The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Copernicus and His Time

[ 1 ] There are people who view Copernicus’s achievement as the greatest intellectual revolution that humanity has ever experienced, as far back as historical memory extends. And one must admit that the impact and influence of this intellectual revolution on all human thought were so significant, so magnificent, that in fact hardly anything else can compare to it in terms of intensity and effectiveness. It is also quite easy to grasp what it must have meant for the world of the sixteenth century—with regard to the Earth, that is, the planet on which people had believed for millennia that they stood firmly at rest in the universe—not only to have to relearn the relationship of this planet, their own home, to the Sun, but, in essence, to the entire universe. In effect, the very ground beneath people’s feet was literally shaken at that time. What they had firmly believed until then—so firmly that they thought the Sun and the entire starry sky revolved around this fixed earthly home, and that everything spread out in the cosmos existed solely for the sake of the purposes and characteristics of this earthly home—they now had to learn to think of it as something that itself races through the cosmos at breakneck speed. They had to learn to think of the moving Sun as something stationary in relation to the Earth, and the Earth itself as something in motion. Although the time has been relatively short since the wave of spiritual life marked by this shift swept over humanity, people today no longer fully realize what a shift in thinking and re-learning was necessary to adapt to the new way of thinking in this field. But it is also necessary, in addition to this, to realize that hardly any other idea in human history has, in such a relatively short time, taken hold of the entire spectrum of human education and intellectual culture and become so deeply ingrained that today we can no longer conceive of anything other than humans learning the Copernican system of the world in school during their earliest childhood, as part of the most elementary teachings and insights. When one considers this significance and impact, it becomes doubly interesting to ask: How does this progress fit into the overall development of the human spirit and into the entire evolution of culture?

[ 2 ] In my last lecture, I took the liberty of speaking here about “Human History, the Present, and the Future in the Light of Spiritual Science.” And what appeared to us at that time as the greatest event in human development is particularly evident in a beautiful, specific example when we look at the work of Copernicus. What, in fact, happened back in the sixteenth century, when—shortly after Copernicus’s death—his great work on the revolution of the celestial bodies was presented to the educated world, a work that Copernicus himself believed to be so fully in harmony with his own position as a Catholic canon that he dedicated it to the Pope, and yet remained on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books until the year 1821?

[ 3 ] Copernicus’s achievement can truly be understood only within the context of the cultural climate of his time and the intellectual understanding of the era; only when one takes into account that, in the centuries leading up to Copernicus’s emergence on the intellectual scene, insofar as it considered itself scientific, what might be called Aristotelianism—the worldview of this great Greek sage of pre-Christian culture—had prevailed. For those medieval thinkers and researchers who preceded Copernicus stood firmly on the foundation of what Aristotle had produced as a scientific spirit centuries before the Christian era. And insofar as these sages, these philosophers and researchers of the Middle Ages were Christian, they harmoniously integrated Christian teachings, in their own way, with what they had adopted as Aristotle’s scientific way of thinking. And Copernicus’s doctrine represents, in a certain sense, a break—not, one might say, with Aristotle’s doctrine, but rather with what had emerged from Aristotle in the Middle Ages through the scholars, namely the Christian scholars. These Christian scholars called Aristotle, in matters of the natural order of the world, a “forerunner of the Lord,” of Christ himself. For them, the entire worldview was divided into two parts: one part that could come only from Christian revelation itself, from the tradition of the Scriptures. This part dealt with that which, according to the beliefs of the time, was entirely inaccessible to human reason. They derived a second element of their worldview entirely from Aristotle, and they imbued everything they considered scientific—in relation to the knowable, to what human beings can achieve through their research and science—with Aristotelian thought and an Aristotelian mindset. When one sees Aristotle continuing to exert such an influence on the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages, and when one then sees him superseded by Copernicus and his great successors—Kepler, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and so on—one must ask: What was the original Aristotle actually like, and what about the doctrine that was regarded as Aristotelian by the Christian scholars of the Middle Ages?

[ 4 ] If one delves into Aristotle’s achievements—as presented to us in his comprehensive, magnificent works—one finds, however, that his work encapsulates, as if reborn from a formidable mind, the thinking of the preceding cultural epochs. But this manifests itself in a remarkable way in Aristotle. Of course, it is not possible here in this context to go into greater detail regarding Aristotle’s teachings; attention should be drawn only to one point, which is particularly necessary for us in the field of the humanities in order to understand the achievements of Copernicus and the character of his era.

[ 5 ] When one studies Aristotle, one finds that, in his logical, purely rational manner, he has processed and formulated into ideas everything about which one must nevertheless say: Aristotle adopted it from ancient times. If one were to rely solely on what human reason could have grasped in Aristotle, one would by no means find that the ideas of human reason encompass everything we see presented before us in Aristotle’s teachings. For we find in him a worldview that animates the universe—indeed, all of nature, extending even to the farthest reaches of the cosmos—and imbues it with spirit. We find him clearly stating that not only the human physical body but also what we must call the spiritual-psychic aspect of the human being are born out of the universe, that both originated within it, if we may use this expression. The human body, fundamentally, because what we call matter or substance—with its laws—is spread throughout the universe. The spiritual-psychic aspect, however, according to Aristotle, has sprung from the universe itself, because he conceives of this universe as being imbued with spirit and soul. What we see in the stars is, for Aristotle, not merely an accumulation of matter; rather, in every star he sees at the same time the expression, the material embodiment, of a soul-being, and the path of a star through the universe is, for Aristotle, not the result of mere mechanical or physical forces, but the expression of the will of the star spirit or the star soul. And when one delves deeper into what he says in detail, one finds something quite distinctive shining through everywhere. Through his purely logical—one might say abstract—discussions, one finds, to put it briefly, what had been handed down to the Greeks as ancient knowledge, as ancient insight, and what Aristotle expressed in rational form, in intellectual ideas. And one cannot truly understand Aristotle except by taking as a foundation what was said here in the last lecture: The entire course of human development is such that humanity originated from a consciousness entirely different from that which we have today—and which, since the dawn of modern times, can be called normal human consciousness—a consciousness organized primarily around the intellect and reason. — This was not the case in ancient times. In ancient times, there existed at the core of every human soul a kind of clairvoyance that was innate to human beings, and as we have explained in the previous lectures, this can still be attained today through training, as is further described in the book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.

[ 6 ] This clairvoyant insight, which does not depend on what the senses perceive or what the reasoning mind—bound to the human brain—can grasp, is something from which humanity has evolved; it existed in ancient times but has grown weaker and weaker in the course of human development. In ancient times, humanity was able to look into what lies deeper in things and within things than what the senses alone could see and the intellect alone could grasp. Everywhere, at the very foundation of human cultures, one finds a primordial knowledge hidden—a knowledge gained through intuition, inspiration, and imagination. But such is the course of human development that this primordial knowledge was bound to be gradually lost, for only under that condition could that which we today call the intellectual element—intellectual culture—develop. What we today call the fundamental nerve of all scientific inquiry and all scientific worldviews could develop only because that ancient, twilight-like clairvoyant knowledge—born from the depths of the soul like images in a dream—gradually transformed itself within the human soul into our present-day knowledge. For what we might call logical thinking, the intellectual element—which makes our modern science great and significant—was entirely absent from the ancient clairvoyant consciousness. But what was known back then—what the originally clairvoyant human soul had attained—was carried forward all the way into Greek times. This primordial knowledge of humanity still shines through, in a most remarkable way, even verifiable by external observation, in a figure such as Plato, the teacher of Aristotle. We find this primordial knowledge of humanity—in a form that modern humans can no longer attain on their own—developed, for example, in the Eastern cultures, particularly in ancient Indian culture. And it is interesting to see how, in Indian culture, something similar to what we find in Aristotle grows out of humanity’s ancient primordial culture, which was able to look into the spiritual world. In Indian culture, what ultimately emerges—as something people have gained, as it were, through millennia of education—is what might be called: human internalization to the point of logical thinking, to the point where the mind seeks to arrive at an explanation of the world purely through itself, without clairvoyance and without looking into the spiritual world through imaginations, inspirations, or intuitions. We see how this ancient culture preserves its ancient insights, yet allows the soul to be educated in such a way that what has been handed down is expressed in logical formulas and rational ideas. In Indian culture, we observe the interesting fact that the peoples of the East remain at this stage; that, since reaching it, they have not progressed beyond it—a stage that emerged centuries before our Christian era. In Aristotle, the representative figure in this regard, we see how, through the further development of the ancient clairvoyant knowledge, logical culture—that is, intellectual culture—takes on an entirely different character. We see how what might be called the doctrine of the animacy of the world still resonates. But as humanity develops the culture of thought from ancient clairvoyance—where the human being seeks to grasp the world through thought—a kind of separate science of reason emerges in Aristotle: logic, through which logic can now become the instrument for a completely different kind of research.

[ 7 ] If we then compare Aristotle and Indian culture, we must say: Indian culture reaches a dead end in its development; it runs, as it were, into a cul-de-sac, where thought, which lives within itself, must always turn back to the primordial culture—as embodied in the findings of ancient clairvoyance—whenever it seeks to recognize something positive. — With Aristotle, on the other hand, we see that although the primordial culture also finds its culmination in thought, that thought is cultivated in such a way that it can now grasp something else, so that human reason becomes ready to serve as an instrument for something else. One cannot truly understand Aristotle unless one views his entire cosmology in connection with his theory of the soul. For Aristotle, it would have been utterly absurd to believe that the human soul is merely a function, a result of the activity of the human body, just as the candle flame is the result of the material processes within the candle. For him, it was clear that what is assembled in the physical body is, in the case of the individual human being upon entering earthly existence, endowed directly from the spiritual world with that which resides within us as the spiritual-soul core of our being: the spiritual-soul element. And he would never have allowed himself to believe that human beings, in their very being, are absorbed into the inherited characteristics that stem from father and mother and so on; rather, Aristotle derived the spiritual-soul element in human beings from what he called the world of his God, from which he allowed the most significant inner core of the soul to emerge. From God, he had the soul united with the physical-material process that takes place when a human being enters existence as a physical body. Nor did Aristotle ever hold that what originates from the spiritual world as the spiritual-soul essence of the human being ceases with the death of the human being; rather, he was clear that what lives and works within us and makes use of the body as an instrument continues to live on once the human being has passed through the gate of death. He was also fully aware, however, that physical life is by no means superfluous or purposeless, but that what is sent forth from the divine realm as the soul must necessarily immerse itself in physical life, because only there can it acquire what it must bring with it when the human being, upon passing through the gate of death, re-enters the spiritual world. And it is interesting how Aristotle links the fate of the human soul’s core to the fate of the life experienced here between birth and death. He ties it to earthly life in such a way that the soul, freed from the body after passing through the gate of death, continues to live in the spiritual world but must look back upon the world in which it once was. And as it directs its spiritual gaze downward, it sees what was once its physical form, and how it acted in good or bad, beautiful or ugly, wise or foolish deeds, feelings, or thoughts. Thus, in looking back on its physical life, the soul that has passed through the gate of death is bound to this vision, in that what lives on of it in the spiritual world depends on that with which it sees itself as connected—namely, its physical body.

[ 8 ] This is when a grim thought occurs to Aristotle: whatever the soul must experience within itself as a bond to its physical body after passing through the gate of death, it will experience for all infinity, for all distant eternity. — For Aristotle, by virtue of his entire cultural background, was already too far removed from the original human culture, which still knew something of repeated earthly lives. Therefore, he was unable—as is possible within our spiritual science—to show how the human soul, after passing through the gate of death, reappears in a new human body and utilizes the vision of its last earthly life during its existence in the spiritual world in such a way that it perceives what it did, felt, or thought that was deficient, now reshapes it and uses it as the occasion for a new and ever-recurring earthly life, through which what was done poorly or imperfectly in the soul’s earlier, imperfect incarnations can be balanced out. With regard to imperfection, the sole salvation and consolation lies in the fact that, if this life is not the only one, the soul receives a new impetus to make what was deficient more perfect in a subsequent life. Aristotle had not realized this because he did not recognize that, in his time, human intellectual culture had reached the point where man conducted research through the instrument of the brain, which, in its physical and corporeal form, also exists only between birth and death. It was only in this way—by having dimmed and obscured the prospect of repeated earthly lives and life in a spiritual world for his own time—that Aristotle was able to become the founder of logical, scientific thought. He did not go so far as to bind the spiritual-soul aspect to the physical, even though for him the prospect of the repeated incarnations of the spiritual-soul aspect had been lost. That this is so is further demonstrated, in particular, by a book that has just been published in our time and undoubtedly ranks among the best works in Aristotelian scholarship—if not, in my opinion, the very best work on Aristotle’s worldview. This book, which I highly recommend to you, is Aristotle and His Worldview by Franz Brentano (Leipzig, 1911). And to illustrate what Franz Brentano writes—based on a profound insight into Aristotle’s entire mode of thought—about the fate of the soul after a person has passed through the gates of death, I would like to read to you the very words of such an outstanding expert on Aristotle: “But how? Does the idea of retribution not then become completely null and void? — One might think so, and that would explain why Aristotle, unlike Plato, makes no reference at all to retribution in the afterlife in his ethics. Yet that is not the case. We recall the distinction we highlighted regarding the spirits of the spheres in comparison to the Deity. Similarly, distinctions will also exist here, and when the departed human spirits behold the cosmic plan and see themselves interwoven with it through their earthly lives, one recognizes himself as identical with one who practices noble deeds, and another with one who commits shameful acts. The realization they arrive at is at once an eternal, glorifying or condemning Last Judgment, and a Last Judgment that, as such, takes place eternally before everyone’s eyes. Should not retribution and a reward perfectly proportional to true merit also be seen in this?”

[ 9 ] Here we see at the same time how not only religious belief but also Aristotle’s philosophy is linked to the single human life—a connection with that human life that, in its uniformity, now lasts for eternity. And here we have an explanation for why the eternity of rewards and punishments is spoken of so persistently, even where medieval doctrine seeks to be scientific. The aspiration toward the spiritual, the conviction that a spiritual-soul aspect lives within the human being, was an ancient tradition for Aristotle. His mission was to lead the ancient culture out of a spiritual culture.

[ 10 ] Throughout the Middle Ages and well beyond Copernicus, what remained of Aristotle was not a deep understanding, but essentially only the outward tradition—an unquestioning adherence to what was written in Aristotle’s works. And so, in schools everywhere, people taught what they had found in Aristotle. But hidden from outward observation, what might be called the instrument of the intellect was maturing within the human soul. What Aristotle had to report from the ancient spiritual teachings of wisdom was misunderstood and interpreted in a sophistical manner, so that those who came later—Kepler, Galileo, Giordano Bruno—had no choice but to cast aside as obsolete what had been inherited from the belief in Aristotle. Thus, the substance of what Aristotle had handed down was lost. But an inner culture of the soul emerged—precisely an intellectual culture, a culture of the intellect, of reason. Reason and thought are in themselves empty if they cannot engage with another object of inquiry. In Aristotle, we still find the ancient spiritual wisdom as the object of this inquiry. But this wisdom had gradually faded from human consciousness. The Middle Ages, so to speak, had an aptitude only for that which can be seen with the senses and grasped by the intellect, which is bound to the brain. It also prepared, within the souls, the instrument of the intellect itself. And Copernicus was the one who now directed his gaze out into the world in such a way that he grasped the cosmic order in space as it could initially be grasped by the mere external instrument of the intellect—the instrument that, through logic and mathematics, synthesized what extended out there in space. Because the ancient spiritual primordial culture was primarily concerned with understanding human beings—as they stand upon the earth—in relation to their spiritual-soul nature and in relation to their emergence from the spiritual-soul nature of the world, the ancient teaching paid little attention to what must be described as external spatial relationships. The ancient teachings simply accepted the sensory appearance of what was seen externally, for they do not provide a means to comprehend space and time externally, but rather to recognize what lives in the depths of the human soul and is born from the spiritual-soul depths of the universe. It was only when the intellect felt alone with its thoughts that it felt the urge to comprehend reality as it exists all around us. And if we wish to understand the character of the age of Copernicus, we may perhaps observe this character even more clearly in a spirit who, as a spirit, is even greater than Copernicus, even though he did not have as profound an impact on humanity in the field of science as Copernicus himself did.

[ 11 ] Let us imagine a spirit placed in the dawn of modern times, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, those centuries in which the ancient spiritual primordial culture had long since given way in its grandeur within the human soul, but in which the possibility had developed within the human soul to grasp, in a magnificent way, that which the senses perceive—that which the intellect bound to the brain is capable of comprehending, the external sensory reality—through the powers of the strong human personality. Let us imagine a personality endowed precisely with this tendency, and we have the elder contemporary of Copernicus, the “wonder man”—a term truly fitting for a spiritual contemplation—Leonardo da Vinci, who was able to grasp immediate reality, as it presents itself to the senses, with such depth that even in its distorted form as it exists today, his “Last Supper” in the church in Milan still speaks to us so deeply—and speaks to us just as deeply through the reproductions that are widespread throughout the world today. But in Leonardo da Vinci we have before us a person who, as an artist, created this entirely from the depths of his soul—a soul that contained not only the capacity for painting, but also for the work of the sculptor, the engineer, the architect, and indeed, in a comprehensive way, for scientific endeavor. His scientific notes strike us as magnificent when we engage with them. In him we see the greatest representative of the era leading into the sixteenth century—a man within whom all that Aristotle had created to guide humanity toward those powers that arise in the soul for contemplating the world and the scope of reality had become fruitful and mighty. In Leonardo da Vinci, what was abstraction in Aristotle had become an immediate, vital, spiritual reality. This is how he stands before us even when, as a scientist, he grasps the world.

[ 12 ] And equipped with what humanity has been able to learn from Aristotle in terms of culture and inner education, Canon Copernicus—who, in complete silence, over four times nine years, as he himself says, did not investigate any external facts—this is the defining feature: that he did not investigate external facts—but rather accepted what the senses and external reason had hitherto known about the external facts of the solar system. Tycho de Brahe, who appears as a “half-progressive” in comparison to Copernicus, seems downright groundbreaking with regard to the investigation of facts in the sensory world, whereas Copernicus is a figure who, in terms of investigating external facts, represents nothing at all. What, then, did Copernicus do? Anyone who knows him—anyone who truly delves into his writings—knows that he did not apply the culture that humanity had attained through Aristotle to what Aristotle himself had applied it to: to the ancient, primordial spiritual culture—to knowledge of the spiritual and soul aspects of the human being and the spiritual and soul aspects of the universe—but rather to the external, physical, sensory reality.

[ 13 ] Let us not conceive of the internal relationship of the stars to the Sun as medieval science and Aristotelianism did, but let us assume that the Sun is at the center and that the planets revolve around it. What would follow if we made this assumption? This is the question Copernicus asked himself, for example. And he was able to conclude: Then we would have adhered to one of Aristotle’s great principles—a methodological, logical principle—more than those who now seek to explain, in their own way, what is outwardly perceptible to the senses. The latter must assume complicated movements of the individual planets, must seek out immense complications, and must conceive of laws that ultimately constitute the solar system. But an ancient principle—one that can become clear to people precisely through Aristotle’s logic—states that we should never resort to a complicated idea before a simple one can explain the structure of the universe.

[ 14 ] Thus, Copernicus employed the simplest idea, not out of any particular intention. Rather, because he believed he was summarizing the observable facts, he set about placing the Sun at the center of the system and having the planets revolve around it. And what previously could only be explained in a complicated way—the position of a star when it was observed—could now be determined in a simpler manner. Thus, although Aristotle was not understood by those who believed themselves to be true Aristotelians of the Middle Ages, he essentially provided the impetus that brought humanity to the stage where, within Copernicus, the idea took shape of applying the principle of simplicity to the external universe.

[ 15 ] Thus, from the ancient primordial culture of the human soul, that which Aristotle still employed for spiritual wisdom was born into science. But this—which was born from the ancient spiritual culture as an instrument—is now beginning to pour out over the sensory world and to survey it in a lawful manner. And when we then see how the Copernican revolution continues to have an effect—how it continues to influence Kepler, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and indeed even in Newton, it becomes abundantly clear to us that the age of Copernicus has given us the very mission that has enabled humanity to add, to the ancient spiritual culture and science, a culture and science concerning the human sensory world—and also concerning that which presents itself as a sensory world in the vastness of space. This does, however, entail that human habits of thought, human traits of character, and impulses of the will were directed toward immediate, physical, external reality. And this also manifests itself in a remarkable way, connecting with Copernicus’s achievement. Let us now see how deeply souls such as Leonardo da Vinci and those who belong to his circle grew out of what might be called Renaissance culture—that culture which broke with the medieval turning away from nature and allowed people to find joy in immediate reality. This was necessary in order to be able to grasp external reality directly through scientific understanding, as Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus did.

[ 16 ] It is interesting to see how, so to speak, it becomes easier for people in one area and more difficult in another to adapt to this entirely new way of thinking and to apply these new concepts to the universe. We can see how difficult it is for humanity to first establish external reality as the foundation of an intellectual, rational culture in the emergence of that peculiar legend—which certainly has a historical background as well—that actually took shape in Central Europe at the time of Copernicus’s breakthrough, namely the emergence of the Faust legend in the sixteenth century. There we see how people perceived the new way of thinking as something through which they were to lose an old connection with the spiritual realm of the world. However far removed the figure of Faust may seem from the feeling that human beings have been torn away from spiritual culture and are bound to fall prey to all the errors and faults that arise from mere human personality—however far this may be from the idea of the Faust figure just expressed— — it is nevertheless reflected in the life of the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century, as it permeates popular education, as the consciousness expressed, for example, in the well-known saying regarding Faust. Faust set the Bible aside for a while and became a man of the world and a physician. — The latter portrayed a researcher of external nature. It is interesting to observe how a person—and those who are great bearers of culture often are this way—who was, at heart, a naive individual, as Copernicus was, felt within himself: You have done nothing other than bring the idea of simplicity regarding the solar system down to the level of the internalized human soul. — And as a devout man, he had to tell himself: If I recognize the laws of the universe in their true form, then I am actually contributing to the understanding of the great thoughts that pulse through the world as divine thoughts. — In this naivety, he could believe that it was right to dedicate his work to the Pope. Friends, however, had dissuaded him from publishing his work, so that it came to pass that he did not receive the proof of his first sheet until he was on his deathbed, for he believed it would be wrong to hold it back any longer out of fear. But we now see the peculiar way in which the culture of the time had to respond to it. The work was not published until after Copernicus’s death. The person who published it immediately downplayed what Copernicus had intended to say in a preface, in which—in the most cautious manner possible, so as not to cause offense—it was stated that this work was not something that directly accounted for the facts of the world, but rather a possible hypothesis among other hypotheses. Now we must be clear that what Copernicus accomplished at that time marked the beginning of a cultural era in which we still find ourselves, for there has been a steady progression from Copernicus right up to the present day. Yet it strikes us as peculiar what Copernicus, in his naivety, firmly believed to be grounded within the Christian faith. What he accomplished back then strikes us as peculiar when we compare it to what has followed in the course of the centuries. We know this all too well. Copernicus himself escaped all persecution because it was only on his deathbed that he saw the full impact of his world-revolutionizing work. Those who carried on his work—Galileo, Giordano Bruno—fared differently. This is known to the whole world. It is precisely here, in what emerges from the deed of a genius, that we see how everything that later becomes the common heritage of humanity can only assert itself through resistance and more resistance. Truly, one must admit that it feels quite strange when—just as we have done today—one regards Copernicus’s achievement as a necessity and now sees how this achievement continues to have an impact, but also how the mindset that was mobilized around Copernicus’s achievement as opposition to it continues to have an impact as well.

[ 17 ] If we consider Copernicus’s era a little in this cultural-moral sense, the following becomes clear. As he himself conceived and understood this act, he did not find it in the least at odds with his faith, which he believed he held as a man devoutly devoted to his Church. For when Copernicus’s work emerged, and the culture of the external sensory world took hold of humanity, there was still enough remaining from the culture of ancient times of what humanity associated with that which is spread throughout the universe as the spiritual and which formed the content of Aristotelian doctrine. In the time of Kepler, Galileo, and even Newton, it would not have been remotely possible to be regarded as a rational person if one had claimed that the human soul arose in its activity solely from the interplay of material processes, just as the flame arises from the material processes of a candle. This would have been impossible, especially for the greatest minds. Copernicus, despite the fact that his teachings later had such a world-changing impact, remained, in terms of his convictions, firmly grounded in the belief in a spiritual realm that permeates and surges through the entire world. Kepler, the magnificent successor to Copernicus, worked not only as a great astronomer but also as an astrologer. The fact that Kepler worked as an astrologer is significant for characterizing the age of Copernicus. And it is only from this perspective that one need consider the fact that, even though he introduced the three Keplerian laws named after him into science, he was convinced that spiritual and soul forces are at work in all the mechanical processes of the universe, so that one could glean something from the constellations of the stars regarding the human soul and its destiny. This embedding of the human soul within the spiritual and soul-related aspects of the world had an effect not only on Kepler but also on Galileo. For Galileo told himself that, in light of what had been experienced through Copernicus and the newly invented telescope—through which he first recognized the moons of Jupiter and the composite nature of the Milky Way as a collection of individual star clusters—one must not remain stuck in a “science of the page,” but must advance toward a “science of the intellect.” Galileo, like others of his time, was an opponent of Aristotle, but only of the misunderstood Aristotle. On the other hand, he was imbued with what might be called a “culture of thought”—the internalization of thought to the point of logically grasping external reality. Yet he never strayed from the idea that, through what is recognized as logic—that is, the laws of thought that humanity has mastered—the human mind can, in successive moments of time, comprehend what is spread out in space and time. But set against this human intellect—which, step by step, by weighing what the senses perceive, can uncover the mysteries of the universe—Galileo saw the divine Spirit, the divine Intellect, which permeates and interweaves the world, and of which he felt with reverence that it conceives the universe in a single instant, not reflecting upon it as humans do. Thus, for Galileo as well, underlying all worldly phenomena was the spiritual, the divine Spirit, which in a single moment creates the idea of the world out of itself—the world being its image—which the human mind and intellect may then comprehend one thing at a time, at least, as Galileo imagined, over the course of many, many ages.

[ 18 ] Thus we see that even in the age of Copernicus, the awareness that the human soul is rooted in the spiritual-psychic realm of the universe had not yet been lost. And even in Newton we still see how, although he believed he had explained the forces of the external universe as mechanical by formulating the law of attraction and gravity, he believed the spiritual-psychic nature of the human being to be so firmly grounded in the spiritual-psychic nature of the universe that he—the discoverer of the law of gravity—simultaneously became an interpreter and commentator on the Apocalypse. The very sources that set the tone for this era were still imbued with what had indeed faded from ancient science—a science that still echoed in Aristotle and knew that the spiritual-soul aspect within the human being is connected to the spiritual-soul aspect in the vastness of the universe outside. The ancient knowledge had faded, but the traditions were still there, and one could calmly surrender to them, for something lived in the human heart that was willing to surrender to them. But the habits of thought were something else entirely. We see the thought, turned inward upon itself, growing impoverished. Where these minds themselves sought to advance toward an understanding of spiritual-soul life—Kepler, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Newton—all were still able to let the traditions reign in the living essence of their souls. But when they set out to comprehend the life of the soul using the laws they had grasped with their intellect, these soul forces—no matter how vivid they still were—proved powerless. Like the radiance of a faded primordial wisdom, the inclination toward the intellect of his God—as he believed it to be and as it existed in the tradition of his faith—lived on within Galileo.

[ 19 ] But those who, in recent times, sought to discover a lawful connection between the human soul and the spiritual-soul aspects of the world—in much the same way as they had sought, in Copernicus’s time, a lawful connection between the Earth and the stars, the world of space—found themselves confronted, at first, with the impoverishment of thought when left to its own devices. And in one of the most passionate minds of the Copernican era—namely, Giordano Bruno—we see this impoverishment of thought, which had, after all, struggled its way to such a magnificent penetration of the external world as we encounter in Kepler and Copernicus. But we now see this impoverishment of thought in the face of the laws of the spiritual world, for example, when we consider Giordano Bruno as a Renaissance man who points out that where, according to the prevailing view, the so-called “eighth sphere,” there is nothing at all, but rather that one finds worlds upon worlds everywhere, just as the Earth itself is but a small world within the great one. One need only recall this marvelous, magnificent worldview of Giordano Bruno—one that inspires both keen insight and enthusiasm—which overturns much of what had remained to humanity from ancient times; then one sees how Giordano Bruno, in particular, seeks to revive the awareness of the spiritual connection between the human soul and the spiritual world. It is clear to him that when one looks at a physical being such as the human being, one must imagine that it emerges from a spiritual universe, that the spiritual essence of the universe has, as it were, contracted within a human body, only to expand again upon the person’s death and then later contract anew. This is how he conceives of repeated earthly lives. But his thought does not become substantive or inwardly rich. The idea that had found its form through Aristotle—one that had demonstrated its dynamism and fruitfulness in relation to the external world—shrinks, in the thought of Giordano Bruno and later in that of Leibniz, who can be described as Bruno’s successor, into what both Bruno and Leibniz called a monad. What was a monad? Something thought to have been born from the spiritual world. For Leibniz, even a monad contains something like a reflection of the entire universe. But beyond mere dry abstraction—the monad, a reflection of the universe, something that contracts and expands again to traverse the universe anew—modern culture achieved nothing more. Thus, one might admire the power of Leibniz’s philosophy as an effect of Copernicus’s achievement. But when we delve into Leibniz’s philosophy, which conceives of the world as composed of monads, we see that it confronts us in such a way that one actually does not know much to say about the human soul, for it is scarcely enough to say that the soul is a reflection of the universe. We see nothing but abstract descriptions—descriptions that remain vague—when we look at what, as philosophy and the science of the spirit, immediately sprang from Copernicus’s achievement. And, fundamentally speaking, this is the extent of it. The ancient spiritual science of Aristotle—as you can see for yourself in the aforementioned book by Franz Brentano—which still retained the ancient traditions of primordial culture and even a vague awareness of them, still speaks of the human being as composed of various members of his being, conceives of him as a structure of rich harmony, relates the various parts to the various external conditions and facts, and even classifies what falls away from the human being at death together with that which originates from a spiritual world and passes into a spiritual world, thus arriving at concrete, meaningful, and rich conceptions of what is spiritual in the human soul. We thus still perceive in Aristotle a true science with a divine content. We still see the spiritual described there in the way one truly describes the spiritual again today. But by the age of Copernicus, it had shrunk to a meager monad. And the same Giordano Bruno, who finds the most fiery words when pointing out to people the greatness and infinity of the world, finds for the individual human soul nothing but the meagerness of the monad. A few concepts, strung together, are now supposed to represent the human soul—its essence captured in concepts!

[ 20 ] Here we see how the ages work, how human missions work. Humanity could never have attained its present-day culture had it not been for the advent of Copernicanism, but at the same time we see how spiritual science was initially bound to become impoverished. Only in our own time do we now see that something is emerging—and this is what spiritual science aims to be in the spirit of our age—that will once again demonstrate that now, after human thought for a time sought merely to be an instrument for comprehending the external sensory world, this human thought will also become a means of reaching an inner world that transcends mere thought. For what purpose has thought served, from the time of Copernicus onward, throughout the entire Copernican era, and indeed right up to the present day? It has served as what one might call a means for comprehending the external sensory world; it was the instrument of the external facts that the eyes see and that can be grasped with the instrument of the brain. Thought had to serve this purpose in order to obtain as objective and clear a picture as possible of what unfolds in the sensory world. Now that this state of mind has become established in human culture, thought may once again become something else—something that educates the human soul within itself. Human beings must no longer use thought merely as a reflection of external reality; rather, they must detach it in such a way that it perhaps reflects no external reality at all, but instead takes effect when the soul, through meditation and concentration, excludes everything external, so that thought becomes inwardly creative from the inner depths, and the soul arrives at a content other than that of the shrunken monad. From its mission—inherited from the age of Copernicus—to be a reflection of external reality, thought will now transition to preparing the soul; it will draw forth inner, hidden powers from the depths of the soul, enabling the soul to once again perceive what underlies the ancient Aristotelian culture. It will not be old, traditional thoughts that prove most fruitful. No, these will be the ideas discovered through the age of natural science. Precisely those ideas built upon the foundation of the Copernican era act as a source of revelation for the soul, for they draw forth from our soul those powers that enable the soul to perceive itself and then the spiritual-soul aspect of the cosmos, of the universe. Thus, the human soul—which Copernicus has shown can form an image of the external world through the powers it develops in thought—must now unfold thought in its other mission: to use thought as a means of educating the soul toward a culture of the higher self, toward a vision of the spiritual world once more.

[ 21 ] We stand at this turning point today, and this turning point in human culture must come to pass. And if we grasp the necessity that gave rise to the age of Copernicus, we can also grasp the necessity that the times must change into a new era, one in which thought transcends itself, and in which, when we speak of the soul, we no longer speak in abstractions but in concrete descriptions of deeds, qualities, and characteristic traits, thereby arriving at the full nature of the human soul. If one views spiritual science in this way, then perhaps those who today blindly follow anyone who claims in any way to know something about spiritual science will not get their due. We live today not only in a critical age, but also in an age where many people, without examining the facts, immediately follow every prophecy and the like. Just as one part of humanity today is overly critical, so the other part is overly gullible and accepts everything as if it were a revelation from spiritual worlds. But true spiritual science wants nothing to do with what arises from such a craving for all manner of prophecies and revelations. For it is not possible today for spiritual science to lead people to an understanding of our age unless an attempt is made to penetrate it and grasp what the laws governing humanity and evolution actually are. This is why, when a spirit once set out—just as Copernicus had surveyed the laws of space—to survey the development of humanity in the same way, that spirit—Lessing—arrived at the hypothesis of repeated earthly lives. How, then, will things turn out for those who are serious about spiritual culture with regard to spiritual science?

[ 22 ] This is precisely where we can learn a great deal from Copernicus. I have already mentioned what happened to Galileo because of a true adherent of Aristotle. One of his friends believed—based on an interpretation of Aristotle that was no longer understood, and which was justified in the spirit of Aristotelianism at the time—that Aristotle had taught that human nerves originate in the heart. Galileo, who based his views on genuine sensory observation, said to the man in question: “I will take you to a cadaver and show you that Aristotle was wrong, for human nerves originate in the brain.” — In fact, the man who adhered to Aristotelianism in this sense also looked at the corpse and then said: “When I observe nature, it seems to me as though the nerves originate in the brain, but from Aristotle I know that the nerves originate in the heart, and if nature contradicts Aristotle, then I believe Aristotle and not nature!” — This is no fairy tale; it is a fact that clearly demonstrates how the great truths must be incorporated into human culture despite all opposition. Therefore, we need not be surprised if something has emerged in our time that could be characterized in the following way. Someone might want to show another person, through the entire course of a child’s development, how everything a human being carries within cannot stem from mere physical heredity. This might play out as follows: he points out to the other person, “Just look at everything spiritual science has said about this subject.” — One might then imagine that one of the very intelligent people would reply: “Yes, when you spiritual scientists speak this way, it seems as if what manifests as an effect in the growing human being comes from a previous earthly life. But monism says otherwise.” And if spiritual observations contradict monism, then I believe monism and not the spiritual observation.

[ 23 ] Perhaps something similar to what happened when the Copernican era was taking hold of humanity could happen again in our own time. Many people today might say: We must regard the doctrine of repeated earthly lives as a hypothesis that rationally explains human life, but we cannot yet be convinced of it. It is said, to be sure, that those who have developed inner vision themselves perceive the soul in a state in which it reveals itself as belonging to a lawful spiritual world that transcends birth and death, but what good does it do us—who cannot thus observe the human soul as it reveals itself in its true form throughout its repeated earthly lives—if we are told about the laws of spiritual science and must accept the doctrine of repeated earthly lives merely as a hypothesis?

[ 24 ] Anyone who might say this from a materialistic-monistic perspective would thereby prove that they have not even progressed as far as the Catholic Church did with regard to the Copernican doctrine—which the Church, decades ago, did not treat leniently either. For what did people have to accept the Copernican doctrine as? Copernicus did nothing other than formulate a thought, express that thought as simply as possible, and apply it as the basis for the phenomena. With this thought, he developed a proof—not through investigations into what actually happens. And if one takes his thought, one will say: That is correct. — The very same situation exists today for those who cannot or will not take the path to spiritual insight into the human soul and its immediate nature. For today, spiritual science also demonstrates that everything that presents itself as human destiny, as human activity, and as the laws governing this activity can only be explained by accepting the law of repeated earthly lives and of karma. And it is shown that by accepting these laws, one can have the same certainty today regarding the spiritual and soul aspects of the human being as Aristotle could have through his logic regarding the content of his teaching, which flowed from primordial wisdom, and as the followers of Copernicus had regarding his teaching concerning external phenomena in space.

[ 25 ] Copernicus’s work was published in 1543. It was not until 1851 that what could truly be called proof of Copernicus’s theory became possible, for it was only then that the Foucault pendulum experiment was discovered, which demonstrates how a large pendulum, when set in motion, always swings in a single plane; and since the pendulum actually rotates in a plane, this must imply the Earth’s rotation. It was not until 1851 that an internal proof for Copernicus’s theory could be found based on the constancy of the pendulum’s oscillations. This is how it is with regard to external facts. With regard to internal facts—with regard to repeated earthly lives—a person can at any time set out on the path that leads to spiritual insight and shows them the origin of the living essence that passes through the human being from one life to the next. The inner proof, which was not provided for Copernicanism until centuries later, can be provided at any time for repeated earthly lives. But it is just as unnecessary for the acceptance of the law of repeated earthly lives and karma that someone possess this spiritual insight as it was unnecessary for the acceptance of Copernicanism that the inner proof had already been provided by Foucault’s pendulum experiment. And I said: Anyone who, for the reasons stated, would reject the doctrine of repeated earthly lives and karma would prove to be even more intolerant than the Catholic Church, which did not wait until 1851 to revoke the decree of excommunication against Copernicus’s work, but had already withdrawn it in 1821. — Perhaps the “ban-monists” will be gracious enough to retract their contradictions even sooner than the Catholic Church was, having withdrawn the decree of ban against the Copernican doctrine decades before the Foucault pendulum proof.

[ 26 ] But we, who stand on the ground of spiritual science, can learn precisely from figures such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno how that which must take root in human culture will indeed take root, despite all the persecution of heretics. For the attitudes that opposed Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and others still exist today, albeit among those who view spiritual science as mere daydreaming, fantasy, or even folly—even though they belong to the “enlightened” class. They may not compile a written or printed index, but they place spiritual science on the index of monism, just as the Catholic Church, for its part, placed Copernicus’s teachings on the index.

[ 27 ] One may resist the progress of humanity, but one cannot prevent it. And those who today dismiss spiritual science as mere fantasy will have to retract their edicts, just as the edicts against Copernicanism were retracted. Spiritual science, however, imbued with its own truth, can wait for this “Year 1821” of the materialist monists, and it will wait. It will wait by speaking to those who will already understand beforehand how spiritual science once again opens up a view of the spiritual worlds for human beings—worlds with which the innermost, essential core of human nature is so intimately connected that the human soul—understanding the world and itself, and drawing inner strength from this understanding—gives itself hope for life, confidence, and strength.

[ 28 ] What I attempted to express in my second Mystery Drama, The Trial of the Soul, regarding the sense of oneness with the spiritual essence of the universe, is what the soul can say about the connection between all its powers and universal existence:

Worldly thoughts live within your mind,
Worldly forces weave within your feelings,
Worldly beings work through your will.
Lose yourself in worldly thoughts,
Experience yourself through worldly forces,
Create yourself from beings of will.
Do not end in the distance of the worlds
Through the dream-like play of thought—;
Begin in the expanses of the spirit,
And end in the depths of your own soul.
You will find divine goals
By recognizing yourself within yourself.