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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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Michaelmas and the Soul-Forces of Man
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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Michaelmas and the Soul-Forces of Man
Schmidt Number: S-5439
On-line since: 11th September, 2003
Present-Day Man as a World Hermit, Elementals
OU will have sensed, my dear friends, in what I was able to tell you
at the close of yesterday's lecture, concerning the old conception of
Michael's conflict with the Dragon, an indication that for our time a
revitalization is called for of the elements of a Weltanschauung
once contained for mankind in this gigantic picture and not
even so long ago. I repeatedly drew attention to the fact that in many
18 th Century souls this conception was still fully alive.
But before I can tell you as I shall in the next lectures
what a genuine, up-to-date spiritual viewpoint can and must do
to revivify it, I must present to you episodically, as it were
a more general anthroposophical train of thought. This will
disclose the way in which the conception under discussion can be
revitalized and once more become a force in mankind's thinking,
feeling, and acting.
If we observe our present relation to nature and to the whole world,
and if we compare this with sufficient open-mindedness with that of
former times, we find that at bottom man has become a veritable hermit
in his attitude toward the cosmic powers, a hermit in so far as he is
introduced through his birth into physical existence and has lost the
memory of his prenatal life a memory that at one time was
common to all mankind. During that period of our life in which
nowadays we merely grow into the use of our forces of mind and memory,
and to which we can remember back in this earth life, there occurred
in former epochs of human evolution the lighting up of real memory, of
an actual retrospect of prenatal experiences man had passed through as
a psycho-spiritual being before his earth life. That is one
factor that makes present-day man a world-hermit: he is not conscious
of the nature of the connection between his earthly existence and his
spiritual existence.
The other factor is this: when now he gazes into the vast cosmos he
observes the outer forms of the stars and constellations, but he no
longer has any inner spiritual relation to what is spiritual in the
cosmos. We can go further: the man of today observes the kingdoms of
nature that surround him on earth the manifold beauty of
plants, the gigantic proportions of mountains, the fleeting clouds,
and so on. Yet here again he is limited to sense impressions; and
often he is even afraid, when he feels a deeper, more intimate contact
with the great spaces of nature, lest he might lose his ingenuous
attitude toward them. This phase of human evolution was indispensable
for the development of what we experience in the consciousness of
freedom, the feeling of freedom, in order to arrive at full
self-consciousness, at the inner strength that permits the ego to rise
to its full height; but necessary as was this hermit life of man in
relation to the cosmos, it must be but a transition to another epoch
in which the human being may find the way back to spirit, which after
all underlies all things and beings. And precisely this finding the
way back to spirit must be achieved by means of the strength that can
come to him who is able to grasp the Michael idea in its right sense
and in its true form, the form it must assume in our time.
Our mentality, the life of our Gemüt, and
our life of action all need to be permeated with the Michael impulse.
But when we hear it stated that a Michael Festival must be
resuscitated among men and that the time is ripe for assigning it its
place among the other annual festivals, it is naturally not enough
that a few people should say, Well let us start let us have a
Michael Festival! My dear friends, if anthroposophy is to achieve its
aim, the superficiality so prevalent today must obviously play no part
in any anthroposophical undertakings; but rather, whatever may grow
out of anthroposophy must do so with the most profound seriousness.
And in order to familiarize ourselves with what this seriousness
should be we must consider in what manner the festivals once
vital, today so anaemic took their place in human evolution.
Did the Christmas or Easter Festival come into being because a few
people had the idea of instituting a festival at a certain time of the
year and said, Let us make the necessary arrangements? Naturally that
is not the case. For something like the Christmas Festival to find its
way into the life of mankind, Christ Jesus had to be born; this event
had to enter the world-historical evolution of the earth; a
transcendent event had to occur. And the Easter Festival? It could
never have had any meaning in the world had it not commemorated what
took place through the Mystery of Golgotha, had not this event
intervened incisively for the history of the earth in the evolution of
humanity. If nowadays these festivals have faded, if the whole
seriousness of the Christmas and Easter Festivals is no longer felt,
this fact in itself should lead to a revived intensification of them
through a more profound comprehension of the birth of Christ Jesus and
the Mystery of Golgotha. Under no conditions, however, must it be
imagined that one should add to these festivals simply by establishing
a Michael Festival with equal superficiality at the beginning of
autumn. Something must be present that can be incisive in human
evolution in the same way though possibly to a lesser degree
as were all events that led to the institution of festivals.
The possibility of celebrating a Michael Festival in all seriousness
must inevitably be brought about, and it is the anthroposophical
movement out of which an understanding for such a Michael Festival
must be able to arise. But just as the Christmas and Easter Festivals
were led up to by outer events, in evolutionary objectivity, so a
radical transformation must take place in the inner being of mankind
before such a step is taken. Anthroposophy must become a profound
experience, an experience men can think of in a way similar to that
which they feel when imbued with the whole power dwelling in the birth
of Christ Jesus, in the Mystery of Golgotha. As was said, this may be
so to a lesser degree in the case of the Michael Festival; but
something of this soul-transmuting force must proceed from the
anthroposophical movement. That is indeed what we long for: that
anthroposophy might be imbued with this power to transmute souls: and
this can only come about if the substance of its teaching if I
may call it that becomes actual experience.
Let us now turn our attention to such experiences as can enter our
inner being through anthroposophy. In our soul life we distinguish, as
you know, thinking, feeling, and willing from one another; and
especially in connection with feeling we speak of the human
Gemüt. Our thinking appears to us cold, dry,
colorless as though spirituality emaciating us when our
thoughts take an abstract form, when we are unable to imbue them with
the warmth and enthusiasm of feeling. We can call a man
gemütvoll only when something of the inner
warmth of his Gemüt streams forth to us when
he utters his thoughts. And we can really make close contact with a
man only if his behavior toward ourself and the world is not merely
correct and in line with duty, but if his actions manifest enthusiasm,
a warm heart, a love of nature, love for every being. This human
Gemüt, then, dwells in the very center of
the soul life, as it were.
But while thinking and willing have assumed a certain character by
reason of man's having become cosmically a hermit, this is even more
true of the human Gemüt. Thinking may
contemplate the perfection of its cosmic calculations and perhaps
gloat over their subtlety, but it simply fails to sense how basically
remote it is from the warm heartbeat of life. And in correct actions,
carried out by a mere sense of duty, many a man may find satisfaction,
without really feeling that a life of such matter-of-fact behavior
is but half a life. Neither the one nor the
other touches the human soul very closely. But what lies between
thinking and willing, all that is comprised in the human
Gemüt, is indeed intimately linked with the
whole being of man. And while it may sometimes seem in view of
the peculiar tendencies of many people at the present time as
though the factors that should warm and elevate the
Gemüt and fill it with enthusiasm might become
chilled as well, this is a delusion. For it can be said that a man's
inner, conscious experiences might at a pinch occur lacking the
element of Gemüt; but through such a lack
his being will inevitably suffer in some way. And if such a man's soul
can endure this if perhaps through soullessness he forces
himself to Gemütlessness the process
will gnaw at his whole being in some other form: it will eat right
down into his physical organization, affecting his health. Much of
what appears in our time as symptoms of decline is basically connected
with the lack of Gemüt into which many
people have settled. The full import of these rather general
statements will become clear when we delve deeper into them.
One who simply grows up into our modern civilization observes the
things of the outer world: he perceives them, forms abstract thoughts
about them, possibly derives real pleasure from a lovely blossom or a
majestic plant; and if he is at all imaginative he may even achieve an
inner picture of these. Yet he remains completely unaware of his
deeper relation to that world of which the plant, for example, is a
part. To talk incessantly about spirit, spirit, and again spirit is
utterly inadequate for spiritual perception. Instead, what is needed
is that we should become conscious of our true spiritual relations to
the things around us. When we observe a plant in the usual way we do
not in the least sense the presence of an elemental being dwelling in
it, of something spiritual; we do not dream that every such plant
harbors something which is not satisfied by having us look at it and
form such abstract mental pictures as we commonly do of plants today.
For in every plant there is concealed under a spell, as it were
an elemental spiritual being; and really only he observes a
plant in the right way who realizes that this loveliness is a sheath
of a spiritual being enchanted in it a relatively insignificant
being, to be sure, in the great scale of cosmic interrelationship, but
still a being intimately related to man.
The human being is really so closely linked to the world that he
cannot take a step in the realm of nature without coming under the
intense influence exercised upon him by his intimate relations to the
world. And when we see the lily in the field, growing from the seed to
the blossom, we must vividly imagine though not personified
that this lily is awaiting something. (Again I must use men's
words as I did before to express another picture: they cannot quite
cover the meaning, but they do express the realities inherent in
things.) While unfolding its leaves, but especially its blossom, this
lily is really expecting something. It says to itself: Men will pass
and look at me; and when a sufficient number of human eyes will have
directed their gaze upon me so speaks the spirit of the lily
I shall be disenchanted of my spell, and I shall be able to
start on my way into spiritual worlds. You will perhaps object
that many lilies grow unseen by human eye: yes, but then the
conditions are different, and such lilies find their release in a
different way. For the decree that the spell of that particular lily
shall be broken by human eyes comes about by the first human glance
cast upon the lily. It is a relationship entered into between man and
the lily when he first lets his gaze rest upon it. All about
us are these elemental spirits begging us, in effect, Do not look at
the flowers so abstractly, nor form such abstract mental pictures of
them: let rather your heart and your Gemüt enter into what
lives, as soul and spirit, in the flowers, for it is imploring you to
break the spell. Human existence should really be a perpetual
releasing of the elemental spirits lying enchanted in minerals,
plants, and animals.
An idea such as this can readily be sensed in its abundant beauty; but
precisely by grasping it in its right spiritual significance we can
also feel it in the light of the full responsibility we thereby incur
toward the whole cosmos. In the present epoch of civilization
that of the development of freedom man's attitude toward the
flowers is a mere sipping at what he should really be drinking. He sips
by forming concepts and ideas, whereas he should drink by uniting,
through his Gemüt, with the elemental spirits of the
things and beings that surround him.
I said, we need not consider the lilies that are never seen by man but
must think of those that are so seen, because they need the
relationship of the Gemüt which the human being can enter
into with them. Now, it is from the lily that an effect proceeds; and
manifold, mighty and magnificent are indeed the spiritual effects,
that continually approach man out of the things of nature when he
walks in it. One who can see into these things constantly perceives
the variety and grandeur of all that streams out to him from all sides
through the elemental spirituality of nature. And it flows into him:
it is something that constantly streams toward him as super-sensible
spirituality poured out over outer nature, which is a mirror of the
divine-spiritual.
In the next days, we shall have occasion to speak of these matters
more in detail, in the true anthroposophical sense. At the moment we
will go on to say that in the human being there dwells the force I
have described as the force of the Dragon whom Michael encounters,
against whom he does battle. I indicated that this Dragon has an
animal-like form, yet is really a super-sensible being; that on account
of his insubordination as a super-sensible being he was expelled into
the sense world, where he now has his being; and I indicated further
that he exists only in man, because outer nature cannot harbor him.
Outer nature, image of divine spirituality, has in its innocence
nothing whatever to do with the Dragon: he is established in the being
of men, as I have set forth. But by reason of being such a creature
a super-sensible being in the sense of world he instantly
attracts the super-sensible elemental forces that stream toward man out
of nature and unites with them, with the result that man, instead of
releasing the plant elementals from their spell through his soul and
Gemüt, unites them with the Dragon, allows them to perish
with the Dragon in his lower nature. For everything in the world moves
in an evolutionary stream, taking many different directions to this
end; and the elemental beings dwelling in minerals, plants, and
animals must rise to a higher existence than is offered by their
present abodes. This they can only accomplish by passing through man.
The establishment of an external civilization is surely not man's sole
purpose on earth: he has a cosmic aim within the entire world
evolution; and this cosmic aim is linked with such matters as I have
just described with the further development of those elemental
beings that in earthly existence are at a low stage, but destined for
a higher one. When man enters into a certain relationship with them,
and when everything runs as it should, they can attain to this higher
stage of evolution.
In the old days of instinctive human evolution, when in the
Gemüt the forces of soul and spirit shone forth and when
these were as much a matter of course to him as were the forces of
nature, world evolution actually progressed in such a way that the
stream of existence passed through man in a normal, orderly way, as it
were. But precisely during the epoch that must now terminate, that
must advance to a higher form of spirituality, untold elemental
substance within man has been delivered over to the Dragon; for it is
his very nature to hunger and thirst for these elemental beings: to
creep about, frightening plants and minerals in order to gorge himself
with the elemental beings of nature. For with them he wants to unite,
and with them to permeate his own being. In extrahuman nature he
cannot do this, but only in the inner nature of man, for only there is
existence possible for him. And if this were to continue, the earth
would be doomed, for the Dragon would inevitably be victorious in
earthly existence.
He would be victorious for a very definite reason: by virtue of his
saturating himself, as it were, with elemental beings in human nature,
something happens physically, psychically, and spiritually.
Spiritually: no human being would ever arrive at the silly belief in a
purely material outer world, as assumed by nature research today; he
would never come to accept dead atoms and the like; he would never
assume the existence of such reactionary laws as that of the
conservation of force and energy, or of the permanence of matter, were
not the Dragon in him to absorb the elemental beings from without.
When these come to be in man, in the body of the Dragon, human
observation is distracted from what things contain of spirit; man no
longer sees spirit in things, which in the meantime has entered into
him; he sees nothing but dead matter. Psychically: everything a
man has ever expressed in the way of what I must call cowardice of
soul results from the Dragon's having absorbed the elemental powers
within him. Oh, how widespread is this cowardice of the soul! We know
quite well that we should do this or that, that such and such is the
right thing to do in a given situation; but we cannot bring our self
to do it a certain dead weight acts in our soul: the elemental
beings in the Dragon's body are at work in us. And psychically:
man would never be tormented by what are called disease germs had his
body not been prepared through the spiritual effects I have
just described as a soil for the germs. These things penetrate
even into the physical organization; and we can say that if we
perceive man rightly in his spirit, soul, and body as he is
constituted today, we find him cut off from the spirit realm in three
directions for a good purpose, to be sure; the attainment of
freedom. He no longer has in him the spiritual powers he might have;
and thus you see that through this threefold debilitation of his life,
through what the glutted Dragon has become in him, he is prevented
from experiencing the potency of the spirit within himself.
There are two ways of experiencing anthroposophy many
variations lie between, but I am mentioning only the two extremes
and one of them is this: a man sits down in a chair, takes a
book, reads it, and finds it quite interesting as well as comforting
to learn that there is such a thing as spirit, as immortality. It just
suits him to know that with regard to the soul as well, man is not
dead when his body dies. He derives greater satisfaction from such a
cosmogony than from a materialistic one. He takes it up as one might
take up abstract reflections on geography, except that anthroposophy
provides more of comfort. Yes, that is one way. The man gets up from
his chair really no different from what he was when he sat down,
except for having derived a certain satisfaction from what he read
or heard, if it was a lecture instead of a book.
But there is another way of receiving what anthroposophy has to give.
It is to absorb something like the idea of Michael's Conflict with the
Dragon in such a way as really to become inwardly transformed, to feel
it as an important, incisive experience, and to rise from your chair
fundamentally quite a different being after reading something of that
sort. And as has been said, there are all sorts of shades
between these two.
The first type of reader cannot be counted upon at all when it is a
question of reviving the Michaelmas Festival: only those can be
depended upon whose determination it is, at least within their
capacities, to take anthroposophy into themselves as something living.
And that is exactly what should be experienced within the
anthroposophical movement: the need to experience as life-forces those
ideas that first present themselves to us merely as such, as ideas.
Now I will say something wholly paradoxical: sometimes it is
much easier to understand the opponents of anthroposophy than its
adherents. The opponents say, Oh, these anthroposophical ideas are
fantastic they conform with no reality; and they reject them,
remain untouched by them. One can readily understand such an attitude
and find a variety of reasons for it. As a rule it is caused by fear
of these ideas a real attitude, though unconscious. But
frequently it happens that a man accepts the ideas; yet, though they
diverge so radically from everything else in the world that can be
accepted, they produce less feeling in him than would an electrifying
apparatus applied to his knuckle. In the latter case he at least feels
in his body a twitching produced by the spark; and the absence of a
similar spark in the soul is what so often causes great anguish
this links up with the demand of our time that men be laid hold of and
impressed by the spirit, not merely by what is physical. Men avoid
being knocked and jerked about, but they do not avoid coming in
contact with ideas dealing with other worlds, ideas presenting
themselves as something very special in the present-day sense-world,
and then maintaining the same indifference toward them as toward
ideas of the senses.
This ability to rise to the point at which thoughts about spirit can
grip us as powerfully as can anything in the physical world, this is
Michael power. It is confidence in the ideas of spirit given
the capacity for receiving them at all leading to the
conviction: I have received a spiritual impulse, I give myself up to
it, I become the instrument for its execution. First failure
never mind! Second failure never mind!
A hundred failures are of no consequence, for no failure
is ever a decisive factor in judging the truth of a spiritual impulse
whose effect has been inwardly understood and grasped. We have full
confidence in a spiritual impulse, grasped at a certain point of time,
only when we can say to our self, My hundred failures can at most
prove that the conditions for realizing the impulse are not given me
in this incarnation; but that this impulse is right I can know from
its own nature. And if I must wait a hundred incarnations for the
power to realize this impulse, nothing but its own nature can convince
me of the efficacy or impotence of any spiritual impulse.
If you will imagine this thought developed in the human
Gemüt as great confidence in spirit, if you will consider
that man can cling firm as a rock to something he has seen to be
spiritually victorious, something he refuses to relinquish in spite of
all outer opposition, then you will have a conception of what the
Michael power, the Michael being, really demands of us; for only then
will you comprehend the nature of the great confidence in spirit. We
may leave in abeyance some spiritual impulse or other, even for a
whole incarnation; but once we have grasped it we must never waver in
cherishing it within us, for only thus can we save it up for
subsequent incarnations. And when confidence in spirit will in this
way have established a frame of mind to which this spiritual substance
appears as real as the ground under our feet the ground without
which we could not stand then we shall have in our
Gemüt a feeling of what Michael really expects of us.
Undoubtedly you will admit that in the course of the last centuries
even the last thousand years of human history the vastly
greater part of this active confidence in spirit has been
disappearing, that life does not exact from the majority of men the
development of such confidence. Yet that is what had to come, because
what I am really expressing when I say this is that in the last
instance man has burned the bridges that formerly had communication
with the Michael power.
But in the meantime much has happened in the world. Man has in a sense
apostatized from the Michael power. The stark, intense materialism of
the 19th Century is in effect an apostasy from the Michael
power. But objectively, in the domain of outer spirit, the Michael
power has been victorious, precisely in the last third of the
19th Century. What the Dragon had hoped to achieve through
human evolution will not come to pass, yet on the other hand we
envision today the other great fact that out of free resolution man
will have to take part in Michael's victory over the Dragon. And this
involves finding the way to abandon the prevalent passivity in
relation to spirit and to enter into an active one. The Michael forces
cannot be acquired through any form of passivity, not even through
passive prayer, but only through man's making himself the instrument
of divine-spiritual forces by means of his loving will. For the
Michael forces do not want to be implored: they want men to unite with
them. This men can do if they will receive the lessons of the
spiritual world with inner energy.
This will indicate what must appear in man if the Michael conception
is to come alive again. He must really be able to experience spirit,
and he must be able to gather this experience wholly out of thought
not in the first instance by means of some sort of
clairvoyance. We would be in a bad way if everybody had to become
clairvoyant in order to have this confidence in spirit. Everyone who
is at all receptive to the teachings of spiritual science can have
this confidence. If a man will saturate himself more and more with
confidence in spirit, something will come over him like an
inspiration; and this is something that really all the good spirits of
the world are awaiting. He will experience the spring, sensing the
beauty and loveliness of the plant world and finding deep delight in
the sprouting, burgeoning life; but at the same time he will develop a
feeling for the spell-bound elemental spirituality in all this budding
life. He will acquire a feeling, a Gemüt content, telling
him that every blossom bears testimony to the existence of an
enchanted elemental being within it; and he will learn to feel the
longing in this elemental being to be released by him, instead of
being delivered up to the Dragon to whom it is related through its own
invisibility. And when the flowers wither in the autumn he will know
that he has succeeded in contributing a bit to the progress of spirit
in the world, in enabling an elemental being to slip out of its plant
when the blossoms wither and fall and become seed. But only as he
permeated himself with the powerful strength of Michael will he be
able to lead this elemental being up into the spirit for which it
yearns.
And men will experience the cycle of the seasons. They will experience
spring as the birth of elemental beings longing for the spirit, and
autumn as their liberation from the dying plants and withering
blossoms. They will no longer stand alone as cosmic hermits who have
merely grown half a year older by fall than they were in the spring:
together with evolving nature they will have pressed onward by one of
life's milestones. They will not merely have inhaled the physical
oxygen so and so many times, but will have participated in the
evolution of nature, in the enchanting and disenchanting of spiritual
beings in nature. Men will no longer only feel themselves
growing older; they will sense the transformation of nature as part of
their own destiny: they will coalesce with all that grows there, will
expand in their being because their free individuality can pour itself
out in sacrifice into the cosmos. That is what man will be able
to contribute to a favorable outcome of Michael's Conflict with the
Dragon.
Thus, we see that what can lead to a Michaelmas Festival must be an
event of the human Gemüt, a Gemüt event that
can once more experience the cycle of the seasons as a living reality,
in the manner described. But do not imagine that you are experiencing
it by merely setting up this abstract concept in your mind! You will
achieve this only after you have actually absorbed anthroposophy in
such a way that it makes you regard every plant, every stone, in a new
way; and also only after anthroposophy has taught you to contemplate
all human life in a new way.
I have tried to give you a sort of picture of what must be prepared
specifically in the human Gemüt, if the latter is to learn
to feel surrounding nature as its very own being. The most that men
have retained of this sort of thing is the ability to experience in
their blood circulation a certain psychic element in addition to the
material factor: unless they are rank materialists they have preserved
that much. But to experience the pulse-beat of outer existence as we
do our own innermost being, to take part once more in the cycle of the
seasons as we experience the life inside our own skin that is
the preparation needed for the Michael Festival.
Inasmuch as these lectures are intended to present for your
contemplation the relation between anthroposophy and the human
Gemüt, it is my wish that they may really be grasped not
merely by the head but especially by the Gemüt; for at
bottom, all anthroposophy is largely futile in the world and among men
if it is not absorbed by the Gemüt, if it carries no
warmth into this human Gemüt. Recent centuries have heaped
cleverness in abundance upon men: in the matter of thinking, men have
come to the point where they no longer even know how clever they are.
That is a fact. True, many people believe present-day men to be
stupid; but granting that there are stupid people in the world, this
is really only because their cleverness has reached such proportions
that they debility of their Gemüt prevents them from
knowing what to do with all their cleverness. Whenever someone is
called stupid, I always maintain that it is merely a case of his not
knowing what use to make of his cleverness. I have listened to many
discussions in which some speaker or other was ridiculed because he
was considered stupid, but occasionally just one of these would seem
to me the cleverest.
Cleverness, then, has been furnished us in abundance by the last few
centuries; but what we need today is warmth of Gemüt, and
this anthroposophy can provide. When someone studying anthroposophy
says it leaves him cold, he reminds me of one who keeps piling wood in
the stove and then complains that the room doesn't get warm. Yet all
he needs to do is to kindle the wood, then it will get warm.
Anthroposophy can be presented, and it is the good wood of the soul;
but it can be enkindled only by each within himself. What everyone
must find in his Gemüt is the match wherewith to light
anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is in truth warm and ardent: it is the
very soul of the Gemüt; and he who finds this
anthroposophy cold and intellectual and matter-of-fact just lacks the
means of kindling it so it may pervade him with its fire. And just as
only a little match is needed to light ordinary wood, so
anthroposophy, too, needs only a little match. But this will enkindle
the force of Michael in man.
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