The Rudolf Steiner Archive

30. The Mission of Art (Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe)

[ 1 ] Art is something that different people, depending on their temperament and life experiences, consider essential or insignificant to life. How different were the perspectives in the past: Plato had devised that grand plan for the art of statecraft, yet he regarded poets and artists as dispensable to the whole organism. Schiller saw art as an elevation for humanity.

[ 2 ] What does art have to say about the true forces of life? Theosophy lets things speak for themselves and asks: What has art shown us throughout the various world-ages? We must first try to find our way around this in broad strokes. Theosophy is, in its form, something quite new. It is based entirely on a certain premise: that of delving into the supersensible spiritual world. There are powers within the human soul that can be developed—such as the awakening of the soul’s spiritually perceptive powers. It is a fact, just like the case of the man born blind who learned to see after surgery.

[ 3 ] Art did not used to look the way it does today. Over the centuries and millennia, it has changed greatly. People often fail to take this into account today. The ancient Greeks were not like us. Back then, they were much closer to the spiritual realm that lies beyond the physical world. In ancient times, there were countless people who, through their natural gifts, were able to glimpse into the spiritual world. This meant that people were different from us today, both in their very nature and in their feelings. Today, people must develop the same qualities in their outer lives as everyone else. Everything that the people of ancient times did was influenced by the supersensible world. For example, they saw the spiritual force behind stones and plants. Now, those who are spiritually developed and can see into this realm know that there is a spiritual law at work here, and that what happens in the physical world is a reflection of spiritual processes. For the ancient Greeks, it was quite clear that when something happened in the physical world, the reason for it lay in the spiritual realm.

[ 4 ] For the Greeks, there was a very special event: they transitioned to an entirely different way of life. What we today call intellectual and cultural life did not exist back then. They were beings who had evolved from clairvoyance. They possessed various degrees of clairvoyant ability. Outstanding individuals—what we now call geniuses—were, back then, those who were well-versed in the spiritual world. Those who transformed their higher clairvoyant gifts into deeds were the lords of the heroic age. Clairvoyance was a reality back then. Today, genius is not bound to heredity; back then, it was bound to the bloodline. There were specific families who were able to acquire this clairvoyant leadership. The lords and heroes were people in whom the instinctive connection to the supersensible world lived. They did not need to ponder what they should do; they acted out of their instincts and desires. They surrendered themselves to them without rational deliberation. That was the significant turning point: feeling was transformed into a culture of reason. A Greek of later times might well have felt: Our ancestors acted out of the immediate impulse of their souls; now such a quality is no longer inherited. The Greeks expressed this in a metaphor: The gods have taken this gift of clairvoyance from us and carried it to Asia, to the priestly state, by means of the most beautiful Greek woman, Helen, the wife of Menelaus, who, as the embodiment of clairvoyance, was carried across to Troy, the priestly state. Helen is another word for Selena—the moon. It was felt that the worship of the sun had replaced the old lunar culture. Achilles, Agamemnon, and Menelaus were seen as figures reaching back into the lunar age. Homer ties in with that event in his Iliad.

[ 5 ] The Iliad begins: “Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.” Passions should be sung about in order to point to the era that preceded the culture of reason. The woman as the embodiment of clairvoyance is lost in two ways. The struggle is for what has been lost, which is bound to the priestly state of “Troy.” Homer depicts the second way as follows: when the storm arises, it is appeased only by the sacrifice of Iphigenia at [Aulis]. The Greek myth shows us the replacement of the culture of clairvoyance by the culture of reason. Odysseus is the bearer of modern rational culture—the wooden horse; the horse as a symbol of reason. He represents the transition to it.

[ 6 ] Poseidon, the god of the sea, is the protector of the old man. Athena is wisdom and also a symbol of reason. Athena guides Odysseus home. Here, the fate of nations is to be depicted, and people are merely used as a means to that end. The poet looks upon the great events of the world and, through art, creates answers to them.

[ 7 ] Plato, on the other hand, took the view that what matters are those who live their lives, not those who come along afterward and recount them. He introduced a priestly form of poetry in the pre-Homeric era that looked up to the gods. It was with this poetry that reflection on life first emerged; before that, such reflection did not exist.

[ 8 ] Aeschylus is still entirely focused on the supernatural world. The Eumenides and Prometheus Bound demonstrate how the supernatural world is becoming intertwined with the sensory world.

[ 9 ] People became increasingly immersed in the culture of reason, and now we come to the thirteenth century, when Dante wrote his Divine Comedy. What does he present to us there? A world of transcendent being. The entire philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus lived on in Dante. Dante was a sage even before he wrote that poem. The supernatural vision was before his soul. He allowed himself to be guided through Hell, through Purgatory; his soul wandered through Heaven. At that time, human beings became aware of their unique individuality. They questioned their relationship to the world around them. This marked a step forward for humanity. Goethe has Dante’s shadow say—for Goethe felt this to be something profound: “How great is the gratitude due to the one who has brought this world to us anew!”

[ 10 ] Once again, we skip ahead several centuries and arrive at the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the time of Shakespeare. Humanity was of a different nature. It had made progress in the physical and sensory realm. How did Shakespeare create? For whom, first and foremost? He did not create for those who set the tone in the world of education. He wrote for the common people and created his plays in a completely neglected segment of society. The educated would never have gone there, for fear of shame and ridicule. Those who set the tone at that time were entirely preoccupied with the physical world, but the common people still retained a certain receptivity. Shakespeare takes people as they are—in their actions and their fates. The impulses of his characters played out in the physical world, but it created only a reflection. He depicted only individual fates. Had Shakespeare lived for centuries more, he could have singled out many more such individual fates and written many more such dramas. The greatest poet, Goethe, could not have created a second drama like Faust. “Faust” is what transcends the individual. Up until Shakespeare, humanity stands firmly grounded in the sensory world. Goethe rises above this and seeks once again to connect heaven and hell. “Faust” depicts what is not merely an individual fate.

[ 11 ] We find Schiller’s exploration and articulation of the purpose of poetry in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” He asks: How does a person rise from the mundane to the higher, the supernatural?

[ 12 ] Whenever Goethe creates individual works of poetry, there is always a process in which the human being steps outside of himself.

[ 13 ] Thus, art proceeds hand in hand with human development. Goethe leads us from the sensory world into the supersensory world. The conclusion of Faust clearly reveals to us this longing for the supersensible world. The twentieth century will bring us Goethe’s testament. Through spiritual science, humanity is to come to understand what art has been yearning for. Now art is to lead humanity into the supersensible. Art is a secret manifestation of the laws of the universe.

[ 14 ] The humanities will fulfill the longing that Goethe expresses at the end of Faust in the “Chorus mysticus”:

All that is fleeting
Is but a parable
That which is inadequate,
Here becomes an event;
That which is indescribable,
Here is danced
The eternally feminine
Draws us upward.