The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. Voltaire from the Perspective of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] Shortly after Voltaire’s death in 1778, Lessing’s work The Education of the Human Race was published, and one might say that this work, in a certain sense, provides the starting point for a view of history grounded in the humanities. This work by Lessing, “The Education of the Human Race,” was mentioned repeatedly in these lectures. Drawing on the consciousness of the eighteenth century, it seeks to find rational grounds for what spiritual science, from its own perspective, must once again advocate today: the repeated earthly lives of human beings.

[ 2 ] Anyone who attempts to think through Lessing’s arguments in this, the most mature work of his life—the “testament” of his intellectual work, so to speak—will find that the ideas in this work bring coherence to the entire structure of human historical development. In this historical development of humanity, we see successive epochs that differ from one another. When we look back at earlier epochs, we find that the human soul experienced different things and sought its ideals in different ways than in later epochs. We can say, in a sense, that the various epochs of historical development stand out sharply from one another due to the nature of what they are able to offer the human soul. And meaning and coherence are brought into this entire historical development when one considers that this human soul—which, according to the belief that human life occurs only once, could, so to speak, participate only in the cultural blessings and cultural impressions of a single cultural epoch—appears again and again in repeated earthly lives, in the sense of Lessing and modern spiritual science; that it draws from each epoch whatever that epoch is able to offer the human soul; that it then undergoes a life between death and the next birth in a purely spiritual world; and that it then reappears in the next epoch—naturally with some variations in the details of each individual life—in order to carry over the fruits, results, and impressions of the previous epoch into the next. Therefore, we can say: what the human soul is to us lives throughout the entire course of historical development; it participates in all epochs. And thus, if we take up Lessing’s idea once more, we can truly speak of a kind of education of the human soul through the spirit of the successive epochs of historical life on Earth. Once we examine more closely—in the spirit of modern spiritual science—what one might say lies in its elementary beginnings even in Lessing’s ideas about the education of the human race, then in the realm of historical reflection—the realm in which our soul develops above all—we will have reached the same level of understanding that we believe we have attained today in the purely natural scientific field. Only then will we, in essence, truly have a history. Only then will we be able to bring meaning and coherence into the organism of historical development; we will recognize how one epoch builds upon another, what the souls of the various epochs possess, why they are placed within the various epochs—in other words: one will recognize the lawful workings and operations of historical epochs just as one today comes to know the workings and operations of the forces of nature as revealed by the natural sciences. Then what spiritual science has to say will no longer appear as fantastical as it might still seem to so many people today. Then people will begin to smile less at the fact that spiritual science must recognize not only a physical-bodily shell for the human being—one that is woven around the person at birth and consists of various limbs—but also an inner spiritual-soul being of the human being, which, however, must be viewed in such a way that its various formations, structures over the course of human epochs.

[ 3 ] In the context of spiritual science, we actually distinguish three structures within the human soul, as it has developed up to the present era. One might say: the most primitive part of this structure—in which the blind passions are still more active and the drives and emotions pulsate, but into which also flows what our perceptions of the physical external world convey to us—is what we call, in the context of spiritual science, the sensory soul. In contrast to this sensory soul, we then speak of another aspect of the soul that reveals the human being to us with greater inner depth, showing him as he can perceive himself once he turns his gaze away from his entire physical surroundings and rises above what reigns within him as more unconscious drives, emotions, and passions. We call this higher aspect of the human soul the intellectual or emotional soul, in which the human being’s spiritual life is already more internalized. And as the highest member of the human soul—that member in which, above all, self-reflective thinking, the human being’s full self-consciousness, and the purest sense of “I” and self-awareness find expression—we call, in the sense of spiritual science, the conscious soul. But we do not speak of these three members—the sensory soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the conscious soul—as if they were abstractions or arbitrarily constructed concepts and ideas; rather, we speak of them in such a way that we simultaneously observe how, in the course of humanity’s historical development, these three members of the soul gradually unfold.

[ 4 ] If we were to go far back in the course of history, beyond the times when Homer and Hesiod composed their works, when the Greek tragedians lived, and when Greek philosophy emerged, we would find what we still recognize today in the echoes of ancient Egyptian and Chaldean culture. Much of this has already been brought to light by conventional research. Spiritual science, however, shows that during the epoch extending from the eighth to the tenth century B.C.E. back into the second to third millennia, human souls—that is, our souls as they were embodied at that time—underwent something that cannot yet be compared at all to life today, to the entire structure and nature of how we live today. What we call modern thinking—what, so to speak, appears to us as a matter of course in the scientific view of the world—would have been impossible back then. It would also have been impossible for the human soul, one might say, to feel so strictly separated—as if isolated within itself—from the rest of nature at the most crucial moments of its life. All of that was still impossible in those days. Human beings felt, with their souls, as if they were right there within the entire cosmos, within the rest of nature; they felt like a part of the rest of nature, just as a hand—if it could have consciousness—would have to feel like a part of the organism. Only today, with the help of spiritual science, can we form a conception of the entirely different inner life that extended roughly into the eighth to tenth centuries B.C.E. When a person back then said, “My instincts drive me to take a step forward,” or when they said, ‘I am breathing’—or when they felt hunger or satiety—they perceived in this transition of inner experience into bodily movement something to which they related in the same way they related to those other experiences, such as when they said to themselves: ‘It is lightning, it is thundering,’ or ‘The wind is whistling through the trees.’ Human beings had not separated what they experienced in their souls from what was happening outside; they were immersed in the rest of nature with their entire inner life. But because they were not yet able to separate themselves from the rest of nature—because they still felt themselves to be a part of the great overall organism—they also possessed a primal clairvoyance, a capacity to look into the spiritual world. He did not see nature as we see it today, but as imbued with spiritual beings, toward whom we are once again striving today through the methods of spiritual science. In those times, it was natural to view nature as both imbued with a soul and with a spirit; yet it was not possible to experience natural processes through thoughts such as we have today, but rather they were perceived in images, and these images were what the laws of nature are to us today; and something of these images has been preserved to this day in the legends and mythologies of the peoples, and even in authentic fairy tales. In ancient times, human beings had an imaginative, pictorial way of thinking. — Today we can attain these insights not only with the help of spiritual science, but I hope that in the new edition of my Worldviews and Views of Life in the Nineteenth Century—now expanded to include a prehistory of the entire Western spiritual life—I will have succeeded in demonstrating what I set out to show: that one can view spiritual life from a purely philosophical perspective, and that one can then discover how a pictorial imagination—which only gradually gave way to the Greco-Latin mode of thinking—existed in primeval times, and how the human soul, through this ancient, still pictorial imagination, felt itself immersed in the total organism of the world, which it could conceive of as imbued with spirit. This took place primarily in the soul of sensation.

[ 5 ] The Greco-Roman conception, which persisted into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of our Christian era, focused primarily on the intellectual or emotional soul. I have already attempted, on the occasion of my lectures on Raphael and Michelangelo, to describe the very different sensibilities and ways of thinking of those times. I have explained how, because the intellectual or emotional soul was particularly developed in the Greek world, the Greeks—and later this was also the case for members of Latin culture—still felt completely at one with their “soul-body,” just as they felt their soul present in every single limb of their body. While an earlier era, which lived particularly in the feeling soul, had an awareness that human beings are a part of the whole of nature, the Greeks had an awareness that what lived in their entire body—and what this body could give them—was at the same time their immediate, true vision of nature.

[ 6 ] This has changed in more recent times; even today, because people are still reluctant to delve into the humanities, they do not examine these matters with the full thoroughness they deserve. Things have changed particularly since the rise of the natural sciences at the dawn of modern thought, since the times of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno. For it was then that what we call the conscious soul began to develop. And it began to develop in such a way that human beings only now truly became a mystery to themselves, in that they only now began to feel, through their independent soul life, set apart from the rest of nature, while at the same time experiencing their soul as something distinct from the physical body. As strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless true that, as the more materialistic trend emerged in the natural sciences, it can be said of this period that the human soul felt increasingly separated from nature.

[ 7 ] What kind of era has emerged in Western culture since the fifteenth century? It is the era that, as it were, spreads a web of laws over nature, extending into the boundless expanses of space. It seems vast and mighty to us when Giordano Bruno stands at the dawn of the modern era and conceives of the power of the laws of nature extending into the infinite expanses of the heavens. But what a human being experiences in his or her soul cannot be found in these spatial expanses. When a member of ancient Egyptian or ancient Chaldean culture looked up at the starry heavens, he or she sensed that a force emanated from the constellations that was connected in such and such a way to his or her own moral experience. When the ancient astrologer looked up at the starry heavens and could perceive human destinies within them, this view of nature still allowed one to conceive of the soul as present within the workings of nature. But then a time dawned that made it increasingly impossible for human beings to conceive of the soul as present within nature. For it was precisely with the rise of modern natural science in recent times that humanity began to grapple with the question: How do I relate to the workings of nature, which no longer allows anything soulful to radiate toward me? The human soul was thus compelled to ask itself, in light of the position taken by natural science, what the soul’s place is. We see this struggle in Giordano Bruno. He conceives of his own soul as a monad. Although he conceives of the world in the sense of modern natural science, he still conceives of it as animated by monads.

[ 8 ] Leibniz, too—who exerted such a powerful influence on thinkers even in the eighteenth century—conceives of the soul as a monad, and he conceives of it in such a way that it can stand in a relationship to the rest of the world that is possible within its own essence. Thus Leibniz asks himself: What must the human soul be like in order to have a place in the picture of nature that I must form for myself? And he can answer this question only by simultaneously shaping this picture of nature itself in a very specific way. Once again, for Leibniz, everything becomes a composition of monads. When we look into any aspect of nature, we find animate monads underlying it. For Leibniz, what we see is like looking at a swarm of mosquitoes that appears as a cloud-like formation; as we draw nearer, this cloud-like formation dissolves into individual mosquitoes, and the swarm of mosquitoes initially appears to us that way only because we are not looking at it closely. I must, Leibniz tells himself, conceive of the image of nature in such a way that the human soul can exist within it. He could do this only by conceiving it as a monad among monads. Therefore, he distinguishes among the monads those that exist in a dull state, then those that are sleeping, then those that are dreaming, and finally those such as the human soul. But everything else that comes into being arises solely because everything we see coming into being appears to us just as a swarm of mosquitoes appears to us as a cloud. And we could list the most outstanding minds right up to our own day, and we would find that the struggle for an understanding of the human soul in the face of the modern conception of nature presents itself in such a way that the human soul feels: I must be able to form a conception in the face of what may arise as a conception of nature, and which offers me nothing more of a natural, soul-like quality. In the face of this struggle—that is, what appears as a more or less materialistically tinged monism, and what the human soul itself would like to conceive of as a natural form—what is taking place within the human soul, toward which philosophers have striven ever since nature could no longer be conceived as animated—in the face of this, all monism is merely an episode that will pass: But the human soul, having detached itself and being aware of what it must conceive as an image of nature, will increasingly strive to arrive at a content within itself—that is, to arrive at what it formerly drew from nature itself in bygone eras.

[ 9 ] Therefore, we can say: Since the age of modern natural science, everything has been geared toward deepening the human soul within itself, and everything points to the very essence of modern spiritual science that we seek and that is represented here: that through experiencing itself in a spiritual world, the human soul may come to know itself as part of the entire cosmos, to know itself as sustained by spiritual-divine powers, whose outer expression and image is external nature. Just as truly as human beings, when they still lived in their sensory soul, knew themselves to be a part of the whole of nature, just as the Greco-Roman era, which still experienced itself in the intellectual or emotional soul, did not yet experience itself as separated from the physical being, so too does the modern era experience itself in the conscious soul, yet knows itself to be separated from nature, since it must form an image of nature that no longer contains anything spiritual. The human soul had to grow stronger and gain the power to conjure up from within itself the abundance of spiritual experiences that could restore to it the sense of security it had when it still felt itself to be a limb of the soul-pervaded cosmos.

[ 10 ] This is how the modern human soul has experienced itself since the fourteenth century in the development of the conscious soul. The development of the intellectual or emotional soul lasted from the eighth and tenth centuries B.C. through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. What we are experiencing—the phase we have been in for about four centuries—and what we must recognize is this: we must understand that the spiritual life which the human soul conjures forth from within itself will be able to become ever richer and richer, so that it may once again live in a spiritual realm. What we experience as the inner grasping of the conscious soul originated in the period from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries of our era. We have thus been living within this period for about four centuries.

[ 11 ] In the midst of this period—which we have just sought to understand in terms of its inner struggle, its strife, and its striving for self-experience within the soul of consciousness—one might say: Voltaire lived right in the middle between us and the dawn of the striving for the development of the soul of consciousness. And one can understand this spirit when one is able to place him historically within this age of the self-experience of the soul of consciousness. For Voltaire, with all his brilliant intellectual qualities, with all his masterful intellectual activity, with all that was good in him, is a symptomatic expression of the striving for the development of the soul of consciousness, just as he is with all his—one might say—bad, terrible, and questionable qualities.

[ 12 ] There were initially two things that he had to confront in the era that can be called the age of the development of the conscious soul. The first is that an ever more glorious and magnificent picture of nature—one we cannot admire enough—has developed over the last few centuries, reaching its most outstanding splendor in modern natural science: a wondrous picture of nature in which, however, there is, so to speak, no room for the human soul itself as it comes to understand itself. And alongside this, among the most enlightened minds—many of whom we could cite—there is the striving to solve this riddle: How does the human soul arrive at a conception through which it can maintain its inner balance in the face of this newer image of nature? The image of nature grows ever more glorious; the striving within the human soul to maintain its own identity, to secure inner certainty, appears more and more as though we were observing it in a rising and falling wave. For this is how we perceive the human soul: as if it were constantly trying to make a fresh start in order to find itself in relation to this image of nature, but always rushing back again because it is powerless to find within itself what must be conjured up from the soul of consciousness in this age. And so we still stand in the midst of the struggle that is, after all, the most important reason why spiritual science must take its place in the present: the struggle for the inner cosmos, of which we have spoken here in these lectures, and which must be sought by human beings. Thus we see thinkers such as Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Locke all striving, in a sense, to answer this riddle: What am I to do with my soul in the face of the natural world outside? One could take up the thread from any of the thinkers who confront us here. Let us, for example, take up the thread from Locke.

[ 13 ] Locke, who—one might say—is a symptomatic expression of what English intellectual life sought to grasp regarding the soul at the dawn of the Age of Voltaire, appears to us in the following way. Locke feels, so to speak, completely overwhelmed by the power of the image of nature—so overwhelmed that he must say: “In essence, we can find nothing in our soul other than what this soul has first received from external nature through the senses.” So powerful is the image of nature, so imposing, that Locke wishes to limit all human mental life—insofar as it develops knowledge—initially to what we perceive through the senses and what the mind can synthesize into a worldview; and thus he stands before the world, saying to himself: We find nothing in the human soul that did not render it isolated, that did not present it as a “tabula rasa,” as a blank slate, before the sensory impressions from external nature arrive, which the soul then processes. Thus we see how the power of this view of nature initially appears so great and overwhelming that he loses faith in finding anything at all within the human soul itself. Above all, one must consider the moral and spiritual aspect of Locke’s position. A connection to the spiritual world was given to humankind through what the ancient traditions, religions, and customs offered. Even well into the era of modern natural science, people still believed they were connected to the spiritual realm of the world, including through spiritual links. Now there was a view of nature that seemed so overwhelming that the human soul no longer dared to think anything about itself. Now the soul stood there—and the perspective from which it stood stemmed above all from thinkers like Locke. The souls said to themselves: As human souls, we can know or recognize nothing that is not conveyed to us through the senses and through the intellect, which is limited to the senses. And now it was a matter of developing, as it were, from the old traditions and feelings that still flowed up from earlier times, enough spiritual temperament, enough spiritual strength, to recognize—alongside what one can perceive only as an image of external nature—some kind of spiritual-divine world, about which one had to admit, however: Even if one believes in it, one cannot reach it through any form of knowledge. The image of nature initially took on a form that excluded any cognitive connection between the human soul and the divine-spiritual foundation of the world.

[ 14 ] This is how that worldview and that sense of life and experience of the world came into being—the one into which Voltaire, who was born in 1694 and thus spent his youth at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was initially placed. At first, he was so immersed in the spirit of his time that it made an immense impression on him when—having been persecuted in France at an early age—he fled to England and there became acquainted with precisely that Enlightenment philosophy which restricted all human knowledge to the observation of nature and, so to speak, clung to a divine-spiritual world solely on the basis of the soul’s temperament. Thus Voltaire was, so to speak, deeply absorbed by this experience of the world, by this inner feeling of the soul, and in his restless yet brilliant soul the immediate conviction arose: One stands on solid ground when one places oneself on the foundation of the overwhelming laws of nature. But strong and powerful within him was what I have just called the religious temperament. His soul would not let go of a sense of faith in a connection with a spiritual-divine world. And so we see how, in Voltaire, on the one hand, an infinitely far-reaching admiration arises for what modern natural science and the picture of nature before him had brought about, and an admiration for philosophical debates such as those presented, for example, by Locke; and on the other hand, a need arises within him to bring forth everything the human spirit can muster as grounds for such a view of nature—and yet to hold fast to the old idea of the immortality of the human soul, of a connection between humanity and the entire existence of the world, and of a freedom of the human soul that is held within certain limits. And now we encounter a peculiar trait in this man, Voltaire—a trait that shows us how he embodies, in every respect, a symptomatic expression of what was alive in that entire era.

[ 15 ] What one encounters in Voltaire in this regard is perhaps most clearly illustrated by referring to another work that appeared almost at the same time as Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race—namely, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—if one is to cite Kantianism at all. From his youth onward, Kant lived under circumstances very similar to Voltaire’s with regard to the image of nature. Kant was, in the fullest sense of the word, devoted to the “spirit of the Enlightenment.” It is from him, after all, that the saying originates: “Enlightenment means, for the human soul, having the courage to use one’s own reason,” as contained in the beautiful essay “What Is Enlightenment?” In Kant, something like the fullest consequence of the Enlightenment’s impulses becomes evident, much as it did in Voltaire. Kant, like Locke and later Hume, confronts the power of the image of nature, which revealed how the world and the human soul come into being. For what has emerged as the image of nature cannot be rejected. It made a profound impression! And this natural philosophy made such an impression on Locke that, in pursuit of knowledge, he rejected everything that could not derive from sensory impressions and reason. Kant proceeds “by principle.” He is the thorough, principled thinker who must reduce everything to its principles, and thus he writes his Critique of Pure Reason. In it, he shows how human beings can possess knowledge at all only of what constitutes external nature, and how a practical—yet undeniable—faith can arise in the human soul from a perspective entirely different from that from which external knowledge derives. In the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant revealed his stance on these matters: “I therefore had to set aside knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Kant demands for faith a realm where conscience extends, where the categorical imperative speaks—one that is not knowledge, yet nevertheless provides an impulse to which human beings must adhere, and which nonetheless leads to the idea of God and the idea of freedom. Thus, Kant had to approach the matter from a principled standpoint by posing the question: If the human soul, under the influence of the modern view of nature, cannot attain any knowledge of itself, how can we then maintain a well-founded faith in it? And he secured a well-founded faith in the human soul by expelling knowledge altogether from the realm where anything can be said about the human soul—that is, by restricting knowledge to the external world.

[ 16 ] Voltaire did not yet possess what Kant had to reduce to a principle—one without which he could not have lived, and one on which the entire subsequent era would draw. Voltaire had only the logical aspect, which held that all knowledge is limited to the natural sciences. He needed to draw from the power of his own personality what Kant derived from a principle—from something entirely impersonal. And so, throughout his entire life—a life that is synonymous with one aspect of the entire intellectual life of the eighteenth century—we see Voltaire constantly conjuring up anew from his “temperament” and his “lively mind” what Kant sought to derive from the principle: namely, the categorical imperative. Time and again, throughout his long life, we see him striving to muster all his wit and cleverness to tell himself: We can know nothing in the face of the picture of nature; but step into the breach, O human soul; with wit and cleverness, now seek to bring forth all the reasons, whatever their nature may be, whether good or bad, to uphold what must nevertheless be upheld in the face of the picture of nature!

[ 17 ] One might say, then, that what in Kant has been reduced to a principle—one that can be regarded as impersonal—was alive in Voltaire’s temperament, in Voltaire’s lively mind. And anyone who wishes to judge human souls must seek to gain some insight into the fabric of a soul, with all its struggles, which, in a sense, must hold fast throughout an entire long life to something that, through the power and significance of the image of nature, is constantly in danger of slipping away. If we view Voltaire in this way, and then, starting from this fundamental perspective, turn our gaze to what he created in detail, we will find that he becomes understandable. For just as he stood there with his soul—which I have attempted to depict with a few strokes, as in a charcoal drawing—he essentially had the whole world against him. What Voltaire sought was an intellectual worldview in which God, freedom, and immortality have a place, but one that could hold its own against the image of nature. For Voltaire became an ever more ardent and ever more prejudiced advocate of the modern scientific way of thinking, and this aspiration lived within him and developed—since it was, in a sense, the foundation of his being—taking on all manner of forms that at times assumed a rather unpleasant character in the course of his life.

[ 18 ] Precisely during the period in which we see Voltaire, so to speak, as the most spirited expression of the human soul’s struggle to find itself as a conscious soul—precisely during this period—it was least possible to grasp clearly how this struggle of the human soul relates to an earlier struggle of the human soul in past epochs. Voltaire, for example, was by no means able to arrive at a pure, noble image of Greek culture. To him, what his era sought—what it sought above all to highlight, particularly in contrast to the Greek approach, as a scientific conception of nature—seemed far more significant and grand than what the Greeks had intended with their image of nature, which simultaneously encompassed the image of spiritual and mental life and activity. Because the very essence of the soul’s entire struggle for consciousness lived within Voltaire, he was, in a sense, bound to misjudge an era in which every form of culture still reflected a connectedness of the human soul with the rest of the world. We still encounter such a connection in the characters created by Homer and by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—these great Greek tragedians. For Voltaire, these Greek “tragic poets” were in no way comparable to what humanity had achieved in his own time. To him, the Greeks—in their entire worldview—seemed above all to be people who had produced fables about nature; whereas the age of the great scientific discoverers appeared to him as the one that had advanced humanity further in a short time than all earlier ages combined. Yes, indeed: in the age in which the human soul had to strive to maintain its dignity in the face of the image of nature, in this age it had to be unjust toward earlier ages, in which “the human soul could, so to speak, draw its strength from the surrounding nature without any effort on its part.”

[ 19 ] Thus we see Voltaire’s relationship to earlier times take on, as it were, a tragic character; and we see him placed within his surroundings as if from a complete contrast to the world from which he actually emerged.

[ 20 ] Looking back at the era of French intellectual life from which Voltaire emerged, one can say: This world still paid little attention to the great mysteries that were now confronting the scientific way of thinking and the soul of consciousness as it strove upward. This world still lived within those traditions that had, as it were, been given to it so that it might develop in peace toward the Age of Enlightenment—an age of self-discovery, of coming to terms with itself. Voltaire found himself surrounded by a world—and his French world was, after all, still thoroughly permeated by the most rigid and intolerant Catholic principles—that sought to extract everything soulful and spiritual from tradition, and that rejected precisely what was dear and valuable to him: this turning inward toward the self in contrast to the image of nature. And so a tremendous aversion arose in Voltaire toward the entire intellectual world surrounding him—an aversion he expressed so early on in the trials of his life that one might say he had led a life eventful enough. He was imprisoned in the Bastille twice, in 1717 and 1726; then, in 1726, he was forced to flee to England, where he remained until 1729. He then returned to France and, beginning in 1734, lived for a long time in seclusion at the castle of the Marquise du Châtelet in Cirey, Lorraine, immersing himself particularly in scientific studies that were to show him how the worldview could be grasped in terms of modern science. What emerged for him there was an understanding of the necessary fundamental conditions—the intellectual foundations of the modern era. No matter how much one may say against him—that he flattered, that he lied, that he betrayed his friends, that he often sought to achieve something by the basest means—none of that was admirable; but alongside all that was a sacred enthusiasm within him that expressed itself, even through his often cynical and frivolous manner, as follows: The impulses of the human soul demand that the soul find a worldview within itself, that it renew itself in a worldview it can set before itself. At first, nothing else could be given to him but the image of nature. Hence, through his wit, a burning hatred of Catholicism arose within him. Above all, he wanted to use his worldview to penetrate whatever stood in his way. To this end, any means was acceptable to him. While he stood in opposition to Catholicism in this way, he found himself, on the one hand, cut off from everything that might connect him to it; for he hated all the institutions and customs of Catholicism—the rituals, the forms of worship—and saw no connection with what emerged for him from his worldview, which he sought to ground in the natural sciences. The other aspect was that he clung to God, freedom, and immortality solely through his temperament, through his lively, intelligent soul; but what enabled him to hold fast to these were abstract thoughts, intangible ideas.

[ 21 ] When the Greeks looked up to those realms from which human beings, according to their understanding, drew their impulses, they saw a divine-spiritual force at work there. Let us look at the works of the Greek tragedians. In them we see the human world depicted, bordering on a divine-spiritual world; we see the world of the gods influencing the human world, and the fates of human beings interwoven with the fates of spiritual beings; and we see how, especially in the imaginations of ancient times, the contents of consciousness were animated by these spiritual beings—something that could come alive in poetry. Just as human beings could come to life in tragedy and epic poetry, so too could these contents of consciousness come to life in poetry. And how vividly they came to life in the works of Homer! And now, as we observe the era in which the human soul separated itself from its fellow beings, we see that its connection with such spiritual beings has been lost! We can trace how the supersensible figures still alive in Greek poetry gradually became more and more abstract, more and more conceptual, from Virgil onward into more recent times—with the sole exception of Dante, who shaped his Divine Comedy on the basis of a clairvoyant inspiration, and for whom these figures stand before him once again in living form, albeit in the form in which he could see them; otherwise, however, we see everywhere how, as we approach the age of the conscious soul in which Voltaire lived, these figures fade more and more, and how human beings are left more and more to their own devices. We see how poets, when they wish to depict human life, are increasingly compelled to disregard a supersensible world that no longer stands before them.

[ 22 ] Voltaire, one might say, was too great to be able, in his overview of life, to refrain from considering spiritual beings. His temperament was too grand, too all-encompassing for that. And that was part of his nature. Hence the peculiarity, the wonder, that confronts us, as it were, already in his youthful epic, The Henriade, where he depicts the fate of King Henry IV. There we see how he cannot—and will not—limit himself to what takes place in the external world, to which the scientific worldview seeks to confine itself. On the other hand, however, we see how he feels constrained in his approach at every turn, so that the words from which he draws ideas of freedom, immortality, and God are connected only to abstractions. His soul is too highly developed for him, amid all the struggles that were being waged at that time between the most diverse religious and political factions, to have wanted to portray life in his Henriade merely as one who views it solely as a human being with a scientific worldview, and who grasps the rest of human life only as abstract ideas of God, freedom, and immortality. His soul is too great for that. Thus we see how, in Voltaire, the longing to connect the human soul with a supernatural world comes to the fore; but we also see how it is impossible for him, from within Catholicism—which he hates—to envision a supernatural world that is humanly conceivable. For him, the history of the saints was merely a collection of legends, and Christ was, to him, more or less a pious, good-natured dreamer. Moreover, Voltaire could not bring himself to accept that human life, in its most significant events, should unfold solely as it did in the life of Henry IV of France—as it appears when examined through the external senses and analyzed by the intellect. Thus, strange figures appear in The Henriade: such as “Discorde,” Discord. How strange, in the work of Voltaire—the representative of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century—to find this figure of Discorde, of Discord! She looks down upon the events in France, which are not unfolding as she wishes. She wants more and more discord among people so that she can achieve her goals. She looks down with displeasure upon what is happening against Rome, and therefore sets out to come to an agreement with Rome. Thus we see a mythological figure, Discord, shaped by Voltaire, looking with displeasure upon what is happening in France, and we then see her embark on the journey to Rome. — Now one might say: all of this is allegory! But it is precisely out of poetic impulse that one must say what I am about to say: This Discord takes on entirely realistic forms, so that one can no longer regard her as a mere allegory—for example, where it is described how she comes to the Pope, how she is alone with him, and how she wins him over. There she behaves just like a coquettish figure from the age of Voltaire; there she employs every possible art of seduction. Precisely from a poetic impulse, I would like to say: I do not believe allegories are capable of accomplishing what she does to sway the Pope in favor of the political party in France! And with what the Pope is able to give her, she returns to France, acts as an instigator, appears to the monks sometimes in the guise of Saint Francis, sometimes as Augustine, travels from city to city, from village to village, and when it is in her interest that Henry III not emerge victorious, she manages to seduce the Dominican monk Jacques Clement. In this portrayal, Voltaire poured out everything he had on his mind against Catholicism, in keeping with his religious free-thinking. It is interesting to see how far Voltaire goes in his depiction of this Dominican monk, who is now to be swayed by Discord so that he may bring about the downfall of Henry III. A prayer is quoted in The Henriade that Clement, the monk, sends up to heaven. I would like to read this prayer to you in Krafft’s translation so that you may rekindle the feeling you must have when you immerse yourself in Voltaire’s world—regarding what stirred in his soul against Catholicism, which he goes so far as to have one of its devout followers send the following prayer up to heaven:

[ 23 ] “O God, enemy of tyrants, who guides the Church, Will we henceforth see how you oppress your own? How you, fond of murder, bless perjuring scoundrels, And show full favor to a king who reviles you? O great God! Your judgment tests us too severely;

Show the enemy your wrathful face at once;
Keep death and destruction far from us,
And let the king whom your wrath has given us die.
Come now! Shake the fiery heights of heaven to their core,
And send forth before you the Strangler, sharp and sudden,
Down! And arm yourself and strike the enemy armies
With your thunderous ray, which will crush and consume them.
Like leaves that the wind bends and scatters at will,
Let both men and heads fall—both kings alike;
Upon their corpses, then, from all the people of the Allians,
Whom you have saved, a song of jubilation shall resound!”

Discordia, peering intently, parts the air, and
Hears this dreadful prayer and carries it to the abyss of hell.
Immediately she brings from where night and terror wed,
The cruelest despot of the King of Shadows.
He comes, and “Fanaticism” is the sound of his name,
A perverted child of the holy religion:
Armed to protect her, he seeks to destroy her;
Born in her womb, he entwines her to her death.

[ 24 ] This is the prayer of the Dominican monk, intended to bring about the deaths of Henry III and Henry IV; he prays to heaven that God may send death. And Discord is drawn to the monk’s prayer; she enters his cell and summons “Fanaticism” from the depths of hell as her ally. Yet another figure that Voltaire presents to us in all its reality! And how does he speak of fanaticism—which he believes has found its strongest support in modern times in the principles of popular sentiment? This is how he speaks of it: |

It is he who, at Rabbah in the Valley of the Arnon,
Once led the people of Ammon, the son of misfortune,
When women, filled with grief for their god Moloch,
Placed their children’s bodies in his fiery embrace.
To Jephthah he made the ill-fated oath,
And drove his blade into the heart of the lovely maiden.
Goaded by him, Calchas once spoke blasphemous words,
And thereby incited the murder of Iphigenia,
In your forests, O France, he lingered long;
He raised the censer high to the grim Teutates.
You have not forgotten the sacred stranglings,
The work of the Druids, practiced to please the idols.
From the lofty Capitoline Hill his words rang out, full of horror:
“Seize the Christian people, tear them apart, exterminate them!”
But ever since the Eternal City recognized the Son of God,
From the ruins of the Capitol he turned toward the Church.
Now he poured out his fury upon Christian hearts:
Those who once shed their blood became the persecutors.
At the Tower he founded his impetuous sect,
Which stained its insolent hands with regicide.
In Lisbon and Madrid, he kindled that flame
On consecrated wooden stakes, upon which the tribe of Judah
Was sent by priests in solemn pomp,
Because he had not turned away from the faith of the fathers.

And ever he walked, in his deceit,
In the sacred robes of the Church and the clergy; ...

[ 25 ] Discord brings this fellow up from the depths of hell. And from this fellow, ClEment receives the dagger with which he wounds Henry III, causing him to die from his wounds.

[ 26 ] Thus we see how spiritual forces come into play in Voltaire’s poetry. We also see how Saint Louis, the progenitor of the royal dynasty, is sent down by God to speak to Henry IV, to instill wisdom in him, so to speak, and Voltaire does not shy away from putting into Saint Louis’s mouth everything that is to take place in the history of France. We also see how he links the world he depicts—the era of Henry IV—in an even more sinister sense by attributing after Henry first advanced victoriously and then faltered, attributes this to the fact that discord led him to the “Temple of Love,” where he languished and grew weary in an ill-fated love until he is called upon once more to a new battle. Read this narrative, this description of the Temple of Love, as he portrays it—as a kind of magical cult to which the opponents of Henry IV are devoted, as a kind of devil-worship with all the altars and rituals that he claims play a role among certain factions—and one will say to oneself: how Voltaire is not driven by his reason, not by his intellect, not by what he becomes through his struggle to attain the conscious soul— but through what he is—through his entire impetuous temperament, through the sum of his emotional sensibilities—he tends to connect the whole of human life with a spiritual world—which Herman Grimm rightly finds insubstantial and abstract. But therein, in that struggle of the human soul, as it unfolds in the forecourt of spiritual life, before one could even conceive of a spiritual science, therein lay the tragedy of Voltaire’s soul: that where it seeks to portray truly authentic experiences—great, powerful experiences of human life—it must seek the connection between external life and a spiritual world—and yet can find this connection only in an inadequate way. That is why The Henriade appears today as an “unreadable” poem, because everything Voltaire could muster in terms of a connection between the human world and the spiritual world is, at its core, based on traditions he rejects, traditions he hates, because he feels incapable of depicting in any way the secret forces that run through the evolution of humanity. It must be said: it took all the agility of Voltaire’s soul—that very agility which, admittedly, led to the shortcomings of the soul already mentioned—to sustain itself in the face of the fact that this soul felt within itself how the external image of nature was increasingly robbing it of the possibility of an inner spiritual grounding. And already in The Henriade, in those characters who are mythological figures and do not appear at all as mere allegories, one notices how this soul of Voltaire struggles and searches for something to which it can cling in human life—and how it finds nothing yet. One must take this aspect of Voltaire into account and will then truly appreciate all that he did to comprehend human development. That is why his wonderful characterization of Charles XII or Louis XIV—despite all its shortcomings—is so exemplary, because for him the greatest mystery lay therein: How is historical development experienced? What forces are at work within it, and what forces in the environment surrounding human development?

[ 27 ] Given the intensity with which the image of nature affected him, he could not help but express himself with all his might and with utter cynicism, going overboard in every respect, so to speak—as, for example, when he attributes to the Maid of Orleans every possible thing that weighs on his mind regarding the superstitions of all ages. But it is precisely the soul of Voltaire that reveals how souls feel when they face the pulse of the times in such a way that they do not hear it beating—in the fullest sense of the word—yet sense it in the pulsing of their own blood: an age is coming to an end—yet those who feel the emptiness within themselves say to themselves: The new age is not yet here! — One senses the tragedy of the Voltairean soul when one presents it in such a way that one sees it as if asking: How does the human soul find its footing in the face of the new image of nature? Today we would say: How does the soul of consciousness struggle to emerge within the human being? And we find the answer to this when we look at Voltaire, as he turns his gaze toward all that France has been able to produce in terms of external culture, as the old, traditional powers handed down from antiquity have become abstract to him; for we see how he describes heaven and hell—in a certain sense, even magnificently, heaven— to which Henry IV is led by Saint Louis, when he describes how spiritual forces split apart the forces of nature, how worlds are thrown into turmoil—and how all of this nevertheless chokes at the deepest, subconscious levels of the soul, which seek a foothold where the soul can be anchored with its essence, with its deepest divine essence. But Voltaire cannot find this anchor!

[ 28 ] As the decade approached in which Voltaire died, the seed was already present in a soul to seek within humanity itself the original source of a knowledge that not only reaches into nature but is also capable of delving into the spiritual universe. When Voltaire had died, Goethe carried within him the idea of his Faust—that Faust through whom we see how he actually extracts, from what Voltaire would have called the most superstitious notions of the soul, a figure like that of Faust, who shows us how the deepest longing, the deepest will, and the highest knowledge are to be sought in connection with this human soul. And under the influence of this insight into the deepest depths of the human soul—into which Voltaire could not see, because the power of the image of nature had too strong an effect on him, and because God, freedom, and immortality—the entire spiritual world—remained, in essence, abstract ideas—under the influence of this insight into the human soul, what finally emerged in Goethe was a figure quite similar to Voltaire: Mephistopheles, except that Faust, who seeks the birth of the conscious soul in a different way, says to Mephistopheles: “In your nothingness I hope to find the universe!” And, in essence, this is the message that resounds from Goethe to Voltaire—for Goethe, in a different way than Voltaire, sought to capture the modern era’s striving for an inner discovery of the conscious soul and its anchoring in the spiritual worlds. Voltaire presents himself as the star of a setting world—a world in which all striving is directed toward the attainment of the soul of consciousness—and into which shines that which exerts the strongest pull toward the soul of consciousness: the scientific worldview. Voltaire is nevertheless the greatest star of this fading world, even though he cannot find what once again expands the human soul toward a spiritual world. Nothing is more characteristic of Voltaire than a remark he made about Corneille in his History of Louis XIV. There he says that Corneille had also published a French translation of the little book The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, and that he had heard this little book had gone through thirty-two printings in the French translation. He cannot believe this and remarks: “for it seems so unbelievable to me that a sound soul could read this book to the end even once.” Here we see, in one particular instance, how Voltaire’s soul was unable to find a way to open up a source to the spiritual world within himself.

[ 29 ] Today we are discussing how spiritual science is a genuine continuation of what the scientific worldview compels people to accept, but we are also discussing how this spiritual science is a genuine continuation of Goethe’s worldview. We speak of the fact that a second human being dwells within the human being, one who can experience himself soulfully; we speak of what the human being truly is, which is expressed in Goethe’s words: “Two souls, alas, dwell within my breast.” But we speak of this in such a way that the human being’s spiritual-soul aspect can seek and find its spiritual-soul home. In spiritual science, we speak once again of a spiritual world to which the human being belongs with his spiritual being just as he belongs to the physical world with his physical body. Voltaire, however, is so overwhelmed by the power of the image of nature that he has no sense at all of the “second human being” within the human being. While Goethe, shortly after him, has his Faust strive with all his might toward that second human being who reaches out from the physical human being toward the spiritual worlds, we see in Voltaire that he cannot comprehend anything of such a second human being. A statement he makes specifically in reference to this second human being is very characteristic: “No matter how hard I try to find that we are two, I have ultimately found that I am only one.” He cannot admit that there is a second self within him. He has tried, but that is his tragedy: in the end, he can only conclude that he is just one person, bound to his brain. That was his profound tragedy, which Voltaire coped with through his cynicism, and even through his frivolity. Subconscious depths of the soul, a second human being within the human being in connection with a spiritual world—the conscious mind could not allow itself to acknowledge this. The conscious mind needed numbing. He was able to find this in external experience, because external experience yielded to the magnificent, intelligent worldview that he was able to create amidst the most contradictory inner experiences. Thus we can understand that Voltaire had a very hard time coming to terms with himself, and that he needed various forms of numbing. One must truly look to the greatness of this man to comprehend something as magnificently paradoxical as the fact that one day, in Switzerland—where he had done so much good—pretended to be terminally ill so that the priest would come to administer the last rites; and after receiving the sacrament, he jumped up and declared that it was all just a joke, and mocked the priest. But one must also live in a world that is so “derivative”—a world that lacks the real connection between the human soul and the spiritual realms, just as Voltaire lived in such a world—in order not to arrive at the connection he himself sought to reach.

[ 30 ] Let’s take another look at Goethe: He takes a “vagabond”—Faust—to show how the deepest impulses arise in the human soul. And if we trace Goethe’s entire life, we see how he seeks to find human character in all its richness within the simplest of souls. Voltaire lives entirely within an abstracted sphere—his intellectual realm—where everything is uprooted; there he cannot find what binds the human soul to a spiritual world, and so he can speak only to that abstracted sphere. We can hardly comprehend today that a mind like Voltaire’s would say: “I will not deign to write for cobblers and tailors; to give them something they can believe in—that is a task for apostles, not for me.” And he does not want what he considers his most sacred conviction to be treated as we might wish today—that it penetrate every human soul; rather, he makes the characteristic statement that he writes only for the educated class because he has grown out of it: “The heavens and the earth, which submit to my enlightened spirit, can be understood only by the upper class; the rabble is such that the most foolish heaven and the most foolish earth are precisely the best!” In this respect, too, Voltaire lives within a cultural sphere that is in decline. That is his tragedy. Such cultural spheres, however, also have the potential to develop maturity with regard to certain currents. And Voltaire did develop that maturity. It is expressed in his incisive, intelligent judgment—which remains clear even in his wit—and in his wholesome, even in his frivolity still wholesome, way of engaging with the world and relating to it. Thus one can also understand how a mind as great in many respects as Frederick the Great could feel drawn to Voltaire, could then push him away, could, so to speak, cast him out again after some time, yet had to return to him again and again, and had to pass this judgment on him: “This Voltaire actually deserves nothing better than the fate of a learned slave, but I value what he can offer me in terms of his French.” And he could offer him much more than just the linguistic element. That is what I have tried to suggest today.

[ 31 ] One can understand that the eighteenth century—which, on the one hand, had to shed the proper light on everything that hindered the emergence of the conscious soul, yet which, precisely in the waning spirit of the cultural current, had to display a certain grandeur— one can understand that this had to find expression in such a distinctive way precisely in Voltaire. And one sees Voltaire in the right light when one sets against him as a counterpoint what we have identified as the positive, enduring element—in the sense of Lessing or Goethe—in the human soul’s striving toward the elements of consciousness. Truly, what I have taken the liberty of saying to you today about Voltaire can certainly only serve to awaken an awareness of how difficult it is to form an objective picture of this very peculiar man—this peculiar man of whom we may say: Much of what he fought for, what he strove for, lives on today as something taken for granted within us—even in those who do not even think to read Voltaire’s writings. Indeed, one can say of Voltaire in particular: Humanity may outgrow his writings; but it cannot outgrow the force that he represented; for he will always have to remain a link in humanity’s spiritual striving. For what was bound to emerge as the liberation of the human soul rests on the fact that, first of all, something had to be worn away by a spirit as corrosive, as purely dissolving—one might say, as purely Mephistophelean—as Voltaire was. And it is not surprising that Voltaire’s spiritual-psychological historical legacy has fared much as his remains have. They were first interred at the Pantheon in Paris, a place of honor; when a different political faction came to power, they were exhumed and scattered; then, when a third political faction replaced the previous one, they were gathered up again and reburied. And now some claim that these recovered remains are not the genuine ones. To that extent, the historical image of Voltaire holds true—one that, from one perspective or another, is sometimes portrayed as that of a liberator from bondage, an apostle of tolerance, but from another perspective is again subjected to every possible form of disparagement! And given the sheer complexity of Voltaire’s personality, it can very easily happen—if one strives to maintain complete objectivity regarding the historical portrayal of Voltaire—that some might then say it is not the correct one, just as some say that the remains interred in the Pantheon are not the genuine ones.

[ 32 ] Nevertheless, I say: If the science of the spirit is to fulfill its task in the present and the future, then perhaps the image of the great disruptor, the great dissolver—the one who has swept so much away—will be able to emerge before the science of the spirit in its full objectivity. For this much can be said: Voltaire is a human being—he himself stated this to Frederick the Great—with all the flaws of a human being and, one might even say, a human being with all the “wonders” of a human being, so well suited that the poet’s saying is fulfilled in him:

Confused by the parties’ favor and hatred,
His portrayal in history wavers.

[ 33 ] His personality was such that his image can only “waver.” But even though everything about him is subject to fluctuation, when it comes to the image of Voltaire—whether among those who find him likable or those who do not—one must always acknowledge that, however one may perceive him, whether with love or hatred, he was nonetheless a great man who filled a role in what might also be called the science of the spirit: the ongoing education of the human race toward the heights of intellectual and spiritual human experience, conscious of itself in the world!