Lecture Six
WORKING WITH SCULPTURAL ARCHITECTURE I
Dornach, 2nd January 1915
It will be relatively easy — I am
saying relatively, of course — for a person to take up
more or less theoretically what we understand by the
spiritual-scientific world outlook, or anthroposophy. But it
will not be easy to fill our whole being and life itself with
the impulses coming from spiritual science. To absorb
anthroposophy theoretically, so that you know that the human
being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral
body and so on, in the same way as you know that one or
another tone has so-and-so many vibrations, or that oxygen
combines with hydrogen to make water, is the way we have
grown accustomed to learning things through the
natural-scientific approach mankind has gradually acquired
over the last few centuries.
We are less
accustomed, however, to allowing our feelings and attitude of
mind to be affected by the kind of knowledge spiritual
science has to offer. Yet the kind of approach we must have
to spiritual science is fundamentally opposite to the
approach we must have to natural science. Emphasis is often
laid on the fact that everyone feels that science is dry and
stops us having a warm contact with life and its happenings;
that dry science has something cold and unfeeling about it
and robs things of their dewy freshness. Yet one could say
that to a certain extent this has to be so with ordinary
science. For there is an enormous difference between the
impression made on us by a wonderful cloud formation in the
evening or morning sky and the bare reports an astronomer or
a meteorologist gives us. There is such abundant richness in
the natural world around us that its effect on us is to warm
us through and through whereas, in comparison, science, with
its concepts and ideas, appears dull and dry, cold, lifeless
and loveless. Yet there is every justification to feel this
way as far as external, natural-scientific knowledge is
concerned.
There are
good reasons why external, natural-scientific knowledge has
to be like this, but spiritual science is not this kind of
knowledge. On the contrary it ought to bring us nearer and
nearer to the living abundance and warmth of the outside
world and of the world altogether. But this means learning to
bring certain impulses to life in us that a person of today
hardly possesses at all. A present-day person expects it to
be in the nature of what he calls science that it has a cold
and sobering effect on him, like the character of Wagner in
Goethe's Faust. He expects that if he assimilates science the
riddles of nature will be solved, and then he will know how
everything is constituted and be perfectly satisfied with
what he knows.
Science even
makes some people shudder nowadays, for a quite specific
reason. They maintain that what made life so rich and fresh
in the past, was the fact that man had not solved every
riddle and could still wonder about the unsolved ones. And
then science comes along, they say, and solves the riddles of
nature one after the other. And they imagine how boring life
will be in the future when science will have solved all the
mysteries and there will be no further possibility of
wondering about anything, or having any feelings of an
unscientific kind. What terrible desolation would befall
mankind; we have every reason to be horrified at the
prospect.
But spiritual
science can kindle different feelings than these, and
although those feelings would be less in keeping with modern
times than the solving of riddles, they show how awakening
and life-giving spiritual science can be. If we absorb
anthroposophy in the right way — not just take notes of
what is being said, so that we can make use of them like they
do in ordinary science, and perhaps even do a neat diagram,
so that we can take it all in at a glance like physics
— if we do not do it so much that way, but let what
anthroposophy has to say reach our hearts and we unite with
it, we shall notice that it comes to life in us and grows, it
awakens our independence and initiative and becomes like a
new living being within us, that is forever showing new
aspects. To approach external nature with our souls thus
filled with anthroposophy, is to find more riddles in nature
and not less. Everything grows even more puzzling, which
broadens instead of impoverishing our life of feeling; you
could say that spiritual science makes the world more
mysterious.
Of course the
world becomes a desolate place when the physicist says to you
‘You see the sunrise . . . .’ and then, showing
us a diagram, he tells us which particular refractions are
taking place in the rays of light so that the glow of dawn
appears. This is certainly horrible, not from the point of
view of human reason, but for the human heart and an
understanding connected with the heart.
It is quite
different when spiritual science tells us, for example, When
you see the sunrise or hear one or another piece of music, it
must feel to you as though the Elohim were sending their
punishing wrath into the world. Then we become aware of the
mysterious living weaving of the Elohim behind the glow of
dawn. To know the name of the Elohim and to be able to give
them a place in the ninefold diagram we have drawn in our
notebook, is not knowing anything about the Elohim. But out
of the living feeling we can have in looking at the sunrise
will come a perception of movement and life in rich
abundance, just as we know that when we look at a human
being, any amount of conceptual knowledge about him will not
tell us the whole of his nature, nor fathom the universal
life within him. Likewise, we shall become aware that the
dawn is revealing something to us of the unfathomable life of
the cosmos.
Spiritual-scientific knowledge makes life more enigmatic and
mysterious in a way that kindles richer feelings within us.
And it is a fundamental feeling of this kind our souls can
acquire, when we bring spiritual science to life within us
and when we try to make ourselves at home in the kind of
ideas I have just indicated. Then we shall never be tempted
to complain that spiritual science only appeals to our heads
and does not take hold of our whole being. We just need to be
patient until the message of spiritual science becomes a
living being within us and forms itself anew, filling us not
only with its light but also with its warmth. Then it will
take hold of our hearts and our whole being and we shall feel
the richer for it, whereas, if we take up spiritual science
in the same way as ordinary science, we are bound to feel the
poorer.
Yet, on the
other hand, it is quite natural that, to begin with,
anthroposophy seems to many people to lead to an
impoverishment, because they have not yet been able to find
the inner life of the message of anthroposophy that can reach
their heart, and because anthroposophy does not yet have the
same effect on them as, for instance, the warm words of a
fellow human being speaking to us. But we have to learn that
anthroposophy can become alive that it can give us as much
support and encouragement as we can otherwise only receive
from another human being.
Our hearts
find this so difficult at the present time because we have
lost the habit of uniting ourselves with the life of things.
It is difficult enough if one tries in small doses to
re-introduce this living with things. This was attempted in
our four Mystery Plays. You have only to think of the scene
in spirit land, in the fifth act of
The Soul's Awakening,
where Felix Balde is sitting on the left side
of the stage — seen from the audience — after he
has ascended to Devachan, and a spiritual being on the other
side of the stage speaks to him of his experience of weight.
Here one should feel the weight that is descending in the
distance. When people see something descending, they are
accustomed nowadays only to be aware of the descending and
only to see the thing higher up to start with, and then
coming lower and lower down. They are quite unaccustomed to
creeping into things and feeling the experience of weight,
feeling the thing pressing down all the time. With an
expression like that I am hoping to lift people out of their
egoistic bodies right in the middle of the play, and to
plunge them into the life of things outside themselves.
If this
cannot happen, then real artistic feeling will not be able to
arise again. In order that, for instance, a true feeling for
architecture can come again, the concepts we receive from
spiritual science must come alive. To begin with it makes
very little difference which particular anthroposophical
concepts we carry round with us. But if we really do
something like this we shall see how much richer our soul
life becomes. We shall gain a lot if, for instance, as well
as just seeing this diagram we try and submerge ourselves in
it and try to feel what is going on: weight pressing down
here, and weight being supported there.
We want to go
even further and not just look at it, but feel that the beam
needs to have a certain strength, otherwise the load will
crush it, and the supporting pillars must also have a certain
strength, otherwise they too will be crushed. We must feel
the way the sphere on top is pressing down, the pillars
supporting and the beam keeping the balance. Not until we
creep into the elements of weight, support and balance,
between the pressing down and the supporting, shall we feel
our way into the element of architecture.
But if we
follow a structure of this kind not only with our eye but, as
it were, crawl into it and experience the weighing down, the
supporting and the balance, then we shall feel that our whole
organism is becoming involved, and as if we have to call on
an invisible brain belonging to our whole being and not just
our head. Then we can awaken to the consciousness, ‘Ah!
now we are beginning to feel!’ To take our simple
example, we shall feel a supporting element, an upward
striving, supporting luciferic element; a weighing and
pressing down ahrimanic element, and a balance between the
luciferic and ahrimanic which is a divine quality. Thus, even
lifeless nature becomes filled with Lucifer and Ahriman and
their superior ruler, who eternally brings about the balance
between them.
If we thus
learn to experience the luciferic, ahrimanic and divine
elements in architecture, so that architecture affects us
inwardly, we shall become conscious of a richer feeling of
the world which leads or, one could almost say, pulls the
soul into the things of the world; for our soul is now not
only within our body's skin but belongs to the cosmos. This
is a way of becoming conscious of this. We shall become
aware, too, that whereas outside, the architectural element
is supporting, weighing down and creating a balance, we
ourselves in this encounter with the architectural element,
develop a musical mood. Architecture produces a musical mood
in our inner being, and we notice that even though the
elements of architecture and music appear to be so alien in
the outer world, through this musical mood engendered in us,
our experience of architecture brings about a reconciliation,
a balance between these two elements.
This is
where, from our epoch onwards, living progress in the arts
will lie, through learning to experience the reconciliation
of the arts. This was dimly felt by Wagner, but it can only
really come about when the world comes alive with spiritual
science.
Reconciling
the arts: that is what we attempted to do — for the
first time, and in a small, elementary way — in our
Goetheanum building. We did not want only to talk in a cold,
abstract way about it, but show in the architecture of the
building itself an impression, a copy of this reconciling of
a musical mood with architectural form. If you study what is
presented in our series of pillars and everything connected
with them, you will discover that we were making the attempt
to bring the elements of support, weighing down and the
balance into living movement. Our pillars are not merely
supports, and our capitals no longer mere supporting devices,
and the architraves that extend above the pillars do not just
have the character of rest, serving only to round the pillars
off at the top, but they have a character of living growth
and movement.
We attempted
to bring architectural forms into musical flux, and the
feeling one can have from seeing the interplay between the
pillars and all that is connected with them, can of itself
arouse a musical mood in the soul. It will be possible to
feel invisible music as the soul of the columns and the
architectural and sculptural forms that belong to them. It is
as though a soul element were in them. And the
interpenetration of the fine arts and their forms by musical
moods has fundamentally to be the ideal of the art of the
future. Music of the future will be more sculptural than
music of the past. Architecture and sculpture of the future
will be more musical than they were in the past. That will be
the essential thing. Yet this will not stop music from being
an independent art; on the contrary, it will become richer
and richer through penetrating the secrets of the tones, as
we said yesterday, creating musical forms from out of the
spiritual foundations of the cosmos.
However, as
everything that is inside must also be outside, in art
— all that lives in it must be embodied in a kind of
organism — the world of soul within the series of
pillars and everything belonging to them must also become
embodied. This happens, or at least is about to happen in the
painting of the domes. Just as the pillars and everything
belonging to them are, as it were, the body of our building,
so is all that is going to appear in the domes — when
you are inside the building — its soul; and just as the
world appears to be filled with spirit, when our organs are
directed outwards, our windows executed in the new art of
glass shading shall represent the spirit. Body, soul and
spirit shall be expressed in our building. Body in the column
structure, soul in everything to do with the domes, and
spirit in what is in the windows.
Where these
things are concerned karma has brought various things about
for which we can be grateful, for just in the case of the
Goetheanum building, karma has indeed helped us in several
matters. The soul of a human being is so constituted that
from outside we perceive it in his physiognomy, but we have
to have resources like love and friendship to penetrate into
a person's soul, if we want to get to know it from inside, as
it were.
When I was
travelling from Christiania to Bergen on my last lecture tour
in Norway, I happened to see a slate quarry which gave me the
idea of trying to get slate from there. We were successful,
and it really was what one might call a karmic happening, for
when we look at the roof of the domes that are now tiled with
this slate with its quite unique qualities, we are sure to
say that it has something of the quality of the life of the
soul, that at one and the same time both discloses and
conceals what is within. Now if we really want to feel the
domes as soul life we shall have to develop a love for
spiritual science. For what is going to be painted inside the
domes should really appear to us as a kind of reflected image
in colour and form, of what spiritual science can mean to us.
To see this we have to go inside. But when the building is
really finished, no one will be able to understand what he
sees when he goes inside if he has not developed a love for
spiritual science; otherwise what he sees there will probably
remain something that can cause a bit of a sensation, but
will not be anything that particularly appeals to his heart.
What he gets from it will easily tempt him to deny that the
architecture has anything to offer the feelings.
Just as we
have seen in this instance that what comes to life out of
anthroposophy can be rediscovered in the world, life can also
be fructified through anthroposophy, in realms in which we
can more readily see that our heart's understanding needs to
be warmed and fructified. For it is not only artistic and
scientific areas that are to be fructified by spiritual
science, but the whole of life has to be.
Let me take
as an example a realm in which we can see particularly well
how anthroposophical concepts can come alive in outer life. I
will choose the realm of education, any kind of art of
education. Let us begin from the fact that children are
educated by grown-ups. What does the materialistic age
envisage when it speaks of a child being educated by a
grown-up? Fundamentally speaking, the materialistic age sees
in both of them, both the grown-up and the child, only what
you get from a materialistic outlook, namely, a grown-up
teaching a child. But it is not like that. Externally the
grown-up is only maya, and seen from outside the child is
only maya too. There is something in the grown-up not
directly contained in maya, namely the invisible man, who
passes from one incarnation to another, and there is also an
invisible part in the child that goes from incarnation to
incarnation.
We shall
speak about these things again. But I would like to tell you
a few things today from which you will see in the course of
time — if you meditate on them — what else there
is in spiritual science. I will start with the fact that a
person, as he appears in the external world, cannot teach at
all, nor can the person who stands before us, externally, as
a child, be educated. In reality something invisible in the
teacher educates something invisible in the pupil. We shall
only understand this properly if we focus our attention on
what is gradually unfolding in the growing child, as the
outcome of previous incarnations. And when everything coming
from previous incarnations has made its appearance, the child
withdraws, especially in present times. What we are actually
educating is the invisible result of previous incarnations.
We cannot educate or have any effect on the visible child.
That is how the matter stands with regard to the child.
Now we will
look at the teacher. During the first seven years of the
child's life he can only educate by means of what the child
can imitate; in the second seven years it will be through the
influence he has as an authority; and finally in the
following seven years it will be through the educational
effect of independent judgment. Everything that is active in
the teacher all this time is not in his external physical
part at all. The part of us which do the educating will
not take on physical form until our next incarnation. For all
the qualities in us which can be imitated, or the qualities
upon which our authority is based, are germinal qualities and
will form our next incarnation. When we are teachers our own
next incarnation converses with the previous incarnation of
the pupil. It is an illusion to think that as present people
we speak to the child of the present. We only have the right
feeling for this if we say to ourselves, ‘The very best
in you which your spirit can think and your soul can feel,
and which is preparing itself to make something of you in the
next incarnation, can work on the part of the child that is
sculpturing its form out of times long past.’ The
musical element in us is what enables us to educate. What we
should educate in the child is the element of sculpture.
Take as a
whole all that I have said in these lectures about the
musical element and of how, in its most exalted form, it
corresponds to what man meets with in initiation. Music is
related to everything that is in a process of development and
lies in the future, and the realm of sculpture and
architecture is related to what lies in the past. A child is
the most wonderful example of sculpture we can see. What we
need as teachers is a musical mood, which we can have in the
form of a mood pervaded by the future. If you can have this
feeling when you are involved in teaching it will add a very
special tone to the relationship of the teacher to the child.
For it will make the teacher set himself the highest aims,
whilst having the greatest measure of understanding for the
children's naughtiness. There really is an educational force
in this mood.
Once the
world comes to see that the right atmosphere for teaching
arises when a musical mood in the teacher is combined with
seeing the sculptural activity in the pupil; once it is
established that this is what is required for a love of
teaching, then education will be filled with the right
impetus. For then the teacher will speak, think and feel in
such a way that in the course of his lessons, what comes from
the past will learn to love what reaches out to the future.
The result will be a wonderful karmic adjustment between the
teacher and his pupils. A wonderful karmic balancing.
If the
teacher is egoistic and only tries to make the child an
imitation of himself, then the teaching is purely luciferic.
Education becomes luciferic when we try as far as possible to
turn the pupil into a copy of our own opinions and feelings,
and are only happy if we tell the pupil something today and
he repeats it word for word tomorrow. That is a purely
luciferic education. On the other hand an ahrimanic education
comes about if the pupil is as naughty as possible in our
lessons and learns from us as little as he possibly can.
However, there is a state of balance between these two
extremes, just as there is between weighing down and
supporting. This is arrived at through the interplay of the
musical-sculptural elements I have just been speaking about.
We must learn to distinguish between the teacher's intentions
and what the child turns out to be. If we have the right
mood, then even though we have been trying to teach our pupil
something quite specific, we shall be overjoyed to realise
that he has not turned out as we intended, but that the child
has developed into something quite different from what we
intended him to be. This is the remarkable thing, that the
teacher can only rid himself of his egoism in teaching, if he
overcomes the desire to turn the child into a copy of his own
views on what is good and right, and especially of his own
favourite thoughts. The best thing we can achieve, as
teachers, is to be able to face perfectly calmly the thought
of the child becoming as different from us as possible.
But you
cannot come along and say, ‘Please give me a recipe for
it, write a few rules down for me on how to teach like
that.’ That is the remarkable thing about the spiritual
world outlook, that you cannot work according to rules, but
you really have to absorb spiritual science, so that you are
filled with it and your impulses of feeling and will are
increased. Then the right thing will happen, whatever
particular task you face in life. The essential thing is to
tackle it in a living way.
Now you could
ask, ‘Which is the right teaching method from the point
of view of spiritual science?’ And the correct answer
would be, ‘The best spiritual-scientific method of
teaching is for as many teachers as possible to engross
themselves in spiritual science in a living way, and to
acquire the feelings that come from spiritual science’.
This is less convenient, of course, than reading a textbook
on the art of spiritual-scientific education. Yet spiritual
science is forever being asked, ‘What is the
spiritual-scientific point of view on this or that?’
Now spiritual science does not have a point of view, or, if
you like, it has as many points of view as life itself. But
spiritual science itself must become life. Spiritual science
must be absorbed and brought to life within us, then it will
be able to bear fruit in the various realms of life. People
will then get beyond whatever it is that makes life so dry
and dead: we could call it the request for uniformity.
External science requires uniformity, but spiritual science
gives manifoldness and variety, the kind of variety that
belongs to life itself. Thus, spiritual science will have to
bring transformation into the furthest reaches of life.
Let us look
at what some realms of life are like today. Learning takes
place up to a particular age; you learn one thing up to one
age and something else up to another. Then comes the time
when you go out into life, as we say, and do not want to
learn any more; even when you go in for a scientific career
you do not like having to learn any more. The ones who do go
on learning in order to keep up with their science are
thought to be the odd ones. In the general run people learn
until a certain age and after that they play cards or other
useless things in their spare time, or they develop an
attitude like this one I came across. I had been invited to
give a series of lectures on the history of literature in a
circle that included some ladies with a thirst for knowledge.
Now it could be said that the softer, or if you prefer it,
‘retarded’ brain that ladies have has retained
more the receptivity and flexibility of ancient times, when
learning continued throughout life. This is more often found
among women than men. But these ladies had the feeling that
they ought to bring the gentlemen along too, to the lecture
cycle. So the gentlemen were there, and they did not all go
to sleep. Some of them really listened. Then there was
conversation, tea and cakes, in other words they did what is
considered to be essential in some circles, if the lectures
are not to be too dry. So there was conversation too. And
after I had been lecturing on Goethe's Faust, some of the men
summed up their attitude by saying, ‘When you see Faust
on the stage it is not really the kind of art you can enjoy,
it isn't even recreation, it is science.’ This was
their way of saying that when a person has been working in an
office all day, or has been serving customers, or standing in
a court of law interrogating witnesses and sentencing the
accused, by the evening he is in no state to listen to
Goethe's Faust any more and needs recreation and not
science.
This is an
example of a common attitude with which no doubt you are
familiar. You only need to mention it, for everyone knows how
widespread it is, and that a lot of people would find it
strange the way we gather here in such a studious fashion and
want to go on learning, despite the fact that several of us
are fairly old. They think they know a much better way of
spending time. Yet a complete change will have to take place
in people's approach to spiritual science, in that they will
not just want to let it remain a study, but will want to have
a living and permanent relationship with it. This will come.
You cannot learn anthroposophy the same way as you learn
science, by taking it down in a notebook; anthroposophy must
stay alive. It becomes dead if we only learn its content and
do not remain connected with it through living activity. It
becomes dead and withers away, whereas it should be kept
alive. Spiritual science must work in this way to enliven us
and keep our hearts receptive for all they can receive from
the spiritual worlds, so that we develop further all the
time.
There is no
doubt that in our epoch humanity shows a quality of old age;
on the whole it does not have the kind of youthfulness it had
in mythical times. Spiritual science must be people's draught
of youth, so that they will feel able to learn from life
throughout their lives. Nowadays we can experience odd things
in this connection. I know a man with an active mind, a
person who has had all kinds of connections with modern
intellectual culture all through his life. Now he celebrated
his fiftieth birthday recently, and gave a leaflet out on
this occasion containing some very peculiar notions. For
instance he said — but I want to alter things a little
bit, so that you will not guess who it is — he said,
‘I have been offered a post in the realm of art that I
had been longing for, for many years. But now that I have
reached the age of fifty, old age in fact, I do not really
want it any more. For to fill a post of that kind and to
inspire the people around you, you need to be young, you need
to be full of fantastic illusions. And these illusions have
to consist of thinking that what you are doing and the people
you have to deal with are the whole world and nothing else
matters. What really counts is what is right there. Fifteen
years ago I was of an age when I could have done it. Now I am
past it. You should not wait until people have grown old
before you offer them influential positions, but let them be
privy councillors, for instance, when they are between thirty
and forty.’ This was the gist of what this
‘old’ man said.
This mood is
absolutely in line with the whole quality of our contemporary
culture. It is a mood very easily acquired by people who
accept what materialistic culture has to say about the human
being, for materialism has not the power to penetrate the
whole being of man; the content of this materialistic
knowledge is not powerful enough to have the kind of
influence on his soul life that will last right into old age.
Spiritual science proves that even if a person grows old
externally he can stay young in soul, and if he has not done
anything special by the age of fifty, although he does not
need to succumb to the illusion that what he is doing is of
prime importance and everything else can fall by the wayside,
he can still be young enough to devote all his strength to
what he has to do. He can be youthful, in fact childlike
enough to concentrate the whole of his forces on what has to
be done, just as a child concentrates all his forces in play.
Spiritual science must become a magic draught of youth and
not just a theory. That is also an impulse of transformation.
Tomorrow I will talk about other impulses of
transformation.
|