The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. The Germanic Soul and the German Spirit

[ 1 ] In the lectures I have had the privilege of giving here so far this winter, I have attempted to offer some insights into the character traits of German development and their relationship to the development of other European nations. Today I would like to take the liberty of offering, in aphoristic form, some characteristic insights into the psychological and spiritual unfolding of the Germanic-German essence, all with a view to our fateful and difficult times. Tomorrow I will then attempt to show what the insights of spiritual science can mean for people in the happy, but also in the serious, painful, and even sorrowful moments of life, particularly with regard to our present time.

[ 2 ] The reflections to be presented here will be based on the perspective of spiritual science—a perspective that has been mentioned here frequently, but which is still largely unrecognized or even rejected by the general public. Those who are familiar with this spiritual science, however, sense from their own insights not only how it can enrich and elevate life, but also how it can shed light on intimate, important connections within life—and not only within the life of the individual, but also within the lives of peoples, human relationships, and human coexistence.

[ 3 ] However, right at the outset of any consideration of the life of nations, we must point to insights from spiritual science that have been mentioned frequently in past lecture series, but which must be drawn upon to understand today’s discussion. We must point to insights from spiritual science that are among the least recognized and accepted: insights that tell us that at the very beginning of every people’s development, the life of the soul takes on very special forms, and that the origins of humankind on Earth exhibited a life of the soul entirely different from our present one. In our time, with its materialistically colored worldview, this naturally cannot yet be acknowledged. People imagine, after all, that humanity’s beginnings on Earth lay in very primitive states of the soul—states of the soul that people currently strive to conceive of, one might say, as animal-like as possible. Spiritual science reveals something fundamentally different to us. It shows us that at the very beginning of humanity’s development on Earth—and extending back even to the beginnings of every people’s development—there lies a clairvoyant quality of the souls. This means that at the beginning of human development and also of the development of individual peoples, human souls do not merely exist in states through which they perceive external material reality with their senses and form ideas, concepts, and ideas—but that the souls are capable of living in other states, in states of consciousness that are not those of our ordinary daily life, nor those of our chaotic dream life, and even less those of unconscious sleep. At the beginning of human evolution, people lived in states of consciousness in which souls were capable of developing imaginative clairvoyance—that is, of entering into a connection within themselves with the spiritual reality around us, with that reality which no eye can see, which no ear can hear, which cannot be grasped by the intellect bound to the senses and the brain, and whose perceptions do not penetrate our soul from the outside like sensory impressions, but arise within the soul as images—images that are not dream images, but rather reflect the realities of the spiritual world, those realities that lie behind the sensory world as causes and effects. Thus, in the original human being, there are states of consciousness in which he knows himself to be connected to a spiritual world, in which this spiritual world arises within him in images.

[ 4 ] However, in these earlier, primitive stages of human development, this clairvoyant insight into the spiritual worlds can only be attained because what we call human “self-consciousness”—the awareness of life within the personality—is still underdeveloped. The times of ancient clairvoyance correspond to a state of the soul in which the soul could not yet say “I” to itself with full understanding, as it can now; in which the soul did not yet feel itself as an individuality, as a personality, but rather as a part of a great spiritual world organism, like a limb of the entire cosmos. Thus, in those ancient times, the consciousness of the personality was clouded and dim. Instead, however, at certain times a tableau of images would unfold before the soul—shadows of the spiritual world cast into the soul. And when we look at the starting points of the individual developments of peoples, we can truly understand these developments only if we are able to go back to that point in a people’s development at which the human souls within that people still possess at least some of this clairvoyant knowledge; that is, if we go back to times when an imaginative knowledge of the spiritual world existed. We come to know the individual peoples, the souls of the peoples, and the spirits of the peoples when we observe the various ways in which peoples develop from these original clairvoyant states toward those that then signify higher, more advanced stages of culture. For this development from the state of original clairvoyance toward the higher stages of culture—which are attained with full personal self-awareness—differs among individual peoples, and the nature of the peoples depends on how they develop from this indicated primitive stage of culture upward to a higher one.

[ 5 ] Here we have a characteristic example of the ancient Greek people, and most Eastern peoples are similar to them, as are, in a certain sense, the peoples of the ancient Italian Peninsula. A people such as the Greeks can only be fully understood when one realizes that this people transitions from the original pictorial impressions of a spiritual world to the development of the worldview that is presented to us in its mythology and religious conceptions. This is still little recognized today, yet the beginnings of this understanding are already present in mainstream scholarship, which leads to the perspective just outlined here. In his beautiful book *The Riddle of the Sphinx*, Ludwig Laistner attempted to show how all ancient myths and all ancient conceptions of the gods—especially those of the Greeks—are, as it were, transformed versions of earlier clairvoyant perceptions that have already passed into the imagination. And when we look at the ancient Greek pantheon, we can understand it only if we regard it as transformed conceptions of the supersensory world that were gained while clairvoyance was still prevalent. But this people—the Greeks—experienced the transformation of the concepts of ancient clairvoyance into the mythical worldview, and even the transformation of the mythical worldview into the philosophical worldview, in such a way that, as a people, they underwent this transformation with a sort of youthful vitality. At a youthful stage of national development, ancient Greece underwent the transition from the old clairvoyant worldview through the mythical to the philosophical. Alongside this, what is contained within the self-consciousness of the people of such a nation—that which presents the human being as a personality, as an individual—begins to develop; everything that constitutes the warm-hearted, personal, and sincere element of the human being comes to the fore. This develops alongside the ordinary state of consciousness, and the individual is then only able to apply this emotional, heartfelt element to the everyday circumstances of life. Because they live in the ordinary state of consciousness within the everyday circumstances of life, they are able—in a different frame of mind—to turn their attention to spiritual matters. As a result, two worlds enter his consciousness: one in which he lives with his emotional nature in everyday circumstances, and one that lifts him up with his spiritual nature into the spiritual world; and he then faces, as an individual with his emotional sensibility, that which he has derived from what has passed from his clairvoyance into mythical and philosophical concepts. What constitutes these philosophical ideas then appears as something given to him like a revelation—something he looks up to, but with which he is not so closely connected that every fiber of his soul and will would be directly involved in the formation of his worldview.

[ 6 ] Such is the spiritual development of a people like the Greeks—a people who, as it were, in their youthful state underwent what might be called the transition from clairvoyant insight to a worldview through which one recognizes the soul’s connection to those powers that transcend life and death.

[ 7 ] The course of development was quite different among those peoples—the Germanic peoples—who, around the beginning of our era, swept in from the east and the north to the borders of the Greek and Roman empires. Of course, we also find clairvoyant insight at the starting point of these peoples’ development; there were times when their souls, through the images of clairvoyant imagination, were drawn toward the spiritual world. But the soul lost these clairvoyant imaginations, just as it loses them among all peoples, including the Germanic peoples; for all of humanity must pass through a stage of development that is intended solely for the physical world, a stage that can be intended only for the reception of concepts concerning the physical world. At a certain point—and this coincides quite precisely with their advance against the Roman Empire—the individual Germanic peoples lost not only the ability to glimpse into the spiritual world through the original dreamlike clairvoyance, but they also gradually lost, during the Migration Period and their advance against the Roman Empire, their understanding of what the soul can gain from such knowledge derived from ancient clairvoyance. And one can say: this is connected to the fact that all these peoples went through the stage of clairvoyant knowledge during their youth, but that in their later years—as it were, in the vigor of manhood—they were unable to make a transition from that original clairvoyant knowledge to their later worldviews. Thus, among these peoples, the development of their worldview moves directly from childlike states to what I would call a “more mature” national state. In the childlike state, what was once clairvoyant perception remains present amid a dimming of consciousness; there, too, the peoples’ full receptivity to the myths that emerged from ancient clairvoyance has dimmed. These myths have been preserved, at most, as traditions for external understanding. In contrast, a sense of personality has developed among these peoples—a firm grounding in the individuality of life. What has become established among them are the qualities of the mind, the immediate traits of character, and the mental and character traits through which a person functions in everyday life. And because the old clairvoyant conceptions no longer extend into this ordinary, everyday life, the soul, the impulses of the will, and even the impulses of character must develop the longing to find within themselves the strength to feel, experience, and perceive the connection with the spiritual world. Out of the, so to speak, dormant forces of the soul, the longing for the divine-spiritual worlds therefore develops among these peoples. And unlike the Greeks, they cannot now look toward something that shines into their souls as the product of the development of the old clairvoyant conceptions; rather, they develop a deep soul—a soul that is indeed profound in its grasp of the ordinary circumstances of daily life, but which at the same time feels the deepest longing for the spiritual foundations of life. In their mature adulthood, these Germanic peoples stand at the stage in time we have indicated, in such a way that their spirit strives for a religious deepening of their worldview, yet the old concepts of earlier clairvoyance no longer resonate within their spirit.

[ 8 ] Thus, in the early days of the Germanic world—while the Germanic peoples were advancing toward the peoples of the South—and regardless of their worldviews, personal character traits emerged: the strong, courageous qualities of the will and the spirit. We find a reflection of this state of mind above all in that marvelous work of poetry, which stands worthy alongside the greatest works of all time—alongside the Homeric epics, alongside the Finnish Kalevala: the *Nibelungenlied*. Just as the “Nibelungenlied” has come down to us, it reveals to us people through whom we can no longer clearly perceive what binds them to the ancient clairvoyant conceptions. Instead, we gain a deep insight into the struggles and the trials the soul must endure to find its way in life. But if we look closely at the very nature of the “Song of the Nibelungs”’s narrative, we become aware of how remnants of the ancient clairvoyant imagination still extend into the lives of these people—yet how these remnants are shaped in such a way that they are, as it were, tailored to serve people’s everyday lives and, furthermore, their historical lives. We become aware of this, for example, when we hear how the woman who is to become the wife of Siegfried the Horned foresees, with a premonition, all the misfortune that is to befall the man who will one day become her husband, as she sees in a dream a white falcon upon which two eagles swoop down and kill it with their claws. And then again, after Siegfried has become her husband and Hagen is about to murder Siegfried, she sees two mighty mountains crashing down upon her husband Siegfried. — What remains of the old clairvoyant concepts is no longer sufficient to lead people beyond ordinary imagination; but it is so woven into his life that through it a person learns what lies ahead for him, in both the great and the small. These ancient conceptions also find their way in in other ways; for example, if we consider what follows from the older traditions surrounding the *Nibelungenlied*: when we see how Siegfried slays the dragon, bathes in the dragon’s blood, and thereby acquires a layer of tough skin that makes him invulnerable—except for the spot between his shoulders, where a linden leaf has fallen, and which is then the very spot where Hagen later murders him. — Thus we see the old connection with the spiritual world extending into the lives of the Germanic peoples; but this extension serves the way in which human beings position themselves within the life of the physical world.

[ 9 ] Thus we see how these Germanic peoples are first and foremost called—I would say, by expressing their personally experienced connection to the spiritual world—to develop the qualities of the mind, of character, and also the qualities of strong individuality, as well as to unfold those qualities that link soul to soul, binding and uniting souls in physical life. The impulses of gratitude, loyalty, and everything that radiates from the human soul, are so superbly portrayed for the soul of the ancient Germanic people in the *Nibelungenlied* because those who contributed to its composition possessed a dim awareness of how human beings have been drawn out of their connections with the spiritual world and firmly placed within the physical world with all the qualities of their souls.

[ 10 ] With this, however, we have sketched out in a few strokes a fundamental characteristic of the Germanic spiritual life—that spiritual life which, in such a distinctive way, reveals personal depth and characterological depth everywhere—and at the same time that deep, deep longing for the spiritual worlds, which seeks fulfillment, but which initially experiences this fulfillment as a tragically painful yearning and hope, because the ancient conceptions born of clairvoyance have lost their powerful hold over the human mind.

[ 11 ] It is highly remarkable to observe the different ways in which the peoples of the South—and the Germanic peoples of the North—had to relate to Christianity, the gift to the world, due to this disposition of the soul. Let us realize that the peoples of the South, with their worldview ideas born of ancient clairvoyant conceptions, had to receive this Christianity. They had to compare what it revealed to them with what they knew—or at least with what they could be firmly convinced had once been known through direct experience. A longing such as is taken for granted today, and as it developed among the Germanic peoples: a longing for the spiritual worlds, a — I might say — tragic yearning to pierce the veil that separates human beings from the spiritual worlds; such a yearning could, in fact, not really exist among those peoples who had direct knowledge of the existence of a spiritual world, because they were connected to these worlds in particular states of consciousness. What, therefore, makes possible a longing for a worldview—one that stirs the soul inwardly and can attune the whole human being—is something we come to know particularly through the peoples of the North. For this reason, the peoples of the South could only receive the incoming Christianity by comparing it to the character of their ancient conceptions, which had been born out of earlier clairvoyance; by regarding it as something given to the human being from without, to which the human soul surrenders itself. Everywhere we see how, even among these peoples, a dual world comes to life: a world to which the soul is devoted in its everyday and historical relationships—and the world of the ideas given in earlier times, born of ancient clairvoyance, which is now permeated and illuminated by the revelations of Christianity.

[ 12 ] Christianity, however, had a different—a completely different—effect on the souls of the Germanic peoples, on those souls in whose innermost depths a longing—a tragic longing—for the spiritual worlds lived. To these souls came now what Christianity is able to give to souls; it brought all that infinite warmth, all that stirs the mind and the heart, which can flow into the souls from Christianity. And the fact that it was intimately connected with the deepest impulses in the foundations of the soul—those with which human beings live in their everyday lives—was felt when one contemplated the suffering of the Savior, when one contemplated the Mystery of Golgotha. And so these souls felt as if what had been revealed to them from the outer world were something born from the soul itself—something the soul, in essence, had simply not known, but which it had experienced in its depths long, long before. The Germanic peoples embraced Christianity as an inner element, as an intimate matter of the soul itself, not as an external revelation. And the great difference that resulted from this in terms of an emotional, a spiritual understanding of the world can be gauged particularly well when one considers humanity’s relationship to nature and the environment, by first looking at the southern peoples who embraced Christianity and then at the Germanic peoples. This Christianity directed the souls—all souls—toward the eternal, toward that which had descended from the cosmic sphere and entered into the course of human history. What was revealed here was something different from what one could feel and experience in nature and in external life. Consequently, a peculiar view of nature developed among the southern peoples—something that has often been described as a certain contempt for nature; a view of nature arose as if it were of lesser value for life, as if it signified a fall from the divine-spiritual worlds. And a belief developed as if one now had to turn away from life, to become estranged from nature and the life all around. To put it radically, one could say: a kind of disdain for natural existence and for human life in the physical world developed.

[ 13 ] How different was the Germanic peoples’ attitude toward nature! Something lived within them that must have arisen from the distinctive development of their souls. As their connection to the ancient clairvoyant conceptions faded, they were, after all, dependent on living in harmony with nature and with other people. Thus they developed character traits and emotional qualities that could be kindled by nature and human life in the most intense way. They looked deep into nature; they saw and felt everything one can feel in terms of joy at nature, and also how one can mourn nature—nature as one sees it unfold magnificently every spring, or when one sees the bright dawn, and how one sees it fade again when we watch the sun sink into the evening glow, or when autumn and winter set in. But they were also able to feel a special connection to human life out of their own state of mind. Human life presented itself to them in such a way that, for them, as it were, what held human life together—the forces pulsing and surging through it from the spiritual worlds—was no longer alive. A certain tragic—one might say—“mood of mourning” developed among these peoples from this view of nature and human life; and we see this mood of mourning, this mood of lament, pervading the view of the gods held by the ancient Germanic souls. After all, the poet of the *Nibelungenlied* himself states that he wishes to reveal to his listeners how sorrow follows from joy. For this epic, the *Nibelungenlied*, ends in sorrow, in downfall, in distress, murder, and death! How sorrow arises from joy—that is what the poet of this song sought to reveal. And when we survey the Germanic pantheon, we see how the Germanic peoples viewed their gods as those who would one day experience the “twilight of the gods”—who would no longer reign as they once did, but would instead be locked in battle with one another, so that one would slay the other. With a mood of sorrow, with a tragic mood, the ancient Germanic peoples viewed the divine world underlying nature and human life. This is a different mood than what one might, to put it radically, call a demeaning and disparaging view of nature. It is a life intimately connected with nature, a coexistence with nature, but a life that mourns the existence revealed through the fate of nature and humanity, that loves the fate of nature and humanity, yet believes it must experience impulses of suffering and lamentation through this love.

[ 14 ] This is the great, fundamental difference between the Southern and Northern views of nature. And so we can empathize with the Germanic mindset, and can first turn our attention to those among the Germanic peoples who were, as it were, the outposts of the European mission of the Germanic peoples—that is, to those Germanic tribes that, in greater or lesser numbers, were the first to come into contact with the peoples of the South: the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Vandals, and the Lombards. We turn our attention to them; and no matter how barbaric the outward appearances of these peoples may seem to us, we see—if we are only willing to see—at the core of their character, at the core of their view of nature and life, those character traits that have just been described. And with these character traits, with this view of nature and life, they merged with the peoples of southern Europe and with what eventually emerged from these peoples of the South and the West. And as we know, these peoples who have just been named were absorbed into the peoples of the South and the West. Romanic culture arose.

[ 15 ] But if we take a close look at this Romance culture, what do we find in it? We find within it that which still lingered dimly of an ancient worldview born of clairvoyance, and we find this permeated, interwoven, and pulsing with what the individual Germanic tribes—which have vanished from the course of world history, down to their very names—have infused into it; and everything that developed as Romanic culture in the west and south of Europe has, at its very core, the Germanic spirit, even if it was subsequently overshadowed by the continuation of ancient Roman culture. And one can understand the Romance element only when one knows that it draws its life from a vanished Germanic spiritual world. One understands the creative spirits of Italian culture; one understands the wondrously beautiful Italian music; even figures such as Augustine and John Scotus Erigena, as well as the great artists of the Italian Renaissance and the Quattrocento, one understands even Dante only when one is clear that the substantiality of the soul-life of these ancient Germanic peoples has been absorbed into what was subsequently overshadowed in its outward manifestations by the continuing current of ancient Roman culture. — Thus we find the first outposts of the Germanic spiritual world in these peoples, who have, as it were, sacrificed themselves for the progress of external history. And it is only through the blending of the ancient Roman soul with the Germanic soul described above that the cultures of the South and the West essentially arose and were then able to develop further. What has been incorporated into these cultures is precisely what we can call the “Germanic soul,” which has developed in the manner indicated.

[ 16 ] Now, this Germanic spiritual essence stood in such a relationship to Christian revelation that it received it as something complete, something that had been cast into fixed forms, in contrast to the traditional worldviews of antiquity. From this arose a coexistence, a duality between what constitutes spiritual and religious revelations on the one hand, and worldview concepts on the other; and as a sort of separate, second inner world, the emotional and soul-like elements that had come over from Germanic culture developed. Either did the latter embrace the Christian revelations as an external reality, or—later, within the Romance-Germanic element—did a critical spirit develop from the soul-life, which still stood in inner opposition to what Christianity had to offer. Thus arose the purely intellectual, which then reached its particular zenith in Voltaire.

[ 17 ] One might say: it was predestined in world history that a part of the Germanic soul-life had to be sacrificed for the sake of southern and western Europe; it flowed into those peoples. Another part, however, remained in the center of Europe, and this part had the special task of enabling the spiritual essence of these peoples to progress through the further development of the soul toward the spiritual. For, in essence, we have so far described only the Germanic spiritual essence. But while the others—the vanguard of Germanic culture—depart as soul-substance toward the south and west of Europe, we see a core of the Germanic soul remaining in the center of Europe. And how does this core develop? It elevates to the spiritual level what has emerged as character traits and emotional disposition among the peoples of Germania—and what has been illuminated and warmed by Christianity—for the spiritual is the higher development of the soul. And as the soul develops upward toward the spiritual, the spiritual—because Christianity is the dominant force—must develop in the periods leading up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in such a way that an even more intimate relationship is established with what the soul itself intimately experiences and what is revealed in Christianity.

[ 18 ] As early as the ninth century, we see the first glimmer of the spiritual emerging from the Germanic soul in that wonderful poem that originated in Saxony: the *Heliand*. In the *Heliand*, we see the life of Jesus Christ depicted; but we see it depicted as if Jesus Christ were traveling through the world as one of the Germanic war kings, having fully assumed a Germanic nature; and those who follow him—his disciples—appear in this poem as Germanic vassals. Christianity is fully absorbed into the Germanic folk element there; the Christian legend has been resurrected and reborn from the souls of the people of Central Europe in the *Heliand*. And we sense that what is now emerging at a particular juncture is precisely what had already manifested itself in ancient Germanic paganism but then faded away: that the Germanic folk soul is compelled not to receive Christianity from the outside, as the Romanic world did, but to generate from within itself—and to experience within itself—that which can be experienced in Christianity and in Christian impulses. That is why, in the *Heliand*, the story of the life of Jesus Christ is told as if it had taken place in Central Europe, at the heart of Germanic culture. Thus, the author narrates as if he were describing events in his homeland—not only in form, but in the entire manner of the narrative, including the description of places and so on.

[ 19 ] Then we see how the ascent of the soulful into the spiritual continues to unfold before us in that marvelous flowering of German intellectual life that we refer to as medieval German mysticism, which begins with Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, takes on a distinctive form in Paracelsus, then continues in Valentin Weigel and Jacob Böhme, and finally reaches its climax in the wonderful sayings of Angelus Silesius, who lived in Silesia in the seventeenth century, from 1624 to 1677. Here, in this German mysticism—first in Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, and then in the others who became their disciples—we see how directly the soulful merges into the spiritual realm.

[ 20 ] What is the attitude of these spirits toward what they call their “God”? Their attitude toward what they call their God is that they want to overcome, to cast off everything that feels, wills, and thinks within their individual personalities and individualities; they want to feel themselves to be merely an instrument through which God Himself speaks, feels, thinks, and wills. This feeling is expressed right down to the word, right down to a beautiful word: they want to rid themselves—that is, to cast off—what might be called: “I feel this way or that way through my personality,” “I think this or that through my personality,” “I will act out of my impulses.” No! These spirits do not want that. Whatever they call their God—whatever they perceive as the God who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha—they want Him to completely fill their minds and all their inner powers, to completely spiritualize them, so that the soul may be wholly filled with Him, so that nothing of their own lives within it, but rather that they may be wholly filled with the Divine, and that the Divine may will within them, and they may be merely a vessel for this Divine. Thus they wish to place themselves within the spiritual order of the world so that they can say: When my hand moves, I know that it is the God within me who unfolds the power to move the hand; when I think—it is God who thinks within me; when I feel and will—it is God who feels and wills within me; I will reject everything within me that is an independent life, and will allow only God to reign within me! And they expected everything from the grace that can illuminate them, if they empty their souls and allow themselves to be illuminated by the grace of God, which can flow into them. From this they expected the perfection of their souls.

[ 21 ] What do we experience in these personalities? This is what we perceive: what appears to be an innate quality of the human soul—the ancient Germanic emotional life, the ancient Germanic life of feeling, which was still filled with hope and longing for the spiritual world—permeates Christian impulses with the same impulsiveness with which it once permeated external physical experience. What a human being is in the outer physical world merges, in these masters, with the inner experience of God and the divine world order. It merges to such an extent that, for example, Meister Eckhart, in a beautiful saying that I would like to read aloud, was able to characterize this mood of the soul—where we see the soulful transitioning into the spiritual—with the words: “If you love God, then you can do whatever you wish, for then you desire only the Eternal and the One, which is also what God desires; and whatever you do, you do in God, and God does it in you.” This awareness of oneness with God is what confronts us where the German spirit is born from the Germanic soul. And this inner experience of the Spirit, this active presence of the Spirit in the soul—oh, it shines out to us so wonderfully, in such a magnificent—I would say—in such a wondrously magnificent way from the beautiful poetic sayings of the seventeenth-century Angelus Silesius in his *Cherubic Wanderer*. We stand here as if at a high point in the development of the soul as it steers toward the spirit. — I cannot help but read to you some of these verses by this German mystic who lived in Silesia and who played a part in the birth of the German spirit from the Germanic soul:

That God is so blessed
and lives without desire,
He has received this from me,
just as I have received it from Him.

[ 22 ] How deeply united with God is a soul that can speak in such a way that it understands how to say: God is so blissful and without desire precisely because He can experience bliss within me, because He receives it from me just as I receive it from Him. However, in this context, one must no longer think of the “I” that is bound to the self-will of life, but rather of the “I” that knows itself to be entirely pulsing and warmed by what God wills—as I have just read from Meister Eckhart. Another saying

means: I myself am eternity,
when I leave time behind,
and unite myself with God and God
with myself.

[ 23 ] What an intimate fusion of the human self with the Divine creates here the feeling that the self lives in the awareness that it itself grasps God in eternity! And

Now the question: What does my God look like?
Go, look at yourself,
Whoever looks at himself in God,
truly looks upon God.

[ 24 ] The unity of the human being with the Divine. And so completely—I would say—intoxicated by the connection between the human soul and that which lives in the Mystery of Golgotha, and that which lives in the impulses of Christianity, is the following saying:

The Cross at Golgotha
cannot redeem you from evil,
unless it is also
erected within you.

[ 25 ] This means that a person must experience within himself everything he is capable of experiencing when he empathizes with and relives everything that can appear before his mind’s eye as he shares in the sufferings and triumphs of the Savior. And this awareness of eternity is particularly evident to us in two sayings by Angelus Silesius—sayings of which one might say that it is one of life’s greatest strokes of luck that they were ever uttered in the German language. The first:

I die, yet I do not live:
God Himself dies within me:
And what I am to live,
He also lives forever and ever.

[ 26 ] Contemplating death, facing death—and knowing: “It is not I who die, but God who dies within me”—this means nothing other than knowing that man passes through the gate of death while still alive. For if one knows that God lives within one, then one also knows that death is thereby overcome for the sake of knowledge; for to know that God dies within me is to know that I do not die; for God does not die. Thus, one of the German mystics once knew how to express the greatest mysteries of life in the most concise words. And just as profound is another saying by Angelus Silesius:

The love that proves itself
to God within you,
is God’s own power,
His fire, and His Holy Spirit.

[ 27 ] “It is not I who speak here,” says Angelus Silesius, “nor is it I who love; it is God’s voice, God’s love within me—that is what I can ‘become.’” This means that divine life descends into my soul and fills it when I try to divest myself of my own self, to be merely a vessel for that which can enter the soul as divine-spiritual life.

[ 28 ] And the forces that had thus become part of the development of the German spirit continued to work, and we see them reemerge where the German spirit has instilled in its people the deepest impulses to date. In the period we call the German Classical era, we see the emergence of a longing for the deepest experience of one’s own human spirit, for the search for everything that a human being can experience in the spirit, and for the shaping of what the human spirit can experience into a worldview. We see it dawning in thinkers such as Lessing and Herder; we see it rising to new heights in Goethe and Schiller and in the German philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. And what do we see there as the deepest strength of the German people, as they seek to look not only to what has been historically handed down but also to what can be given only through the external, physical perception of the world? It seeks the truth to which the human soul is inclined, the truth it seeks in its depths; and it comes to give birth anew, from the spirit, to everything that surges and swells through the entire course of world history, recognizing it in a new form. And in this sense, Lessing offers a summary of all human striving and inquiry in the work that also marks the conclusion of his life: *The Education of the Human Race*. In it, he describes how divine-spiritual forces permeate the course of historical development, how all of history is an educational endeavor on the part of divine-spiritual powers, and how the Christian impulse emerges as the greatest driving force in the progress of earthly development. Yet something is also dawning in German intellectual life that can only gradually take its full form in the future, something that must first be understood anew in the present through spiritual science—the realization of how earlier historical epochs interact with later ones, and how what humanity has attained in earlier historical epochs can be carried over into later ones. And Lessing, by explicitly stating that he does not shy away from acknowledging that a greater truth need not be regarded as lesser simply because it appeared first in the course of development and in times when humanity was not yet clouded by the prejudices of the school — Lessing comes to the recognition that the human soul lives through repeated earthly lives, that the complete life of the human soul unfolds in such a way that it returns in ever-new earthly lives, and that between two earthly lives, an existence unfolds in a purely spiritual world, where the soul transforms the powers it acquired in its last earthly life, so that it may then return and carry over into later epochs what it has acquired in earlier ones. This creates a continuous process of evolution in which human beings themselves participate.

[ 29 ] Then we see how, through Herder, the spirit that comprehends itself—the spirit that sought to flourish into such religious fervor among the German mystics—how this spirit, illuminated and purified, seeks to permeate all of nature and human life. It is a great and magnificent work that Herder created in his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind,” in which he describes how spirit lives in all things—a spirit he finds when he looks into the depths of his soul, but which at the same time guarantees humanity’s eternal serenity, its eternal “immersion,” and its eternal rest in eternal-divine existence.

[ 30 ] And we then see how, in Goethe—to mention once again the work that has already played a role in earlier lectures—how this work becomes a “person” through Goethe’s creation of *Faust*: the striving to connect the human soul life, through one’s own power, with that which rests, creates, and works in the spiritual worlds. And alongside this, in the figure of Mephistopheles, Goethe has set against Faust everything that might stand as an obstacle to deter human beings from this striving. Ultimately, however, human beings must win their freedom, where the words from the other world may resound to them: “Whoever strives and makes an effort, we can redeem.”

[ 31 ] Next, we see the magnificent endeavor of the German national philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who, during Germany’s darkest hours, found those heartfelt words that he expressed in his “Addresses to the German Nation.” We see Fichte standing before us with his ideas, which—arising from the human “I,” yet one that is from the outset imbued with all the impulses of God and the Spirit—create an entire spiritual world, a world for which the physical world is merely the material through which it is to be realized. We see one of the boldest philosophical-spiritual endeavors in Fichte’s philosophy. It is a philosophy that is convinced from the outset that human beings possess not only their five senses and their ordinary intellect, but also a higher sense—a sense through which a spiritual world is directly experienced, whereby human beings know themselves to be one with divine-spiritual life, and create in external reality only the material necessary to work within it. One might say: what still confronts us in a vague, soulful striving in the works of Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and even Jacob Böhme and Angelus Silesius, becomes luminous clarity in Fichte’s philosophy—luminous clarity because, although the mind is the dominant element of the soul here, it clarifies itself into luminous ideas that encompass a spiritual world and seek to affirm: The entire spiritual world lives within the “I.” Just as Angelus Silesius sought to be one with his God—with the entire divine workings and life—within his “I,” so it was clear to Fichte from the very beginning: If I truly reach that point within my “I” where this “I” comprehends itself in its deepest essence, then I am with God; then I am not merely creating just any worldview, but one that God creates within me. And one of the boldest, the most courageous thoughts is a Fichtean thought. It is not expressed by Fichte quite as I am about to express it; but everything Fichte said can be summarized in these words: If the human “I,” with its powers, with what it is, is to be dependent on anything—be it the external world, the brain, the body, or whatever—then it is bound to something else; then it is not that which the divine-spiritual being can experience within itself. This “I” need not be a different being in itself, but it must create itself again and again; and creating itself must be the most important activity of the “I.” This is how Fichte sees it. For Fichte, seeking to recognize the deepest essence of the “I” means knowing at every moment that one is creating this “I.” If it were to be lost for a single moment, it would have the power to create itself again and again. Fichte conceives of this “I” as creative. Through this, it is a direct reflection, a true image of the spiritual deity.

[ 32 ] What Fichte sought to identify as the innermost core of the soul’s substance in the human being—the “I” united with its God—Hegel breaks down into ideas—albeit abstract ones—that were in turn meant to encompass the entire world and, at the same time, to represent the world’s inner creative power. Hegel told himself: if the human spirit truly succeeds in allowing the pure, light-filled ideas to live within it, then it is not merely the individual human spirit—bound to the brain—that thinks; rather, it is the higher power living within the human being, the divine power that illuminates the world; then God thinks within the human being. For Hegel, the only thing that matters is to clarify and condense his thinking to such an extent that it transcends everything bound to an external world and truly arrives at the pure thought that God thinks in the soul. This endeavor is Hegel’s philosophical endeavor.

[ 33 ] Thus, German intellectual development has, for the time being, reached the stage of “Spirit” in the highest possible way. It is peculiar that here, as it were at the very peak of intellectual development, a point was reached that could not be held onto—from which one later, as it were, fell back down again; so that, with regard to everything that followed, what Hegel once said truly applies: “Only one person understood me, and even he misunderstood me.” It was a height to which few could ascend and even fewer could hold on.

[ 34 ] What had Hegel's philosophy achieved—and what had it not yet achieved?

[ 35 ] What had been achieved was that consciousness had developed within the soul, that the Germanic development of the soul had progressed so far toward German spiritual life that it had been recognized: human beings can only relive the spiritual world within themselves if they seek development, if they seek to ascend into spiritual worlds from which the peoples once emerged when they still possessed the ancient gift of clairvoyance. But Hegel had remained stuck at the level of concepts and ideas. For he could not say to himself: Concepts and ideas are still bound to the human body; I must proceed to that which exists as experience outside the human body. — How it is possible for the human soul to attain such an experience outside the body has been discussed here on several occasions; this will be discussed further tomorrow, when it will also be shown how such an experience and insight can help a person move forward in both serious and joyful moments of life. But Hegel had already attained an awareness of how the spirit lives within human beings in their external existence, even if he could demonstrate it only through dry, sober ideas. And even if Hegel could only sketch a worldview that plays itself out in dry, sober ideas—because it does not rise, out of inspiration, to a grasp of real life in the spirit—the line, the true direction toward grasping the spirit, is nevertheless present within German spiritual life in Hegel’s philosophy. And when we look at the impulses that are present in the Germanic soul, born of this experience of the spirit, and when the question is asked: “Is this the end, now that things have unfolded in this way?” then we can say: No! This is not the end; it is—one might say—merely a stage of the beginning. With Hegel’s philosophy, something has been achieved about which one must say: if one can immerse oneself in it and make the soul an inner instrument of the ideas, then the soul develops further. The German soul must therefore be entrusted with the world mission of ascending once more from the abstract idea—from the grasping of the thoughts and ideas that surge through nature and human beings within nature—to the direct, living grasping and experiencing in the spirit and in the spiritual world. We see the German spirit at a stage in its early development, and we understand why it must be at such a stage: because it has developed in such a way that, starting from a mind turned in on itself, it first had to grasp within itself that which must unravel the mysteries of the world. That is why this German spirit is so difficult to understand. — It is peculiar, for example, to hear that the brilliant Pole Adam Mickiewicz gave a lecture in Paris in 1843 in which he stated: “The German students knew nothing at all about Hegel: Does Hegel believe in an immortal human being? Does he believe in the true Christian God?” Mickiewicz believed that Hegel’s philosophy rises so little to these mysteries of life that one cannot even tell whether it intends to speak of these things at all. And he made the following statement: Polish and French journalists understood Hegel much better than Hegel’s students; for—he argued—these Polish and French journalists knew precisely that Hegel knew nothing of the immortal human being or of the true Christian God. — How foolishly does the otherwise brilliant Mickiewicz speak of Hegel! Why were the French and Polish journalists able to “understand” Hegel so easily? Precisely because the journalists navigate in shallow waters and fail to recognize that with Hegel one must descend deep, deep down, that the questions stretch out there, that they must then be posed deeper and deeper, and that the mind one normally possesses cannot, from the concepts given by Hegel, intuit the perspectives from which the great mysteries of the immortal God must be solved. Mickiewicz expressed nothing other than what can be characterized by a saying of the old satirist Lichtenberg, which I wish to quote by bringing it together with Mickiewicz’s remarks: “When books and a mind collide, and it sounds hollow, the book is not necessarily to blame.”

[ 36 ] This is what matters: that German intellectual life at the beginning of the nineteenth century learned to take the first steps toward true spiritual science, toward living spiritual knowledge—steps that carry within themselves the power of progress and the power of perfection. What do we take away from this reflection—and from this last-mentioned consequence of the reflection regarding the nature of the German spirit? What does this mean for us—so that we can take it into our feelings, into the feelings we can harbor in these fateful, difficult days, when so much precious blood and so much strength are being expended for German intellectual life, for the German spirit in both East and West? What does this mean?

[ 37 ] We see the continuous evolution of the Germanic soul into the German spirit; we see the German spirit in its early stages, we see the seeds that are already there and the promise that it must yet rise to heights that are already implicit within it—heights that must not be stifled but must be allowed to develop, because they are part of its very essence. Individuals may die before they have lived their lives to the fullest. People may die in the early years of their existence because they will return in other earthly lives, and because, moreover, others can take their place in earthly cultural life. Unfinished human lives can unfold in outward physical existence. But unfulfilled national lives cannot! For if a nation were to be murdered or its existence compromised before it has fulfilled its mission, then no other national individuality would take its place. Nations must live out their full potential! Nations must complete the cycle of their existence—not merely the stages of childhood and maturity, but their existence all the way to the highest perfection. The German spirit, German spiritual life, is not at an end, not on the verge of completion; rather, it stands at a beginning. Much still lies ahead for it. When the wishes of enemies—who seek the opposite—rise up from all sides against the very possibility of existence for the German people and the Central European world, then it must be this that gives the Central European world and the German people the strength to resist—the strength to keep alive the seeds we find planted in its soul precisely when we contemplate that soul in its full, living development. And faith in the victorious nature of German life need not be a mere blind faith; it can arise from a living understanding of the German essence—from that living understanding which leads to the conviction that German life must endure, because the German essence must fulfill its mission in the development of the world, because there would be nothing else that could elevate the purely external, materialistic worldview to that most ideal, spiritual height whose very purpose lies within the German essence. Truly: it is in this German spiritual life that lies what will one day lead the purely materialistic worldview out into an understanding of the spiritual world. And that the greatest minds have sensed that there is a beginning—and not an end—to German spiritual life, we see in all the great minds as they have expressed the impulses of this spiritual life. Herman Grimm, often mentioned in these lectures, once pointed out—this passage is found in his lectures on Goethe—what the materialistic worldview has made of the world in the present day. He refers to the Kant-Laplace theory, which posits a vast cosmic nebula as the starting point of our world’s development; this nebula condenses into a great ball of gas that, in some way, begins to rotate, and in this way our Earth, along with the other planets, comes into being; on Earth, over the course of time, spirit and life develop in a way that remains unknown, and later—according to this theory—once the Earth has died out, all life and all spirit will fall back into the sun. For Herman Grimm, such a materialistic view of the evolution of the world is incompatible with what can emerge from the sources of German spiritual life. That is why, in his lectures on Goethe, he expresses himself in strong terms regarding such a portrayal:

[ 38 ] “No more fruitless prospect for the future can be imagined than the one that is being imposed on us today as scientifically necessary in this expectation. A scrap of bone that a hungry dog went out of its way to find would be a refreshing and appetizing morsel compared to this excrement of creation, as which our Earth would ultimately fall back to the Sun, and the thirst for knowledge with which our generation accepts such notions and presumes to believe them is a sign of a sick imagination—one that scholars of future epochs will one day devote much ingenuity to explaining as a historical phenomenon of our time.”

[ 39 ] What hope can spring from such a consideration of the German spirit as has been undertaken today? We have seen how the Germanic soul has developed out of ancient clairvoyance; we have seen this soul develop further into the German spirit, whose first glimmer is evident in German mysticism; we have seen this German spirit unfold further into the vision of *Faust*, into the spirit of Goethe, Schiller, and the others, and we can see today how it will continue to develop through a permeation of the world all the way to the sources of the spiritual, in which the human soul—if it only grasps itself deeply enough—can truly participate. Viewing the German spirit in this way gives us confidence that German strength must be invincible; it gives us a confidence that is not based on mere blind faith, but which must be our comfort and our hope in these fateful and difficult days.

[ 40 ] To conclude this reflection, let me summarize what appears to be a consequence of it in the following words:

The German spirit has not yet accomplished
What it is meant to create in the unfolding of the world;
It lives with hope amid concerns for the future;
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerfully
Something hidden that must still ripen and take effect. —
How can the desire for its own end, without understanding,
Come to life under the enemy’s power,
As long as life reveals itself to it,
Which sustains it creatively at the roots of its being!