O
f peculiar
importance for the understanding of the history of the
West in its relation to the East is the period that lies
between three or four hundred years before, and three or four
hundred years after, the Mystery of Golgotha. The real
significance of the events we have been considering, events
that culminated in the rise of Aristotelianism and in the
expeditions of Alexander to Asia, is contained in the fact that
they form, as it were, the last Act in that civilisation of the
East which was still immersed in the impulses derived from the
Mysteries.
A
final end was put to the genuine and pure Mystery impulse of
the East by the criminal burning of Ephesus. After that we find
only traditions of the Mysteries, traditions and
shadow-pictures, — the remains, so to speak, that were
left over for Europe and especially for Greece, of the old
divinely-inspired civilisation. And four hundred years after
the Mystery of Golgotha another great event took place, which
serves to show what was still left of the ruins — for so
we might call them — of the Mysteries.
Let
us look at the figure of
Julian the Apostate
[Flavius Claudius Julianus, called the Apostate
by the Christians, was Roman Emperor from 361–363.].
Julian the Apostate, Emperor of Rome, was initiated, in the 4th
century, as far as initiation was then possible, by one of the
last of the hierophants of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This means
that he entered into an experience of the old Divine secrets of
the East, in so far as such an experience could still be gained
in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
At
the beginning of the period we are considering, stands the
burning of Ephesus; and the day of the burning of Ephesus is
also the day on which Alexander the Great was born. At the end
of the period, in 363, we have the day of the death — the
terrible and significant death — of Julian the Apostate
far away in Asia. Midway between these two days stands the
Mystery of Golgotha.
And
now let us examine a little this period of time as it appears
in the setting of the whole history of human evolution. If we
want to look back beyond this period into the earlier evolution
of mankind, we have first to bring about a change in our power
of vision and perception, a change that is very similar to one
of which we hear in another connection. Only we do not often
bring the things together in thought.
You
will remember how in my book
Theosophy
I had to describe the different worlds that come under consideration
for man. I described them as the physical world; a transition world
bordering on it, namely, the Soul-world; and then the world
into which only the highest part of our nature can find
entrance, the Spirit-land. Leaving out of account the special
qualities of this Spirit-land, through which present-day man
passes between death and a new birth, and looking only at its
more general qualities and characteristics, we find that we
have to give a new orientation to our whole thought and
feeling, before we can comprehend the Land of the Spirits. And
the remarkable thing is that we have to change and re-orientate
our inner life of thought and feeling in just the same way when
we want to comprehend what lies beyond the period I have
defined. We shall do wrong to imagine that we can understand
what came before the burning of Ephesus with the conceptions
and ideas that suffice for the world of to-day. We need to form
other concepts and other ideas to enable us to look
across the years to human beings who still knew that as surely
as man is united through breathing with the air outside him, so
surely is he in constant union through his soul with the
Gods.
Starting then from this world, the world that is a kind of
earthly Devachan, earthly Spirit-land, — for the physical
world fails us when we want to picture it, — we came into
the interim period, lasting from about 356 b.c. to about
a.d. 363 And now what
follows? Over in Europe we find the world from out of which
present-day humanity is on the point of emerging into something
new, even as the humanity of olden times came forth from the
Oriental world, passed through the Greek world, and then into
the realm of Rome.
Setting aside for the moment what went on in the inner places
of the Mysteries, we have to see in the civilisation that has
grown up through the centuries of the Middle Ages and developed
on into our own time, a civilisation that has been formed on
the basis of what the human being himself can produce with the
help of his own conceptions and ideas. We may see a beginning
in this direction in Greece, from the time of Herodotus onward.
Herodotus describes the facts of history in an external way, he
makes no allusion, or at most very slight allusion, to the
spiritual. And others after him go further in the same
direction. Nevertheless in Greece we always feel a last breath,
as it were, from those shadow-pictures that were there to
remind man of the spiritual life. With Rome on the other hand
begins the period to which man to-day may still feel himself
related, the period that has an altogether new way of thought
and feeling, different even from what we have observed in
Greece. Only here and there in the Roman world do we find a
personality such as Julian the Apostate who feels something
like an irresistible longing after the old world, and evinces a
certain honesty in getting himself initiated into the
Eleusinian Mysteries.
What Julian, however, is able to receive in these Mysteries has
no longer the force of knowledge. And what is more, he belongs
to a world where men are no longer able to grasp in their soul
the traditions from the Mysteries of the East.
Present-day mankind would never have come into being if Asia
had not been followed first by Greece and then by Rome.
Present-day mankind is built up upon personality, upon the
personality of the individual. Eastern mankind was not so built
up. The individual of the East felt himself part of a
continuous divine process. The Gods had their purposes in Earth
evolution. The Gods willed this or that, and this or that came
to pass on the Earth below. The Gods worked on the will of men,
inspiring them. Those powerful and great personalities in the
East of whom I spoke to you — all that they did was
inspired from the Gods. Gods willed: men carried it into
effect. And the Mysteries were ordered and arranged in olden
times to this end, — to bring Divine will and human
action into line.
In
Ephesus we first find a difference. There the pupils in the
Mysteries, as I have told you, had to be watchful for their own
condition of ripeness and no longer to observe seasons and
times of year. There the first sign of personality makes its
appearance. There in earlier incarnations Aristotle and
Alexander the Great had received the impulse towards
personality.
But
now comes a new period. It is in the early dawn of this new
period when Julian the Apostate experiences as it were the last
longing of man to partake, even in that late age, in the
Mysteries of the East. Now the soul of man begins to grow
different again from what it was in Greece.
Picture to yourselves once more a man who has received some
training in the Ephesian Mysteries. His constitution of soul is
not derived from these Mysteries: he owes it to the simple fact
that he is living in that age. When to-day a man recollects,
when, as we say, he bethinks himself, what can he call to mind?
He can call to mind something that he himself experienced in
person during his present life, perhaps something that he
experienced 20 or 30 years ago. This inward recollection in
thought does not of course go further back than his own
personal life. With the man who belonged, for instance, to the
Ephesian civilisation it was otherwise. If he had
received, even in a small degree, the training that could be
had in Ephesus, then it was so with him that when he bethought
himself in recollection, there emerged in his soul, instead of
the memories that are limited to personal life, events of
pre-earthly existence, events that preceded the Earth period of
evolution. He beheld the Moon evolution, the Sun evolution,
beholding them in the several kingdoms of Nature. He was able,
too, to look within himself, and see the union of man with the
Cosmic All; he saw how man depends on and is linked with the
Cosmos. And all this that lived in his soul was true, ‘own’
memory, it was the cosmic memory of man.
We
may therefore say that we are here dealing with a period when
in Ephesus man was able to experience the secrets of the
Universe. The human soul had memory of the far-past ages of the
Cosmos.
This remembering was preceded in evolution by something else:
it was preceded by an actual living within those earlier times.
What remained was a looking back. In the time, however, of
which the Gilgamesh Epic relates, we cannot speak of a
memory of past ages in the Cosmos, we must speak of a
present experience of what is past.
After the time of cosmic memory came what I have called the
interim time between Alexander and Julian the Apostate. For the
moment we will pass by this period. Then follows the age that
gave birth to the western civilisation of the Middle Ages and
of modern times. Here there is no longer a memory of the cosmic
past, still less an experience in the present of the past;
nothing is left but tradition.
- Memory of the Cosmic Past.
- Present Experience of the Past.
- Tradition.
Men
can now write down what has happened. History begins. History
makes its first appearance in the Roman period. Think, my dear
friends, what a tremendous change we have here! Think how the
pupils in the Ephesian Mysteries lived with time. They
needed no history books. To write down what happened would have
been to them laughable. One only needed to ponder and meditate
deeply enough, and what had happened would rise up before one
from out of the depths of consciousness. Here was no
demonstration of psycho-analysis such as a modern doctor might
make: the human soul took the greatest delight in fetching up
in this way out of a living memory that which had been in the
past. In the time that followed, however, mankind as such had
forgotten, and the necessity arose of writing down what
happened. But all the while that man had to let his ancient
power of cosmic memory crumble away, and begin in a clumsy
manner to write down the great events of the world, — all
this time personal memory, personal recollection was
evolving in his inner being. For every age has its own mission,
every age its own task.
Here you have the other side of that which I set before you in
the very first lectures of this course, when I described the
rise of what we designated ‘memory in time.’ This memory in
time, or temporal memory, had, so to say, its cradle in Greece,
grew up through the Roman culture into the Middle Ages and on
into modern times. In the time of Julian the Apostate the seed
was already sown for the civilisation based on personality, as
is testified by the fact that Julian the Apostate found it,
after all, of no avail to let himself be initiated into the
Eleusinian Mysteries.
We
have now come to the period when the man of the West, beginning
from the 3rd or 4th century after Christ and continuing down to
our own time, lives his life on Earth entirely outside the
spiritual world, lives in concepts and ideas, in mere
abstractions. In Rome the very Gods themselves became
abstractions. We have reached a time when mankind has no longer
any knowledge of a living connection with the spiritual world.
The Earth is no longer Asia, the lowest of the Heavens, the
Earth is a world for itself, and the Heavens are far away, dim
and darkened for man's view. Now is the time when man evolves
personality, under the influence of the Roman culture
that is spread abroad over the lands of the West. As we had to
speak of a soul-world bordering on the spiritual world, on the
land of the Spirits that is above, — so, bordering on
this spiritual oriental world is the civilisation of the West;
we may call it a kind of soul-world in time. This is the world
that reaches right down to our own day. And now, in our time,
although most men are not at all alive to the fact, another
stupendous change is again taking place.
Some of you who often listen to my lectures will know that I do
not readily call any period a period of transition, for in
truth every period is such, — every period marks a
transition from what comes earlier to what comes later. The
point is that we should recognise for each period the nature of
the transition.
What I have said will already have suggested that in this case
it is as though, having passed from the Spirit-land into the
Soul-world one were to come thence into the physical world. In
modern civilisation as it has evolved up till now, we have been
able to catch again and again echoes of the spiritual.
Materialism itself has not been without its echoes of the
spirit. True and genuine materialism in all domains has only
been with us since the middle of the 19th century, and is still
understood by very few in its full significance. It is there,
however, with gigantic force, and to-day we are going through a
transition to a third world, that is in reality as different
from the preceding Roman world as this latter was different
from the oriental.
Now
there is one period of time that has had to be left out in
tracing this evolution: the period between Alexander and
Julian. In the middle of this period fell the Mystery of
Golgotha. Those to whom the Mystery of Golgotha was brought did
not receive it as men who understood the Mysteries, otherwise
they would have had quite different ideas of the Christ Who
lived in the man Jesus of Nazareth. A few there were, a few
contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, who had been
initiated in the Mysteries, and these were still able to have
such ideas of Him. But by far the greater part of Western
humanity had no ideas with which to comprehend spiritually the
Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the first way by which the Mystery
of Golgotha found place on Earth was the way of external
tradition. Only in the very earliest centuries were there those
who were able to comprehend spiritually, from their connection
with the Mysteries, what took place at the Mystery of
Golgotha.
Nor
is this all. There is something else, of which I have told you
in recent lectures
[See the 8th and 9th lectures in
Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres.
],
and we must return to it here. Over in
Hibernia, in Ireland, were still the echoes of the ancient
Atlantean wisdom. In the Mysteries of Hibernia, of which I have
given you a brief description, were two Statues that worked
suggestively on men, making it possible for them to behold the
world exactly as the men of ancient Atlantis had seen it.
Strictly guarded were these Mysteries of Hibernia, hidden in an
atmosphere of intense earnestness. There they stood in the
centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, and there they
remained at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Over in Asia
the Mystery of Golgotha took place; in Jerusalem the events
came to pass that were later made known to men in the Gospels
by the way of tradition. But in the moment when the tragedy of
the Mystery of Golgotha was being enacted in Palestine, in that
very moment it was known and beheld clairvoyantly in the
Mysteries of Hibernia. No report was brought by word of mouth,
no communication whatever was possible; but in the Mysteries of
Hibernia the event was fulfilled in a symbol, in a picture, at
the same time that it was fulfilled in actual fact in
Jerusalem. Men came to know of it, not through tradition but by
a spiritual path. Whilst in Palestine that most majestic and
sublime event was being enacted in concrete physical reality,
— over in Hibernia, in the Mysteries, the way had been so
prepared through the performance of certain rites that at the
very time when the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled, a living
picture of it was present in the astral light.
The
events in human evolution are closely linked together; there
is, as it were, a kind of valley or chasm moving at this time
over the world, into which man's old nearness with the Gods
gradually disappears.
In
the East the ancient vision of the Gods fell into decay after
the burning of Ephesus. In Hibernia it remained on until some
centuries after Christ, but even there too the time came when
it had to depart. Tradition developed in its stead, the Mystery
of Golgotha was transmitted by the way of oral tradition; and
we find growing up in the West a civilisation that rests wholly
on oral tradition. Later it comes to rely rather on external
observation of Nature, on an investigation of Nature with the
senses; but this after all is only what corresponds in the
realm of Nature to tradition, written or oral, in the realm of
history.
Here then we have the civilisation of personality. And in that
civilisation the Mystery of Golgotha, with all that pertains to
the spirit, is no longer perceived by man, it is merely handed
down as history.
We
must place this picture in all clearness before us, the picture
of a civilisation from which the spiritual is excluded. It
begins from the time that followed Julian the Apostate, and not
until towards the end of the 19th century, beginning from the
end of the seventies, did there come, as it were, a new call to
humanity from the spiritual heights. Then began the age that I
have often described as the Age of Michael. To-day I want to
characterise it as the age when man, if he wishes to remain at
the old materialism — and a great part of mankind does
wish so to remain — will inevitably fall into a terrible
abyss; he has absolutely no alternative but to go under and
become sub-human, he simply cannot maintain himself on the
human level. If man would keep on the human level, he must open
his senses to the spiritual revelations that have again been
made accessible since the end of the 19th century. That is now
an absolute necessity.
For
you must know that great spiritual forces were at work in
Herostratus. He was, so to speak, the last #8224 stretched out
by certain spiritual powers from Asia. When he flung the
burning torch into the Temple of Ephesus, demonic beings were
behind him, holding him as one holds a sword, — or as it
might be, a torch; he was but the sword or torch in their
hands. For these demonic beings had determined to let nothing
of the Spirit go over into the coming European civilisation;
the spiritual was to be absolutely debarred entry there.
Aristotle and Alexander the Great placed themselves in direct
opposition to the working of these beings. For what was it they
accomplished in history? Through the expeditions of
Alexander, the Nature knowledge of Aristotle was carried over
into Asia; a pure knowledge of Nature was spread abroad. Not in
Egypt alone, but all over Asia Alexander founded academies, and
in these academies made a home for the ancient wisdom, where
the study of it could still continue. Here too, the wise men of
Greece were ever and again able to find a refuge. Alexander
brought it about that a true understanding of Nature was
carried into Asia.
Into Europe it could not find entrance in the same way. Europe
could not in all honesty receive it. She wanted only external
knowledge, external culture, external civilisation.
Therefore did Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus take out of
Aristotelianism what the West could accept and bring that over.
It was the more logical writings that the West received. But
that meant a great deal. For Aristotle's works have a character
all their own; they read differently from the works of other
authors, and his more abstract and logical writings are no
exception. Do but make the experiment of reading first Plato
and then Aristotle with inner concentration and in a meditative
spirit, and you will find that each gives you quite a different
experience.
When a modern man reads Plato with true spiritual feeling and
in an attitude of meditation, after a time he begins to feel as
though his head were a littler higher than his physical head
actually is, as though he had, so to speak, grown out beyond
his physical organism. That is absolutely the experience of
anyone who reads Plato, provided he does not read him in an
altogether dry manner.
With Aristotle it is different. With Aristotle you never have
the feeling that you are coming out of your body. When you read
Aristotle after having prepared yourself by meditation, you
will find that he works right into the physical man. Your
physical man makes a step forward through the reading of
Aristotle. His logic works; it is not a logic that one merely
observes and considers, it is a logic that works in the inner
being. Aristotle himself is a stage higher than all the pedants
who came after him, and who developed logic from him. In a
certain sense we may say with truth that Aristotle's works are
only rightly comprehended when they are taken as books for
meditation. Think what would have happened if the Natural
Scientific writings of Aristotle had gone over to the West as
they were and come into Middle and Southern Europe. Men would,
no doubt, have received a great deal from them, but in a way
that did them harm. For the Natural Science that Aristotle was
able to pass on to Alexander needed for its comprehension souls
that were still touched with the spirit of the Ephesian age,
the time that preceded the burning of Ephesus. Such souls could
only be found over in Asia or in Egypt; and it was into these
parts that this knowledge of Nature and insight into the Being
of Nature were brought, by means of the expeditions of
Alexander. Only later in a diluted form did they come over into
Europe by many and diverse ways — especially, for
example, by way of Spain, — but always in a very diluted
or, as we might say, sifted form.
The
writings of Aristotle that came over into Europe direct were
his writings on logic and philosophy. These lived on, and found
fresh life again in medieval scholasticism.
We
have therefore these two streams. On the one hand we have
always there a stream of wisdom that spreads far and wide,
unobtrusively, among simple folk, — the secret source of
much of medieval thought and insight. Long ago, through the
expeditions of Alexander, it had made its way into Asia, and
now it came back again into Europe by diverse channels, through
Arabia, for instance, and later on following the path of the
returning Crusaders. We find it in every corner of Europe,
— inconspicuous, flowing silently in hidden places. To
these places came men like
Jacob Boehme
[(1575–1624), mystic. See
Eleven European Mystics
by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York, 1971.
],
Paracelsus
[Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541),
physician. See
Eleven European Mystics.
]
and a number more, to receive that which had come thither by many
a roundabout path and was preserved in these scattered primitive
circles of European life. We have had amongst us in Europe far
more folk-wisdom than is generally supposed. The stream
continues even now. It has poured its flood of wisdom into
reservoirs like
Valentine Wiegel
[(1533–1588), mystic. See
Eleven European Mystics.
]
or Paracelsus or Jacob Boehme,
— and many more, whose names are less known. And
sometimes it met there, — as for example, in
Basil Valentine
[Alchemist and Benedictine monk, lived from 1413
onwards in the Monastery of St. Peter in Erfurt. His writings were
not discovered or printed till the beginning of the seventeenth
century. See
Eleven European Mystics.
]
— new in-pourings that came over later into
Europe. In the Cloisters of the Middle Ages lived a true
alchemistic wisdom, not an alchemy that demonstrates changes in
matter merely, but an alchemy that demonstrates the inner
nature of the changes in the human being himself in the
Universe. The recognised scholars meanwhile were occupying
themselves with the other Aristotle, with a misstated,
sifted, ‘logicised’ Aristotle. This Aristotelian philosophy,
however, which the scholiasts and subsequently the scientists
studied, brought none the less a blessing to the West. For only
in the 19th century, when men could no longer understand
Aristotle and simply studied him as if he were a book to be
read like any other and not a book whereon to exercise oneself
in meditation — only in the 19th century has it come
about that men no longer receive anything from Aristotle
because he no longer lives and works in them. Until the 19th
century Aristotle was a book for the exercise of meditation;
but in the 19th century the whole tendency has been to change
what was once exercise, work, active power into abstract knowledge,
— to change ‘do’ and ‘can’ into
‘know.’
Let
us look now at the line of development, that leads from Greece
through Rome to the West. It will illustrate for us from
another angle the great change we are considering. In Greece
there was still the confident assurance that insight and
understanding proceed from the whole human being. The teacher is the
gymnast
[Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in
A Modern Art of Education
by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and
Human Values in Education
by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.].
From out of the whole human being in
movement — for the Gods themselves work in the bodily
movements of man — something is born that then comes
forth and shows itself as human understanding. The gymnast is
the teacher.
In Rome the
rhetorician
[Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in
A Modern Art of Education
by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and
Human Values in Education
by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.].
steps into the place of the
gymnast. Already something has been taken away from the human
being in his entirety; nevertheless we have at least still a
connection with a deed that is done by the human being in a
part of his organism. What movement there is in our whole being
when we speak! We speak with our heart and with our lungs, we
speak right down to our diaphragm and below it! We cannot say
that speaking lives as intensely in the whole human being as do
the movements of the gymnast, but it lives in a great part of
him. (As for thoughts, they of course are but an extract of
what lives in speech). The rhetorician steps into the place of
the gymnast. The gymnast has to do with the whole human being.
The rhetorician shuts off the limbs, and has only to do with a
part of the human being and with that which is sent up from
this part into the head, and there becomes insight and
understanding.
The
third stage appears only in modern times and that is the stage of the
professor
[Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in
A Modern Art of Education
by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and
Human Values in Education
by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.].
who trains nothing but the head of his
pupils, who cares for nothing but thoughts. Professors of
Eloquence were still appointed in some universities even as
late as the 19th century, but these universities had no use for
them, because it was no longer the custom to set any store by
the art of speaking; thinking was all that mattered. The
rhetorician died out. The doctors and professors, who looked
after the least part of the human being, namely his head,
— these became the leaders in education.
As
long as the genuine Aristotle was still there, it was training,
discipline, exercise that men gained from their study of him.
The two streams remained side by side. And those of us who are
not very young and who shared in the development of thought
during the later decades of the 19th century, know well, if we
have gone about among the country folk in the way that
Paracelsus did, that a last remains of the medieval
folk-knowledge, from which Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus drew,
was still to be found in Europe even as late as the sixties and
seventies of the last century. Moreover, it is also true that
within certain orders and in the life of a certain narrow
circle a kind of inner discipline in Aristotle was cultivated
right up to the last decades of the 19th century. So that it
has been possible in recent years still to meet here and there
the last ramifications, as it were, of the Aristotelian wisdom
that Alexander carried over into Asia and that returned to
Europe through Asia Minor, Africa and Spain. It was the same
wisdom that had come to new life in such men as Basil Valentine
and those who came after him, and from which Jacob Boehme,
Paracelsus and countless others had drawn. It was brought back
to Europe also by yet another path, namely through the
Crusaders. This Aristotelian wisdom lived on, scattered far and
wide among the common people. In the later decades of the 19th
century, one is thankful to say, the last echoes of the ancient
Nature knowledge carried over into Asia by the expeditions of
Alexander were still to be heard, even if sadly diminished and
scarcely recognisable. In the old alchemy, in the old knowledge
of the connections between the forces and substances of
Nature that persisted so remarkably among simple country folk,
we may discover again its last lingering echoes. To-day they
have died away; to-day they are gone, they are no longer to be
heard.
Similarly in these years one could still find isolated
individuals who gave evidence of Aristotelian spiritual
training; though to-day they too are gone. And thus what was
carried east as well as what was carried west was
preserved, — for that which was carried east came
back again to the west. And it was possible in the seventies
and eighties of the 19th century for one who could do so with
new direct spiritual perception, to make contact with what was
still living in these last and youngest children of the great
events we have been describing.
There is, in truth, a wonderful interworking in all these
things. For we can see how the expeditions of Alexander and the
teachings of Aristotle had this end in view, to keep unbroken
the threads that unite man with the ancient spirituality, to
weave them as it were into the material civilisation that was
to come, that so they might endure until such time as new
spiritual revelations should be given.
From this point of view, we may gain a true understanding of
the events of history, for it is often so that seemingly
fruitless undertakings are fraught with deep significance for
the historical evolution of mankind. It is easy enough to say
that the expeditions of Alexander to Asia and to Egypt have
been swept away and submerged. It is not so. It is easy to say
that Aristotle ceased to be in the 19th century. But he did
not. Both streams have lasted up to the very moment when it is
possible to begin a renewed life of the Spirit.
I
have told you on many occasions how the new life of the Spirit
was able to begin at the end of the seventies, and how from the
turn of the century onwards, it has been able to grow more and
more. It is our task to receive in all its fullness the stream
of spiritual life that is poured down to us from the
heights.
And
so to-day we find ourselves in a period that marks a genuine
transition in the spiritual unfolding of man. And if we are not
conscious of these wonderful connections and of how deeply the
present is linked with the past, then we are in very truth
asleep to important events that are taking place in the
spiritual life of our time. And numbers of people are fast
asleep to-day in regard to the most important events of all.
But Anthroposophy is there for that very purpose, — to
awaken man from sleep.
You
who have come here for this Christmas Meeting, — I
believe that all of you have felt an impulse that calls you to
awaken. We are nearing the day — as this Meeting goes on,
we shall have to pass the actual hour of the anniversary
— we are coming to the day when the terrible flames burst
forth that destroyed the Goetheanum. Let the world think what
it will of the destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, in the
evolution of the Anthroposophical movement the event of the
fire has a tremendous significance.
We
shall not however be able to judge of its full significance
until we look beyond it to something more. We behold again the
physical flames of fire flaring up on that night, we see the
marvellous way in which the fusing metal of the organ-pipes and
other metallic parts sent up a glow that caused that wonderful
play of colour in the flames. And then we carry our memory over
the year that has intervened. But in this memory must live the
fact that the physical is Maya, that we have to seek the truth
of the burning flames in the spiritual fire that it is ours now
to kindle in our hearts and souls. In the midst of the
physically burning Goetheanum shall arise for us a spiritually
living Goetheanum.
I
do not believe, my dear friends, that this can come to pass in
the full, world-historic sense unless we can on the one hand
look upon the flames mounting up in terrible tongues of fire
from the Goetheanum that we have grown to love so dearly, and
behold at the same time in the background that other
treacherous burning of Ephesus, when Herostratus, guided by
demonic powers, flung the flaming brand into the Temple. When
we bring these two events together, setting one in the
background and one in the foreground of our thought, we
shall then have a picture that will perhaps have power to write
deeply enough in our hearts what we have lost and what we must
strive our utmost to build again.
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