking life, we have before us in
miniature an actual microcosmic reflection of Spring, Summer,
Autumn and Winter. If we follow man's physical and etheric
organism through a period of 24 hours, contemplating it in the
light of Spiritual Science, we pass, in the microcosmic sense,
through the course of a year. Accordingly, if we consider only
that part of man which remains behind in the bed when he is
asleep or moves around when he is awake during the day, we can
say that the course of the year is completed microcosmically in
him.
But
now let us consider the other part of man's being which
releases itself in sleep — the Ego and astral body. If
again we use the kinds of knowledge available in spiritual
investigation, namely Inspiration and Intuition, we shall find
that the Ego and astral body are given over while man is asleep
to spiritual Powers within which they will not, in the normal
condition, be able to live consciously until a later
epoch of the Earth's existence. From the time of going to sleep
until the time of waking, the Ego and astral body are withdrawn
from the world just as the Earth is withdrawn from the Cosmos
during Winter. During sleep, Ego and astral body are actually
in their Winter period. So that in the being of man during
sleep there is an intermingling of conditions which are only
present at one and the same time on opposite hemispheres
of the Earth's surface; for during sleep man's physical and
etheric bodies have their Summer and his Ego and astral body
their Winter.
During waking life, conditions are reversed. The physical and
etheric organism is then in its Winter period. The Ego and
astral body are given over to what can stream from the Cosmos
to man in his waking state. So when the Ego and astral body
come down into the physical and etheric organism, they (i.e.
Ego and astral body) have their Summer period. Once more we
have the two seasons side by side, but now Winter in the
physical and etheric organism, Summer in the Ego and astral
body.
On
the Earth, Summer and Winter cannot be intermingled. But in
man, the microcosm, Summer and Winter intermingle all the time.
When man is asleep his physical Summer mingles with spiritual
Winter; when he is awake his physical Winter mingles with
spiritual Summer. In external Nature, Summer and Winter are
separated in the course of the year. In man, Summer and Winter
mingle all the time from two different directions. In external
Nature on Earth, Winter and Summer follow one another in time.
In the human being, Winter and Summer are simultaneous, only
they interchange, so that at one time there is Spirit-Summer
together with Body-Winter (waking life), and at another,
Spirit-Winter together with Body-Summer (sleeping life).
Thus the laws and forces in external Nature around us cannot
neutralize each other in any one region of the Earth, because
they work in sequence, the one after the other in time; but in
man they do neutralize each other. The course of Nature
is such that just as through two opposing forces a state of
rest can be brought about, so can an untold number of natural
laws neutralize and cancel out each other. This happens in the
human being with respect to all laws of external Nature,
inasmuch as he sleeps and wakes in the regular way. The two
conditions which appear as Nature-necessity only when they
succeed each other in time, are coincident and consequently
neutralized in man — and it is this that makes him a
free being.
Freedom can never be understood until it is realized how the
Summer and Winter forces of man's spiritual life can neutralize
the Summer and Winter forces of his outer physical and etheric
nature.
External Nature presents to us pictures which we must
not see in ourselves, either in the waking or in the
sleeping state. On no account must this happen. On the
contrary, we must say that these pictures of the course and
order of Nature lose their validity within the
constitution of man, and we must turn our gaze elsewhere. For
when the course of Nature within the human being no longer
disturbs us, it becomes possible for the first time to gaze at
man's spiritual, moral and psychic make-up. And then we begin
to have an ethical and moral relationship to him, just as we
have a corresponding relationship to Nature.
When we contemplate our own being with the aid of knowledge
acquired in this way, we find, telescoped into one another,
conditions which in the external world are spread across the
stream of time. And there are many other things of which the
same could be said. If we contemplate our inner being and
understand it rightly in the sense I have indicated today, we
bring it into a relationship with the course of time different
from the one to which we are accustomed today.
The
purely external mode of scientific observation does not reach
the stage where the investigator can say: In the being of man
you must hear sounding together what can only be heard as
separate tones in the flow of Time. — But if you develop
spiritual hearing, the tones of Summer and Winter can be heard
ringing simultaneously in man, and they are the same tones that
we hear in the outer world when we enter into the flow of Time
itself. Time becomes Space. The whole surrounding
universe also resounds to us in Time: expanded widely in Space,
there ring forth what resounds from our own being as from a
centre, gathered as it were, in a single point.
This is the moment, my dear friends, when scientific study and
contemplation becomes artistic study and contemplation: when
art and science no longer stand in stark contrast as they do in
our naturalistic age, but when they are interrelated in the way
sensed by Goethe when he said that art reveal; those secrets of
Nature without which we can never fully understand her. From a
certain point onwards it is imperative that we should
understand the form and structure of the world as artistic
creation. And once we have taken the path from the purely
scientific conception of the world to artistic understanding,
we shall also be ready to take the third step, which leads to a
deepening of religious experience.
When we have found the physical forces and the forces of
soul-and-spirit working together in the inner centre of our
being, we can also behold them in the Cosmos. Human willing
rises to the level of artistic creative power and finally
achieves a relationship to the world that is not merely passive
knowledge but positive, active surrender. Man no longer
looks at the world abstractly, with the forces of his head, but
his vision becomes more and more an activity of his
whole being. Living together with the course of cosmic
existence becomes a happening different in character from his
connection with the facts and events of everyday life. It
becomes a ritual, a cult, and the cosmic ritual comes into
being in which man can have his place at every moment of his
life. Every earthly cult and ritual is a symbolic image of this
cosmic cult and ritual — which is higher and more sublime
than all earthly cults.
If
what has been said today has been thoroughly grasped, it will
be possible to study the relationship of the anthroposophical
outlook to any particular religious cult. And this will be done
during the next few days, when we shall consider the
relationship between Anthroposophy and different forms of
cult.
* The Birth of Natural
Science in World-History and Its Subsequent Development.
Course of 9 lectures given at Dornach from 24th December, 1922
to 6th January, 1923.
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