Central Europe between East and West
Ahrimanic Inspiration and Spiritual Impulses
The
Symbol of the Rose Cross
Prague, 15th May 1915
When we gather at such an occasion at which an own room is
dedicated to our efforts which we can give a spiritual
character commensurate with our spiritual-scientific feeling,
it is good to think of the big viewpoint which we want to get
as supporters of spiritual science towards the world and its
phenomena, its tasks, its big riddles. How should our time, our
distressing time full of ordeals not urge our souls to get a
more far-reaching viewpoint? In particular in our time, one has
to long for a viewpoint that reaches farther than the external
life and external human efforts.
Out
of the tasks and the efforts of our spiritual-scientific world
view we put up a sculptural group at an important place in our
new Dornach construction. This sculptural group should explain
that which our souls should feel in the most intimate and also
in the deepest sense. This group contains a central figure. One
may call this central figure Christ; one may also call it the
divine in the human being which tries to position itself in the
right way in the world. One may call this middle figure the
“human being,” the cosmic human being, expressed in
an earthly personality as Christ was expressed in the earthly
personality in a temporal-historical life by Jesus of
Nazareth.
But
two other figures will be on the sides of this middle figure,
the one on top like on a rock, winged, but falling off from the
rock. Because of the peculiar posture of the hand of the middle
figure, expressing neither hatred nor power, but inner firmness
a strength is achieved by which the figure on the rock on top,
the winged figure, breaks the wings and falls down into the
depth. This breaking of the wings — this must be well
expressed in this sculpture — is not achieved because the
human being, who stands in the middle, the Christ-human being,
breaks the wings, but because he stretches out his hand in his
spirituality, the other, the winged being, does not endure
that, and because he finds that unbearable for his being which
lives below, he himself breaks his wings by internal strength
and falls off. You have to record the fact that this being
throws down himself that he is not thrown down by any
adversary.
Below inside the rock we see another figure tied up in chains.
This is eager to turn up the earth from below. But he does not
cope in his striving with that which flows out from the
downwards directed hand of the middle figure. He writhes
because he is thrown back by his own nature and by the strength
of the middle figure.
You
anticipate that in this group is expressed what we call the
Christ-principle of our universe in the middle figure, the
luciferic principle in the angel falling off from the rock, and
the ahrimanic principle in the figure in the cave which strives
from below upwards. I endeavoured to design the three figures
as very similar portraits — we may express such a matter
in this intimate circle, — so that one really gets an
impression of the form which Ahriman takes on appearing to the
human being in such a connection, and also of the physiognomy
of Lucifer which he takes on appearing to the human being.
Until our days, the western religious world view lacks the
knowledge that Ahriman and Lucifer work in the whole world
interrelation.
Publicly one can only indicate the matters because today people
still recoil from precisely expressing these matters. However,
we remember that even in the yesterday's public lecture I said
that the human being is led by meditation, on one side, to a
region where he feels lonesome in his innermost nature and
helpless, on the other side, to a region where he feels being
penetrated in his nature with fear and powerlessness. What
threatens us if we strive unilaterally only for freeing
ourselves from the material, what threatens us if we strive for
the spiritual in the abstract this is that we are seized by the
luciferic principle. What threatens us if we only strive down
for the material if we live longing for the material where we
appear as fossilized — as I have explained it in the
public lecture yesterday — this is the ahrimanic
principle. And the human being stands between the luciferic and
ahrimanic principles.
This must be recognised. But we have also to recognise
correctly that it is not sufficient for us to say: we have to
remove anything luciferic and ahrimanic from ourselves. —
All the emotions of hatred and fear which we summon up against
the luciferic and the ahrimanic elements are not good,
actually, for our human nature. We have to realise that Ahriman
and Lucifer have their justification in the whole universe.
That is why it is indicated in the sculptural figure that
Christ does not want to overcome Lucifer and Ahriman because He
hates them or wants to harass them, but that Lucifer and
Ahriman overcome themselves. It is wrong to develop feelings in
us, as if we had to reject Ahriman and Lucifer, as if we had to
fight against them directly. Even the normal divinity
permeating the world did not order in its wise guidance of the
universe that Ahriman and Lucifer are not allowed to exist in
the guidance of the universe. They are there.
If
we ask ourselves where the luciferic principle does exist in
the human development even today, then we have to look at the
East. In the East, in Asia and in the European Russia, Lucifer
prevails in the culture. Although the Russian element has a
vocation to develop the spirit-self in future, as I explained
in the series of talks on the mission of the folk-souls, the
threat exists that the Russian culture is entangled by Lucifer.
It is on the way to experiencing that. The luciferic principle
consists of the fact that good spirits lag behind. In the
Greek-Orthodox Church was a good spirit until the sixth,
seventh centuries. But a spirit that is good at a certain time
changes into a luciferic spirit if it is detained beyond this
time. Adhering to the orthodox religion means “to be in
Lucifer's claws.” And that is much more the case with the
spiritual forms that develop in the East that were justified in
ancient times. Because they preserve themselves, they run into
in the luciferic element. Everywhere in the East, we find many
people who have to go through something in the luciferic
element. Everywhere in the West, we find the souls imbued with
the ahrimanic element, in America above all. In America the
trend exists to develop a civilisation which is imbued
completely with the materialistic ahrimanic element which is
infiltrated with purely material views, even where one strives
for spiritualism. Even where one strives for spirituality, one
wants to seize the spirits, as it were, with the hands like the
spiritualists. This tendency becomes stronger and stronger, and
the longing for the material becomes bigger and bigger. It will
also seize the west of Europe gradually. There the mission is
fulfilled to introduce the ahrimanic element into
civilisation.
These are the big points of view I had in my eye: that we see
how we are roped in between the luciferic principle of the East
and the ahrimanic principle of the West in Central Europe, but
that we have a vocation to rise toward the forces that are
shown by the Christ-principle. This principle makes Lucifer
break his wings by overcoming the feeling of powerlessness,
and, on the other side, emits forces against Ahriman which push
back any fear of knowledge of the spiritual world. Because you
cannot hold up the ahrimanic element pulsating through the
world, it is there. Also Central Europe is seized by this
ahrimanic element. People must only know how they have to
position themselves to it, because the course of the ahrimanic
element is the course through materialism. This course through
materialism must be, and it has a deep wisdom-filled reason why
this course through materialism must be.
Imagine that there is a one-sided religious movement — I
expressly say “one-sided” religious movement, also
in Christianity, and manifests itself in the element of
Jesuitism the strongest. Think that it always turns against the
real scientific progress. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church did
only acknowledge the Copernican world view in the 19th century.
The one-sided religion combats the external science, of course,
this cannot be different. Two impulses are in this fighting
against the external science. One impulse is that the one-sided
religion may feel: in science which is done only in view of the
external world Ahriman shows himself. This aspect of the
quarrel is justified. Ahriman cannot be kept away from the
external science if it does not look up to the spiritual world
view; this is justified. However, the impulse of the one-sided
religion against science is not justified.
This one-sided religious world view itself is inspired, is
ensouled, so to speak, by the luciferic element in particular.
Since striving for religious deepening and hating the
scientific investigation of spiritual worlds is that Lucifer
wants from the human beings. Lucifer could not arrive better at
his goal, if all human beings were only religious. This
religious attitude has a tremendously strong selfish impact.
Imagine only how the human beings who do not strive for
spiritual knowledge understand their religion. They want
egotistically to become blest, live egotistically after death,
as they imagine it. They want egotistically to be embodied only
once in the world. In the one-sided religion, egoism has
reached its peak, egoism of the soul, not only of the body. The
best religious aspirations which surround us are in this
egoism. The most pious people who touch us by their devoutness
— Lucifer is he who controls their religious feelings.
Lucifer prefers to get a lot of devout souls who have a sense
for the spiritual, for the good they aim at egotistically.
Because he does not want criminal souls, he wants to lead just
the devout souls into his realm.
So
we have, on the one side, the justified scientific element,
which stands just at the threshold to the ahrimanic if it does
not look up to the spiritual world, on the other side, the
luciferic element which would be enslaved by selfish
religiousness also in Central Europe unless the spiritual world
view brought in a spiritual knowledge. This will be the
progress of Christianity. It is exceptionally valuable to our
souls if we penetrate ourselves with the knowledge that we
stand between that what must be there, to the luciferic and
ahrimanic elements from which we cannot escape which lose,
however, their power if we recognise them. This is the
characteristic of the spiritual world: if we recognise it, it
loses the power through which it makes the human beings
obsessed. Lucifer and Ahriman are invisible. If we get an idea
of them in space and time, they lose their power over us.
You
must not believe that if a person has a premonition of a bad
spirit because of his clairvoyant capacity but does not behold
it, the person does something worse when he represents the bad
spirit pictorially or plastically. On the contrary, the
following is correct: the spirit loses its power as a result of
the sensory view. People will no longer become nervous by
spiritually putting a figure, but the spirit as an invisible
power loses its significance as an invisible force, and we
consciously position ourselves in it. As God Himself uses
Lucifer and Ahriman to put the world from East and to West back
to the right track, so that the world does not experience an
irregular development, but advances like by a pendulum
movement, in the same way the world government lets the
luciferic of the East, the ahrimanic of the West be
effective.
However, it also poses the difficult and big task for us in
Central Europe to look at this pendulum movement correctly.
This pendulum is, actually, a small boat, as if a small boat
were appended to a pendulum clock. In this small boat the souls
of Central Europe are sitting who strive rightly for
spirituality. These souls really have to dive in it and know
that they have to grasp the right balance point. They have to
recognise what is behind the threshold of the everyday
consciousness; they have to take up it in their consciousness.
Our present grievous days are admonitions above all to those
who already anticipate a little bit of that which approaches
the world in future.
It
does not concern that within the war an external victory is won
by the one or the other side, but it concerns how people live
after this victory. Imagine that the Central European nations
were victorious, however, on the field of this victory the
purely materialist-ahrimanic world view would spread out and
this would be detained by the luciferic element. If the East,
on one side, and the West, on the other side, penetrated the
Central European spirituality, an external victory would also
not be salutary for this Central Europe. Since centuries, the
human beings are penetrated rather strongly by the
ahrimanic-luciferic element without noticing it. Imagine only
that it was necessary to reject the oriental-luciferic element
in our Central European theosophical movement. For that which
we got as theosophy from the East was infiltrated by Lucifer
and led also in its extreme to the recognition of an external
human idol, a physically reincarnated Christ. This was the
quarrel we had to have about the unjustified interpretation of
the theosophical world view.
But
we must be clear to us that we have to recognise correctly in
Central Europe how we have to imagine what approaches humankind
in future. We learn to see just by that which spiritual science
can be to us that materialism, the materialistic world view is
not allowed to extend about the area prepared for Central
Europe. Those have to strive to prevent it who anticipate a
little bit of the fact that a spiritual world view really
spreads out, floating over Central Europe and radiating from
there to the whole earth. It would be imaginable, externally
imaginable as a hypothesis that this Central Europe would serve
a materialistic civilisation after a victory. Then Ahriman
would reap the fruits of this victory. This must be
prevented.
Think only of such a tragic figure like Ernst Haeckel. Goethe
wrote a theory of evolution. Since 1884, I attempt to make it
clear to the people that it is a theory of evolution which is
spiritual in the highest sense. But people cannot understand it
in the deep way in which it is given there. When Darwin put it
up trivially, people understood the teachings which could flow
into their hearts and souls. The teachings had got a
materialistic colouring. Take such a tragic figure like Ernst
Haeckel. He got any thought, any fiber of his scientific life
from England. Huxley, Locke, Darwin were his masters. Today
Ernst Haeckel is somebody who turns mostly against England, he
is one of the most furious fighters — as far as he can be
it as an old man. He stood at the head of those who sent back
their medals, certificates and honourings to England. However,
it does not matter to send back medals and honourings unless
the English coloured Darwinism is sent back.
And
still some other things are there. The souls are prepared for
materialism best of all if they are in a half-sleeping state
for the external life, so to speak, if they are still childish
souls. One does not notice that one can bring into the souls
ideas which prepare them best of all to accept the
materialistic view as a matter of course. Ahriman accomplished
this, while he let a very effective spirit come into being who
planted the tendency of materialism in the childish souls,
unnoticed by the British people, without the human beings being
aware of it. This is the exceptionally ingenious author of
Robinson Crusoe. If anybody plants the ideas of
Robinson in the childish souls, they get the propensity
for materialism. In the book even religion comes into being of
its own accord, as well as cabbages grow up. Nowhere is
reflected on anything that should flow in from the spiritual
world. See only Robinson moving through the world. There
was a time of the literary development in Central Europe when
imitations of Robinson existed in many languages. So
many translations of Robinson are there. One cannot
count them at all. So deep is this there inside. But the
Central European culture has to show the way to spirituality
again. And really a higher guidance inspired the brothers Grimm
to collect fairy tales. If we give these fairy tales to our
children instead of the ahrimanic Robinson, we bring
them the propensity for spiritualism.
One
is painfully affected if one — all that is symptomatic
— experiences the following: a very significant
philosopher of Austria, Ernst Mach, wrote a book,
Analysis of Sensations,
which was of great importance for many who
want to think philosophically today. On the third page, he
speaks of self-knowledge. We know that self-knowledge is
exceptionally important, as I have often explained. Ernst Mach
gives a proof of the fact that self-knowledge is rather
difficult even for the external world. He tells: I passed a
shop window where I saw my own picture, my own figure meeting
myself. I thought: what an unpleasant, disgusting person meets
me there. I myself was it. — Thus he said. He himself was
it who has known himself so little that he said to his mirror
image: what an unpleasant, disgusting person. And to make that
clear completely, he adds: when he was already a professor, he
had once returned from a trip at night and had got in a bus.
When he got in, he saw in the mirror a man getting in and said
to himself again: what a down-and-out schoolmaster is getting
in there? So he adds: I knew the appearance of my type better
than my individual appearance.
If
it is already so difficult for a person who does not often see
himself in a mirror — this speaks for Ernst Mach that
this has taken place — to recognise the external figure,
then one will get an inkling how difficult it is to get
self-knowledge in the soul. It is just this, however, what is
necessary: attaining self-knowledge in the soul. I would like
to say, it affects somebody almost tragically if one reads up
in the same book even farther, and Ernst Mach speaks of the
education of his son and says from really serious soul: thanks
to God — no, he does not say that, but something that is
commensurate with it — never did my children read any
fairy tales. So they were not introduced in a spiritual world
by fantastic ideas resulting from reading fairy tales. —
There we see that nesting in the souls of the present which
wants to lead the Central European culture to Ahriman. One has
to say: that does not concern to be victorious, but that the
right attitude of mind is victorious on the basis of the
victory.
We
are also heavily burdened in Central Europe, even in the case
of a victory. Because we are connected with something that is
infiltrated very luciferically. It was once a benefit for
Europe that from South Europe the Arabian, Moorish culture
spread out. For the past, it was justified, but today it has
become ahrimanic. We are heavily burdened with the alliance
with the Ottoman Empire
[ the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War
on the side of the Central European powers in 1914.].
We have to find the correct standpoint and not believe that
we can arrange our sensations according to external political
viewpoints.
The
life of the external world is not suited to prevent Ahriman.
The external banal literature leads directly to the ahrimanic
principle and pours scorn on the attempts to clearly see the
powers working into our world. That is why that must appear as
a big warning, which appears to us under the sign of blood and
grief; to make the present souls inclined to get the gifts of
the spiritual life. Our souls have to tend to that which was
prepared in the Central European culture especially expressing
that we are put pendulum-like between two powers permeating the
world and that we must find the balance. We have to realise
that, on the one side, the world strives for ahrimanic
hardening, strives to get solidified in the fire of the purely
material; that it strives, on the other side, to ascend
egotistically to an abstract spirituality.
Following the one or other side would ruin the Central European
human being. Following only the science engaged in the external
senses would persuade us to tear the roses from the cross and
only to look at that which solidifies. We would gain a world
view gradually which would completely deflect the human being
from looking at the spiritual. It would allow to only looking
at that which has solidified ahrimanically. Try to imagine the
ideals of the ahrimanic science: it is a world of whirling
atoms, a purely material world creation. One wishes to throw
everything spiritual out of this world-picture. One wants to
imagine, and one teaches it already the children at school,
that once whirling gaseous masses were in the universe from
which the sun formed which then again pushed off the planets.
One makes it clear to the children at school, while one does an
oil drop in water, pushes a small round paper sheet at its
equator through it, pierces it with a pin in the middle and
turns the pin then. Small drops are split off that way; a small
planetary system comes into being. Of course, it is proved what
one shows in such a way, but one forgets the most important
fact that the teacher must turn the pin. In truth, however, you
have to conceive a big Mr. Teacher turning the whole matter in
space, if you want to imagine it honestly. But the thoughts,
the sensations and feelings, which tend to Ahriman, are those
which imagine the creation of the sun and the planets in the
just described way. That also influenced the historical view.
Herman Grimm
[Herman Grimm (1828–1901), in his
Lectures on Goethe]
says once: a bone of carrion around which a hungry
dog is circling is a more appetising sight than this world view
which is based only on this Copernican world view.
This is a threat to tear the roses from the cross and to have
only the black, charred cross. The other threat is to tear the
cross from the roses and want to strive only for the spirit,
despise what the divinity has put in the world development, not
to want to dive affectionately into the thought that the
phenomena of the sensory world express the godhead. This is the
unilaterally religious world view which despises the science
which only wants the roses and which tends unconsciously to the
luciferic element of the East. In the same way, science, which
wants to tear the roses from the cross and to keep only the
charred cross, tends to the West. We, however, in Central
Europe, we have a vocation to have the roses on the cross to
have this what is expressed only by the connection of the roses
with the cross, the roses on the cross. Looking at the stiff
cross we feel that that which has come as a stiff material to
the world entered the world from the godhead. It is, as if
spirituality created a circle in the material for itself: ex
deo nascimur.
We
also feel that if we understand it correctly we may enter the
spiritual world not only with Lucifer, but that we die, while
we are united with that which descended from the divine higher
Self to the world: in Christo morimur.
And
uniting the cross with the roses, the material world view with
the spiritual world view, we feel that the human soul can awake
in spirit: per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.
Therefore, the cross wound around by roses was the symbol of
Goethe who positioned himself in the spirituality of the
Central European culture. It must be our symbol. That is why we
will remind — as far as we can be present in future,
gathering in this room — of that which must be our ideal
out of the big tasks of the earth development: winding roses
around the cross, neither tearing the roses from the cross and
holding only the cross in our hands, nor only estimating the
roses and ascending by means of the roses to the spiritually
blossoming, sprouting life in the abstract. It is expressed to
us in our symbol, in the rose cross, what we want to take up
more and more in our souls, in our feelings when we come
together in a room dedicated to our attempts. Then we can be
sure that the spirits who lead the earth development in good
sense exist invisible among us; that our words, that all our
thoughts and feelings, while we dedicate ourselves to the
spiritual-scientific attempts that all this is really supported
in such a room by the spiritual powers guiding our attempts. We
can feel, cultivating our spiritual-scientific views, as if we
are constantly inspired by the spirits who exist invisible in
such a room. I would like to call on these spiritual powers
that they are always present with the souls if they strive in
serious truth, honestly and affectionately in this room. If
that comes true, we can be sure that this spiritual-scientific
world view finds the way to the gods as it was always
found.
Today we come together in such rooms. They are separated from
the efforts of the external world. The external world considers
the events in our rooms as something sectarian, something
superstitious. And thus we are gathered as it were underground
compared with the intellectual culture of the present. This
intellectual culture, which is deeply infiltrated by Lucifer in
the East, by Ahriman in the West, is above ground. There we
remember repeatedly in order to strengthen our hearts, to
invigorate our souls that in another epoch the western world
view ascended from underground to the surface. There was the
world view of the Roman Empire, the world view which had taken
up the distinguished philosophy and the artistic world view of
the Greeks. There were basically brilliant minds among those
who lived within this ancient Rome and its surroundings with
this old world view. They were deeply despised who cultivated a
quite new teaching underground in the catacombs. However, those
who cultivated the new teaching, separated from the world view
above ground justified at that time, knew that they had only to
hold on the contents of their striving and to retain what had
entered in the world as a result of the Christ Impulse.
They strove in the catacombs and knew: those lived above ground
who were out to kill them who pursued them who did not
understand them. — After we have got these conditions of
the ancient Roman Empire clear in our mind, we look at the
human development a few centuries later. What was above has
disappeared. What lived underground in the catacombs has
ascended; it passes triumphantly through the West. It already
lived in the souls of those who were striving for that which
should then conquer the world although they were repelled,
despised and mocked living underground in the catacombs. We
must feel that way, my dear friends, as if we were still
spiritually outcast and mocked and pursued by those who
cultivate the so-called justified world view today. But in such
a way as it happened in the first epoch of the western
Christian development, it will go on. What one would best
destroy — not like once, while one covered human beings
with pitch and burnt them, but while one mocks them — it
will gain acceptance. What jeers and mocks there, what wants to
conquer the earth only with an ahrimanic and luciferic world
view this will have disappeared, like the ancient Roman
culture, the ancient world view disappeared in a certain way.
However, what is cultivated in our catacombs — they are
spiritual catacombs, the world has progressed, nevertheless
— what is felt in these catacombs, what is imagined, what
is reflected, what penetrates our souls: it will ascend and
arrive triumphally at the culture of the next epoch. We may
keep in mind that at every moment when we pass the gate to such
a room. And staying in it, we keep in mind that we are still
like in a submarine which will take the direction upwards
— and absolutely will take it if we become engrossed
strongly in this with which we have learnt to connect our
souls. With this vow that we want to penetrate ourselves
strongly with the spiritual Christ Impulse which is developing
a further level, with this attitude, with this vow we really
will enter this room. We enter in the sense of these feelings
that everything is dedicated to the spiritual powers, to the
spiritual individualities who permeate our movement, as we can
know, who spread out their blessing and protecting hands about
us. We want to keep in mind that when we come together here in
future.
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