Lecture 5
October 25th, 1914 Dornach
We spoke
yesterday of the way in which the impulses of Will, Feeling
and Thinking in man are brought to expression in our
Building.
It will be
apparent to you from many things that have been said here
recently that the art in our Building must contain a new
element that has not hitherto existed in the evolution of art
but is essential for the further progress of humanity.
Admittedly it
will be difficult from a purely external point of view to
understand the real aim of this Building. A person may say to
himself: I really can make nothing of it — and
according to the standard of what he has hitherto regarded as
artistic he will naturally have criticism to make. But
remember, any new impulse in human evolution has always been
criticised when it is judged according to the standards of
the past.
It will help us
to understand the point here if we try to find a formula to
express what is entailed by this renewal of the principle of
art through the anthroposophical conception of the world.
When we review the development of art, we can think of the
architectural forms produced by mankind, either in the
original Egyptian, Greek or Gothic architecture, or what
represents the renewal in a later age of what was there in an
earlier one — I mean the Renaissance. We can also think
of sculpture, painting, and so forth.
If we compare
the effect made upon us by the essential character of these
arts with what is aimed at in our Building, we can say;
Everything that has been brought into being hitherto is like
something in repose which, for us, has been wakened to life.
Picture a human being in some fixed position. Somebody comes
along and speaks to him - and he begins to walk, to move!
This might well apply to the evolution of art up to our own
day. We can regard it as something in repose, to which we
would fain speak the magic word which rouses it into inner
life and activity, into movement.
This is what we
want to achieve, because it is demanded by the impulses of
transition which are at work in our time and call upon us to
find a new impulse for the future evolution of humanity.
To take an
example, let us think of a beautiful Greek building. Its
essential character consists in the symmetrical structures
which mutually bear and support each other, just as the limbs
of a human being standing immobile bear and support each
other — but everything is at rest.
Compare this
with what we have aimed at in our Building. In time, of
course, everything will develop, for we have been able to
make only very primitive beginnings with the means and help
available to us, In the Building we have movement from West
to East; we have motifs which grow, as it were, from the
simple forms to be seen in the West in the capitals and
architraves into greater complication, and then become more
inward and simpler again towards the small cupola. What was
formerly a merely inorganic principle of symmetry has been
brought into movement. What formerly was at rest is now in
movement. This will have to come to expression in the
painting — as far as it is possible in our age
to achieve what must be the goal.
In painting
there are two poles. The one pole is that of drawing, the
other that of colour, Fundamentally speaking, there are these
two poles in all painting. Now a person may be a wonderful
draftsman — that is to say, he may have the gift of
reproducing in the lines he draws the inner form-quality of
his subject, so that a picture of this form-quality is evoked
by the drawing.
Now we must be
clear that anyone who concentrates on the actual drawing in a
painted picture must inevitably be very one-sided in his
relation to the Real — or, as is often said, to Nature.
Nature does not work with lines only, but has far richer
means for giving expression to what is inherent in a living
being. Hence the painter or the draftsman, when he is
inwardly moved by his subject, must express more in
his lines than Nature is able to bring to expression in
lines.
But we shall
never be able to avoid feeling that drawing in itself is
nothing more than a substitute for what Nature can achieve.
Whatever we may be capable of expressing through drawing, we
can never produce anything that surpasses Nature; we cannot
even equal Nature. Whatever we aim at in this respect must
always remain a bungling attempt, for the simple reason that
with the far richer means at her disposal, Nature is able to
bring to expression the inmost essence of her creations.
On this
account, drawing can never be anything more than an
auxiliary. And I believe that one who is a true draftsman
will always feel that in drawing he is only producing
something like a scaffolding to be removed later on, and that
the less any evidence of it remains, the better. I think that
anyone with artistic sensibility, looking at a painting in
which the actual drawing is especially conspicuous, would
have an impression similar to that made by a building from
which the scaffolding has not been removed but still stands
in position. Indeed the point can be reached where the actual
drawing is felt to be just a clumsy adjunct to the work of
art itself.
It is rather
different as regards the other pole of painting, the colour
pole. Here we must bear in mind that colour is a fixation of
something that, fundamentally speaking, is not present in
Nature at all, or at most can be captured only momentarily.
One cannot really count what is attached to some object, and
which one then paints, as belonging to the element of colour
in itself; for if a painter is concerned with making a
meticulous reproduction of say, the colours of the clothes of
people he is painting, he is certainly a bad artist.
But
fundamentally speaking, anyone who might try, in the colour
of the face, for example, to bring the inner, vital processes
of the human organism into evidence, would not be a good
artist either. One who paints a pale face — assuming,
to take the extreme case, that the pallor is intended to
indicate that the person in question is ill — would
certainly not have produced anything really artistic, not to
speak of how inartistic it would be to depict a wine-bibber
by painting him with a red nose!
If it is
desired to capture in colour something that is, so to say,
stationary, and expresses itself in the world of reality, one
is still not working with truly artistic impulses. But if one
paints, let us say, a cloud, and in the cloud brings the
whole magic of Nature to expression — perhaps the early
morning sun and its effect upon the tints of the cloud
— then one captures something that is transient in
Nature and does not originate from the configuration of the
actual cloud itself. What is captured here is something that
is transient, but for all that rooted in the conditions
prevailing in the whole environment, in the whole Cosmos, in
so far as the Cosmos is involved in the phenomenon. In
painting a cloud that at a particular hour of the day is
brilliantly coloured, we really paint the whole universe as
it is at that time. If in painting a human being we attempt
to reproduce his inner, organic state, then, as I have said,
we are not working with the true artistic impulses. But if we
succeed in giving expression to what this human being has
experienced — if, for example, we can suggest
in the painting something that is the cause of the particular
reddening of the countenance - then we are truly in the realm
of the artistic; and still more is this the case when we can
perceive from the picture itself what the experience has
been, when the red of the cheeks tells us what the person
must have undergone — again something that is not
confined to the individual, but is in the whole environment,
in the whole Cosmos.
What I am
saying here is connected in a certain way with something I
spoke about in the lectures on “Occult Reading and
Occult Hearing”. I said there that even in the waking
life of day the soul is in reality always outside the body,
and that the body is only a mirror by means of which man
makes himself conscious of what is out there in the Cosmos.
He alone is a true artist who lives, as it were, with the
Cosmos and who regards what he has to portray simply as the
stimulus to depict his life in the Cosmos.
If we paint a
cloud and therewith the whole Cosmos, we are outside the
cloud in our life of feeling and ideation, and the cloud is
there merely to enable us to project what lives in the whole
Cosmos into a single entity.
But if we want
to live in this way in the Cosmos when it is a matter of
using colour, we must awaken colour to life. Colours confront
us as qualities of the beings in outer Nature. When our
observation is confined to the physical plane we recognise
the colours that are attached to the objects of Nature. If we
are to see colours, a foundation is always necessary, with
the possible exception of atmospheric phenomena such as a
rainbow or other phenomena of the kind. Hence the rainbow has
not without reason been regarded as something that unites the
heavens, the spiritual, with the earth, because in the
rainbow we see the heavens in colours; we actually see
colours as such.
I have already
said that it is possible to plunge into the flowing world of
colours, to live with the colours themselves, liberating
them, as it were, from the objects. If we succeed in doing
this, colour becomes the revealer of deep mysteries; a whole
world resides in the flowing, surging sea of colour.
But the world
of colour must first be liberated from the conditions imposed
upon it on the physical plane; the creative power of colour
must be sought and found.
If painting is
to be an organic part of our Building, it must be born out of
this impulse; the attempt must be made to portray in colour
something that is not to be found on the physical plane,
where everything coloured — with the exception of the
rainbow and similar phenomena — is attached to objects.
It must be possible to live in the colour blue, for instance,
with one's whole soul, as if the rest of the world simply
were not there; the soul must feel itself flowing out into
the blue which fills the whole world.
But if we
really penetrate into the surging world of colour, the result
will be that we shall not simply brush on tints, for we then
discover the creative power of colour; we shall also
find inner differentiation in colour. We shall find that blue
has something about it that draws and attracts the soul,
something in which our soul would like to lose itself,
longing and yearning for it without end. We shall also find
that forms arise out of the colour blue itself, forms which
bring the secrets and the very soul of the universe to
expression. From the creative power of colour a world will
come into being, a world that has form, inner
differentiation. Form will be born out of the colour
itself. We shall feel that we are not only living in the
colour, but that the colour itself gives birth to the form
— in other words, the form is created by the
colour.
In this way we
shall find our way, through colour, into the creative forces
of the world. Only so can we succeed in painting in such a
way that what we paint is not merely a covering of surfaces,
but leads out into the whole Cosmos, participating in the
life of the whole Cosmos. Reference was made yesterday to
what the paintings in the two cupolas must represent; the
impulses of Lemurian, Atlantean and our own life, as well as
the impulses at work in the cultures of ancient India,
ancient Persia, Egypt and Chaldea, Greece and Rome. In this
way, the subjects will be inwardly understood and this inner
understanding of colour, which, as it passes over into the
actual painting, simultaneously becomes an understanding of
form, will reveal to us what is actively at work in the
evolution of humanity.
A review of
painting in the past will show that the tendency of this art
has been to work with colour attached to objects on the
physical plane. But colour must be freed from objects if the
paintings in our cupolas are to achieve their aim.
What is
essential, therefore, is that the impulse of painting shall
be deepened and quickened inwardly. It will he difficult to
make our contemporaries understand what is being aimed at
here. We shall have to resign ourselves to this for as long
as people persist in judging a work of art as
“right” or “good”, or I don't know
what else, when it reminds them of some real object, so long
will our paintings not be understood.
As long as it
is possible to say that a tree is well painted because it is
naturalistic, giving the impression that one is standing in
front of an actual tree — as long as this is the
criterion for judging painting and art in general, just so
long will people be unable to understand what our painting is
intended to be. They will inevitably regard it as nonsense,
and be incapable of seeing anything in it. — Why have
works of art existed? Surely in order to be looked at! Who
has ever supposed anything else? But what we want to create
in our Building will certainly not be there merely to be
looked at! Indeed, we may be happy if those people who
believe, as a result of their previous experience and study,
that works of art exist merely for the sake of being looked
at, consider our art extremely bad. For one thing is certain:
what these people do not want, is the very thing we want to
achieve!
Typical
incidents often occur in this connection. One of our friends
met me one day on the way from the glass-engraving studio to
our house, and told me that he had been talking to an old
gentleman who said that if the one who had conceived the idea
of the domes of our Building had ever seen the Church of St.
Peter in Rome, he would have designed them differently. Now
the one who conceived the idea of our domes has seen St.
Peter's not only once but many times, has admired and
appreciated its greatness, but for all that he designed the
domes as they are.
It is quite
natural that such things should happen. Even St. Peter's in
Rome is there to be looked at — but what we are doing
in our Building must not only be looked at, it must also be
experienced. And what would have been the right
answer to give to that old gentleman? The right answer would
have been to say to him: Do you know the fairy-tale of the
king's son who looked at things only through his window? And
do you know what happened when one day he had to “eat
of the serpent”? Then he began to understand what the
sparrows on the roof-tops and the chickens in the courtyard
say to one another. — That old gentleman had obviously
not eaten of the serpent! What does it mean, to “eat of
the serpent”? It means, not merely to have theoretical
ideas about Spiritual Science, but to have been gripped by it
in the very fibres of one's heart and soul, so that one feels
oneself to be an actual image of this Spiritual Science. If
we can feel this with our whole being then we have eaten of
the serpent, and we shall know as an actual experience what
is intended by our Building. We shall not merely look at it
but experience what it aims to achieve; we shall
realise that man, dimly and unconsciously in his life of
will, passes from incarnation to incarnation, born in one
incarnation in this people, in another incarnation in
that.
Just as this
will-impulse in man can be experienced in the progression of
the Building from West to East? in the successive motifs of
the columns, capitals, and architraves, so can the element of
feeling be experienced in what unfolds in the direction from
below upwards — but it must be an actual experience.
And the element of thought, when thinking is not merely
abstract, cold, prosaic, but is quickened to life by the
heart of the Cosmos itself — this should be experienced
in the closure denoted by the domes, and also in their
details. If, for example, the juxtaposition of one colour to
another is one that is never found in Nature, if a being with
facial features resembling those of man is portrayed in a
colour which it could never have in Nature, one must feel in
actual experience that what comes to expression there does so
through its own inherent impulse.
This will be
achieved for the first time — even if only in the most
elementary beginnings — if the attempts made are in any
degree successful. In the paintings, particularly, things
will not be as they are in Nature, but far rather as they are
in the spiritual world.
Two things must
be achieved about which very few people nowadays are capable
of thinking at all. But the fact that there are still a great
many people who do not know, and moreover do not want to
know, anything about the great vistas which lie ahead in
evolution, certainly does not contribute to the welfare of
humanity. To feel as it were in concentrated form those
things of which our Building stands as the sign and token, we
must quicken our inner life, quicken the soul to life through
rich and varied experiences gathered from the manifold
sources available in the world.
Let us think of
times very different from the present and of the mental
horizon of men in those times. Think of the mental horizon of
the Greeks and of all that was unknown to them but is well
known to men of the present age.
The Greeks did
not know of America or Australia; they knew nothing of the
Western hemisphere; they knew nothing of a very great many
things we now know about Europe, Asia and Africa.
Geographically, their horizon was narrow. — See what
your feelings are when you study the map which a Greek was
able to draw; think at tile same time of the rich inner world
of the Greek, of his creative power. Compare what might be
called the “geographical” chart of the heavens
which the Greek was able to draw with present maps of the
heavens. In ancient Greece, the map of the physical
configuration of the earth was very meagre, the chart of the
heavens very comprehensive. What was present in Greece was
still, in essentials, a spiritual experience of the physical
plane, geographically — within narrow limits;
spiritually — a vista of wide expanses of the
heavens.
True, it was no
longer as it had been, for example, in Egypt, when men looked
out into the Cosmos and in astrological pictures still
experienced something of the spiritual Being; whose physical
expressions are the stars. Nevertheless, a precipitation of
all this was still present in ancient Greece. When we read in
Homer's “Iliad” that information is given by
Thetis that Zeus can do nothing at the time because he is in
Ethiopia and will not return home for twelve days —
that still has an astrological meaning — but it is
expressed in such a way that the reader does not notice that
the description refers to the passage of the heavenly bodies
through the Zodiac, When 'the Greek said “Zeus is with
the Ethiopians”, he meant: Zeus is in a particular sign
of the Zodiac — and the number twelve is also
mentioned. All this Indicates a change from an earlier time,
but on the other hand there is still an echo of what was
revealed to men originally from the wide expanse of his
spiritual horizon.
Now let us turn
away from Greece and consider the modern age. Geographically
, the globe has nearly all been explored and only a few
regions today are blank patches in the maps. We see the new
age arising. America is included by the Oriental peoples in
their earth — the America that simply did not exist for
the Greeks. The geographical horizon widens and widens but
the spiritual horizon, the map of the heavens, shrivels up
completely. What does modern man know of the denizens
presented to us in Greek mythology? He knows nothing at all!
Europeans really live under the delusion that they still know
something about the heritage left by ancient Greece. —
What precedes the times of ancient Greece has no more than a
spectral character for historians, however much they may
investigate it by means of physical records. — But
man is at least still a living reality in Greece.
When the man of today imbibes what is imparted in the
schools, he is assimilating history, and his soul lives in
the history he has come to know in such an external way. We
drag around with us a great deal of history — a very
great deal of history.
It is not so in
the case of the Asiatic, nor is it yet so in the case of the
American. Although he has his history, it is not a vital part
of his life. The American is much less conscious of history
than the European. There will be few Americans who attach any
great importance to being able to trace back their
genealogical tree through centuries, Probably there are very
few indeed — but in Europe there are numbers. That is
what I mean by “dragging around” with us the
history upon which so much depends today in the whole
configuration of life, of the social life too.
A time is
conceivable in a far distant future — for the occultist
more than conceivable — when everything that we carry
around with us as history since the Greek age will lie at
rest (we will not speak of where it will be resting) —
a time is conceivable when the tide of the peoples will have
rolled across Asia over the Europe and America, and when men
will know as little on the physical plane of all that we now
recount and experience as European history as we today know
of what happened in Europe four to six thousand years ago. We
can look towards a time when this tide of the peoples will
have rolled across Asia, a time when a quite different kind
of life will develop and when everything that now stirs the
very fibres of our hearts will lie as it were in a geological
stratum of history. It will then lie as much in the past as
what happened in Europe some four thousand years ago lies in
the remote past for us.
The time will
come when Goethe, let us say, will be
“discovered” in the same way as modern man has
discovered the ancient world and its happenings from the
earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs. For in the outer world there
will be physical men who will need to discover Goethe in this
way!
We are gazing
here at vast perspectives in the evolution of humanity. The
Greeks knew nothing of America! In time to come no Greeks
will be in existence, and the descendants of the present-day
Americans will know of them only as a people belonging to a
far, far distant past — or maybe they will know nothing
of them at all!
The process of
which I have just spoken more as a physical process, also
takes place in the spiritual, in the following sense. —
In the course of his evolution into the future, man must
acquire the faculties which enable him to discover the
spiritual again, to know a future spiritual world which for
most people today is as unknown as the present continent of
America was unknown to the Greeks. We are at the beginning of
this voyage of discovery to the spiritual America.
In this connection — from the angle of scientific
thinking — we stand, spiritually, at the same point
where men were standing physically when the first ship sailed
from the Old World to America. Spiritually, we are on the
voyage of discovery to the other, spiritual half of our human
existence.
By saying this
I only wanted to give some indication of the importance of
Spiritual Science in the evolution of humanity. For now
everyone can fill in for himself the gaps that still remain
to complete the picture: Suppose for a moment that America
had not been discovered, that Europeans were still living in
ignorance of the existence of America. Is such a thing
conceivable? It is quite inconceivable. But a time will come
when it will be just as inconceivable that men were once
incapable of discovering the spiritual world through
Spiritual Science. This will be utterly inconceivable. And
the thought can be carried even further.
What effect has
the expansion of the geographical horizon had upon humanity?
if we look for the most spiritual culture that has developed
on the earth up till now, we must look for it before America
was discovered. For with the discovery of America,
materialism begins. In a mysterious way, every geographical
expansion is bound up with the expansion of materialism.
Humanity must again acquire a spiritual knowledge of the
world. This will be achieved through discovery of the
spiritual America — when the path symbolised
in our Building is found by the world outside.
We have spoken
of the element of progression in the Building from column to
column, from architrave to architrave. That is the
progression on the physical plane. But we can also follow the
motifs from below upwards, we can look upwards.
What comes to
light in the course of history — in so far as we can
observe it externally — is expressed for us in the
progression. But an inner deepening will become more and more
necessary, a deepening of the soul which is at the same time
— as in the case of Goethe's Faust who descends to the
Mothers — an actual ascent into the spiritual
world — naturally into the spiritual world of the good
Spirits.
But when man
raises himself into the spiritual world, a kind of conclusion
will eventually be reached. I say “conclusion”.
Let us grasp what this word really implies. The idea of
evolution prevailing today is that it is like a barrel that
begins to roll and goes on rolling and rolling forever
— it is also imagined that there was never any
beginning to this process, that it has always been going on.
People who talk about evolution today almost invariably
imagine that there has always been evolution, that everything
has always been evolving, that it has always been so! But in
reality this is not the case. It is nothing but a bad habit
of the mind, a slovenly kind of thinking, to conceive of
evolution as having no limits either in the past or in the
future. The geographical, physical evolution of the earth
also means evolution for every race, every people, Yes, but
that certainly has an ending, a conclusion, at some time or
other!
When everything
has been discovered, there is an ending. We shall not be able
to say then: Now we will equip our ship once again and make
further discoveries. it is not true that evolution can
continue endlessly; evolution has a conclusion. And just as
physical evolution must have an end, so too will spiritual
evolution have to have an end; an actual dome will arch one
day over what humanity has experienced in the course of
history. And true as it is that when the whole globe has been
explored, no further ships will be equipped in order to
discover still more distant lands on the earth, it is equally
true that what is to be spiritually discovered by man will
also one day actually have been discovered. The idea that men
will go on investigating endlessly is the most erroneous
there could possibly be.
It is essential
that thinking shall be in accordance with reality if sound
ideas are to be developed. But so few people think in
accordance with reality in our present age, although they are
convinced that they do. One can, for example, come across
people who say: When there is nothing more left to
investigate, the world will be a very dull place. These
people forget that according to the modern idea of evolution,
investigation will never come to an end. Yet one day it will,
just as geographical exploration of the earth will eventually
come to an end. Those people who are tormented by the thought
that investigation will one day come to an end and that there
will be nothing more to do in this respect and who ask:
“What will man do then?” — must be given
the answer: That will be plain enough when the time comes,
and in any case it will be something quite different from
investigation.
I have now
given you a number of ideas, the purpose of which may puzzle
you. But if you take them together you will be able to
recognise this purpose yourselves. We see that the course of
all historical life is reflected in the form of our Building.
Men live on through the ages, just as in the Building one
goes forward from column to column. They rise to a higher
level just as one raises one's eyes to the columns, capitals
and architraves. And they hope for a consummation — a
conclusion — just as one will find it on looking up
into the interior of the cupola.
But there is to
be a conclusion in history too — it is to be portrayed
in the painting of the domes. This painting must not merely
be a covering of the surface, but call forth the thought:
When you come to the surface of the dome you will discover
something. — One must forget that any physical
structure is there. The physical element of the paintings
must be pierced through; one must see through the surfaces
into the expanse of the spiritual worlds. It may possibly be
that we shall not succeed in this in the case of our
Building, but as the principle is developed, one day, perhaps
— as the result of Spiritual Science — men in
some future time will behold a mighty dome whose
configuration leads their gaze out into the infinitudes of
spiritual life.
If we live at
some particular place on the earth and want to travel to
another — at certain times we may want to do this but
are prevented — then it is brought home to us that men
can confront each other as enemies, that they can fight with
one another about things of the earth, and even more than
fight. But they cannot fight about the sun and the stars!
Even though the Chinese have called their ruler the Son of
the Sun, the Son of Heaven, and although for various reasons
they have started wars on the earth, they have never started
a war about ownership of the sun; it has never occurred to
them to engage in strife with other nations about ownership
of the sun. All kinds of things can be the cause of strife in
the souls of the peoples spread over the earth; but that
which directs men's gaze upwards into the spiritual worlds
can never be an inducement to strife. It cannot lead to
strife.
It must be
realised that a great deal has yet to happen in the course of
earth-evolution before humanity will have advanced far enough
to have such a vision of the spiritual world that Spiritual
Science will be as the sun and the stars are in physical
life. Much will be necessary before this point is reached
— above all the point where, through Spiritual Science,
men will begin to think not only with the instrument that is
almost entirely used for thinking today, namely, the head. In
a certain sense it is true to say that nothing is more remote
from us than our heads! For in all, essentials, the head, as
far as its main foundation is concerned, was already
completed at the time of the ancient Sun-evolution. The rest
is an inheritance, partly from the Saturn-evolution, and has
developed to further stages; during the Moon-evolution
another important impulse was given. But. what is thought out
in the head is in reality as remote from men as is their
knowledge of the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon- evolutions,
Although there
are often profound truths in many sayings current in everyday
life, there is one very common phrase which should not be
believed. One often hears it said “I have a mind
(German, “head”) of my own.” That is an
error. No one has a mind (or “head”) of his own;
his head belongs to the Cosmos! If someone were to say:
“I have a heart of my own”, he would be
talking sense. But he talks nonsense when he speaks of having
a head or a “mind” of his own.
Men will have
to begin to develop thoughts which are experiences in the way
I described yesterday in speaking of the inner experience of
rising from the recumbent into the standing position. We
experience this too, merely with the head. In reality a
stupendous process takes place in us when we raise ourselves
out of the recumbent position in which we lie parallel with
the surface of the earth, and place ourselves into the
direction of the earth's radius — but we experience it
in an utterly abstract way. This change of direction from the
cross-beam of the cross to the vertical beam — when
this becomes a real experience it is a stupendous. process, a
cosmic process it is the Cosmic Cross.
This happens
every day. But we do not by any means think every day about
the fact that through the act of standing up end lying down,
this Cross is inscribed into very life.
It is a far cry
for man from this abstract process of standing up and lying
down, from this assumption of the form of the Cross, t0 the
conception that can be expressed by saying: If man were not
so constituted on the earth that he lies down and again
stands up, the Mystery of Golgotha would not have been
necessary.
If someone
utters the sound B — as for example in the word
Building — and adopts the sign B for this sound, then
the sign signifies the sound B. If someone asks for a sign to
express the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha was necessary
for earth-evolution, then it is to be found in the Cross,
which embodies the acts of lying down and standing up.
Because man is so constituted on the earth that he lies down
and stands up, the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place.
This will be
known when men begin to think with the second brain —
not with the “head-brain” but with a second brain
to which I referred in the lectures on “Occult Reading
and Hearing” when I said: The lobes of the brain must
be regarded as arms held in a fixed position. If your arms
and hands grew to your sides, you would think in such a way
that there would be no possibility of doubting that this
Cross is the appropriate sign for the Mystery of Golgotha. It
is only the head-brain that is baffled by this kind of
thinking. But it is also the head-brain that creates the soil
for the many misunderstandings prevailing in the world. The
reason why so many misunderstandings arise is because the
head-brain alone is active and creative today. But the second
brain must also become creative, creative to such a degree
that something indicated figuratively a little while ago, is
fulfilled. I said that the Greeks did not know of America.
But when we go back to other ancient traditions, we find that
there were times when the existence of America was indeed
known. But then this knowledge was lost. There were also
times when that which Spiritual Science is striving again to
acquire was present. Spiritual Science knows that a great
deal that formerly came to men from subconscious, dreamlike
experiences, must come again consciously. Men also
had something like a common speech, which only later
differentiated. There is profound truth in the biblical
legend of the Tower of Babel. But as long as men can only
think with their heads they will not be able to be creative
in the way they were creative in ancient times, for example,
in speech. Spiritual Science, however, has within it the
capacity to bring the elements of speech into
movement. And when it is said that in our Building the
element of art has been brought into movement, it must also
be said that life itself must be stirred into movement.
A vista can
arise before us of a time when Spiritual Science will be
truly creative, when through the thoughts and ideas unfolded
in Spiritual Science, speech itself will become creative.
Spiritual Science will one day be spread over the whole earth
and will give rise to a common speech, corresponding to no
speech or language existing at the present time. I am not
referring to anything like Esperanto, for that is an
artificial, inorganic invention. The speech of the future
will come into being when man learns to live in sound itself,
just as he can learn to live in colour.
When he learns
to live in sound, then the sound itself gives birth to the
configuration, so that it becomes possible once again to
create speech or language out of actual spiritual experience.
We stand only at the very beginning of many things in
Spiritual Science but as yet not even at the beginning of
what has here been indicated. We must, however, keep it in
our minds in order to realise the importance of Spiritual
Science and to be aware that Spiritual
Science bears within it a new knowledge, a new art, and
even a new speech — a speech that will not be
compiled artificially, but will be born.
Just as men
will never fight about the sun or the stars, they will also
never fight about that new speech, by the side of which the
other languages still in existence when this new speech has
come into being can quite easily continue.
As you will
certainly have felt, we have placed a far-reaching ideal
before our souls, a very far-reaching ideal. Most
materialistic thinkers of the present time would certainly
say: This is all airy nonsense, for the fool who can talk
like this about the creative power of speech and about
Spiritual Science must assuredly have lost all solid ground
from under his feet.
It is easy to
imagine that if some person of eminence in our time had been
listening from a corner to what has been said, he would have
burst into derisive laughter at this flight into the clouds
without solid ground underfoot. We, however, could have a
certain understanding of his attitude, because by placing
such lofty ideals before us, we have indeed lost the dense,
solid earth underneath us. As long as the earth continues its
evolution as a physical planet, this ideal will not be
realised. The physical earth will have come to an end before
this ideal is fulfilled. But the souls of men will live over
into other planetary incarnations, and these souls will
experience the fulfilment of this ideal if they become
conscious of it in our time.
Yes! Ahriman
might stand there and be the arbiter between ourselves and
the person we have imagined sitting in the corner, listening
and chuckling to himself because he supposes us to have lost
all ground from under our feet. Ahriman might well rub his
hands and say: “They call that ‘ideals of the
future’! They have lost the ground from under their
feet; the gentleman up there on the hill says so himself. He
mocks himself and knows not how! He is speaking the truth and
is not aware that he is doing so” —
But we know
that even though we do not stand on the solid soil of the
earth, we nevertheless stand in Reality with what we make
into the living word of the soul, And why? Because we avow
the Mystery of Golgotha in earnest and not with the
shallowness that is so general today. We know that Christ
lives, and that we can know the truth when we let Him be the
great Teacher and Leader in our striving for spiritual
wisdom. But He uttered words to this effect: You cannot truly
believe in Me in your inmost being until you cease to
acknowledge only those words and ideals which will perish
together with the earth — (for the whole outer
configuration of the earth will perish, the earth in its
present form will pass away) — until you hearken to My
true words. Of these true words He has said: “Heaven
and Earth will pass away, but My words will not pass
away”. Therefore in the life of soul we can have firm
foundations, even though our ideals cause opponents to say
that we no longer stand an the solid ground of the earth. If
we are to make true avowal of the mystery of Golgotha we must
have ideals which are more enduring than the earth and the
configuration of the heavenly bodies circling around the
earth in the Cosmos. We must hearken to the revelation of the
Mystery of Golgotha which will be there even when the earth
no longer exists, nor the heavens which now look down upon
the earth.
The meaning of
the word that proceed from the Mystery of Golgotha is
infinitely deep. And those who will not lift their souls from
the ground into the cupola — which should be
transparent in order that they may look into the spiritual
world — those persons are not living in Reality. For if
this dome, this cupola, is to be the expression in
architecture of the Mystery of Golgotha, it must itself
remind us of the words: “Heaven and Earth will pass
away, but My words will not pass away.”
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