The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. The Mission of Art

[ 1 ] Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe

[ 2 ] We shall conclude this winter series of reflections on the life of the human soul by offering some thoughts—particularly in light of the preceding discussions—on that realm of the human soul into which such rich and mighty treasures of the human inner life flow. Our reflections will conclude with some insights into the nature and significance of art in human development. And since the realm of art is so vast, our reflection will focus solely on the development of poetry throughout the course of human evolution; even here, it goes without saying that we can only pause to consider the highest peaks of spiritual life in this realm.

[ 3 ] One might now very easily raise the question: What do all those reflections on the soul that we have undertaken in the course of this winter—and which were aimed above all at seeking truth and insight into the spiritual world—what do all these reflections have to do with the realm of human creativity, which seeks above all to express itself through the element of beauty? And in our time, it would be very easy to take the position that everything that finds expression through knowledge and understanding must be far, far removed from that which finds expression through art. It is generally believed that all knowledge and all science must operate within the strictly defined laws of experience and logic; the artistic element, on the other hand, is thought to move within the more arbitrary laws of the inner self, the heart, and the imagination. Truth and beauty may well be pushed far, far apart, particularly in the judgment of our contemporaries. And yet: it is precisely the great leading figures in the field of artistic creation who have always felt that, through true art, they wish to express something that flows from the very same sources of human existence—indeed, from the deepest depths of human existence—just as knowledge and insight do.

[ 4 ] To name just a few examples, consider Goethe, who was not only a seeker of beauty but also a seeker of truth; who, in his youth, tried every possible means to acquire knowledge of the world and answers to the great mysteries of existence. Before Goethe set out on his Italian journey—which was to lead him to a land of longed-for ideals—he had studied extensively with his friends in Weimar to draw closer to his goal of exploring the truth, including, for example, the philosopher Spinoza. And Spinoza’s reflections on the idea of God had made a profound impression on his soul—those reflections by this modern philosopher who seeks a unified substance in all manifestations of life. And Goethe, along with Merck and other friends, believed he could discern in Spinoza something like those tones that, emanating from all the phenomena surrounding us, herald the sources of existence—sources that might offer him something akin to the fulfillment of a Faustian striving. But Goethe’s mind was too rich, too profound, to gain from the conceptual debates in Spinoza’s works a sufficient picture of truth and knowledge. What he felt there, and what he actually sought according to the longings of his heart, becomes clearest to us when we follow him during his Italian journey as he contemplates the great works of art that evoke for him an echo of the art of antiquity, and senses in them what he had hoped in vain to feel in Spinoza’s concepts. That is why, after contemplating these works of art, he writes to his friends in Weimar: “This much is certain: the ancient artists possessed just as great a knowledge of nature and just as sure a conception of what can be imagined—and how it must be imagined—as Homer did. Unfortunately, the number of first-rate works of art is far too small. But when one sees even these, one has nothing left to wish for but to recognize them properly and then depart in peace. These sublime works of art have been produced by human hands according to true and natural laws, and are at the same time the highest works of nature. Everything arbitrary and imagined falls away there; there is necessity, there is God.” He believed, as he said, that he recognized that the great artists who created such works proceeded from within their souls according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds. What else does this mean but that Goethe believed he recognized that the laws of nature rise up into the human soul and gain strength there, so that what plays itself out on other levels as laws of nature in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms—once it has passed through the human soul—plays itself out in the creative powers of that human soul. That is why Goethe sensed the active regularity of nature once again in these works of art and why he wrote to his friends in Weimar: “Everything arbitrary and imagined falls away there; there is necessity, there is God!” In such a moment, then, we also see Goethe’s heart moved by the insight that art reveals its highest potential only when it springs from the very same foundations from which all knowledge and insight also spring. And we then feel how deeply these words spring from Goethe’s soul when he later utters the statement: “Beauty is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that, were it not for its appearance, would have remained eternally hidden from us!” Thus, Goethe sees in art a revelation of the laws of nature, a language through which is expressed what is otherwise attained through knowledge in other fields of research.

[ 5 ] And when we move from Goethe to a more recent figure who likewise sought to imbue art with a mission and, through art, to give humanity something connected to the sources of existence—when we turn to Richard Wagner, we find in his writings, in which he attempted to clarify for himself the nature and significance of artistic creation, many similar hints regarding the inner kinship between truth and beauty, between knowledge and art. Thus, drawing on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, he says that something resounds from these sounds that is like a revelation from another world, and yet is so different from everything we would conceive of in purely rational or logical forms. But one thing at least applies to these revelations through art: that they affect our soul with a compelling force and permeate our feelings with a sense of truth against which, in fact, all logical and purely rational faculties of cognition cannot compete. And on another occasion, Richard Wagner says, with reference to symphonic music, that something resounds from the instruments of this music as if they were organs of the mysteries of creation; for they reveal something like the primal emotions of creation, according to which chaos was ordered, and which were at work in harmonizing the chaos of the world long before any human heart had existed to perceive these emotions of creation. — Thus, Richard Wagner also sees in the revelations of art a truth, a mysterious insight, a revelation that can stand alongside what is otherwise called insight and knowledge.

[ 6 ] One more thing should be mentioned: Anyone who approaches humanity’s great works of art from the perspective of spiritual science has the feeling that something speaks from them—a revelation of humanity’s search for truth. And the spiritual scientist feels a kinship with what speaks through art. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he feels a closer affinity to the revelations of the artist’s spirit than to so much of what is otherwise accepted today, without a second thought, as so-called spiritual revelation.

[ 7 ] Why is it that truly artistic personalities attribute such a mission to art, and why is the heart of the spiritual scientist so drawn precisely to the mysterious revelations of great art?

[ 8 ] We will delve into what might provide answers to these questions by summarizing and applying some of what has come to light in the lectures of this winter series.

[ 9 ] If we wish to recognize the significance and purpose of art in the sense that we have maintained throughout these lectures this past winter—that is, by finding answers not according to human opinions or the whims of our speculating intellect, but rather as the facts of the development of the world and of humanity themselves provide us with answers— then we must direct the question we have toward the development and unfolding of art itself within the course of human evolution. Therefore, let us allow art—what it has been and what it has become—to reveal its significance for humanity. — Admittedly, if we wish to consider the beginnings of art—as it first approaches humanity in the form of poetry—we must go back a long way by ordinary standards. But with regard to poetry, let us for now go back only as far as human physical records can lead us. Let us go back to that figure—now regarded by many as legendary—with whom Western art begins as poetry: to Homer, from whom Greek poetry takes its starting point, and whose work has been preserved for us in the two great epic poems, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” It is immediately striking, however, when we begin to let these two epics take effect upon us, that the one—or, since we do not wish to dwell today on the question of personality—those from whom these epics originate, announce to us right at the beginning an impersonal element:

Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus...

[ 10 ] Thus begins the *Iliad*, the first of Homer’s epics; and again: “Sing to me, Muse, of the man who wandered far…” begins the second epic, the *Odyssey*. The one from whom these verses flowed thus wishes to point out that what speaks from his mouth is actually due to a higher power, that it comes to him from somewhere, and that he best describes the state of his soul not by referring to what that soul itself has to say, but to what is inspired in it by a power which—as we sense if we understand Homer even a little—was not merely a symbol for it, but something entirely concrete and essential. If people today feel little when Homer says, “Sing, O Muse…,” then this is not the fault of the fact that Homer merely wishes to offer a symbol, merely to describe what is going on in his soul, but rather it is the fault of modern man, who no longer possesses within his soul the experiences from which such impersonal poetry as Homer’s flowed. However, we can only understand this impersonality at the dawn of Western poetry if we ask ourselves: What might have preceded this dawn of Western poetry? From what might it itself have sprung?

[ 11 ] When we consider the development of humanity from the perspective of spiritual science, we arrive at the age-old questions concerning the forms of human consciousness in general. In our reflections on human evolution, we have often emphasized that the powers of the human soul have changed over the course of millennia, and that all our soul powers once had a beginning. When we look back into the past, we encounter people whose souls were endowed with powers entirely different from those of people today. We have emphasized that in the distant past—to which, admittedly, no external history but only spiritual scientific research leads us—human consciousness as a whole functioned differently, and that an ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance was inherent in all human beings as a natural power of the human soul. Before human souls had descended so far into material life that they viewed the world as we do today, the spiritual world was something entirely real and substantial to them, which they perceived all around themselves. But we have spoken of the fact that they did not perceive the spiritual world in the manner of a trained clairvoyant consciousness, which is linked to a clearly defined center of human soul life through which a person perceives themselves as an “I,” as a self. If we go back to the distant past, the sense of “I”—which has emerged and developed over millennia upon millennia—does not yet exist. However, precisely because human beings did not have this focal point within themselves, their spiritual senses were open to the outside world, and they perceived a spiritual world as if in a kind of real dream that reflected spiritual realities. But it was, after all, a kind of dreamlike, ego-less, clairvoyant consciousness.

[ 12 ] Humanity has looked into the spiritual world from which its true inner self originated in the distant past. And in powerful images—like images in a dream—the forces that underlie our physical existence stood before the human soul. In this spiritual world, primitive man saw his gods; he witnessed the facts and events unfolding among his divine beings. And it is indeed a mistake for modern scholarship to believe that the myths of the gods among various peoples are merely a product of “popular imagination.” If one tries to imagine that in the distant past the human soul functioned in a similar way to how it does today—only that back then it indulged more in imagination than in a mind constrained by fixed laws—and that the figures preserved in the myths of the gods were created out of that imagination, then that is actually a fantasy; then it is those who hold such a belief who are fantasizing. For prehistoric humans, the events depicted in mythologies were realities. Myths, sagas, even fairy tales and legends are born of an original capacity of the human soul. This is precisely connected to the fact that, in the distant past, the human “I” did not yet function as it does today, that human beings did not yet have their fixed center through which they are at home with themselves and within themselves. And because they did not yet have this center, they did not shut themselves off within their ego, within their narrowly defined soul; they had not yet separated themselves from their surroundings as they would later do. They lived within their surroundings as an integral part of them, whereas modern humans feel separated as beings from the outside world. And just as people today can feel that physical energy flows into and out of their physical organism to sustain their life, so too did prehistoric humans, with their clairvoyant consciousness, feel that spiritual forces flowed in and out of them. They felt an intimate interplay with the forces of the greater world. Indeed, he could say: When something is happening in my soul—when I think, feel, or will something—then I am, in essence, not a closed-off being, but a being into whom the forces of the beings I perceive are working. And these beings I perceive, who are out there, send inner forces into me to stimulate me to have thoughts, to have feelings, and to express impulses of the will. — Thus, in the bosom of the spiritual world, human beings felt that divine-spiritual powers were thinking within them; they felt, as their emotions ebbed and flowed, that spiritual powers were at work within them; and when their will accomplished something, they felt that divine-spiritual powers were pouring into them with their own will and their own goals. In primeval times, human beings felt themselves to be vessels through which spiritual powers expressed themselves.

[ 13 ] We are thus referring to a distant primeval age, which, however, extended through all manner of intermediate stages up to the time of Homer. It is easy to see how Homer appears merely as a kind of continuator of humanity’s primordial consciousness. To demonstrate this, we need only cite a few passages from the *Iliad*. — In it, Homer depicts that mighty battle between the Greeks and the Trojans. But how does he do so? What, in the consciousness of the Greeks, was the basis for this battle?

[ 14 ] Even if Homer does not assume this, this struggle was not based solely on something that played out as opposition within all those passions and desires, concepts, and ideas that originate from the human self. Were it merely the passions of the Trojans as individuals and as a people, or merely the passions of the Greeks as individuals or as a people, that were fighting one another there? Were it merely the forces emanating from the human self that were present on the battlefield? No! The legend, which reveals to us the connection between primal consciousness and Homeric consciousness, tells us that at a festival of the three goddesses—Hera, Pallas Athena, and Aphrodite—they competed for the prize of beauty, and that a human connoisseur of beauty, Paris, the son of the Trojan king, was to decide which of them was the most beautiful. And Paris had thrown the apple—the prize of beauty—to Aphrodite, and she had promised him in return the most beautiful woman on earth: Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Paris could only win Helen by abducting her. And because the Greeks wanted to avenge the abduction, they prepared for battle against the Trojans, who lived across the Aegean Sea. That is where the battle took place.

[ 15 ] Why do human passions flare up, and why does Homer have the “Muse” describe all these things? Are these merely events that took place here in the physical world among human beings? No! Greek consciousness shows us that behind what occurs among human beings lies the conflict between the goddesses. — Thus, even with the consciousness of his time, the Greek seeks the causes of what takes place in the physical world and says: I cannot find here the forces that cause human powers to clash. I must ascend to where divine forces and powers stand opposed to one another.” — The divine powers, as they were envisioned in images at that time—as we have just described—played a role in the struggles of human beings. There, then, we see emerging from humanity’s primordial consciousness what stands before us as the first great product of poetry: Homer’s *Iliad*. Therefore, we can say: set to verse and portrayed in human terms from the standpoint of a later human consciousness, we still find in Homer an echo of what humanity’s primordial consciousness had perceived. And nothing else has happened here than that we must look to the period before Homer for that point in human development where, for the people who then found expression in the Greek world, the clairvoyant consciousness had closed off, so that, as it were, only an echo of it remained.

[ 16 ] A person from prehistoric times would have said: “I see my gods fighting in the spiritual world, which is open to my clairvoyant consciousness!” People of the Homeric era could no longer see into that world; but a memory of it was still alive. And just as people felt inspired by the worlds of the gods in which they were immersed, so too did the poet of the Homeric epics still feel within his soul the same divine forces that people had once felt at work within themselves. That is why he says: “The Muse who inspires my soul speaks this!” Thus, Homeric poetry connects directly to the correctly understood mythology of prehistoric times. If we understand Homer in this way, we see something emerging in him that acted as a substitute for the ancient clairvoyant powers in the human soul. The ancient power of clairvoyance, by receding, had closed the gate to the spiritual worlds for ordinary human consciousness. But in the course of human evolution, something has remained as a substitute for the old clairvoyance. And that is the poetic imagination in Homer. Thus, the guiding world powers have withdrawn direct clairvoyant perception from human beings and given them a substitute in its place—something that, like the old clairvoyance, can live within the soul and evoke a formative power within it.

[ 17 ] Poetic imagination is an advance payment from the forces that guide humanity for their insight into the distant past.

[ 18 ] Now let us recall something else. — In the lecture on “The Human Conscience,” it was shown how, at various stages of Earth’s evolution, the decline of humanity’s ancient clairvoyant powers took place in very different ways. In the East, we still find ancient clairvoyance present in the souls of people at a relatively late stage. And we have also emphasized that, the further west we go, the less these clairvoyant abilities are present among the peoples of Europe. But this is also the case because, among these peoples—where other soul forces and abilities were still relatively underdeveloped—a strong sense of the “I” asserted itself at the center of the soul. This emergence of the sense of the “I” in the various regions of Europe, however, developed in a wide variety of ways: differently in the north than in the west, and differently still, particularly in southern Europe. Particularly in Sicily and Italy, the sense of self developed most intensely in pre-Christian times. While in the East the soul forces had long continued in a state of “being outside oneself,” without a sense of self, there were people in the aforementioned regions of Europe who developed a strong sense of self because they no longer participated in the old clairvoyance. To the same extent that the spiritual world withdraws from human beings externally, the inner life—the sense of self—flourishes. And it was particularly in the regions of present-day Italy and Sicily that the human sense of self developed strongly. — How different, then, must the souls of the Asian peoples have been from those of the peoples who lived in the regions described, in certain ancient times. Over in Asia, we can still see how the mysteries of the world unfold before the soul in mighty dream images, how human beings direct their spiritual eye outward and witness the deeds of the gods unfolding before them. And in what these people can recount, we see what we might call the primordial narrative of the spiritual realities underlying the world. When the ancient clairvoyance was replaced by its later substitute—the imagination—the vivid parable, the image, developed there in particular. Among the Western peoples, on the other hand—in Italy and Sicily—something developed that sprang from a self that was firmly established within itself, something capable of developing a superpower. Among these peoples, it is enthusiasm that bursts forth from the soul without its having direct spiritual insight; it is the intuitions of the human soul that ascend to that which the soul cannot, in fact, see. Here, then, we do not have retellings of what was seen as the deeds of the gods. But in the soul’s fervent turning, through human speech or song, toward what can only be sensed, the primal prayer springs from this enthusiasm—the song of praise for those divine powers that cannot be seen, because clairvoyant consciousness is less developed here. And in Greece, the land in between, the two worlds converge. There are people there who receive inspiration from both sides: from the East comes the pictorial vision, and from the West comes the enthusiasm that, in the hymn, surrenders itself to the sensed divine-spiritual powers of the world. It was within Greek culture, through the convergence of these two currents, that the evolution of Homeric poetry—whose origins we must trace to the 8th to 9th centuries B.C.—became possible, leading to what we then find in Aeschylus, three to four centuries later in Greek culture.

[ 19 ] Aeschylus truly appears to us as a figure upon whom, however, the full power of the Eastern imagery—that compelling force which, for example, in Homer was still present as an echo of the ancient conception of the deeds of the gods and their influence on humanity—no longer had any effect. That echo was already very faint—so faint that, at first, something akin to a kind of disbelief arose in Aeschylus’s soul regarding what people had once seen in images of the divine world during their original, clairvoyant state. In Homer, we still find that he is fully aware of how human consciousness once rose up to the forces that, as divine-spiritual powers, stand behind what human passions and feelings constitute in the physical world. Therefore, Homer does not merely describe a battle that is taking place; we even see how the gods intervene. Zeus and Apollo intervene where human passions are at work and give expression to something. The gods are a reality that the poet allows to influence his poetry.

[ 20 ] How different things turned out with Aeschylus! He was already profoundly influenced by another force that had come over from the West: the human self, the inner unity of the human soul. That is why Aeschylus is the first to portray the human being who acts from within his own self and begins to detach himself, through his consciousness, from the divine powers flowing into him. In Aeschylus, the active human being takes the place of the gods we still find in Homer—albeit only in its early stages. Thus Aeschylus becomes the playwright who places the acting human being at the center of the plot. While the epic was bound to emerge under the influence of the Eastern imagination’s vivid imagery, drama—which places the acting human being at the center—developed under the influence of the personal self that was asserting itself in the West. — Take, for example, Orestes, who has committed matricide and now beholds the Furies. Yes, Homer still plays a role here; things do not change that quickly. Aeschylus is still aware that the gods were once perceived by humans through imagery, but he is close to abandoning that view. It is quite characteristic that it is Apollo—who still acts with full power in Homer’s poetry—who incites Orestes to commit matricide. Afterward, however, the god no longer holds sway; afterward, the human self stirs, and it becomes evident that within Orestes the human self, the inner human being, asserts itself. Apollo is even outright proven wrong; he is rejected. What he seeks to instill clearly demonstrates that he can no longer exercise complete control over Orestes. This is why Aeschylus was the ideal poet for a figure such as “Prometheus,” who is precisely the divine hero who embodies humanity’s liberation from the divine powers and rebels titanically against them.

[ 21 ] Thus, with the awakening sense of self—which is carried over from the West through the mysteries of human evolution and which, in the soul of Aeschylus, encounters the memories of the Oriental pictorial imagination—we see drama taking its beginning. And it is quite interesting that tradition wonderfully confirms what we have now sought to gain purely from spiritual scientific insight.

[ 22 ] There is a wonderful tradition that goes some way toward justifying Aeschylus, showing that he could not have revealed the secrets of the mysteries—of which he was accused—since he had never been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. He did not set out at all to depict anything he might have gleaned from the temple mysteries, from which Homer’s poems sprang. He stands, in a certain sense, apart from the mysteries. On the other hand, it is said that in Syracuse, Sicily, he absorbed those mysteries that pertain to the emergence of the human self. This emergence of the “I” manifests itself in a different way where we see the Orphics developing the ancient form of the ode, the hymn, which the human soul sends upward to the divine-spiritual worlds that are no longer seen, but only intuited. Here, art has taken a step forward. Here we see that it has grown quite naturally out of the ancient truth, but that it has paved the way to the human “I,” and that it has become what it is because it was meant to grasp the thinking, striving, and willing human “I.” As human beings moved from a life in the external world into their own inner world, the figures of Homeric poetry gave rise to the dramatic characters of Aeschylus, and drama emerged alongside the epic.

[ 23 ] Thus we see the ancient truths living on in a different form in art; we see, rendered through the imagination, what ancient clairvoyance was able to grasp. And what art has preserved from ancient times, we see applied to the human “I” that has come into its own, to the human personality.

[ 24 ] And now let’s take a giant leap forward. Let us move forward through the centuries to the 13th and 14th centuries of the Christian era, to that towering figure who, in the midst of the Middle Ages, leads us in such a moving way up into the realm that the human self can attain when it works its way out of itself toward the vision of the divine-spiritual world: let us turn to Dante. In his *Commedia*, Dante has created a work about which Goethe—after allowing it to take effect on him repeatedly, since it came before his eyes again in old age in the translation of an acquaintance—wrote the words in which he expressed his thanks to the translator for sending him the translation:

How deeply grateful we must be to Him,
Who has just brought us this book,
Which puts a magnificent end
To all our searching and all our lamentations!

[ 25 ] What path has art taken from Aeschylus to Dante? How does Dante once again present us with a divine, spiritual world? How does he guide us through the three realms of the spiritual world—through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven—through the worlds that lie beyond human sensory existence?

[ 26 ] Here we see how—albeit in the same direction, one might say—the fundamental spirit of human development has continued to work. In Aeschylus, we can still clearly see that he possesses these spiritual powers throughout his work: the gods—Zeus, Hermes, and so on—confront Prometheus; the gods confront Agamemnon. There is still an echo of the ancient visions, of what the old, clairvoyant consciousness was able to draw from the world in time immemorial. Dante is quite different. Dante shows us how, purely through immersion in his own soul, through the development of the powers slumbering within the soul, and through the overcoming of everything that hinders the unfolding of these powers, he became able “in the midpoint of life,” as he characteristically puts it—that is, at the age of thirty-five—to turn his gaze toward the spiritual world. So while people with the old clairvoyant consciousness directed their gaze outward into the spiritual environment—and while Aeschylus, at least, still reckoned with the ancient divine figures—we see in Dante a poet who descends into his own soul, who remains entirely within the personality and its inner mysteries, and who, through the path of this personal development, enters the spiritual world, which he unfolds in such powerful imagery in the *Commedia*. There, the soul of Dante’s individual personality stands entirely alone. There, it takes no account of what is revealed from without. No one can imagine that Dante could describe things in a manner similar to Homer or Aeschylus; that he might have drawn upon traditions to adopt the figures of ancient clairvoyance; rather, Dante stands on the ground of what could be developed in the Middle Ages entirely within the power of the human personality. And we are faced with what we have often emphasized: that human beings must overcome whatever clouds their clairvoyant vision.

[ 27 ] Dante depicts this to us through vivid images of the soul. Whereas the Greeks still saw realities in the spiritual world, in Dante we see only images—images of those soul forces that must be overcome. Those forces that arise from the sensory soul—as we are accustomed to calling this aspect of the soul—and which are lower forces capable of hindering the “I” from developing to higher stages must be overcome. Dante points this out; and likewise, those forces of the intellectual soul and the conscious soul that can hinder the higher development of the “I” must also be overcome. Plato, however, already points to the opposing forces, insofar as they are good: wisdom, the power of the soul of consciousness; courage in itself, the power that originates from the soul of understanding or the soul of the mind; and moderation, that which the soul of sensation attains in its highest unfolding. When the “I” undergoes a development sustained by the moderation of the Sensitive Soul, by the strength or inner composure of the Intellectual or Emotional Soul, and by the wisdom of the Conscious Soul, it gradually attains higher soul experiences that lead upward into the spiritual world. But first, those forces that work against moderation, inner integrity, and wisdom must be overcome. Moderation is opposed by intemperance and gluttony; these must be overcome. Dante illustrates that these must be fought and how one confronts them when a person wishes to enter the spiritual world through their own soul forces. For Dante, a she-wolf is the image of intemperance, of the dark sides of the feeling soul. Then we encounter the dark sides of the intellectual soul as forces that resist development: whatever is not self-contained courage, whatever are the senselessly aggressive forces of the intellectual soul, appears to us in Dante’s imagination as something to be fought against in the form of the lion. And wisdom that does not strive toward the heights of the world—that directs itself toward the world merely as cleverness and cunning—appears to us in the third image, the lynx. The “eyes of the lynx” are meant to represent eyes that are not eyes of wisdom, which look into the spiritual world, but eyes directed solely toward the sensory world. And after Dante shows how he defends himself against such forces that resist development, he describes to us how he ascends into the worlds that lie beyond sensory existence.

[ 28 ] In Dante, we see a human being who is self-reliant, searching within himself, and drawing from within himself the forces that lead into the spiritual world. Thus, that which creates in this direction is drawn entirely from the external world into the human inner being.

[ 29 ] Thus, in Dante, a poet describes what can be experienced in the innermost depths of the human soul. In its evolution, poetry has delved a little further into the human inner world, has become more intimate with the “I,” and has drawn itself even deeper into the human “I.” — Thus the figures Homer created for us were entwined in the web of divine-spiritual powers; thus Homer himself still felt entwined within it when he said: “Let the Muse sing what I have to say!” Dante stands before us—a human being, alone with his soul, which now knows that it must unfold from within itself the powers that are to lead into the spiritual world. We see, in particular, that it is becoming increasingly impossible for the imagination to rely on what is conveyed from the outside. And the fact that it is no longer merely opinions at work here, but forces deeply rooted in the inner life of the human soul, may be evident from a small detail.

[ 30 ] In more recent times, one epic poet sought to become the chronicler of a sacred narrative: Klopstock, a man of deeply religious nature, with even deeper underlying currents than Homer, and who therefore consciously aspired to be for the modern era what Homer had been for antiquity. He attempted to revive Homer’s sensibility. But now he wants to be true to himself. So he cannot say, “Sing to me, O Muse…,” but must begin his *Messiah* with: “Sing, immortal soul, of the redemption of sinful mankind….” Thus we see, in fact, that among those who truly matter, progress in humanity’s artistic creation is indeed present.

[ 31 ] Let us take another giant leap forward a few centuries. Let us look up from Dante to a great poet of the 16th and 17th centuries: Shakespeare. Here again, we see a remarkable progress in Shakespeare—progress, in this context, meaning “advancement.” How one might otherwise evaluate Shakespeare’s work is a matter of personal taste; that is criticism. Here, however, we are not dealing with criticism but with facts; what matters is not the superiority of one over the other, but the necessary, lawful progression.

[ 32 ] We see the development of humanity in our field, as it progresses from Dante to Shakespeare, taking remarkable turns. What particularly struck us about Dante? A person stands alone in his own way, with his revelations of the spiritual world; he describes what he has experienced as a great experience—but within his own soul. Can you imagine that this one person, Dante, would convey the same truth if he were to describe his visions to us five or six times in a row, one time this way, another time that way? Or don’t you have the feeling that when a poet like Dante describes something like this, the world into which the poet immerses himself is one that can really only be described once? That is why Dante did just that. It is the world of a human being, but also of a moment in which the human being becomes one with what constitutes the spiritual world for him. One would therefore have to say: Dante immerses himself in the human and personal. And he does so in such a way that this human and personal aspect is his own. He is still dependent on this—on traversing this human and personal aspect of his own in every direction.

[ 33 ] Now let us turn to Shakespeare. — Shakespeare creates a wealth of characters; he shapes all manner of characters: an Othello, a Lear, Hamlet, a Cordelia, Desdemona. But these Shakespearean characters are portrayed in such a way that we do not immediately perceive anything divine behind them when the mind’s eye sees them in the physical world with purely human qualities and purely human impulses. What is sought in their souls is that which springs directly from the soul in terms of thinking, feeling, and willing. It is individual human personalities that Shakespeare portrays. But does he portray them in such a way that, in each personality, Shakespeare is present—just as Dante is solely the human being who immerses himself in his own personality? No, Shakespeare has gone one step further; he has taken the step that delves even deeper into the personal—not only into a single personality, but into the various personalities. Shakespeare denies himself every time he portrays Lear, Hamlet, and so on, and he is never tempted to reveal his own ideas; rather, he is completely effaced as Shakespeare and lives entirely through his creative power in the various characters, in the personalities. Whereas Dante, in his depictions, presents the experiences of a single personality—experiences that must remain those of that one personality—Shakespeare portrays the impulses arising from the inner human self in the most diverse forms. Dante started from the human personality; but he remains within that framework and penetrates the spiritual world. Shakespeare has gone a step further in this regard, in that he steps out of his own personality and slips into the individual personalities he portrays; he immerses himself completely in them. He does not create what lives in his own soul, but rather what lives in the personalities he observes. In this way, he creates for us many individualities, many distinct personalities of the external world, but in such a way that he creates them all from their own center.

[ 34 ] So we see this as well: how the development of art continues to advance. Having originated in the distant past from that state of consciousness in which a sense of self did not yet exist at all, it reached the point in Dante where it came to encompass the individual human being, so that the self becomes a world unto itself. Now, with Shakespeare, art has progressed to the point where the other “I’s” constitute the poet’s world. For this step to be taken, it was necessary for art to, so to speak, descend from the spiritual heights from which it actually sprang into the physical and sensory realities of existence. And it is precisely this step that art takes from Dante to Shakespeare. Let us try to juxtapose the two figures, Dante and Shakespeare, from this perspective:

[ 35 ] Let light-hearted aesthetes criticize him and denounce Dante as a “didactic poet”: whoever understands Dante and allows his entire richness to take hold of them will feel that it is precisely Dante’s greatness that all medieval wisdom and philosophy speak from Dante’s soul. The development of such a soul—the very soul that was to create Dante’s poetry—required the foundation of all medieval wisdom. This wisdom first influenced Dante’s soul, and it reemerges as his personality expands into a world of its own. Consequently, however, Dante’s poetry—though fully comprehensible at first glance—can have its full effect only on those who are immersed in the heights of this medieval spiritual life. Only then can the depths and subtleties of Dante’s poetry be grasped.

[ 36 ] Dante, however, took a step down. He attempted to bring the spiritual down into the lower realms. He achieved this by writing his poetry not in Latin, as some of his predecessors had done, but in the vernacular. He ascends to the highest heights of spiritual life, but he descends into the physical world all the way down to a single vernacular. — Shakespeare must descend even further. People today indulge in the most varied fantasies about the way in which Shakespeare’s great poetic figures came into being. If one wishes to understand this descent of poetry into the everyday world—a world that is still quite despised today from the heights of existence—one must keep the following in mind: One must imagine a small theater in a London suburb, where actors performed whom one today would truly not count among the greats, except for Shakespeare himself. Who went into this theater? Those who were despised by London’s upper classes! In London, at the time Shakespeare was staging his plays, it was considered more respectable to attend cockfights and similar events than to go to this theater, where people ate and drank and threw the eggshells they had eaten onto the stage if they did not like the performance; where people sat not only in the auditorium but also on the stage itself, and where the actors performed right through the middle of the audience. It was there, before an audience belonging to the lowest class of London’s population, that the plays were first performed—plays which people today so readily imagine would have immediately reigned supreme in the heights of intellectual life. At most, the unmarried sons who were allowed to go to certain obscure places—provided they wore civilian clothes—would sometimes venture out to this theater where Shakespeare’s plays were performed. It would not have been proper for a respectable person to enter such a venue. Thus, poetry had descended to a level that stemmed, so to speak, from the most naive impulses.

[ 37 ] Nothing human was alien to the genius behind Shakespeare’s plays, who created his characters during this period of human and artistic development. Thus, even in terms of such outward expressions, art has descended from what is felt within the narrow stream of human leadership to what is universally human—that which flows broadly at the very bottom of everyday human life. And anyone who looks more deeply knows that something like this—a bringing down of a stream of spirit from the heights—was necessary in order to create something as vibrant as what we encounter in the highly individual forms of Shakespeare’s characters.

[ 38 ] And now let us turn to a period closer to our own: the age of Goethe. Let us try to trace, in his work, the figure into which he poured all his ideals, his aspirations, and his sacrifices over the course of sixty years—for that is how long he worked on his *Faust*. Everything his rich life experienced in the depths of his soul and in his interaction with the outside world—and everything through which it ascended from one level of knowledge to the next toward an ever-higher resolution of the world’s mysteries—all of that has been poured into the figure of Faust, coming back to meet us from there. What kind of figure is Faust from a poetic perspective?

[ 39 ] In Dante’s case, we could say: What he describes to us, he describes as an individual drawing on his own vision. But that is not the case with Goethe in regard to *Faust*. Goethe does not describe things based on a vision; he makes no claim whatsoever that they were revealed to him during a particularly festive time, as is the case with Dante regarding the *Commedia*. Goethe shows at every point in his *Faust* that the things depicted therein are the product of his inner work. And while Dante had to have experienced events precisely in such a way that they could be depicted in this one-sided manner, we can say that the experiences Goethe depicts are indeed of an individual nature, but that he transformed what he experienced inwardly into the objective nature of Faust. What Dante depicts is his most personal inner experience. In Goethe’s case, these are also personal experiences; but what the poetic figure of Faust does and suffers in the poem is not Goethe’s life. It never coincided with Goethe’s life at any time. It is the free poetic reworking of what Goethe experienced in his soul. While one can identify Dante with his *Commedia*, one would almost have to possess the mind of a literary historian to claim that Faust is Goethe! What Goethe experienced, he has, with great genius, woven into this poetic figure. Such assertions—Goethe is Faust! — Faust is Goethe! — are merely a play on words. Faust is indeed a singular figure, but we could not imagine a figure like Faust being created in as many variations as Shakespeare created his characters. The “I” that Goethe portrays in his Faust can only be presented once. Alongside Hamlet, Shakespeare was able to create other characters: Lear, Othello, and so on. One can, of course, write a “Tasso” or an “Iphigenia” alongside “Faust”; but one is still aware of the difference that exists between these works. Faust is not Goethe. Faust is, at heart, every human being. Goethe incorporated into Faust what lived in his deepest longings. But he truly created a character who, as a poetic personality, is completely detached from his own personality. He individualized him to such an extent that we do not have before us—as with Dante—an individual vision, but rather a figure who lives within each of us in a certain way. This is the further advancement of the art of poetry in Goethe. — Shakespeare was able to create characters to such a degree of individualization that he himself became submerged in the characters and created from their very centers. — Goethe could not place a second, similar character alongside the figure of Faust. He does indeed create a character who is individualized; but it is not an individualized, single human being. This character is individualized in relation to every single human being. Shakespeare descended into the inner core of Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Cordelia, and so on. Goethe has descended into what is the highest human quality in every single person. Consequently, however, he creates a character that applies to every single person. And this character detaches itself once again from the poetic personality that created it, so that it stands before us in *Faust* as a real, objective external figure.

[ 40 ] This is yet another step forward for art along the path we have described. Art springs from the spiritual contemplation of a higher world and increasingly penetrates the human inner life. It exerts its most intimate influence only within the human inner life, where a person is alone with himself: in Dante. In Shakespeare, the “I” emerges once more from this inner world and enters into the souls of others. In Goethe, the “I” goes out, immerses itself in the soul of every human being, but now—such is Faust—as that which is found to be typically the same in every single individual soul. We see this emergence of the “I” in *Faust*. And because the “I” can only step outside itself and understand other aspects of the soul if it unfolds the soul’s powers within itself and immerses itself in the other spiritual realm, it is only natural that, as his artistic creation progressed, Goethe was led to not only to depict people’s external physical deeds and experiences, but also that which every human being can experience as spiritual—that which every human being finds in the spiritual world when they open their own “I” to this spiritual world.

[ 41 ] Poetry has entered the human “I” from the spiritual world, and in Dante it has grasped the human “I” at its very core. In Goethe, we see the “I” stepping out of itself once more and immersing itself in the spiritual world. We see the spiritual experiences of ancient humanity immersing themselves in the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*, and in Goethe’s *Faust* we see the spiritual world emerging once more and being presented before humanity. Thus we allow the powerful spiritual final scene of *Faust* to take effect upon us, where the human being once again reaches the spiritual world after having plunged into it, unfolded from the inside out, and, through the unfolding of spiritual powers, now has a spiritual world before him. It is something like a completely renewed, yet advanced repetition of a chorus of primordial tones: From the imperishable realm of the spiritual world resounds that which humanity has attained as a substitute for spiritual vision—that which it was able to receive in the imagination from human history and present in a transitory form. From the imperishable realm, the transitory figures of Homer’s and Aeschylus’s poetry were born. Once again, poetry ascends from the transitory into the imperishable as the mystical chorus at the end of *Faust* fades into the words: “All that is transitory is but a parable!” There, as Goethe has shown, the human spiritual power ascends once more from the physical world back into the spiritual world.

[ 42 ] We have seen artistic consciousness take giant strides through the world and its personalities in poetry. Art springs from the spiritual realm, where it had its original source of knowledge. Spiritual contemplation withdraws more and more as the external sensory world expands ever further before human beings, and as the human “I” develops ever more in tandem with it. In these stages of world development, human beings must follow this progression from the spiritual world to the sensory world, to the world of the “I.” If human beings could take these steps merely in an external, scientific manner, they would have only an intellectual understanding within external science. But for the time being, they are given a substitute. What clairvoyant consciousness can no longer perceive is created—as in a shadowy reflection—by the human imagination. Imagination must now accompany humanity’s path all the way to human self-consciousness, all the way to Dante. But the thread that binds human beings to the spiritual world can never be severed, not even when art delves down into the isolation of the human “I.” Human beings carry imagination with them on their journey, and during the time when *Faust* was created, they used it to recreate the spiritual world from within.

[ 43 ] Thus, Goethe’s *Faust* stands at the starting point of an era in which it becomes clear to us how humanity is once again flowing back into the world from which art originally sprang. $o It is art, then, that has the mission to continue weaving the threads from primordial spirituality to the spirituality of the future for those people who, in the meantime, cannot enter the spiritual world through higher training. And art has already advanced so far that the view into the spiritual world reemerges in the imagination; from that very imagination from which the second part of Goethe’s *Faust* draws. From this may arise the inkling that humanity stands at the threshold of a stage of development where it must once again gain knowledge from the spiritual world, where it must immerse itself with all its powers, in full awareness, into the spiritual world. Thus art has spun the thread further, has led humanity, through intuition and with the aid of the imagination, upward into the spiritual world, and has paved the way for what we call spiritual science—where, with full self-consciousness and bright clarity, humanity will once again look into the spiritual world from which art itself has flowed, and into which art flows—a future perspective that lies before us. To lead people, as far as is already possible today, to this world—toward which, as we have seen in examples from art, all human longing is directed—that is the task of spiritual science, and that has also been the purpose of the lectures presented in this winter cycle.

[ 44 ] Thus we see how, in a certain sense, those who feel as artists do are correct in sensing that what they have to offer humanity are revelations of the spiritual world. And art has the mission of providing revelations of the spiritual world at a time when direct revelations were no longer possible. Thus Goethe was able to say of the works of the ancient artists: “There is necessity; there is God!” They offer revelations of secret laws of nature that cannot be discovered without art. And so Richard Wagner was able to say that in the sounds of the Ninth Symphony he heard the revelations of another world, against which mere rational consciousness can never stand. — The great artists felt that they were carrying the spirit from which all that is human has emerged—from the past, through the present, into the future. And so we, too, can wholeheartedly agree with the words spoken by a poet who considered himself an artist: “The dignity of humanity is entrusted to your hands!”

[ 45 ] With this, we have attempted to describe the nature and mission of art in the course of human development and to show that art is not as separate from humanity’s sense of truth as one might so easily believe today, but rather that Goethe was right when he said he refused to speak of the idea of beauty and the idea of truth as separate ideas; there is one idea: that of the active, law-governed divine-spiritual in the world, and truth and beauty are two manifestations of that one idea. — Everywhere we find echoes among poets and other artists of this awareness that in art a spiritual source of human existence speaks. In contrast, deeper artistic natures tell us time and again, speaking from their own feelings, that art has given them the ability to feel that what they express is at the same time a message from spiritual life to humanity itself. And through this, artists feel—even when they express the most personal of matters—that their art is elevated to the level of universal humanity, and that they are true artists of humanity when, in the forms and manifestations of their art, they bring to life the words that Goethe lets resound in the *Chorus mysticus*:

Everything Transient
Is just a parable!

[ 46 ] And based on insights from the humanities, we can add: Art is called upon to imbue the image of the transitory with the message of the eternal, of the imperishable. That is its mission!