XIII
The Entry of Man
into the Era of
Freedom
From the
descriptions given yesterday you will have gathered that man has gradually
to acquire freedom in the present period of world and human evolution.
On looking back into the past evolution of the world, we find how, in
respect of his most important activities, his walking, speaking,
thinking, man has been prepared from above by divine-spiritual
Beings. We see how, in order to ensure that what these divine Beings
have accomplished in man during his earthly existence shall take
effect, if only unconsciously, he is always led between death and
rebirth into association with these Beings.
You will
remember that I spoke of a man being led through the forces of Sun and
Moon, and then, in the realm of the Sun, through Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
into the world of the stars, spiritually understood. To this I would add
that when a man in the life between death and rebirth has, so to say,
to retrace his steps after, as at present, progressing in the region
of the planetoids to a perception of the Saturn impulses, on this
return journey he comes into relation with the most sublime
divine-spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies — Thrones,
Cherubim, Seraphim. These are spiritual Beings whose impulses extend
over both spiritual and natural existence. While entering into
the laws of nature and infusing them with life and with spirit, they
have the purpose of bringing about enduring harmony between these
laws of nature and the moral life of the whole Cosmos. They are
Beings who have never appeared in any physical form, yet in the
spiritual world they exercise a scarcely conceivable power upon the
Earth, and make it possible for moral law to be brought into
continuous harmony with natural law. And so, because a man during his
existence beyond the Earth is able constantly to give new life to
impulses of the past, he reaches a point in his evolution when he can
work in accordance with these extra-earthly
impulses.
In the present
epoch of the evolution of world and of man, however, we are faced with the
task of taking under our own free control everything that in the past
was more or less a matter of compulsion, determined for all human
beings by higher Powers.
When we survey
this evolution of world and of man we find that at a certain definite time
man encountered difficulties which had to be overcome on his
way from being led exclusively by divine-spiritual Beings to the
conscious work of raising himself to knowledge of these Beings and so
to the gaining of human freedom. This point of time, which in a
certain sense signifies the greatest crisis in the whole evolution of
man, came approximately 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha. Such
dates are only approximate owing to time being reckoned in various
ways. According to our present reckoning, it was 333 years after the
Mystery of Golgotha that this crisis came about.
If we look
back at this critical moment, we can describe it more or less in the
following way. If the evolution of mankind and that of the
Earth itself had continued as they were doing, if men had remained
under the guidance of the divine-spiritual Beings who had been
leading them up to that time, then, since it was intended by those
Beings that men should acquire freedom, it would have been achieved
— but with what result? At that time it would have meant
upsetting the balance between the two parts of the human astral
body.
Think of
the connection between the physical body and the astral body: we will
keep to the astral body first. Before the year 333 the greater part
of the astral body had been active essentially in the upper man, and
its smaller part in his lower body — the middle man being
between the two. And because in those times the upper part of the
astral body was the more powerful, it was through it that
divine-spiritual Beings exercised upon man their greatest influence.
In accordance with the plan for mankind, human evolution has
proceeded in such a way that up to about 3,000 years before Christ
those conditions for the astral body held good, but by 1,000 years
before Christ the lower part of the astral body was becoming larger
and the upper part relatively smaller, until, in the year 333, the
two parts had become equal. This was the critical situation 333 years
after the coming of Christ, and since then the upper part of a man's
astral body has been continuously decreasing. That is the course
taken by his evolution.
It is impossible
to follow the evolution of man in its reality unless we are able to
understand what happens to the human astral body in the course of
earthly evolution. If human beings had not undergone this decrease in
the upper part of the astral body, their Ego would never have been
able to gain sufficient influence and they could never have become
free. This decrease in the astral body therefore contributes to the
evoking of freedom. I have already said that there is no sense in
asking why the Gods have not arranged everything to give human beings
pleasure. The Gods had to create a universe that was inherently
possible. Much that gives men the greatest pleasure rests on that,
besides other things which, until they are enlightened, they do not
find at all agreeable. This decrease of the astral body is connected
with something else, for on the size of the astral body in the upper
part of man — not on its size as a whole — depends his
power to control, with his Ego and astral body, his physical and
etheric bodies. Hence all men are likely to have their health
gradually impaired by this decrease in the astral body. We can form a
true conception of human evolution only if we recognise that freedom
has to be paid for on Earth by a general weakening of health. Not, of
course, in the form of cholera or typhus, but freedom is not to be
gained without bringing ill-health of some kind along with it.
If all human
forces after the year 333 had remained as they were, men on Earth would have
become weaker and weaker, increasingly powerless. And earthly life
would have come to an end through this complete decadence of
mankind.
At this point
there took place what I should like to describe as follows. At a gathering
of those divine-spiritual Beings I spoke of as belonging to the Sun,
it was decided to send down to the Earth their representative, the
Christ, there to go through something that the divine Beings
connected with mankind would be experiencing for the first time.
Birth and death are certainly not what materialists imagine them to
be, but they are part of man's earthly existence. None of the
divine-spiritual Beings above man — Angels, Archangels, and so
on up to the highest — had ever known death, but only
metamorphoses. They change from one form to another, but they are not
born and do not die. A man, too, changes form, but at the same time
he lays aside his physical and etheric bodies, thus making birth and
death a more radical change than any change experienced by the higher
Hierarchies. So the leaders in the harmonies and impulses of the Sun
resolved to send down to Earth the Christ, as a Being who had not yet
experienced birth and death, so that He might go through this purely
human destiny. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, is not
merely the concern of mankind; it is also a concern of the Gods, and
this can be put into words such as these: The Sun Gods met and held
counsel together as to the steps they should take for warding off
from mankind the danger of becoming weaker and weaker through the
decline of the astral body.
And so the
Christ was sent down to Earth and went through birth and death —
naturally not as a human being but as a divine Being. The consequence was
that through the Mystery of Golgotha, through the fact of Christ's death,
forces came into Earth-evolution for the healing of those other
forces which, in the sense already described, were the cause of
sickness. Thus Christ became for mankind, in very truth, the great
cosmic and terrestrial Healer of mankind. In other words, His forces
entered everything that has to be healed in human beings, so that
man, having his tendency to decadence on the one hand, but on the
other the saving forces of Christ, can find his way to freedom.
Therefore, provision was made in world-evolution to ensure that, 333
years before the great crisis, the Mystery of Golgotha should take
place.
Human evolution
on Earth, accordingly, could not have gone forward without this threat
of disastrous universal sickness, to begin in the year 333.
Then, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came the great universal
healing. Everything therefore done by man without
Ego-consciousness, everything that derives from the deeper forces
tending to his future downfall, can be healed through association
with the Christ. That is what the Mystery of Golgotha means for
earthly and human evolution.
The situation
I have just been explaining was known, until the fourth century after the
coming of Christ, to certain men who still had some knowledge of the
facts through having absorbed the spiritual life of their time. In
all ages before the Mystery of Golgotha there had been old Mysteries,
where the pupils were instructed concerning men's past earthly
evolution, the coming of Christ, and what was to take place in
mankind's future evolution. They were shown in great and powerful
pictures the connection of men on Earth with the spiritual Beings of
the higher worlds. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there were
still isolated individuals here and there who, though scarcely more
advanced than the old Mystery pupils, had preserved some knowledge of
these matters — a knowledge later called Gnosis. They were
scattered through Western Asia, Africa, Southern Europe. Their
knowledge, their wisdom, extended to the source of events in the
evolution of Earth and man, and to the mighty part played by the
Mystery of Golgotha for dwellers on the Earth. But these men, who
still had knowledge of the old Mystery secrets, were filled with
anxiety. They knew that a crisis was coming for mankind. They knew
that in the future human understanding would no longer be able to
fathom the depths of earthly and human evolution.
Thus, in certain
personalities of the first four Christian centuries it is possible to
discern anxiety — not about earthly affairs but about the whole
course of world-evolution. Will men be truly ripe enough, they asked,
to receive what the Mystery of Golgotha has brought? This, in the
first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, was the great
question for those we might call successors of the old
Initiates.
From among
those who in these first centuries were still initiated in Christian
Mysteries there came, for example, a wonderful poem. It told of the coming
of Christ to Earth, but it also gave in impressive dramatic form —
although as a whole the poem was epic — powerful pictures of
the men of the near future, who would no longer be able to understand
the need for a healing element in human evolution. After these
pictures had revealed something of what the Gods had decreed from the
Sun — in the way I mentioned — and the descent of Christ
into the man Jesus had been impressively described, the poem went on
to picture how in human evolution there was to be, in a new,
metamorphosed form, a revitalising of the old Demeter-Isis being. It
was shown how this being was to be revered in a special, powerfully
depicted human form, coming in the future as a solemn promise to
mankind.
These
poet-priests, as I might call them, of the first four Christian centuries,
or at least the most outstanding among them, described how in the further
evolution a certain cult was to arise, practised by all who were to
attain to learning and a life of the spirit. For such men a
sacrificial act of some kind would be established.
The epic
pictured a younger man who was to enter into the whole way in which
human evolution at that time was understood. It was shown how he was to
pass from youth to maturity by developing a cult of the Virgin. This
ritual observance, this sacrificial act, shown as necessary for all
who were becoming learned and wise, if humanity was to find
connection with what had come to men through the Mystery of Golgotha,
was portrayed in vivid colours. A mighty poem, full of colour, came
into being in those early centuries of Christianity. And among those
living more or less in the atmosphere of this poem there were also
painter-priests, who, it is true, painted these scenes in the simple
way understood by ordinary folk; but their pictures had power and
went straight to the heart.
This is what
that poem accomplished. But together with all that came definitely from
the Gnosis, it was rooted out later by the Church. We have only to
remember how it was merely by so-called chance that later on the
writings of Scotus Erigena were saved, and it will not seem absurd
when spiritual research claims that this greatest of poems, evoking
the New Testament, was exterminated root and branch by the later
Church, so that nothing of it was left in the following
centuries. Yet this poem had been there. It was rooted out, together
with all the simple but impressive paintings connected with it.
Concealed in it was all the anxiety felt at the time by the
successors of the old Initiates. There rang through this poem the
grave tones of an elegy.
Now, among
those who did not follow Augustine into a quite different stream, a number
of people retained the capacity to understand these things right into
the fourth century, even up to the beginning of the fifth. But this
understanding could not remain as vivid as it had once been; the
spiritual forces of people in Southern Europe were no longer adequate
for that. So the fundamentals of understanding became
crystallised in the dogmas that have endured, though this could not
have happened if the dogmas had not been preserved in a language
growing ever more lifeless — the Latin language. This carrying
on of Latin into the Middle Ages by learned men had the effect of
benumbing a once living understanding, so that finally all that was
known about Christ becoming man, about the sending of the Spirit, and
about the great healing of which I have spoken, had become rigidified
in dogmas. These dogmas were propagated through the Latin tongue, the
very words of which had nothing more to do with the true content of
the teaching. Thus, in the spreading of Western scholarship through
the medium of Latin, there took place a gradual drying-up of the
fiery, phosphoric element which had permeated that exterminated
poem.
Then came
all the youthful peoples of the North, stirred up more from the East,
and they received the Christ Impulse in the Latinised form through which
it was losing vitality.
We must picture
this Christ Impulse coming up from the South, and the peoples who spread
over the North accepting a dried-up Christianity because their
youthful spiritual forces lacked power to give fresh life to the
greatness underlying the frozen dogmas. The aftermath of all this is
still with us to-day. Even now in those Northern regions there can
apparently be found — for all this is only apparent —
forces that seem to have been too late in receiving the Christ
Impulse, already rigid in dogma, but are called upon, out of direct
knowledge of the spirit, to rediscover all the secrets of the fact of
Golgotha and of Christ's entry into earthly life — all of which
has, however, to be re-discovered in complete freedom. For even
the fact that after the year 333, Christianity, in its benumbed
state, made its way up out of Italy, and young races of men swept
down, whose successors are now spread throughout Russia, Sweden,
Norway, Middle Europe, England, still living under that same
influence — all this came about so that, ultimately, human
beings should be able to lay hold of the Christ Impulse in
freedom.
It is the
present task of those peoples who, as representatives of a civilisation,
are the first to whom Anthroposophy has to be brought, to accept all that
is connected with Christ Jesus, and to recognise that without the Christ
Impulse all men would have become mere “pillars of salt”.
We can use these physical terms, for the Christ Impulse goes into the
physical — right into the healing of the physical. Christ has
become the great spiritual Phosphorus working to overcome the
salt-forming processes in man.
Christus verus Phosphorus
— this phrase could be heard on all sides in the first three
centuries of Christianity. It was also a leading motif in the lost
poem I have described.
So, between
past and future, we must take our place in the present, and by the same
token be able to look back. Naturally, I have no wish to urge upon you
dogmatically what I have just been relating about a lost poem and a
forgotten teaching. That is far from my intention. But the methods
leading to investigation of man's true spiritual course bring us
knowledge of such facts, no less reliable than the facts discovered
by modern science and far more reliable than its hypotheses. Just as
nobody can be compelled to interest himself in matters which,
influenced by present-day materialism, he has always rejected, so
will nobody who is as sure of them as of his own life be deterred
from speaking of them to those who, with a sound feeling for the
whole course of human evolution, are able to perceive the reality of
such an impulse at work therein.
After the
fourth century of Christianity, the poem referred to no longer existed,
but in certain circles many details of it were passed on by word of
mouth, and lived on in memory. But the members of these circles were
prevented by the growing power of the Church from speaking
publicly of any such occurrences during the early Christian
centuries. One of those who still had some notion of the poem —
though they knew of it only in a greatly changed and weakened form
— and some idea of the mood from which it arose, was the
teacher of Dante. It may indeed be said that Dante's
Commedia,
though dogmatically inclined, owed some of its inspiration to what
had been there in the first few Christian centuries.
Naturally
I am well aware of the objections that can be made to such an interpretation
of history — I could make them myself. But recognising, as one
must, the care taken by authors of the history taught in our schools,
and with all respect for the precision that relies on records and
conscientious historical criticism, what is it all worth? It cannot
claim to be true history, real history, for it takes no account of
those records which have been side-tracked in the course of time.
Hence, though documents may be subjected to the most conscientious
criticism, true history will be revealed only in the same way as true
knowledge of nature and of the heavens — through spiritual
investigation. Men must therefore find courage not only to speak
about the world of the stars, as we have been doing during our time
here, but also to introduce into the usual presentation of history
all that it lacks because it was in the interest of certain circles
to deprive posterity of relevant documents. But the impulses in those
destroyed documents live on in the souls of human beings; live on in
those who have come later and crave for the impulses no longer
recorded but once so alive in mankind. Hence it will not only
be necessary for men — if they wish to reach in their evolution
the future intended for them — to transform, to a certain
extent, many of their concepts; they will have also to transform
their attitude to the truth.
To
speak fundamentally: we must find our way again to Christ. Christ
must come again. This assumes that during the present century
there will be men able to understand in what way Christ will announce
His presence, in what guise He will appear. Otherwise terrible
disturbances may be stirred up by people who, having in the
subconscious depths of their being a premonition of this coming of
Christ in the spirit, will represent it to others in a shockingly
superficial way. Clear vision into man's evolution during the early
future will be possible only when an ever-increasing number of people
are sufficiently ripe to see how spiritual research can make real
progress; people who are able to discover in the spiritual world what
men need for the right shaping of their further course. Failing this,
we shall become more and more implicated in all that hinders our
approach to the spiritual — not so much where ideas and
concepts are concerned, as in our general attitude.
In the ideas
and concepts of to-day there is much which looks like a movement towards
what must be the true goal of knowledge in our time. In fact,
however, this serves somewhat to hinder men from seeing the findings
of natural science in the right light. They are left groping for the
facts, as it were, in the dark. Observe how to-day — with the
general spreading of scientific, medical conceptions — we hear
of men who in their later life begin to suffer from nervous troubles
that affect their whole physical constitution and lead to genuine
symptoms of illness. Our present-day physicians realise, then, how
powerless they are to get the better of these symptoms in any obvious
way, or to proceed from pathology to therapy. As an immediate
contemporary of the outstanding Viennese physician, Breuer, I
remember his having a patient in whom physical examination
could detect no pathological condition. It was decided to have
recourse to hypnosis, which was becoming very popular at that time.
Under hypnosis, the patient was found to have had, at an earlier
period in his life, a terrible experience, overwhelming him with
horror. As far as could be made out, this experience had been
repressed into the realm of the subconscious, the unconscious,
creating there a “hidden province” of the soul. Though
the man himself knew nothing of this, it was there in his life and
threatened his health. A man can thus have within him something
which, beginning as a soul-experience, has disturbing after-effects;
it sets up in his soul an isolated region of which he is
unconscious.
It was thought
that if the patient recalled his experience, and so became fully conscious
of it, this very awareness would lead to his cure.
Cases such
as this will be found with increasing frequency in life to-day. But if
we are to understand why people are afflicted so often in this way,
spiritual knowledge must teach us what happens when the upper part of
the astral body decreases, while in its lower part there is a
tendency to accumulate subconscious provinces of the soul. We must
rise from knowledge of man's soul to the historical knowledge of the
spirit, to cosmic spirit-knowledge, in order to explain such
phenomena. I knew Breuer well; he was a man of depth; and, because he
felt that with our present degree of knowledge no progress was to be
made in these matters, he gave up this line of research. He then
became involved with other interests, particularly with those of
Freud and his followers. Out of that grew psycho-analysis, which
rests upon something true, for the phenomena certainly exist.
The origin of physical symptoms must be searched for in the soul; the
idea is quite right. But the knowledge needed to master the phenomena
is not to be found here, for it has to become spiritual
knowledge.
Hence this
psycho-analysis, which has to do with the quite natural, historical
decrease in man's upper astral body, is in the hands of people who
are not only amateurs at investigating soul and spirit, but
also amateurs in the investigation of the physical body, not knowing
how to follow the working of spirit there. So we have two forms of
dilettantism coming together; they are really alike, for these people
know just as little of the real life of man's soul and spirit as they
do of his physical and etheric life. The two extents to which they
are dilettante coincide; and when two similar quantities work on each
other, they multiply:
a x a = a2, or
d x d = d2; thus
dilettantism x dilettantism = dilettantism squared.
So it really comes about that something right, based on true
foundations, appears amateurish because of the weakness of
present-day research. In all this, however, we can see a striving in
the right direction. Anything like psycho-analysis should not,
therefore, be treated as an invention of the devil, but as an
indication that this age of ours wants something it is unable
to achieve, and that anything like psychoanalysis will prosper only
when founded on spiritual research. Otherwise psycho-analysis will
come to us in the strange form to which Jung's logic has driven it.
Jung is indeed
capable of writing, for example, a sentence such as this: One can say that
through the “hidden provinces” of the soul, man was
at one time disposed to assume the existence of a Divine Being. Jung
then adds (he is, of course, inclined to atheism): It is obvious that
such a Being cannot exist. Psycho-analysis, however, argues that man,
having this disposition to believe, must assume the existence
of a Divine Being in order to preserve the balance of his soul. For a
conscientious person — and I would never fail to
recognise that a man such as Jung is both conscientious and
precise — this really means: You are obliged to live with an
untruth because you are unable to live with the truth. There is no
truth in theism, but you have to live with it. In our state of
development to-day such things are not taken in earnest; they must,
however, be taken with all possible earnestness.
So on all
sides, without it being realised, these subconscious yearnings arise.
Those of you who have heard or read other lecture-cycles of mine will
know that I have often pointed out, from spiritual perception, how it
is not right to say: Light streaming from the Sun, for example, goes
out endlessly into the infinity of cosmic space, always decreasing in
intensity with the square of the distance.
I have
repeatedly said that spiritual perception gives a different picture.
The idea that light from a centre streams out into endless distance is
not correct. Just as a bow-string when drawn can be stretched only to
a certain point, and will then spring back, so light goes only to a
certain point and always returns. It does not only expand; it is also
elastic, rhythmical. Hence the Sun not only radiates light but is all
the while receiving it back; for at the end of their outward course
the intensity of the rays is different and their course can be
changed. I want merely to indicate this as revealing itself in
connection with higher cognition, with cosmic knowledge of the world
— the true knowledge of Spiritual Science.
Please do not
take these remarks as indicating any lack of respect for science on my
part. I appreciate science fully; it cannot be sufficiently praised,
and one must recognise the high level of intelligence it brings into
life to-day. But its statements about light, for example, are
amateurish compared with the truth. It is important that the truth
should be reached, if only to bring into all these prevailing ideas,
which men do not know how to deal with, the impulse that could raise
present-day research into the spiritual realm.
In certain
occult circles there is a wrong practice: the student is given various
occult teachings, but is never brought to the point of being shown
whence they derive. The teachings are given in pictures, and
the student is not led on to the realities which are imaged in the
pictures. Hence his soul is surrounded by a world of pictures, and he
never comes to see that through the pictures he ought to be learning
about the whole Cosmos.
For this
reason, after my
Theosophy
had appeared, it had to be followed by
Occult Science.
Here the pictures given in
Theosophy
are led on into the reality of the starry world, into the evolution of
the Earth through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so on. The two books are
complementary to each other.
When in any
sphere men are given nothing but pictures, they are hemmed in by them.
Persons who practise a wrong kind of occultism do this with a student they
are not sure of, and by this means they lead him into what is called
“occult imprisonment”. He is then encircled by confusing
pictures from which there is no escape — a veritable prison of
pictures. That is how much occult harm has been practised, and is
still practised to-day. There are even spiritual beings who drive
certain people into this occult captivity; but for the soul the
phenomenon is just the same. These spiritual beings are let loose in
nature when nature is not understood spiritually, but viewed as
though atomic processes were part of nature. The spirit in nature is
thus denied. Those spirits who are always striving to work against
man — the Ahrimanic spirits — then become active in
nature, encompassing man with pictures of every kind, so that in this
case, too, human beings are occultly imprisoned.
A great part
of what to-day is called the scientific outlook — not the facts of
science, for they can be relied on — consists of nothing else
than pictures of the general occult captivity threatening to overtake
mankind. The danger lies in the surrounding of people everywhere with
atomistic and molecular pictures. It is impossible, when
surrounded by such pictures, to look at those of the free spirit and
the stars; for the atomistic picture of the world is like a wall
around man's soul — the spiritual wall of a prison
house.
This prospect
can show us, in the light of Spiritual Science, what should be rightly
striven for to-day. The facts of natural science are always fruitful and
lead out into the wide realms of the spirit, if they are not approached
with the prejudices of the occult prison in which, fundamentally,
science is at present confined. These things must be a deep inward
experience for us, if we wish to take our right place in the
evolution of the Earth and mankind, in accordance with its past and
its future. It is all this that speaks to us when in some region we
have before our eyes the evidence of human aspiration in the past and
are now able to see it in the full light of spirit and of
soul.
When here we
climb the hills and come upon the Druid stones, which are monuments to
the spiritual aspirations of those ancient times, it can be a warning to
us that the longings of those people of old who strove after the
spirit, and looked in their own way for the coming Christ, will meet
with fulfilment only when we, once again, have knowledge of the
spirit, through the spiritual vision that is our way of looking for
His coming. Christ must come again. Only thus can mankind learn to
know Him in His spiritual form, as once, in bodily form, He went
through the Mystery of Golgotha.
This is
something that here, where such noble monuments of the past have been
preserved, can be felt in a particularly living way.
|