IV
Studies that are
concerned with the karma of human beings must be undertaken with deep
earnestness and inwardly assimilated. For it is not the mere
knowledge of some particular karmic connection that is important.
What is really important is that such studies should quicken the
whole of man's nature, enabling him to find his bearings in
life.
Such studies will
never be fruitful if they lead to greater indifference towards human
beings than is otherwise the case; they will be fruitful only if they
kindle deeper love and understanding than are possible when account
is taken merely of the impressions of a single
life.
Anyone who reviews
the successive epochs in the evolution of mankind cannot fail to
realise that in the course of history very much has changed in
man's whole way of thinking and perception, in all his views of
the world and of life. Generally speaking, man is less interested in
the past than in the future, for which the foundations have yet to be
laid. But anyone who has a sufficiently clear grasp of how the souls
of men have changed in the course of the earth's evolution will
not shrink from the necessity of having himself to undergo the change
that will lead him to study, not merely the single earthly life of
some individual, but the succession of earthly lives, in so far as
these can be brought within the range of his
vision.
I think that the
examples given in the last lecture — Conrad Ferdinand Meyer,
Pestalozzi, and others — can show how understanding of a
personality, love for this personality, can be enhanced when the
latest earth-life is viewed against the background of other lives of
which it is the outcome.
And now, in order
that our studies may be really fruitful, I want to return to a
question to which, as many of those present here will know, I have
already alluded. Reference is often made in spiritual science to the
existence in olden times of Initiates possessed of clairvoyant
vision, personalities who were able to communicate the secrets of the
spiritual world. And from this the question quite naturally arises:
Where are these Initiates in our own time? Have they
reincarnated?
To answer this
question it is necessary to point out how greatly a later earth-life
may differ from a preceding one in respect of knowledge and also in
respect of other activities of the soul. For when in the time between
death and a new birth the moment approaches for the human being to
descend to the earth and unite with a physical-etheric organisation,
a very great deal has to take place. The direction towards family,
race and so forth, has indeed long been determined, but the resolve
to undergo this tremendous change in the form of existence, the
change involved in the transition from the world of soul-and-spirit
into the physical world — this resolve is a stupendous matter.
For as you can well imagine, circumstances are not as they are on
earth, where the human being grows weaker as he approaches the end of
his normal life; after all his experiences on earth he will actually
have little to do with the decision to enter into a different form of
existence when he passes through the gate of death. The change, in
this case, comes upon him of itself, it breaks in upon
him.
Here on earth,
death is something that breaks in upon man. The descent from the
spiritual world is completely different. It is a matter, then, of
fully conscious action, a deliberate decision proceeding from the
deepest foundations of the soul. We must realise what a stupendous
transformation takes place in the human being when the time comes for
him to exchange the forms of life in the pre-earthly existence of
soul-and-spirit for those of earthly existence. The descent entails
adaptation to the prevailing conditions of civilisation and culture
and also to the bodily constitution which a particular epoch is able
to provide. Our own epoch does not readily yield bodies — let
alone conditions of culture and civilisation — in which
Initiates can live again as they lived in the past. And when the time
approaches for the soul of some former Initiate to use a physical
body once again, it is a matter of accepting this body as it is, and
of growing into the environment and the current form of education.
But what once was present in this soul is not lost; it merely comes
to expression in some other way. The basic configuration of the soul
remains but assumes a different form.
Now in the 3rd and
4th centuries A.D. it was
still possible for the soul to acquire a deep knowledge of Initiation
truths, because at that time, especially in Southern Europe and Asia
Minor, body followed soul, that is to say, the bodily functions
were able to adapt themselves inwardly to the soul. One who may have
lived in the early Christian centuries as an Initiate, with a soul
wholly inward-turned and full of wisdom, is obliged to descend to-day
into a kind of body which, owing to the intervening development, is
directed pre-eminently to the external world, lives altogether in the
external world. The result is that owing to the bodily constitution,
the inner concentration of soul-forces that was still possible in the
3rd or 4th century of our era, is so no longer. And so the following
could take place in the course of evolution. — I am telling you
of things that reveal themselves to inner vision.
There was a
certain Mystery-centre in Asia Minor, typical of all such
institutions in that part of the world in the early Christian
centuries. Traditions were everywhere alive in those olden days when
men were deeply initiated into these Mysteries. But everywhere, too,
men were more or less aware of the rules that must be imposed on the
soul in order to acquire knowledge leading to its own deep
foundations, as well as out into the cosmic All. And in the early
Christian centuries these very Mysteries of Asia Minor were occupied
with a momentous question.
Boundless wisdom
had streamed through the sanctuaries of the Mysteries. If you will
read what was described in my book
Christianity as Mystical Fact
— as far as description was possible in a printed
publication at that time — you will see that the ultimate aim
of all this wisdom was an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.
And in these Mysteries of Asia Minor the great question was: How will
the sublime content of the Mystery of Golgotha, the reality of what
has streamed into the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha —
how will it evolve further in the hearts and minds of men? And how
will the ancient, primeval wisdom — a wisdom that encompassed
the Beings who have their habitations in the stars and the manifold
orders of Divine-Spiritual Beings who guide the universe and the life
of man — how will this primeval wisdom unite with what is
concentrated in the Mystery of Golgotha? How will it unite with the
Impulse which, proceeding from a sublime Sun-Being, from the Christ,
is now to pour into mankind? — That was the burning question in
these Mysteries of Asia Minor.
There was one
personality who with his Mystery-wisdom and Mystery-experiences felt
this question with overwhelming intensity. It is in truth a
shattering experience when in the search for karmic connections one
comes upon this man who was initiated in one of these Mysteries in
Asia Minor in the early Christian centuries. It is a shattering
experience, for with his Initiation-knowledge he was aware in every
fibre of his being of the need to grasp the meaning and import of the
Mystery of Golgotha, and he was faced with the problem: What will
happen now? How will these weak human souls be able to receive
it?
Weighed down in
soul by this burning question concerning the destiny of Christianity,
this Initiate was walking one day in the wider precincts of his
Mystery-centre, when an experience came to him of an event that made
an overwhelming impression — the treacherous murder of Julian
the Apostate. With the vision and insight of Initiation he lived
through this event.
It was known to
him that Julian the Apostate had attained a certain degree of
Initiation in the ancient Mysteries, that he wanted to preserve for
the spiritual life of mankind, the impulses that had been cultivated
in the ancient Mysteries, to ensure their continuance, in short to
unite Christianity with the wisdom of the Mysteries. He knew that
Julian the Apostate proclaimed, in the sense of the Mystery-wisdom,
that as well as the physical Sun there is also a Spiritual Sun, and
that whoever knows the Spiritual Sun, knows Christ. But this,
teaching was regarded as evil in the days of Julian the Apostate and
led to his treacherous murder on his journey to Persia. This most
significant, symptomatic event in world-history was lived through by
the Initiate of whom I am speaking.
Those of you who
for many years have been listening to what has been said on the
subject of karmic connections in world-history, will remember that in
the lectures I once gave in Stuttgart on certain chapters of occult
history — reference was also made to the same theme at the
Christmas Foundations Meeting
[Lecture-Course XVI.
Occult History.
Stuttgart, December 27th–31st, 1910 and January 1st, 1911.
World-History in the Light of Anthroposophy.
Dornach. December 24th–31st, 1923.]
— I spoke of the deep tragedy of Julian the Apostate's position
in the history of humanity.
His death was felt
and experienced by the Initiate to whom I am now referring, whose
Initiate-knowledge, received in a Mystery-centre in Asia Minor, was
shadowed by the question: What will become of Christianity? And
through these symptomatic events there came to him the crystal-clear
realisation: A time will come when Christianity will be
misunderstood, will live only in traditions, when men will no longer
know anything of the glory and sublimity of Christ, the Sun-Spirit
Who dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth.
All this lay like
a weight upon the soul of the Initiate. And for the rest of his life
at that time he was heavy-hearted and sorrowful in regard to the
evolution of Christianity. He experienced the consternation and
dismay which a symptomatic event of the kind referred to must
inevitably cause in an Initiate. — It made an overwhelming,
shattering impression upon him.
And then we go
further. — The impression received by this Initiate was bound
to lead to a reincarnation comparatively soon afterwards — in
point of fact at the time of the Thirty Years' War, when very
many outstanding, interesting incarnations took place, incarnations
that have played an important part in the historical evolution of
mankind.
The Initiate was
born again as a woman, at the beginning of the 17th century, before
the actual outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. She lived on into
the time of the conflict and was in contact with certain attempts
that were made from the side of Rosicrucianism to correct the
tendencies of the age and to make preparation in a spiritual way for
the future. This work, however, was largely overshadowed and
submerged by the savagery and brutality prevailing during the Thirty
Years' War. Think only of the
Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz
which appeared shortly before its outbreak. And many other significant
impulses came into the life of mankind at that time, before being
stamped out or brutalised by the War.
This personality,
who as an Initiate had experienced the deeply symptomatic event
connected with Julian the Apostate and had then passed through the
incarnation as a woman in the 17th century, was born again in the
19th century. All that had become even more inward during the
incarnation as a woman, all that had formerly been present in the
soul — not the Initiation-wisdom but the horror caused by the
terrible event — all this, in the last third of the 19th
century, poured into a peculiarly characteristic view of the world
which penetrated deeply into the prevailing incongruities of human
existence.
The whole tenor
and trend of the present age is such that it is difficult for one who
has carried over ancient Initiation-wisdom from an earlier earth-life
into the life of the 19th and 20th centuries, to work effectively
through deeds. And so, in this case, what was brought over —
deeply transformed and apparently externalised, though in reality
still inward — pressed its way from the heart — the seat
of the old Initiation-wisdom — towards the senses and
sense-observation, striving to find expression in poetry, in
literature.
That is the reason
why recent times have produced so many really splendid examples of
literature. Only they are incoherent, they are simply not
intelligible as they stand. For they have been created not only by
the personality who was present on earth at the end of the 19th or
beginning of the 20th centuries, but an additional factor has been
some experience in a past life such as I have related, an experience
that had such a shattering effect upon an Initiate — albeit an
Initiate in Mysteries already decadent. This shattering experience in
the soul works on, streams into artistic, poetic qualities of soul
— and what, in this case, comes over in so characteristic a
way, lives itself out in the personality of Ibsen.
When this vista is
open to one, the secrets of the evolution of humanity light up from
writings which appeared at the end of the 19th century and which
cannot be the work of a single man but of a man through whom and in
whom earlier epochs are also coming to expression.
In approaching a
theme like this, we shall certainly not lose respect either for the
course taken by world-history or for the single personality who
stands before us with greatness and distinction. In very truth, the
experiences that come upon one in this domain are shattering —
that is to say when such matters are pursued with the necessary
earnestness.
Now you will often
have heard tell of an alchemist who lived in a comparatively early
period of the Middle Ages: Basilius Valentinus (Basil Valentine), a
Benedictine monk. His achievements in the spheres of medicine and
alchemy were of momentous significance and to study him in connection
with karmic relationships in world-history leads to remarkable
results, results which show very clearly how difficult it is to
understand the age in which we ourselves are
living.
Many things in our
time are not only incomprehensible but often repellent, disagreeable,
horrifying in a certain respect, and if we look at life merely as it
is perceptible to the senses, it is impossible not to feel
indignation and disgust.
It is different,
however, for one who can perceive the human and historical
connections. Things are by no means what they seem! Traits may show
themselves in life to-day for which the onlookers have, quite
understandably, nothing but censure and indignation. And yet all the
time, even in the unpleasant elements themselves, there may be
something that is intensely fascinating. This will be the case more
and more frequently.
As I said, there
in the early Middle Ages we find Basilius Valentinus, a Benedictine
monk, engaged in the pursuit of medicine and alchemy in his cellars
in the monastery and making a number of important investigations.
There are others with him who are his pupils and they write down what
Basilius Valentinus has said to them. Consequently there are hardly
any original writings of Basilius Valentinus himself; but there are
writings of pupils which contain a great deal that is genuinely his
wisdom, his alchemical wisdom.
Now when, at a
certain time of my life, one of the pupils of Basilius Valentinus who
especially interested me came into my field of vision, I realised:
This pupil is again in incarnation, but spiritually there has been a
remarkable metamorphosis. He has come again in the 19th century and
beginning of the 20th century.
But the alchemical
activity, directed without co-ordination towards the senses,
manifested outwardly as a view of life in which alchemical concepts
are always, so to speak, being welded into sense-observations. In
this later incarnation the man observes external facts — how
people act, how things happen among them, how they talk to one
another — and he groups it all together in a way that is often
repellent. But the explanation lies in the fact that the personality
in question had, in an earlier incarnation, worked at alchemy under
Basilius Valentinus. And now he jumbles everything together —
the relationships between people, how they behave to one another,
what they say, what they do and so forth. He does not look at these
things with the eyes of a modern philistine — far from it!
— but with the eye of a soul in which impulses from his former
alchemical pursuits are still alive. He jumbles up events that occur
among men, makes dramas out of them, and becomes: Frank Wedekind.
These things must
of course be studied in pursuance of a longing for a genuine
understanding of man. When this is the case, life becomes, not
poorer, but infinitely richer. Take Wedekind's
‘Hidalla’
or any other of his dramas which make the brain reel when
one attempts to find the thread connecting what comes first with what
comes later. Yet there is something fascinating about it for anyone
who can look beyond the surface, and the commonplace judgments of the
critics sitting in the stalls will leave him untouched. From their
own standpoint, of course, these critics are justified — but
that is of no account. The real point is that world-history has here
produced a strange and remarkable phenomenon. — Alchemical
thinking, flung as it were across centuries, is now applied to human
life and human deeds; these, together with human rules and standards
are all jumbled into a hotchpotch, just as once in alchemical
kitchens — at a time when alchemy was already on the decline
— substances and their forces were mixed in retorts and tests
made of their effects.
Even in respect of
the point of time at which they occur on earth, the lives of men are
determined by connections of destiny and karma. Let me give you
another example in corroboration of this.
We turn our gaze
back to the time when the Platonic School flourishes in Greece. There
was Plato, surrounded by a number of pupils. In their characters
these pupils differed greatly from one another and what Plato himself
depicts in the Dialogues, where characters of the most varied types
appear and converse together, is in many respects a true picture of
his School. Very different characters came together in this
School.
In the School
there were two personalities in particular who imbibed, each in a
very different way, all that fell from Plato's lips, bringing
such sublime illumination to his pupils, and that he also carried
further in conversations with them.
One of these two
pupils was a personality of rare sensitiveness and refinement. He was
particularly receptive to everything that Plato did, through his
teaching on the Ideas, to lift men's minds and hearts above the
things of earth. Everywhere we find Plato affirming that over against
the transitoriness of the single events in man's life and
environment, stand the Eternal Ideas.
The material world is transitory;
but the material world is only a picture of the Idea which —
itself eternal — passes in perpetual metamorphoses through the
temporal and the transitory. Thus did Plato lift his pupils above the
transitory things belonging to the external world of sense to
contemplation of the eternal Ideas which hover over them as the
heavens hover over the earth.
But in this
Platonic treatment of the world, man in his true being fares rather
badly. For the Platonic conceptions and mode of thinking cannot
properly be applied to man, in whom the Idea itself becomes alive in
objective reality. Man is too individual. The Ideas, according to
Plato, hover above the things. This is true in respect of the
minerals, crystals and the other phenomena of the lifeless
sense-world; Goethe too, while on the track of the archetypal plant
(the ‘Urpflanze’)
was observing the varying types; and the same applies in the
case of the animals. With man, however, it is a matter of seeking the
living Idea within each single human individuality. It was Aristotle
— not Plato — who taught that the Idea as
entelechy has entered into
the human being.
The first of the
two pupils shared with whole-hearted fervour in this heavenward
flight in Platonism. With his spiritual vision he could accompany
Plato in this heavenward flight, in this soaring above the earth, and
words of mellowed sweetness would fall from his lips in the Platonic
School on the sublimity of the Ideas that hover over and above the
things of earth. In his soul he soared to the Ideas. When he was not
lingering in his world of vision but living again in his heart and
mind, going about among the Greeks as he loved to do, he took the
warmest interest in every human being with whom he came into contact.
It was only when he had come down as it were to everyday life that
his heart and feelings could be focused upon the many whom he loved
so well, for his visions drew him away from the earth. And so in this
pupil there was a kind of split between the life of heart when he was
among living human beings and the life of soul when he was
transported to the Eternal Ideas, when he was listening in the
Academy to Plato's words or was himself formulating in words
full of sweetness, the inspirations brought by Platonism. There was
something wonderfully sensitive about this
personality.
Now a close and
intimate friendship existed between this man and another pupil in the
Platonic School. But in the course of it, a different trend of
character which I will now describe, was developing in the friend,
with the result that the two grew apart. Not that their love for one
another cooled, but in their whole way of thinking they grew apart;
life separated them. They were able, at first, to understand one
another well, but later on even this was no longer possible. And it
led to the one I have described becoming irritable and
‘nervy’ as we should say to-day, whenever the other spoke
in the way that came naturally to him.
The second pupil
was no less ready than the first to look upwards to the Eternal Ideas
which were the inspiration of so much living activity in the School
of Plato. This pupil, too, could be completely transported from the
earth. But the deep, warm-hearted interest in numbers of his fellow
human beings — that he lacked. On the other hand he was
intensely attracted by the myths and sagas of the ancient gods which
were extant among the people and were well-known to him. He
interested himself deeply in what we to-day call Greek Mythology, in
the figures of Zeus, Athene and the rest. It was his tendency more or
less to pass living human beings by, but he took a boundless interest
in the gods whom he pictured as having lived on earth in a remote
past and as being the progenitors of humanity.
And so he felt the
urge and the strong desire to apply the inspiration experienced in
his life of soul to an understanding of the profound wisdom contained
in the sagas of the gods and heroes. Men's relation to such
sagas was of course completely different in Greece from what it is
to-day. In Greece it was all living reality, not merely the content
of books or traditions.
This second
personality who had been on terms of intimate friendship with the
first, also grew out of the friendship — it was the same with
them both. But as members of the Platonic School there was a link
between them. Now the Platonic School had this characteristic.
— Its pupils developed forces in themselves which tended to
separate them from one another, to drive them apart after the School
had for a time held them close together. As a result of this,
individualities developed such as the two I have described,
individualities who in spite of their different natures belonged
together and who then grew apart.
These two
individualities — they were born again as women in Italy in the
days of the Renaissance — came again to the earth in modern
times; the first too early and the second rather too late. This is
connected with the strong resolution that is required before making
the descent to incarnation.
Having passed
through the gate of death, the one I described first, who had soared
in spirit to super-earthly realms but without the fullness of human
nature which expressed itself only in his heart and feelings, was
able between death and rebirth to apprehend what pertains to the
First Hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; to some extent
he could also apprehend the Second Hierarchy, but not the Hierarchy
immediately above man, not, therefore, the Hierarchy, through which
one learns how the human body is built up and organised here on
earth.
He thus became a
personality who in pre-earthly existence had developed little insight
into the constitution and nature of the human body; hence, when he
was born again, he did not take into himself the final impulse. He
made a partial, not a full descent into the body, did not come right
down into it, but always hovered a little above it.
His friend from
the Platonic School waited before descending to incarnation. The
reason for the waiting was that had the two of them met, had they
been actual contemporaries, they would not have been able to tolerate
one another. And yet, for all that, the one who had been wont to
speak at such length about his intercourse with men, recounting it
with such charm and sweetness to the other — who did not go
among his fellows but was engrossed in the myths and sagas of the
gods — this first personality was destined to make a deep
impression upon the other, to precede him. The second followed
later.
This second
personality, having steeped himself in Imaginations of the gods, had
now developed a high degree of understanding of all that has to do
with man. Accordingly he wanted to extend his time in the spiritual
world and gather impulses that would enable him to take deep hold of
the body. And what actually happened was that he took hold of the
body too forcefully, he sank too deeply into it.
Thus we have here
two differing configurations of destiny. Of two members of the
Platonic School, one takes too slight a hold of the body in the
second incarnation afterwards and the other takes too strong a hold.
The one cannot completely enter his body; he is impelled into it in
his youth but out of it again soon afterwards and is obliged to
remain outside. This is Hölderlin.
The other is
carried so deeply into his body that he enters with too much force
into his organs and suffers almost lifelong illness. This is
Hamerling.
Thus we have
before us great human destinies stretching through the ages of time,
and the impulses which gave rise to these destinies; and we are now
able to divine how the spiritual impulses work. For we must place
this fact in all clarity before our souls: an individuality like
Hölderlin, who has come from the Platonic School and who cannot
enter fully into his body but has to remain outside it, such an
individuality experiences in the dimness of insanity, impulses that
work in preparation for coming earthly lives, impulses that destine
him for greatness. And it is the same with the other, Robert
Hamerling.
Illness and health
appear in quite a different light when considered in the setting of
destiny than when they are observed within the bounds of the single
earthly life.
I think it can
surely be said that reverence will arise in men's hearts and
minds when life is treated in this way — reverence and awe for
the mysterious happenings brought about by the spiritual world. Again
and again I must emphasise that these things are not being told in
order to satisfy cravings for sensation, but to lead us more and more
deeply into a knowledge and understanding of the spiritual life. And
it is only through this deeper penetration into the spiritual life
that the external, sense-life of man can be explained and
illumined.
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