Lecture One
TECHNOLOGY AND ART
Dornach, 28th December 1914
The main intention of
these lectures
is to build a bridge from spiritual-scientific knowledge to the
kind of conception of life which our time demands, and I intend
also giving a few indications on this theme in the coming days.
What we call
modern life takes living hold of all those people who,
through living in towns or in similar circumstances, have
been torn away from a direct connection with nature. And we
know that since the advent of modern life people have always
thought about its significance both for the intellectual as
well as the material progress of human civilisation. And now
it is time that the impulses we are acquiring from spiritual
science should enter into modern life. Gradually we shall
have won through to the feeling that with respect to many a
thing that meets us in life today we need spiritual science
as a kind of compensation for those things in modern life
that weaken, we might actually say destroy, something of the
general divine-spiritual life forces of man.
People who
are able, by means of the first stages of the life of
initiation, really to let modern civilisation affect them in
all its aspects, will have experiences that give them deeper
insight into the significance which modern life has for man's
whole existence, than that obtained from an external view of
life unsupported by spirituality. People who have taken the
first steps in the life of initiation will pass differently
through the experience of spending a night in a train or on a
steamer, especially if they sleep on the journey. What is
different for the person who is in these first stages of
initiation and the one who has not had any connection with it
is that the experiences become conscious for the former, and
he finds out what is actually happening to him when he spends
a night travelling on a train or a ship, especially if he
goes to sleep. Of course the person who does not acquire
initiation knowledge of things also undergoes the effects
that an experience of that sort has on the whole human
organism. With regard to the whole effect on the human being
there is, of course, no difference.
If we want to
understand what these indications actually mean we must
recall to memory a spiritual scientific truth which you no
doubt know, namely, that whilst we are asleep our ego and
astral body are outside our physical and etheric body. In
fact, because of certain limitations which cosmic laws impose
on us in the natural order of things, our ego and astral body
are very close to our physical body and etheric body in a
case like this, so that if we are asleep on a train journey
our ego and astral body are right inside all the rattling,
rumbling and braking going on in the wheels and the engine of
the train. And it is just the same on a modern steamer. We
are inside everything going on around us. We are inside these
not exactly musical experiences in our surroundings, and you
need only have taken the very first steps in initiation to
notice on waking up that when the ego returns with the astral
body into the physical body and etheric body they bring with
them what they experienced while they were being squeezed
through the machinery, for they really were inside the moving
machinery right up to the moment of waking.
We bring all
this disharmonious squeezing and tearing back into our
physical and etheric body, and if you have ever woken up with
all the after-effects of what the engines of a steamer or a
train have done to your ego and astral body, and bring that
into your waking consciousness, you will notice how little it
synchronises with what is going on within you in the way of a
kind of experience the ego and the astral body have of the
inner harmony of the physical and etheric body. You do in
fact bring back with you the wildest confusion, the most
frightful din of pulling, screeching and rattling and if you
are sensitive to it you will feel that the effect on the
etheric body really is as though your physical body were
being bruised and dismembered — which is, of course, a
clumsy expression, but you will not misunderstand. This is an
absolutely unavoidable side-effect of modern life, and I want
to give a word of warning right at the outset, as the kind of
lecture I want to give today can very easily rouse what I
would call theosophists' hidden arrogance, which flourishes
very well here and there.
I am not
making a general allusion, of course, let alone a particular
allusion, for when one holds a talk on a matter like this,
one immediately provokes judgments. I think that in the case
of this theosophists' arrogance, it can easily happen that
people imagine they must take great care not to expose
themselves to these destructive forces; that they must
protect themselves from all the influences of modern life;
that they must closet themselves in a room containing the
right surroundings, with walls of the colour indicated by
theosophy, to make sure that modern life cannot reach them in
any way that would be harmful to their bodily
organisation.
I really do
not want my lectures to have this effect. Everything of the
nature of withdrawing and protecting oneself from the
influences of all that we necessarily have to encounter as
world karma arises out of weakness. But anthroposophy can
only strengthen the human soul (Gemüt), and should
develop those forces that inwardly strengthen and arm us
against these influences. Therefore, never within the compass
of our spiritual movement could any kind of recommendation be
given to cut oneself off from modern life, or to turn
spiritual life into a kind of hothouse culture. This could
never apply in the realm of true spiritual culture. Although
it is understandable that weaker natures prefer to withdraw
from modern life and go into one or another kind of
settlement where they are out of reach of it, the fact
remains that this arises not from strength but from weakness
of soul. Our task, however, consists in strengthening our
soul life by permeating ourselves with the impulses of
spiritual science and spiritual research so that we are armed
against the onslaughts of modern life, and so that our souls
can stand any amount of hammering and knocking and are still
capable of finding their way into the divine-spiritual realms
right through the hammering and knocking of the ahrimanic
spirits.
One thing
must be taken into account, however, which I have often
referred to. We human beings do not only sleep at night. We
actually sleep in the daytime as well, only we do not notice
our daytime sleep as much as our nighttime sleep. During the
night our thought life is dimmed down, and because our soul
lives predominantly in our thoughts we are, as a matter of
course, more aware of the dimming down of our thought life
during nighttime sleep. During the day our life of will is
more at rest, yet we are less aware of this because we live
less in our will. All the arguing the philosophers have done
about the freedom and lack of freedom of the will is due to
this. As they have not taken into account that they are
investigating the will whilst they are daytime sleepers and
therefore cannot arrive at its true nature, they talk a lot
of nonsense about free will and unfree will, indeterminism
and determinism. In actual fact, whilst we are open to the
waking life of day, we are only conscious of our will life to
a very small degree; it dips down into the subconscious, into
the region that belongs purely to the astral body.
Thus during
our waking day, too, we are involved in all that modern life
has produced around us in the way of the stress and noise of
modern technology. During the night it is more our life of
thought and feeling that becomes submerged in the noise and
stress, during the day it is more our life of feeling and
will.
Now in the
course of human evolution what we call modern life has not
always existed. It came on the scene essentially
at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.
The beginning of the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch actually coincides with the beginning of
the modern age. What does modern intellectual culture say
about the beginning of the modern age? As we know, modern
intellectual culture is proud of the achievements of modern
life. It is expressed somewhat like this: Throughout
antiquity and the Middle Ages people were incapable of
developing a real observation of nature such as could have
led to natural science. This did not happen until modern
times. And when people talk of modern times like this they
are speaking of the time which began with the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch. That was when people broke away from
the old way of observing nature and observed it impartially,
solely according to abstract laws. And it was through this
knowledge of the laws of nature that natural science came
into the position of opening up the possibility of mastering
the forces of nature, and mastering them in an unprecedented
way, as we so often hear. Yet this is just what modern
technology is. And the characteristic nature of modern
technology arose as a result of man acquiring knowledge of
natural laws and then proceeding to use the material world to
fashion his machines according to these natural laws,
machines with which he can then work back on nature and life
by filling modern life with them and creating his own
technological setting; that is, modern life in its essence
and function. Thus we see that it is the modern age that has
established real natural science and the resultant mastery
over nature and its forces.
You often
hear people speaking like this. However if we speak like this
we are speaking Ahriman's language for this is using the
language of Ahriman. But let us see if we can translate this
language of Ahriman into the real and true language that we
are trying to acquire again by means of spiritual science, a
language where words not only acquire the meaning ascribed to
them through observation of external nature, but also acquire
the meaning ascribed to them when we look at the cosmos in
its entirety, that is, both as nature and as spiritual
life.
Let us start
by looking quite superficially at what happens when we
develop modern technology. What is happening in the first
place is just work being carried out in two stages. The first
stage consists of destroying the interrelationships of
nature. We blast out quarries and take the stone away,
maltreat the forests and take the wood away, and the list
could go on — in short, we get our raw materials in the
first instance by smashing and wearing down the
interrelationships in nature. And the second stage consists
of taking what we have extracted from nature and putting it
together again as a machine according to the laws we know as
natural laws. These are the two stages, if we look at the
matter on the surface.
But what is
it like if we look below the surface? Looking at it from
inside, the matter is like this: When we take things from
nature, mineral nature to begin with, we know from previous
lectures that this is linked with a certain feeling of
well-being belonging to the elemental spiritual beings that
are within it. This, however, does not concern us so much
now. What is important here is that we cast out of nature the
elemental spirits belonging to the sphere of the regular
progressive hierarchies who, in fact, are the very spirits
who maintain nature. In all natural existence there are
elemental spiritual beings. When we plunder nature we squeeze
out the nature spirits into the sphere of the spirit. That
is, in fact, what is constantly happening during the first
stage. We smash and plunder material nature and thus release
the nature spirits, driving them forth from the sphere
allotted them by the Jehovah gods into a realm where they can
fly about freely and are no longer bound to their allotted
dwelling places. Thus we can call the first stage the casting
out of the nature spirits. The second stage is the one where
we put together what we have plundered from nature, according
to our knowledge of natural laws. Now when we construct a
machine or a complex of machines out of raw material
according to our knowledge of natural laws, we put certain
spiritual beings into the things we construct.
The structure
we make is by no means without its spiritual beings. In
constructing it we make a habitation for other spiritual
beings, but these spiritual beings that we conjure into our
machines are beings belonging to the ahrimanic hierarchy.
Thus at the first stage we encounter nature spirits who are
in progressive evolution and cast them out and at the second
stage we unite these ahrimanic spirits with our mechanisms or
other products of technology. This means that by living in
this technological milieu of modern times we create an
ahrimanic setting for everything that goes on in us in a
sleeping state, by night or day. So it is no wonder that a
person at the first stages of initiation, bringing back with
him into his waking life all that he has experienced outside
in the way of noise and confusion, feels its destructive
character when he comes back into his physical and etheric
body with this in his ego and his astral body. For he is
bringing back into his own organism the results, as it were,
of his having been in the company of the ahrimanic elemental
spirits. Thus we could say that at the third stage, at the
cultural level, we have technology around us, stuffed full of
ahrimanic spirits which we have put there. This is what
things look like from inside.
Now if we
turn our attention away from the occult side of modern life
and look back at those times when people slept with only a
thin partition dividing them from nature, a partition through
which spirit could easily pass, and when their daytime work
was within the realm of nature that still harboured regular
spirits of the Jehovah hierarchy, we have to admit that in
those times people's souls, their egos and astral bodies,
brought back into their physical and etheric bodies the kind
of nature spirits that had an enlivening effect on their
inner life of soul. And the further we go back in the history
of mankind's evolution the more we find what is becoming a
greater and greater rarity today, namely that people did not
fill themselves with the ahrimanic spirits of technology, but
with nature spirits that were progressing on a straight path
and which the good spirits of the hierarchies, if we may use
the expression, have linked to the events and being of
nature.
Now man will
only attain the kind of connection he needs in order to be
truly human if he seeks it in his inner life, if he delves so
far down into the depths of his soul that he reaches the
forces that connect him with the spirit of the cosmos, out of
which he was born and in which he is embedded, but from which
he can be separated. A separation has already taken place in
his sense perception and intellect, and now again through his
being filled with ahrimanic beings in the course of modern
life, as we have seen. Only by penetrating into the depths of
his own being will man find the connection with divine
spiritual beings that he needs for his salvation, the
spiritual hierarchies that are progressing on a straight
path. This connection with the spiritual hierarchies for
which we were actually born, in the spirit, this living
connection with them, is made difficult to the highest degree
by the saturation of the world by modern technology. Man is
being, as it were, torn away from his spiritual-cosmic
connections, and the forces which he should be developing
within him to maintain his link with the spiritual-soul being
of the cosmos are being weakened.
A person who
has already taken the first steps in initiation will
therefore notice how the mechanical things of modern life
penetrate into man's spiritual-soul nature to such an extent
that a great deal of it is smothered and destroyed. He will
also notice that the destruction of these forces makes it
particularly difficult for him really to develop those inner
forces which unite the human being with the
‘rightful’ spiritual beings of the hierarchies
— please do not misunderstand the word. When a person
who has taken the first steps in initiation tries to meditate
in a modern railway carriage or on a modern steamer, he makes
a great effort, of course, to activate the necessary forces
of vision to lift him into the spiritual world, yet he
notices the ahrimanic world filling him with the kind of
thing that opposes this devotion to the spiritual world, and
the struggle is enormous. You could call it an inner struggle
experienced in the etheric body, a struggle that wears you
out and crushes you. Other people who have not taken the
first steps in initiation also go through this struggle of
course, and the only difference is that the student of
initiation experiences it consciously. Everyone has to go
through it; the effects of this are experienced by
everyone.
It would be
the worst possible mistake to say that we should resist what
technology has brought into modern life, that we should
protect ourselves from Ahriman by cutting ourselves off from
modern life. In a certain sense this would be spiritual
cowardice. The real remedy for this is not to let the forces
of the modern soul weaken and cut themselves off from modern
life, but to make the forces of the soul strong so that they
can stand up to modern life. A courageous approach to modern
life is necessitated by world karma, and that is why true
spiritual science possesses the characteristic of requiring
an effort of the soul, a really hard effort.
You so often
hear people saying “These books of modern spiritual
science are difficult; they make you exert yourself in order
to develop your soul forces and really penetrate into
spiritual science.” This is why
‘well-meaning’ people — and I am saying
this in inverted commas — keep on coming to me and
saying that they want to smooth out difficult passages for
their fellow men and change what is written in rather a
difficult style into something as trivial as can be —
and these last words are not said in inverted commas.
However, it belongs to the essence of spiritual science that
it makes demands on soul activity, that you do not accept
spiritual-scientific truths lightly, as it were, for it is
not just a matter of taking in what spiritual science says
about one thing and another, but of how you take it
in. You should take it in by dint of effort and soul
activity. To make spiritual science your own you must work at
it in the sweat of your soul — please forgive me for
not being very polite. That belongs to the business of
spiritual science, if you will excuse the mundane
expression.
It shows a
further misunderstanding of the actual nerve of spiritual
science if people shy away from the difficult ideas and
conceptual structures of spiritual science. And don't we know
how many people shy away from it, how many people would
prefer to dream — the Lord gives it to His Own in
sleep! They would far rather have things conjured up before
them in all kinds of visions of the spiritual world than
acquire knowledge through the activity of exerting their
inner life of soul. We know how many people there are who
prefer having visions rather than sitting down and studying a
difficult book of spiritual science, even though it is
capable of speaking to the human soul forces that are asleep
during ordinary daily life, for spiritual science really does
activate the part of man that is otherwise unconscious and
transport him into the life of the spiritual world. The right
approach is not to receive conscious daily life apathetically
and to grope in the dark, but to make an effort out of soul
activity to get through what is given for the development of
thoughts and ideas. For when you make an effort and have the
courage to make yourself at home in this development of
thoughts and ideas, this brave and active effort will bring
you to the stage where mere theorising on what is given and
mere acceptance in thought passes over into seeing and really
being in the spiritual world. However, the really modern
conception of life that arises for us from these
considerations is that, because of our technological
surroundings, we descend into a kind of ahrimanic sphere and
become filled with ahrimanic spirituality.
The most
terrible calamity would have come about in earth evolution
if, in earlier ages, provision had not been made for these
experiences of ahrimanic spirituality that world karma is
bringing to modern mankind. Life always progresses like the
swing of a pendulum. It is experienced like a pendulum
swinging in one direction or the other. You cannot say
“Beware of Ahriman!” for nothing can protect you
from him. And if someone longs to shut himself up in a room
surrounded by the colour that suits him best, where he has no
factories near him or trains passing by if he can possibly
help it, but is completely cut off from modern life, there
are many, many ways in which ahrimanic spirituality can get
into his soul. Even though he withdraws from modern life,
modern spirituality will still reach him.
Now something
entered into human evolution that, as it were, held off the
calamity, and I gave an indication of this a long time ago in a
lecture cycle in Munich.
We must take all these things together, for that
is also part of the active experiencing of modern spiritual
science. Man has been given art; art, which also takes its
raw material from nature by reducing and wearing it down, and
at the second stage puts it together again to make something
new, with a breath of life in it, although it is only of a
pictorial nature. The life of the artistic impulses given us
in the past has the capacity, as I said in Munich, to imbue
its material with a more luciferic spirituality. Luciferic
spirituality, beauty as an illusion, in fact everything that
has an effect on man through the medium of art, leads man
away from matter into the spirit, yet it does so through the
life in the material. Lucifer is the spirit who constantly
wants to flee from matter and bear man into the life of the
spirit in an unjustified way. That is the other swing of the
pendulum. It is only because we have to go through a
technological atmosphere in the present incarnation that it
is possible for us to come into connection with Ahriman,
whereas in earlier incarnations we were more connected with a
quality that could be steeped in art. Thus we are countering
certain luciferic forces by means of the present-day
ahrimanic forces, which together form a balance, whilst the
pendulum of life swung one way in the past and swings the
other way now.
What
spiritual science quite specifically has to want at the
present time is that human beings do not sleep and dream
through what world karma is imposing on them. Yet people who
wish to know nothing about spiritual science do sleep and
dream through all the influences of Ahriman and Lucifer. They
are exposed to these influences even if they themselves know
nothing about them. But ‘life cannot go on like this;
life has to be lived consciously from now on, and that is
what spiritual science is for, so that people do not go
through the world sleeping and dreaming, but understand what
is around them. For this to happen, however, we must really
get down to the subtleties of our spiritual-scientific
business — if you will forgive the word. Such
subtleties often go unnoticed, and this is the sort of thing I
find when I read through transcripts of lectures I have
given. Often what is of essential importance to me does not
appear at all in the transcript. Just look at two examples of
this. I used a certain sentence a little while ago and did
not say that spiritual science wants something, but that
spiritual science should want it, or has to want it. That is
a particular expression which comes quite naturally to a
person who is speaking out of the spirit of spiritual
science, for spiritual science leads as a matter of course to
a more impersonal grasp of the truths of spiritual life than
other sciences do. Speaking in the manner of other sciences
we would say “Spiritual science wants something”.
But spiritual science says “what it should want or must
want” And I say “The way I must express
myself” and not “The way express
myself”.
A great deal
depends on such subtleties; we must not pass them by. On the
contrary we must begin to believe that everything depends on
spiritual science taking hold of man's innermost soul forces,
and that it is capable of transforming them. Therefore it
will not do to approach spiritual science with the kind of
thinking one is in the habit of using in ordinary life.
People are still largely unaware of what I mean by this. This
can be seen, actually sensed, so to speak, in certain crude
symptoms in the evolution of ordinary science.
Let us take
one example out of many. Modern science of religion —
irreligious science of religion — is especially proud
of the fact that it has found a connection between New
Testament utterances and commandments and Old Testament and
heathen utterances and commandments. People have followed up
the origin of every phrase in the Lord's Prayer, for
instance, and said “This particular phrase comes from
here and that one from there”. If you hear it like this
it can sound credible. Yet the moment you approach the
Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual world-historical light you
notice that all these things appear in a new context, and
that the important thing is not the discovering that all
these expressions were there in earlier times but looking at
them in the context which gives them a new shade of meaning.
In this respect the Old and the New Testament differ
entirely. Subtle things like this convey the essence of the
Mystery of Golgotha. The words and even the word connections
often stay the same but their shade and colouring is
different, and that makes all the difference.
There is
something tremendous behind the fact, for instance, that the
conception of the ego in the whole evolutionary system of
language is quite differently constructed the further back we
go in pre-Christian times, than it is later on when we go
forwards from the Mystery of Golgotha. The way people spoke
about the ‘I’ changed, and this can be seen in
the configuration of language. When the ‘I’
becomes part of the word for the verb, as is the case in many
languages, it signifies something entirely different from
when it is separated from the verb and spoken as a separate
word, and so on.
The important
thing is to work our way with the help of spiritual science
to an approach to life which looks consciously at the things
which influence our human organism of spirit, soul and body.
The way I have described man's relationship to his
technological surroundings is, of course, only in its
beginning stages. It was about four centuries ago that things
began to get like they are today. Then the nineteenth century
that was so proud of itself took a tremendous leap forward in
the ahrimanisation of human life. Yet a great deal more will
take place in future human evolution in the direction of this
ahrimanisation. We have been in it for about four hundred
years. It is coming slowly and gradually. It has already
reached a certain climax among the vast numbers of our
fellowmen who, because of the isolation caused by living in
towns, hardly have any connection any more with real nature
spirits. I once said, symbolically, that it is important for
man's development to be able to distinguish oats from barley.
Yet really, how many people are there in a town environment
today who cannot tell the difference any more between oats
and barley! Perhaps they can distinguish the plants, as that
is comparatively easy in the case of oats and barley, but
where the grains are concerned they can no longer tell the
one from the other. If they have lived in a town or were
actually born there, they usually cannot tell the
difference.
Now it
happens like this in the evolution of mankind, that when
human beings have progressed a stage, this progress is always
bound up with another experience that is at another stage, as
it were, in a parallel stream. And this has happened. Whilst
technological life has been drawing modern man closer to
Ahriman in the way I have described, he has also been getting
closer to him in another way. When a spiritual view of
history replaces the crude way of viewing history introduced
by materialism, people will understand what spiritual science
has to say on this matter.
If we go back
to the time that preceded the last four centuries, man not
only had a different relationship to his environment than he
has today, but he had, above all, an entirely different
relationship to something that comes to expression in
himself, really comes to expression in himself; he had a
different connection with his speech, to the way he spoke.
Speech does not only contain what modern materialistic
science believes it does; there is something in speech which
in many ways is connected with man's not fully-conscious
experiences, which often occur in the subconscious realms of
his being, and which are therefore interpenetrated by
spiritual beings. Spiritual beings live and are active in
man's speech, and when man forms words, elemental spiritual
beings pour into these words. During human conversations
spiritual beings fly about the room on the wings of the
words. This is why it is so important that we pay attention
to certain subtleties of speech, and do not simply let
uncontrolled feelings get the better of us when we speak.
Right into
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we could say that man
still possessed the remnant of a living experience of the
elemental spirituality contained in language. The
spirituality of language was still active within him, for
language is in a certain respect more inspired and spiritual
in many ways than an individual human being. It is only
occasionally nowadays that we notice a person reverting from
a materialistic way of thinking to a feeling for the inspired
spirituality of language.
On one occasion
here I gave a very clear if trivial example showing in what way
a person's mind can revert from the materialistic role of today.
On the whole it still happens to many people, but they are not
immediately aware of it. If someone is travelling down the
Rhine and he speaks for instance of the ‘old
Rhine’, what does he mean? No doubt he feels something.
But what is he referring to? When people speak of the
‘old Rhine’ I do not think they mean the
riverbed, the hollow in the ground. That would be the only
permanent part, of course. But we cannot discover what else
the ‘old Rhine’ is supposed to be, for the water
is certainly absolutely new; it keeps flowing on, and if you
try and find anything old except the hollowed out riverbed,
it cannot be done. The old Rhine! Language is more inspired
than man, because the language obviously means the River God,
even if people are not conscious of it. One is describing the
elemental being that belongs to it very suitably when one
says the ‘old Rhine’.
That is a
rough example. This spirituality, this belief in spirituality
exists throughout language. And a feeling, at least, for this
connection with spirituality in language still really existed
in the disposition of soul of all the peoples of Europe,
during the course of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch and right
up to modern times as far as the fifteenth and sixteenth
century. If you are not aware of this fact you cannot have
the right feeling for the beginning of the St. John's Gospel.
For the opening words of the St. John's Gospel, “In the
beginning was the Word”, arose, in fact, out of a
consciousness that the part the word plays within the whole
human organism and human life, provides the connection for
man, by way of elemental spirituality in the first place, to
the whole of the world lying behind the world of the
senses.
If, with the
means that spiritual science puts at our disposal, we observe
the way human life has run its course from the Middle Ages up
to modern times, and are able to look right into the soul, we
shall in fact find that man's relationship to speech was
altogether different in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, even
in the last phase of it that lasted up till the fourteenth
and fifteenth century. Whenever they spoke people heard
undertones, genuine undertones. People no longer believe
this, because nowadays human beings really only live in the
material aspect of the sounds of speech. A spiritual element
joined with the sound as though it sounded again an octave
lower. Thus when people spoke, or heard people speaking,
something resounded in the words that was not differentiated
according to one or another language, but was of a universal
human character. One can really say that when human
experience comes to expression, as it were, in the flowering
of the separate languages, mankind today experiences the
flowering as a vibrating of sounds in the ear, and
experiences the sounds as something that have a meaning.
Whereas in earlier times they experienced a steeping of the
whole element of speech in something that joined with it and
was not differentiated into the various languages. The
dividing line between the one experience and the other fell
in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Mankind was torn away
from the genius of language.
Nobody can
understand the actual jolt mankind was given in the
fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, unless he
studies the special character of this damping down of
undertones in the experiencing of speech. Something was lost
to mankind, and this comes to light in the happenings of the
times, whether they be battles or peacetime creations. Before
the point of time mentioned the human soul still experienced
it. Whenever people spoke, this resounding of undertones in
the experiencing of speech still lived in human souls. That
is why the whole of history has an entirely different quality
before this turning point, than afterwards. Through spiritual
science we must develop a spiritual ear, as I would like to
call it, for the completely different tone that events had in
the Middle Ages than they have today, as human souls were
connected to their experiences in quite a different way in
those times.
I will choose
the Crusades as an example of a general human
soul-experience. They are only conceivable in the way they
came about in the Middle Ages if we know of the existence of
these spiritual undertones in the experiencing of language.
The present-day peoples of Middle and Western Europe would
most certainly not be so affected by the words of
Clermont's synod:
God wills it — Dieu le vent — as the peoples
of the Middle Ages were. The reasons for this, however, can only
be recognised if we take into account what has just been said.
An important
phenomenon in all modern intellectual life is also connected
with this. The whole formation of modern history has to do
with this. If you once envisage history with these subtle
language undertones in mind, you will understand why, at the
point of time I have indicated, the various European
nationalities grouped themselves together, those
nationalities who before that time had quite different
relationships with one another; who were governed by quite
different impulses in their relationships to one another. The
way the different nationalities group themselves in the
various parts of Europe, right up to the present day, has to
do with impulses that we interpret quite falsely if we go
back from the present to the Middle Ages to look for the
origins of nations, without bearing in mind the tremendously
important rubicon that had to be crossed in the life of the
soul.
I can only
give you indications of these themes whereas they would
actually require a whole series of lectures. The most
important part of all this must be left to your meditation,
which will discover what can be found as a result of these
indications. What I would hope to have achieved is to have
given you a picture of how to build a bridge between
spiritual science and knowledge of life, and shown you how
spiritual science can lead to a conscious approach to the
reality in which we live.
Having spoken of the real foundations on which these
indications are based, it would appear quite natural that
this modern age of ours makes a renewal of many things
necessary, compared to the past. Through being placed today
by world karma in a setting that functions in an especially
ahrimanic way, and through having to make our soul forces
strong enough to find our way into spiritual spheres, despite
all the hindrances that come to us from ahrimanic
spirituality, our souls are in need of different kinds of
sustenance than before. For the same reason art must also
adopt new paths in all its branches.
Art obviously
had to speak differently to the souls that were less exposed
to the attacks of Ahriman than we are today. Art has to speak
in a new way to souls today, and
our Goetheanum building
is meant to be the very first step, really and truly the very
first step towards art of this kind, and not anything perfect.
It is an attempt actually to create the kind of art that calls
on the soul to be active, on the lines of the whole
conception of modern life, yet a spiritual conception of
modern life. Let us remember the frightfully trivial
comparison I made regarding the Goetheanum building a few
weeks ago. I asked, “How does the effect our Goetheanum
building is intended to have, compare with that of an older
building, or an older work of art in general?
A work of art
from the past made an impression by means of its forms and
colours. Its forms and colours made an impression. If we make
a diagram of it and the form is like this, this form had an
effect on the eye (he did a drawing). What was in space and
what the form was filled out with, was what made the
impression. And it is the same with the colours. The colours
on the walls made the impression.
I said that
our building is not intended to be like that; our building is
meant to be — and this is the terribly trivial
comparison — like a jelly mould that does not exist for
its own sake but for the sake of the jelly. Its function is
to give a form to what is put into it, and when it is empty
you can see what it is for. What it does to the jelly is the
important thing. And the important thing with our building is
what a person who goes inside it experiences in the innermost
depths of his soul, when he feels the contours of the forms.
All that the forms do is set the process going that creates
the work of art. The work of art is what the soul experiences
when it feels the shape of the forms. The work of art is the
jelly. What has been built is the jelly mould, and that is
why we had to try and proceed on an entirely new
principle.
Likewise what
you will find in the way of paintings in our Goetheanum
building will not be there for their direct effect, as used
to be the case with art in the past, but will be there for
the soul to encounter, so that the experience resulting from
this encounter will be a work of art. This of course involves
a metamorphosis — I can only give indications of all
this — the metamorphosis of an old artistic principle
into a new one, which we can depict by saying that when the
sculptural, the pictorial element is taken a stage further,
it is led over into a kind of musical experience. There is
also the opposite step, from the musical element back into
the sculptural-pictorial.
These are
things which are not created arbitrarily by the human soul,
but have to do with the innermost impulses we have to go
through, because we are in the first third of the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch. It has been, as it were, ordained by
the spiritual beings that guide this evolution.
A start has
to be made in every realm. If people find things about our
building that are imperfect they may be assured that the
people who are actually engaged in building it will find far
more imperfections than the people who criticise it —
far, far more. There are faults to be found in it which
people who just look at it would not think of. But that is
not the point. The point is that a start is being made, for
there are so many things that have to happen. The important
thing is not the perfection we achieve in what we must will
to happen, but that a start is made on what has to come to
life here, however imperfect it has to be. For everything new
that comes into the world is imperfect compared with old
things that have stood the test of time. Things that are old
have reached their highest level, whereas new creations are
still in their infancy. That is quite obvious.
I will begin
tomorrow where we have stopped today, and consider the
renewal of an artistic conception of the world and the
connection this has with the whole cultural life of
today.
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