The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. Raphael's Mission in the Light of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] Raphael is one of those figures in the history of human thought who appear like a star—who are simply there—so that one has the feeling they suddenly emerge from the indeterminate depths of humanity’s spiritual development and then disappear again, after having inscribed their essence into this history of human thought through their monumental creations. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear to the inquiring eye that such a human being—whom one initially assumed to shine like a star and then vanish again—fits into the whole of human spiritual life like a limb in a great organism. One has this feeling particularly with Raphael.

[ 2 ] Herman Grimm, the eminent art critic whom I had the privilege of discussing here last time, has attempted to trace Raphael’s influence and fame through the eras that followed his own, right up to the present day. He was able to show that what Raphael created continued to have an effect after his death as if it were alive, that a unified stream of spiritual development flows from Raphael’s life beyond his death and extends right up to the present day. If Herman Grimm has shown how the subsequent development of humanity endures through Raphael’s work, then one might say, on the other hand—in contrast to this spiritual view of history—that even the preceding eras can, in one way or another, give one the impression that, in a certain sense, they already pointed toward Raphael—who would only later enter the course of world history—just as a single limb fits into a whole organism.

[ 3 ] One might recall a statement Goethe once made and apply it, so to speak, from the world of space to the world of time. Goethe once made this significant statement: “How can a human being stand up to the infinite, except by gathering all the spiritual forces—which are drawn in many directions—into the innermost, deepest part of himself, and asking himself: ‘Are you even permitted to conceive of yourself in the midst of this eternally living order, unless there is also within you a persistent movement that circles around a pure center?’”

[ 4 ] Applying this saying to the course of history, one might say that, in a certain sense, the gods of Homer—who were so magnificently depicted by Homer nearly a millennium before the founding of Christianity— would lose something in our eyes as we look back at antiquity, were we not able to see how they have been resurrected in Raphael’s soul—and only there, in a certain sense, have they attained a special perfection through the powerful pictorial expression they have found in Raphael’s creations. Thus, what Homer created long before the emergence of Christianity merges with what sprang from Raphael’s soul in the sixteenth century to form an organic whole.

[ 5 ] And again: if we turn our attention to the biblical figures described in the New Testament and then consider Raphael’s paintings, we have the feeling, the sense, that something would be immediately missing if the biblical narrative had not been supplemented by the formative power found in Raphael’s Madonnas and similar works, which sprang from biblical tradition and legend. Therefore, one might say: Raphael not only lives on in the centuries that followed him, but what preceded him also merges with his own work to form an organic whole and—as it were, in order to attain its completion through him—already points to him, even if this is only expressed in later historical reflection.

[ 6 ] Thus, a phrase that Lessing used in a significant context—the phrase “the education of the human race”—appears in a special light precisely when we see how a unified spiritual essence flows through the development of humanity in this way, and how this unified essence shines forth particularly in such outstanding figures as Raphael. And what we have often been able to emphasize from the perspective of spiritual science in relation to the spiritual development of humanity—the repeated earthly lives of the human being—can be perceived in a very special way when one holds what has just been said before the inner eye. Only then does one perceive how meaningful it is that this human being appears again and again through the epochs of humanity in repeated earthly lives, carrying from one age to the next that which is to be implanted in the spiritual development of humanity. Spiritual science seeks meaning and significance in the development of humanity. It does not merely seek to present what has happened successively as part of a straight, continuous line of development, but rather aims to assign an overarching meaning to the individual epochs, so that when the human soul appears again and again in successive earthly lives, it enters this Earth in such a way that it can experience something new time and time again. Thus we can truly speak of an education that the human soul undergoes through its various earthly lives—an education through all that is created and shaped by the collective spirit of humanity.

[ 7 ] What I intend to present here—from the perspective of the humanities—regarding Raphael’s relationship to the overall development of humanity over the past few centuries is not meant to be a philosophical historical construct, but rather something that has emerged naturally through various reflections on Raphael’s body of work. And it is not because it might be, so to speak, a kind of impulse to philosophically construct the spiritual life of humanity that I am presenting what constitutes this evening’s lecture, but because everything that has emerged for me personally through various perspectives and contemplations of Raphael’s diverse works has quite naturally crystallized into what I wish to present. However, it will be impossible to go into detail about individual works by Raphael. That is only possible if one is able, by some means, to present Raphael’s paintings to the audience at the same time. But Raphael’s entire oeuvre naturally coalesces into a single, overarching impression in one’s perception. When one has studied Raphael, one carries, so to speak, something of this overall impression within one’s soul. And then one might well ask: How does this overall impression relate to the development of humanity?

[ 8 ] When one allows Raphael’s work to take effect, one’s gaze turns to a significant era with which he is intimately connected—that era which, after all, is particularly characterized by the fact that it is identified with the development of the Greek people. And indeed: when we consider the development of humanity over the past millennia, what the Greeks not only created but also experienced through their very being stands out as a kind of middle epoch within this development. What preceded Greek culture—which, in a certain sense, coincides with the founding of Christianity—appears to us as having a character entirely different from that of what followed this Greek culture. When we consider the people of the era that preceded Greek culture, we find that at that time the soul and spirit of human beings were much more intimately connected with everything physical, with the outwardly corporeal, than is the case in later times. What we today call the “internalization” of the human soul—the soul’s turning inward as it seeks to turn toward the spirit and reflect on what underlies the world as the spiritual—did not exist to the same extent in the times preceding the Greek era as it does today. Back then, whenever a person made use of their physical organs, the spiritual mysteries of existence simultaneously shone into their soul. Such an isolated contemplation of the sensory world, as is found in modern science, did not exist in earlier times. People looked at things with their senses and, as they held the sensory impression before them, simultaneously perceived what lived and wove within the things on a spiritual and soul level. Along with the things themselves and their perception through the senses, the spiritual realm revealed itself to people. In earlier times, it was not necessary to withdraw specifically from sensory impressions or to devote oneself specifically to the inner life of the soul in order to advance toward the spiritual aspect of the world.

[ 9 ] If we go back very far in human evolution, we find that even what we call, in the best sense of the word, “clairvoyant perception of things” was a common gift of humanity in primeval times, and that this clairvoyant perception was not achieved through special states of consciousness, but simply existed and was as natural as sensory perception. Then came Greek civilization with its unique worldview, about which one can say that, although it marks the beginning of the internalization of spiritual life, what the spirit experiences inwardly is still seen everywhere in connection with the external events taking place in the sensory world. In Greek civilization, the sensory and the soul-spiritual are in balance. The spiritual was no longer present as directly as in pre-Greek times alongside sensory perception. The spiritual arose, as it were, in the Greek soul—admittedly as something internally distinct, but as something one perceived when directing the senses outward. It was not in things themselves but through things that human beings became aware of the spiritual. Thus, in pre-Greek times, the human soul was, as it were, poured out into physicality. In Greek culture, it had freed itself from physicality to a certain extent, but the soul-spiritual still held the physical in balance throughout Greek culture. This is why what the Greeks created appears just as imbued with spirit as what appeared before their eyes through the senses. — Then came the post-Greek eras, those times in which the human spirit turned inward, in which it was no longer possible for the human spirit to receive, along with the sensory impression, that which lives and weaves within things as the spiritual. These were the times when the human soul had to withdraw into itself and, in isolation within a special inner life, had to experience its own strengths and triumphs if it wished to penetrate to the spiritual. Spiritual contemplation of things and sensory perception of things became, so to speak, two worlds that the human soul had to live through.

[ 10 ] How vividly what has just been said strikes us when we consider a thinker such as Augustine, who, in the post-Christian era, is hardly any further removed from the founding of Christianity than we are, for example, from the Reformation. How characteristic does the progress of humanity we have alluded to seem to us when we compare what Augustine experienced and described in his writings with what has been handed down from the Greek world! What Augustine sets forth in his *Confessions*—what he shows us as the struggles of the internalized soul, what he presents as a scene that unfolds purely within the inner soul, detached from the external world—how impossible this seems to us when we consider the thinkers of Greece, among whom we see everywhere how what exists within the soul is linked to what takes place in the external world.

[ 11 ] It can be said that the history of human development is marked by a powerful turning point. And within this history of development, on the one hand, we find Greek civilization, which shows us how humanity maintains a balance between the spiritual-soul aspects and the outwardly physical aspects. On the other hand, the founding of Christianity stands within this divide; its initial aim was to experience everything the human soul could experience, as it were, inwardly—through inner struggles and triumphs—and to turn one’s gaze not toward the sensory world in order to sense the mysteries of existence, but toward what the spirit could intuitively perceive when it surrendered itself purely to the spiritual and soul forces. How infinitely different and how separated by a deep chasm are the beautiful Greeks—the majestic and so perfectly beautiful Greek gods Zeus or Apollo—from Christ on the cross, dying, sustained by inner depth and inner greatness but not by outward beauty. This is already the outward symbol of that profound turning point that Christianity and Greek culture mark in the development of humanity. We see this turning point in the spirits that follow the Greek era, as an ever-increasing internalization of the soul takes effect.

[ 12 ] This process of internalization, which has taken place in this way, now characterizes the further course of human development. If one wishes to understand this human development from a spiritual scientific perspective, one must realize that we live in an age which—the more we consider its immediate past and the prospects we can glimpse into a possible future—appears to us, in accordance with what has just been said, as a process of progressive internalization. So that we are looking toward a future in which, in fact, an even deeper chasm—than can already be imagined from reflections on the past—will open up between everything that is happening out there in the world, everything that unfolds in the more or less mechanical, machine-like life of the external world, and what the human soul strives to attain when it seeks to grasp the heights of the spiritual—heights it wishes to ascend, which open up only when we attempt, within ourselves, to take the steps upward that lead to the spiritual. More and more, we are moving toward an age of internalization. A significant milestone, however, in relation to this progress of humanity toward interiorization in the post-Greek era is what has been left to us in the works of Raphael.

[ 13 ] Raphael stands out as a truly exceptional spirit, as if at a watershed in human development. What lies before him is, one might say, in a very special way, the beginning of human interiorization. And what lies after him represents a new chapter in this human interiorization. Even if some of what I have to say in today’s reflection may sound like a kind of symbolic contemplation, it should not be taken merely as symbolic expression, but rather as an attempt to grasp that which, due to Raphael’s truly towering greatness, can only be clothed in trivial human concepts by being compressed into the broadest possible concepts and ideas.

[ 14 ] When we try to glimpse into Raphael’s soul, what strikes us above all is how this soul appears in 1483 like a springtime birth for the soul, then undergoes an inner development, unfolds brilliantly in magnificent creations, and dies when Raphael is thirty-seven years old—still young. In order to truly immerse oneself in Raphael’s soul so that one can follow its path, one would like to turn one’s gaze away for a while from everything else that has taken place in world history and direct one’s attention purely to the inner life of Raphael’s soul.

[ 15 ] Herman Grimm was the first to point out certain patterns in the inner development of Raphael’s soul, and one might say: spiritual science certainly has no reason to be ashamed when, in the face of a skeptical humanity today, it points to certain cyclical laws, laws governing a regular spiritual path in every form of development—including individual human development—since a mind as significant as Herman Grimm’s was himself led to recognize such a regular, inner, cyclical development in Raphael’s soul, even without acknowledging spiritual science. Herman Grimm points out, in fact, that the work which delights us so much today in Milan, the “Marriage of Mary,” stands as a completely new phenomenon in the entire development of art and cannot be directly compared to anything that came before it, so that one could say, Raphael’s soul, as it were, gave birth to something from the indeterminate depths of the human soul—something that emerges from these depths and inserts itself into the overall development of the spirit as something entirely new.

[ 16 ] If we thus gain a sense of what was inherent in Raphael’s soul from birth, we can also share Herman Grimm’s perspective as we continue to trace Raphael’s soul, as we observe the progression of Raphael’s development and see how he enters certain stages in a regular course of development—stages of four years each. Remarkably, Raphael’s soul advances in cycles of four-year periods. And when we consider one such four-year period, we see Raphael at a higher stage of development for his soul each time. About four years after *The Marriage of Mary*, he painted *The Entombment*; another four years later, the paintings in the *Camera della Segnatura*; and so on in stages of four-year cycles up to that work which stood unfinished beside his deathbed, *The Transfiguration of Christ*.

[ 17 ] Because everything proceeds so harmoniously within this soul, one is drawn to contemplate it entirely on its own. But then one gains the impression that, in Raphael’s era, such inner depth was bound to develop even in the art of painting, and how that which urged itself into form—in forms that only Raphael could create—was born from the depths of spiritual experiences, even though it appears in images of sensuality. And does it not stand out just as much as history itself?

[ 18 ] Now that we have spent some time contemplating the inner world of Raphael’s soul, let us allow ourselves to be immersed in the era in which he lived and the world around him. There we find, however, that as long as Raphael was still more or less a child and growing up in Urbino, he found himself in an environment that had a stimulating effect on his significant talents as they began to assert themselves. For a palace had been built in Urbino that set all of Italy abuzz at the time. This was something that provided Raphael’s early talents with a kind of harmonious convergence. But then we see him moving to Perugia, then to Florence, then to Rome. Raphael’s life essentially unfolded within a narrow circle. How close together these places seem to us today when we consider his entire life! Raphael’s entire world was enclosed within this circle, as far as the sensory world was concerned. Only in spirit did he rise to other spheres.

[ 19 ] But now we see how, in Perugia—where Raphael was undergoing that youthful spiritual development—bloody battles were the order of the day. The city was populated by a passionately agitated people. Noble families, who lived in constant strife and discord with one another, waged war against each other. One group drove the other out of the city. After a brief expulsion, the other group then attempted to retake the city, and on more than a few occasions the streets of Perugia were covered in blood and strewn with corpses. A historian describes a remarkable scene to us; indeed, the accounts provided by historians of that era are quite peculiar. Through the eyes of a historian, we see a nobleman of the city vividly emerge, who, to avenge his relatives, enters the city as a warrior. The historian describes him to us as riding through the streets on horseback, like the very embodiment of the spirit of war itself, and striking down everything that stands in his way—yet in such a way that the historian evidently had the impression that this nobleman was exacting just revenge. And the image of that warrior, who subdues the enemy beneath his feet, emerges before the chronicler’s mind. In a painting by Raphael, *St. George*, we can literally feel this image—as sketched by the chronicler—emerge from the depiction, and we are immediately struck by the impression: it could not have been otherwise than that Raphael had allowed this scene to take hold of him, and that what must appear so terrible to us on the surface then rises from within Raphael’s soul and became the starting point for his depiction of one of the greatest and most significant paintings in the development of humanity.

[ 20 ] This is how Raphael saw humanity struggling all around him. This is how he was surrounded by confusion upon confusion, war upon war, in the city where he served his apprenticeship under his first master, Pietro Perugino, and we get the impression that there were two worlds in the city at that time: one in which cruel and terrible events unfolded, and another world that lived within Raphael’s soul and which, in essence, had little to do with what was happening around him in the physical world.

[ 21 ] Then, in 1504, we find Raphael having moved to Florence. What was Florence like when Raphael entered the city? At first, the inhabitants gave the impression of weary people who had been through internal and external upheavals and were living with a certain weariness and fatigue. What had Florence not been through! Struggles just as in Perugia, bloody persecutions of various families, but also conflicts with the outside world; and then the profound experience of Savonarola, which stirred the souls of the entire city—he who had died a martyr’s death shortly before Raphael arrived. There he stands before us, this peculiar figure of Savonarola, railing with fiery words against the abuses of the time—indeed, against the cruelties of the Church, against secularization, against the paganism of the Church. As we lose ourselves in contemplation, Savonarola’s impassioned words resonate within us—words with which he captivated all of Florence, so that the people not only hung on his every word but revered him as if a higher spirit had stood before them in that ascetic body.

[ 22 ] Savonarola’s words had transformed the city of Florence, as if a kind of religious reformer had immediately permeated the city’s religious ideas and the entire city, including its government. As if a theocracy had been established, Florence stood under Savonarola’s influence. And then we see how Savonarola succumbs to the very powers against which he had taken a stand, both morally and religiously. A poignant image arises before our minds’ eye: Savonarola being led with his companions to the martyr’s pyre, and how, from that gallows from which he was to fall onto the pyre, he turned his eyes downward—it was in May 1498 — toward the people who had once hung on his every word, who had now abandoned him as well and looked with such disaffection upon the man who had inspired them for so long. Few remained—among them artists—in whose hearts Savonarola’s words still resonated. There was a painter of that time who, after Savonarola had suffered a martyr’s death, donned the monk’s habit himself in order to continue working in his spirit within his order.

[ 23 ] One can imagine the weary atmosphere that hung over Florence. It is into this atmosphere that we see Raphael transported in the year 1504, bringing with him the spring breeze of the spirit through the medium of his art, which, as it were, kindled a spiritual fire in this city—albeit of a very different kind than that which Savonarola could provide. When we thus behold Raphael’s soul—so very unlike the mood of this city, appearing to us so truly in its isolation—when we see him, united with artists and painters, creating in a solitary studio in Florence or elsewhere, another image immediately emerges before us, one that, one might say, even more vividly and historically demonstrates how Raphael’s soul was something inwardly set apart even from the external world with which it was in direct contact. There emerge the figures of the Roman popes—Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X—the entire papal system against which Savonarola had directed his words of wrath, and against which the Reformers had turned. Yet it appears in such a way that we see in this papal system, at the same time, Raphael’s protector; that we see Raphael’s soul in the service of the papacy—and thus see that his soul truly had little in common, inwardly, with what we encounter, for example, in his protector, Pope Julius II, who, after all, said that to people he appeared like someone with a devil inside him who would most like to bare his teeth at his enemies at every opportunity.

[ 24 ] These popes were great figures, but they were certainly not what Savonarola or his like-minded followers would have called “Christians.” The papacy had shifted to a new form of paganism—though not in the old sense of the term. There was little sign of Christian piety in these circles, but plenty of splendor, a thirst for domination, and a lust for power—among the popes as well as those around them. We see Raphael, as it were, as the servant of this Christianity that had become pagan. But how? We see him in such a way that something is created from within his soul, through which Christian ideas often appear in a new form. We see the most intimate and lovely aspects of the Christian world of legends come to life in Raphael’s depictions of the Madonna and in his other works. What a contrast between the inner spiritual depth of Raphael’s work and what was happening around him when he eventually became the outward servant of the popes in Rome! But how was all this possible? If we observe, first at his early school in Perugia and then in Florence, how dissimilar the external was to his inner world, we see this most clearly in Rome, where—amidst a system of cardinal and priestly domination that was, for Savonarola at least, unheard-of (though he, too, was not unlike Raphael)—he created his world-dominating paintings. And yet: one must view Raphael and his circle in this light if one wishes to form a true picture of what lived within his soul.

[ 25 ] Let us allow Raphael’s paintings to speak to us! We cannot do this in detail tonight, but at least one of the better-known paintings deserves special mention so that we can gain a deeper understanding of the very distinctive spiritual quality of Raphael’s soul. It is the “Sistine Madonna,” which is so dear to us, located in Dresden, and which almost everyone is familiar with from the countless reproductions that are spread throughout the world. As she stands before us as one of the most magnificent and noble works of art in the history of humanity, as the mother and child appear to us, floating down from the heights of the clouds that cover the globe, emerging—one might say—from the indefinite, the spiritual super-sensible world, clothed and surrounded by clouds that form human-like figures of their own accord—one of which, as if condensed, resembles the Madonna’s child—the way she appears there evokes very special feelings within us, of which we can safely say that when they permeate our soul, we could forget all the legendary notions from which the image of the Madonna has grown, and forget everything that Christian traditions tell us about the Madonna.

[ 26 ] I do not wish to present this as a dry characterization, but rather to describe as generously as possible what we can feel toward the Madonna. Anyone who views human evolution from the perspective of spiritual science transcends all materialistic views. According to the natural scientific view, lower life forms developed first, and then evolution progressed upward to the human being. From a spiritual scientific perspective, however, we must see in the human being an essential being that transcends everything below it in the natural kingdoms. When we encounter a human being, from a spiritual scientific point of view, we perceive in them something that is much older than all the beings that are more or less closely related to them in the various natural kingdoms.

[ 27 ] For spiritual science, the human being existed before the beings of the animal, plant, and even mineral kingdoms came into being. From a broader perspective, we look back at the course of evolution in which what is now our innermost being was already present—that which later became integrated into the kingdoms that now stand below the human being. Thus we see a human being floating toward us from a superterrestrial world; we see that, in truth, we can only comprehend this human being when we rise above all that the Earth can create and bring forth from within itself to something extraterrestrial, to something even pre-terrestrial. We can know this through spiritual science: even if we allow all the forces and all the essential qualities connected with the Earth itself to take effect upon us, no image of the whole essential human being can be derived from all this; rather, we must lift our gaze from all that is earthly to super-earthly regions and see this human essence floating toward us from them. If we wish to speak in parables, we must first feel how something floats toward the earthly realm; for example, when in the morning—especially in a region such as that in which Raphael lived—we turn our gaze toward a sunrise, toward that golden, gleaming sunrise, and there we can gain a sense of how, even in natural existence, something must be added to what is earthly—forces that work into the earthly realm, forces that we must always associate with the sun. Then, out of the golden radiance, the symbol of that which floats toward us to clothe itself in the earthly rises before our soul.

[ 28 ] In Perugia, in particular, one can feel as though one’s eyes are witnessing the very same sunrise that Raphael once experienced, and that the natural phenomena of the rising sun can evoke a sense of what is transcendent in human beings. From the clouds glistening with the gold of the sun, the image of the Madonna and Child may emerge—or one may at least feel as if it appears that way—as a symbol of the eternally transcendent in human beings, which approaches the earth from beyond the earthly realm and, still separated from it by clouds, possesses within itself all that can arise from the earthly realm. Our sensibility can feel elevated to the highest spiritual heights when we surrender ourselves—not theoretically, not in the abstract, but with our whole soul—to what Raphael’s Madonna evokes in us, and allow ourselves to be permeated by it. It is a natural feeling that we can experience in this way before the world-famous Dresden painting. And as evidence that it has had such an effect on some people, I would like to cite the words that Goethe’s friend, Karl August—then still Duke of Weimar—wrote about the Sistine Madonna after a visit to Dresden:

[ 29 ] “With the Raphael that adorns the collection there, I felt as if I had spent the whole day climbing the Gotthard Pass, passed through the Urseler Loch, and suddenly beheld the blooming, verdant valley. Whenever I looked at it and then looked away, it always seemed to me merely like a vision before my soul; even the most beautiful Correggios were to me merely images of human beings; their memory, like their beautiful forms, was sensually palpable. Raphael, however, always remained to me merely a breath, like one of those apparitions that the gods send us in female form to make us happy or unhappy; like the images that reappear to us in sleep, whether we are awake or dreaming, and whose gaze, once it has met ours, watches us eternally, day and night, and stirs our very core.”

[ 30 ] And it is curious: when one follows the writings of those who, based on their own feelings, can express a profound emotion specifically upon seeing the Sistine Madonna—but also in other paintings by Raphael—one repeatedly encounters, whenever people seek to describe what they feel, comparisons to light, to the sun, to that which illuminates, and to the spirit of spring.

[ 31 ] Here we can catch a glimpse into Raphael’s soul as it engages, from within the described conditions of its surroundings, in a dialogue with the eternal mysteries of becoming human. Here we sense how unique Raphael’s soul is—not something that has grown out of its surroundings, but rather something that points to an immense human past. There is no need to speculate. Such a soul—which looks out into the world and, from within itself, expresses the mystery of existence not through ideas but by feeling it and shaping it into such an image—such a soul then presents itself, quite naturally through such inner perfection, as the most mature of souls, one that truly carries within its dispositions some of the forces of humanity, a soul that must have passed through other epochs of human development—and especially through many of those epochs that poured something great and mighty into this soul—so that it can emerge once more in what we call Raphael’s life. But how does it emerge?

[ 32 ] We see what lives on in Christian legends and traditions emerge in Raphael’s paintings in the midst of an era in which Christianity had become almost pagan and was devoted entirely to outward form and splendor—much like Greek paganism was depicted in its gods and, above all, worshiped by the Greeks, who were intoxicated by beauty. We see Raphael shaping these figures from Christian tradition in an age when what had long been buried under rubble and ruins on Roman soil was being unearthed once more. We see that Raphael himself was among those conducting the excavations. This Rome, into which Raphael was transported at that time, strikes us as remarkable.

[ 33 ] What preceded this period? First, we see the centuries when Rome emerged, built entirely upon the egoism of individual human beings who, above all else, sought to establish a human community—a community in the external physical world—based on what a person, as a citizen of a state, was supposed to represent. Then, once Rome had reached a certain height, once the imperial era had dawned, we see how it absorbs Hellenism as Hellenic culture flows into Roman intellectual life, and we witness how Rome, while politically subduing Greece, is intellectually subdued by Greece. Hellenism then lives on within Roman culture. We see how Greek art, to the extent that it was absorbed by Rome, lives on in the Roman essence; we see Rome thoroughly imbued with the Greek spirit.

[ 34 ] But why did this Greek character not remain a defining feature of Italy’s development in the centuries that followed? Why did something entirely different emerge instead? Because soon after this Greek culture had spread into the Roman world, something else arrived that left a stronger imprint on what was developing as intellectual life on Italian soil: Christianity, the internalization of Christianity—that which was not meant to speak to humanity in the same way as the outward, sensory aspects of the Greek cities, Greek sculpture, or Greek philosophy, but rather to speak to the inner human soul through that which enters it formlessly, that which is meant to grip the human soul only through inner struggles. That is why we see figures such as Augustine emerge—entirely inward figures.

[ 35 ] But then, because everything in development proceeds cyclically and goes through cycles, we see that after this process of internalization—in those people who have undergone it and who, for a long time, have lived in their souls, so to speak, without any connection to beauty in its outward form—that longing for beauty emerges. That longing for beauty begins to emerge. They once again see the inner in the outer. It is significant, then, when we see the internalized life of Francis of Assisi brought to life before our eyes by Giotto in Assisi, when we see the inner experiences expressed in Giotto’s paintings—experiences that, so to speak, Christianity can bring about in the human soul. And even if—if I may be permitted the expression—we still sense that the inner life of the human soul is expressed somewhat awkwardly and imperfectly in Giotto’s paintings, we nevertheless see a steady ascent to that point where the innermost, the most sublime, and the noblest aspects of the soul confront us in outward form in the works of Raphael and his contemporaries. There we are once again drawn to a distinctive feature of this soul of Raphael.

[ 36 ] If we try to put ourselves in Raphael’s shoes and imagine how he himself must have felt, we must admit: Yes, when we see works of art such as the “Madonna della Sedia,” we are struck by how the Madonna with the Child—and before them, the child John—stand before us in such a way that, as we gaze upon them, we could forget the rest of the world, and above all, we could forget that this child, held by the Madonna, might one day be linked to those events we know as the events on Golgotha. Before Raphael’s painting, we forget everything that followed as the “life of Christ Jesus.” We are completely absorbed in the moment captured here. We simply behold a mother with a child, of whom Herman Grimm said that it is the most sublime mystery that can meet us in the outer world. We gaze upon this moment in a tranquility as if nothing could precede or follow it. We become completely absorbed in the relationship between the Madonna and her child, isolating it for ourselves from everything else with which it is otherwise connected. And thus, complete in themselves—with the eternal always revealing itself to us in a single moment—Raphael’s creations essentially appear.

[ 37 ] Yes, how must a soul feel that creates in this way? It cannot feel, for example, like the soul of Savonarola, who, seized by an inner fiery passion, feels the entire tragedy of Christ within himself when he utters his words of wrath, or even when he speaks his religiously uplifting, pious words to listeners engaged in Christian devotion. We cannot imagine that Raphael’s soul possessed the fervor of Savonarola’s or a similar spirit; we cannot imagine that this so-called Christian fire raged within Raphael’s soul. Nevertheless, if we are able to allow the essence of a human soul to make an impression on us to some extent, we must not imagine that, in such inwardness, in such inner perfection, Christian concepts could be brought vividly before us by Raphael—if this soul had been as completely alien to the Christian fire as it appears to us to be when it approaches this Christian fire, when it works entirely objectively on such images.

[ 38 ] One cannot create figures that are objective and well-rounded if, for example, one is imbued with the fire of Savonarola, if one is carried by the entire tragic mood of Christ within one’s soul and feels inspired by it. A completely different kind of calm and a completely different sensibility must have flowed into the soul through Christian feeling. Nevertheless, what is expressed in Raphael’s paintings could not have emerged from the soul unless the very essence of Christian inner life had been alive within that soul. Is it not then almost natural for us to say to ourselves: Yes, here we have before us a soul that already brought with it into physical existence—which it entered as the painter Raphael—that very fire we perceive at work in Savonarola? When we see this soul bringing that fire into existence through birth from earlier earthly lives, then we understand how it could be so serene, so inwardly perfected, that this fire does not confront us as something, so to speak, that consumes and disrupts enthusiasm, but can appear as the serenity of the pictorial creator. One is tempted to say: one already senses in Raphael’s innate dispositions something that seems as though it were alive within them, as if in a previous life he had been able to speak with the same fire as Savonarola later did. And one would not be surprised to find in Raphael’s soul a reborn soul from a time when Christianity was not perceived as visual or as existing within art, but as standing directly at its very foundation, when it had at its starting point the great impulse through which it then worked over the course of the centuries.

[ 39 ] Perhaps it is not too bold, in order to understand a soul such as Raphael’s, to draw upon something like what has just been said. For whoever has learned, through ever-renewed immersion in Raphael’s works, to revere this soul in its depths—to behold it in its “depths” as it works with unfathomable depth—cannot help but, through such profound feeling, make sense of and convey to others what speaks to us where Raphael has poured his soul into his marvelous works.

[ 40 ] Thus, Raphael’s mission truly appears to us in its proper light only when, to borrow an expression from Goethe, we seek the Christian fire in a “life now past,” which then appears to us in a later life as the serenity of his existence as Raphael. Then we also understand how this soul had to place itself so isolated within the world, and we also grasp how that soul—which we have just attempted to characterize, and which perhaps, albeit to a greater degree, possessed something “Savonarola-like” in a previous existence—was able to perceive as something new what had now reemerged in the spiritual development of Italy during Raphael’s time.

[ 41 ] If, during the period when the Empire was emerging and had then taken hold, Greek culture had played a role in Roman development, as has been described, and if an internalization had subsequently taken place, we now see, in the age of Raphael, the Renaissance, on the one hand, this ancient Greek culture, which had been buried under rubble and ruins, reemerging; we see Rome being populated by what remained of Greek culture; we see the resurgence of what had once adorned and beautified the city as the Greek spirit; we see the eyes of the Roman populace turning once more toward the forms that the Greek spirit had once created. On the other hand, however, we also see in this era how the spirit of Plato, the spirit of Aristotle, and the spirit of the Greek tragedians penetrate Roman life. Once again, we witness the conquest of the Roman world by Greek culture. Perhaps it was precisely for such a spirit—one who had once been one-sidedly devoted to the moral-religious outlook of Christianity and who, in a previous life, had surrendered his soul entirely to these moral-religious impressions—that Hellenism had to have a fertilizing and renewing effect, just as it emerged from the rubble and ruins to appear on the Italian Peninsula.

[ 42 ] If, then, one views the moral and religious impulse of Christianity as inherent in Raphael’s innate disposition, one sees what was not yet present in that disposition emerge before his very eyes in the revived Greek civilization. More than on any other soul, the statues resurrected from rubble and ruins and the products of the Greek spirit, unearthed from rediscovered manuscripts, had a profound effect on Raphael’s soul. What emerged from his innate dispositions and from his Christian sensibility—combined with a transcendent devotion to the cosmic—interacted with what was revived from his own era as the Greek spirit. These were the two elements that united within his soul and brought about the fact that, in Raphael’s works, we encounter the inner life created by the post-Greek era, the inner life that Christianity poured into the development of humanity, and what found expression in, one might say, a completely outward revelation in a pictorial world of forms, from which the purest Greek spirit speaks everywhere.

[ 43 ] Thus we see the remarkable phenomenon that, through Raphael, Greek culture is revived within Christianity. Thus we see a form of Christianity emerging in Raphael at a time that, in a certain sense, represents the anti-Christian spirit all around him. We see that in him a form of Christianity emerges that went far beyond all the narrowness of previous Christianity and rose to a broad perspective on the world of that time. And yet we see a Christianity that does not point intuitively toward infinite spheres of the purely spiritual, but rather unites itself—just as the ancient Greeks once united their ideas of the gods in artistic form—with that which, formless, permeates and interweaves the world, and has pressed it into the forms from which it simultaneously delights our senses.

[ 44 ] This is what comes to mind when we try to form an overall picture, when one or another of Raphael’s creations flows into our soul, when we allow ourselves to be moved by everything that can affect us with the highest perfection—and yet with the most wondrous youthful exuberance, for Raphael died at the age of 37. Not for the sake of some abstract theory, and certainly not for the sake of some philosophical historical construct, but springing from the immediate sensation that Raphael’s works evoke, it must be said: In a spirit as towering as Raphael’s, the laws governing the progression of human spiritual life are truly revealed.

[ 45 ] Anyone who imagines this progression of spiritual life as a straight line, where effect always follows cause, is truly out of step with reality. It is all too easy to cite a saying that certainly ranks among humanity’s golden maxims: that life and nature do not make leaps. Certainly, but in many respects, life and nature are constantly making leaps. We can see this in the development of a plant from a green leaf to a flower, and from a flower to a fruit. There we see how, although everything “develops,” leaps are in fact the norm.

[ 46 ] The same is true of humanity’s spiritual life, and this is still shrouded in many mysteries. One of these mysteries is that a later epoch must always draw upon an earlier one. One might say: just as the masculine and the feminine must interact, so too must the various spirits of the ages interact, mutually enriching one another, so that further development may take place. Thus, Roman culture had to be enriched by Greek culture as early as the imperial period so that a new spirit of the age could emerge. And so, in turn, this spirit of the age that arose had to be enriched by the Christian impulse so that the process of internalization we then see in Augustine and others could take place. Similarly, later on, the human soul of Raphael—which was so advanced inwardly—had to be enriched anew by Greek culture, which had been doubly buried yet emerged once more, which had been doubly concealed: from view in the works of art that lay buried beneath the soil of Italy, and from the souls in the buried literary works that embodied the Greek spirit. These centuries of the first Christian millennium in Italy were scarcely, extraordinarily scarcely, touched by what lived on in Greek philosophy and Greek poetry.

[ 47 ] Greek culture was doubly buried and waited, as it were, as if in a realm beyond this world, for a time when it could once again inspire the human soul, which had in the meantime passed through a new religion. Buried, hidden from the outward eyes of people, and buried again for the souls who had no inkling that it would continue to develop, that it existed, while it simply flowed on like a river that sometimes flows a long way beneath a mountain, hidden from view, and then resurfaces. Buried—externally to the senses, internally to the depths of the soul—was this Greek culture. Now it emerged once more. For sensory perception, it was unearthed from the soil of Italy in works of art; for spiritual contemplation, it was unearthed not only by retrieving it from the ancient manuscripts, but by beginning once more to perceive, in the Greek sense, how the spirit lives in all that is sensory, and how everything sensory is a revelation of the spiritual. People began once more to perceive what Plato and Aristotle had once conceived.

[ 48 ] But the one on whom this could have the most fruitful effect—because his soul, in its very nature, had most fully assimilated the Christian impulses—was Raphael. In his case, this Greek culture—twice buried and twice resurrected—now had such an effect that he was able to shape the entire development of humanity in his figures. How wonderfully he was able to do this in the paintings of the “Camera della Segnatura,” where we see the ancient spiritual struggle re-emerging in the images—the struggle of those spirits that had taken shape during the period of internalization—spirits that were not present during the era of Greek civilization. For them to be perceived in this way during Raphael’s time, the entire period of internalization was necessary. Now we see this internalization painted on the walls of the papal chambers.

[ 49 ] What the Greeks had merely conceived in the form of figures, we now see internalized. The inner strivings and spirit of struggle that humanity itself has undergone, we see conjured onto the walls of the papal palace through the Greek spirit of form, the Greek artistic sensibility, and Greek beauty. The way the Greeks imagined the gods influencing the world, they poured that vision into their statues. The way people had experienced their progress toward the foundations of things is presented to us in the painting so often called the “School of Athens.” The way the human soul learned to behold the Greek gods is revealed to our soul in a unique reinterpretation of Homer’s gods in *Parnassus*. These are not the gods of the *Iliad* and *Odyssey*, but rather the gods as seen by a soul that had already passed through the epoch of interiorization!

[ 50 ] On the opposite wall we see the painting that must remain unforgettable to everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs—even though it is now almost impossible to form a conception of it—the painting that depicts the innermost essence, the “Disputa.” While the other paintings depict what one struggles to grasp through a certain philosophical striving—albeit in the beauty of Greek forms—the painting opposite confronts us with the deepest experience the human soul can have. And the fact that we need not think in terms of a narrow Christian consciousness becomes clear here when we find the Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva motif expressed in an entirely different way. We see, as the Trinity facing us, what the human soul can experience inwardly—every soul, regardless of which faith it belongs to. It confronts us—but not merely as a symbolic representation—in the symbolism of the Trinity in the upper part of the painting. It further confronts us in every face of the Church Fathers and philosophers, in every gesture of the hand, in the entire arrangement of the figures, and in the marvelous color scheme. It confronts us in the totality of the painting, which reveals to us the inner life of the human soul in a beautiful form imbued with the Greek spirit. Thus we see the inner life that the human soul has experienced over the course of one and a half millennia resurrected as an outward revelation. We see Christianity not as the paganism of the Roman popes and cardinals, but as the beautiful, magnificent, form-creating Greek paganism—and yet Christianity—resurrected in Raphael’s paintings.

[ 51 ] Thus, this Raphael soul stands at the turning point, as it were, at the watershed of the ages, pointing back to its past, bringing to light what had developed up to the time of Christianity in the beauty of outward manifestations, and at the same time turning toward what has emerged in human development as what is called the “education of the human race”—and what the reawakening soul reveals as the internalization of this human soul. Thus, we stand before these paintings by Raphael, before these marvels of a unique art, in such a way that they appear to us as a confluence of two ages that are clearly and distinctly separated from one another: the preceding post-Hellenic age, the age of external experience, and that of inner experience.

[ 52 ] But we stand before these images in such a way that they simultaneously open up a perspective into the future for us. For who among those who sense what could come to be through the convergence of outer beauty and the inner, wisdom-filled impulse of the human soul would not feel the hope and assurance that, despite all external developments—which must continue to evolve further and further as humanity progresses—this internalization must advance in the course of evolution, and that the human soul must find ever more inward periods in its subsequent lives?

[ 53 ] One can understand what one encounters in literature—though, of course, one encounters it only if one does not approach the works of a mind like Herman Grimm’s as an art scholar or a mere reader; he sought with his whole soul to portray the workings of the human imagination, one can understand it when, at a certain point in Herman Grimm’s work on Raphael, one finds words that become something very special—if one contemplates a mind like Herman Grimm with deep empathy and sees how he himself stood before Raphael’s creations with such deep empathy. But one must sense, at that particular passage in the book on Raphael, what stirred Herman Grimm’s soul when he used a word that he merely hints at, already on the very first pages of his book, at the point where his gaze falls upon Raphael’s emergence from ancient times. In fact, judging by the outward presentation of Raphael’s work in Herman Grimm’s book, one cannot quite discern where this thought originates. Amid broad historical reflections into which Raphael is woven, the thought occurs to Herman Grimm and is written down—modestly written down: “I see before my eyes developments of humanity that I will be denied the chance to experience, but which appear to me so brilliantly beautiful that, for their sake, it would surely be worth the effort to begin human life all over again.”

[ 54 ] It is remarkable to find this longing for “re-embodiment” in the introduction to Herman Grimm’s book on Raphael; it is deeply revealing of the inner sensibility of a man who sought to empathize fully with Raphael’s soul and with Raphael’s connection to other eras. Doesn’t one sense something there that might be expressed something like this: Works such as those by Raphael are not merely a result. They do not merely lead to a contemplation that makes us realize how grateful we must be for what the past has given us up to our own age; rather, such works can also give rise to an entirely different feeling within us—the feeling of hope—because they strengthen our faith in the progress of humanity, and because we must tell ourselves that these works could not be as they are if humanity were not, by its very nature, a being for whom progress is inherent. Thus we gain certainty, thus we gain hope, when we allow Raphael to influence us in the true sense, and then we may say: Through what he created artistically, Raphael spoke to humanity!

[ 55 ] When we look at the frescoes in the “Camera della Segnatura,” we certainly sense the transience of the physical work, and that these often-overpainted works no longer allow us to imagine what Raphael once conjured up on those walls. We sense that one day a humanity will live on Earth that will not be able to experience the original works for themselves. But we know that humanity will always continue to move forward.

[ 56 ] Essentially, Raphael’s works did not begin their triumphant march until countless paintings, engravings, and reproductions of them were created with devotion and love. These works of Raphael continue to have an impact, even in their reproductions. It is understandable, then, when Herman Grimm recounts that he once hung a large phototype of the “Sistine Madonna” in his room, and that whenever he entered that room, he always felt as though he were not quite allowed to enter, as though it belonged to the Madonna, to the image itself, like a sanctuary. Many a person will surely have experienced how the soul actually becomes a different being than it is in ordinary life when it can truly lose itself in a Raphael painting—even a mere reproduction. Certainly, the originals will one day be no more. But do the originals even exist in other fields?

[ 57 ] It is true, as Herman Grimm admits in his book on Homer: We can no longer truly appreciate Homer’s originals either, because in our ordinary lives, without higher spiritual powers, we are no longer able to immerse ourselves in all the nuances and turns of the Greek language, in its beauty and power, when we now allow Homer’s *Iliad* and *Odyssey* to take effect upon us. We no longer have the originals either; yet Homer’s poems still speak to us. But what Raphael gave us in visual form will continue to live on as a living testimony to the fact that there was once a time in the development of humanity when, for the vast majority of people, it was not possible to immerse oneself in the printed and written word—for that was by no means common practice back then— but in which the mysteries of existence spoke to people’s eyes through Raphael’s creations. Raphael’s age was one that read less but saw more. A testimony to this age—which was of a different nature but will continue to exert its influence into all future times, because humanity is a single organism—will be what Raphael will always have to say to humanity. Thus, Raphael’s creation will live on in the course of human development, and will also live on inwardly in the successive lives that Raphael’s spirit is to live through—lives in which he has ever greater and ever more deeply internalized gifts to bestow upon humanity.

[ 58 ] Thus, spiritual science points, so to speak, to a twofold continuation of life: to the continuation described in the lectures already given and which will be discussed further, and to another spiritual life—one to which we always aspire—that becomes our guide as we pass through ever-new epochs of this earthly existence. And it is true what Herman Grimm expressed in words that summarized what had arisen in his feelings and perceptions from his comprehensive description of Raphael: “Even if Raphael’s work should one day have long since faded away or been destroyed, Raphael will still live on for humanity; for in him something has come into being for humanity that is implanted in the spirit of this humanity in every respect, something that will forever sprout and bear fruit.”

[ 59 ] This is what the human soul will feel if it can immerse itself sufficiently in Raphael. Essentially, we have not fully understood Raphael until we can elevate and deepen—from a spiritual-scientific perspective—the feeling that Herman Grimm felt so deeply permeating him—we described last time how close he was to spiritual science—as he gazed at Raphael time and again. We come to understand ourselves in our relationship to Raphael; we understand how such reflections—as we have attempted to present them today in our contemplation of Raphael—can take root as seeds, when we finally summarize what actually needed to be said today in the words of Herman Grimm: “People will always want to know about Raphael—about the young, beautiful painter who surpassed all others. Who died too young. Whose death all of Rome mourned. Even if Raphael’s works were ever to be lost, his name will remain etched in people’s memories.”

[ 60 ] So said Herman Grimm when he began to describe Raphael in his own way. We understand this. And we understand him once again when, at the end of his work on Raphael, he concludes his reflection with the words: “Everyone will want to know about the life’s work of such a man. Raphael has become one of the elements upon which the higher education of the human spirit is based. We wish to draw closer to him, because we need him for our well-being.”