The Rudolf Steiner Archive

19. Questions during the First Anthroposophical University Course II

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: There are still quite a number of questions left over from the last time we had a discussion here. There are about twenty questions. We will have to find another opportunity to address these twenty questions, some of which are indeed interesting. But I have been asked—and that is why we will stay a few more minutes—to answer today, out of these twenty questions, those that come from attendees who must leave tomorrow or in the next few days. So please let me know which questions are most pressing.

Participant: I would like to hear something about marriage from the perspective of spiritual science.

[ 2 ] Rudolf Steiner: This question is indeed somewhat vague, because it is not clear what the questioner actually wants to know. Marriage is certainly a phenomenon, a manifestation within the whole of social life; it has developed alongside social life, and over time it has indeed taken on the most diverse forms—and, in particular, the most diverse meanings—so that one could, for example, ask: What is marriage in today’s rationalistic social life? — or: What does marriage still mean for Catholics? — and so on. So I don’t really know what the question is supposed to mean. For, isn’t it true that there is no particular need to discuss the nature of marriage as such from the perspective of spiritual science? I can’t quite picture what that would entail. The gentleman who asked the question was surprised that nothing about marriage from a social standpoint was included in our lecture programs or course syllabi. Of course, it could have been that marriage might have been touched upon within the framework of the social lectures. But isn’t it true that, as things stand, other social issues are currently much more pressing than those that are usually linked to the problem of marriage today?

[ 3 ] For quite some time now, psychological and anthropological questions—and so on—have been linked to the problem of marriage, and if one is to speak of such a problem at all, one naturally needs to approach it from a particular angle. One can hardly speak of the problem of marriage out of the blue without, in my view, having first addressed the problem of love. When one speaks of the problem of love, the problem of marriage may arise as a consequence of it. But it is in fact hardly possible to discuss such a problem in isolation, because, first of all, what I have said must be taken into account, and second, one must bear in mind that when most people ask such a question, they have in mind something normative, something prescriptive, whereas in reality, since the mid-15th century, people have become increasingly individual beings. So, for the immediate psychological understanding of the marital problem, the fact is that marriage is, of course, initially related to the person themselves, to the human inner life, and—like any other relationship between people—can take on a completely individual character. And to formulate general theories about matters of such an individual nature would lead us into an abstract debate that, fundamentally speaking—especially when such intimate, individual matters are at stake—would always miss the mark in terms of reality.

[ 4 ] Of course, one can also view the issue of marriage from a social perspective. I did this years ago when a member of our Anthroposophical Society organized a printed survey in which he asked people to respond to the question of the marriage issue from the standpoint of the state. Yes, if one starts from such a point of view, then it is possible to discuss the matter. One can then state very clearly that we live in—let’s not say a “state community” for now—but rather that we live in a social community; that this social community has a very definite interest in the child born of marriage—or in the children born of marriage—and that, for the social community, the issue of children is actually a special problem. One can then state that marriage must simply be conceived with the next generation in mind, and that, in light of this conception of marriage oriented toward the next generation, individual aspirations must indeed take a back seat, so that the individual must feel himself to be a member of his social community and cannot then arrange his marriage in whatever way personally suits him.

[ 5 ] These things are such that they lead into the most deeply individual realm, and when they are addressed, they actually always lead to a normative way of looking at things that, in effect, destroys the realities involved. What, after all, is the point of asking such a question? As a rule, one wants guidance for life. And providing such guidance for life is not the task of spiritual science. The task of spiritual science, my dear friends, is to fill the human being with spiritual and soul content so that he may become a whole human being. And then, when he becomes a whole human being—when his soul is filled with what spiritual science can give him, when spiritual science brings to the surface from the depths of his soul all those soul capacities and and impulses of power that lie within him—so that the human being is able to take his place in life and find his path through it—then what is to arise between human being and human being will also come to be; this is not something to be standardized.

[ 6 ] If you read my *Philosophy of Freedom*, you will find, above all, that it aims to shape the human being from within in such a way that he receives the necessary, the right impulses for shaping his life, so that he does not wish to be governed from the outside by any dogmatic commandments. This is what must always be taken into account, even when addressing such a question. It will become clear that those who follow the path of spiritual science will find the right path within the individual. Merely formulating general theories about these matters cannot be the task of spiritual science, because that would in turn mean forcing people into a system, into a mold. But providing templates—general abstractions—cannot be the task of spiritual science, just as it can no longer be the task of contemporary life. The task of spiritual science is to place the individual on their own individual ground and to enable them to live there in a way that is both capable of life and full of meaning.

[ 7 ] That is what I have to say about it. It probably doesn’t address what you meant. But this question is exactly the same as when someone asks how one should go about choosing a career from the perspective of spiritual science. Of course, one can say all sorts of nice things about choosing a career, but one cannot speak in general terms, because it always depends on individual circumstances.

Participants: Where does the sensation of a sour taste come from after traumatic experiences?

[ 8 ] Rudolf Steiner: If one considers the interactions that take place between the spiritual-psychic and the physical aspects of the human being—as has been described in various lectures here—then it is indeed the case that [the human organism] is, as a result of some psychologically traumatic event, so strongly permeated by material processes that are, of course, not directly perceived in ordinary, normal life. When a traumatic event occurs, of course, it is not merely our soul that is affected; rather, the emotional upheaval certainly has its organic, physical counterpart—and in a very specific way. One must simply be clear about just how complex the human organism actually is.

[ 9 ] I myself have pointed out in one of my lectures that the sense of balance, the sense of movement, and and sense of life emerge from within the human being, while at the same time the senses of taste, smell, and touch develop; and that as the senses interpenetrate, the experiences of smell, taste, and touch can take precedence over what we would experience through the senses of balance, movement, and life. And I have shown that if one stops halfway, instead of penetrating to the innermost depths, one enters into a nebulous mysticism. This can certainly be very beautiful and very meaningful, but essentially, when one stops halfway through this journey inward, one actually remains in the realms of taste, smell, and touch. One need only read through the writings—such as the narratives of the hagiographic poets, Mechthild of Magdeburg for example—to be able, I would say, to grasp spiritually with one’s hands how an inward-turned sense of taste, smell, and touch has come about in very beautiful experiences, through what I have just described. Now, when a deeply unsettling experience occurs, it usually involves—I say: usually—the fact that the spiritual-soul aspect, which we refer to in our terminology as the “I” and the “astral body,” but which is precisely the bearer of that which acts inwardly within the human being, tears itself away from the organism as if in sleep. Of course, as a result of such emotional upheavals, a state of fainting may occur, which is simply nothing more than the astral and the soul no longer controlling the etheric body and the physical body because they are not intervening in the proper way. Now imagine this process vividly. A shock occurs; the astral body and the “I” become loosened. They are loosened, but the person still holds on. That is to say, the astral body and the “I” strive to leave, but are held back, and thus a continuous back-and-forth oscillation arises. It is precisely during this back-and-forth oscillation that the experiences occur which take place in the region situated just outside the human being’s actual innermost core, where the senses of taste, smell, and touch [have remained], and even if a taste—an illusion of taste—is subjectively experienced, that is, a stimulation of the taste organs during this back-and-forth oscillation, this is a completely natural phenomenon.

A participant asks about the terms Sal, Mercur, and Sulfur.

[ 10 ] Rudolf Steiner: It has already been quite correctly pointed out that if one wishes to delve into concepts such as those of Paracelsus—and, incidentally, those of sulfur, mercury, and salt used by others as well—one must, of course, completely set aside modern chemistry. One must also bear in mind that, in Paracelsus’s time, modern chemistry as such did not yet actually exist. The entire way of thinking was different back then. It is interesting how modern historians, when they look back to earlier times—as a Nordic chemist who recently wrote a history of alchemy did—describe the processes in question by noting that only the figures of the 13th to 15th centuries could make sense of them, whereas the modern chemist cannot make any sense of what is being discussed there at all. This stems from the fact that the entire way of thinking was different. Thinkers before the emergence of modern chemistry did not have the concept of matter as we understand it today. They were more concerned with the process of how one state developed into another. In other words, they were more interested in the relationship between one state and another in the material world. Thus, for the external world—for the non-human world, or, one might say, the external, organic world—one used the concepts of earthy, watery, airy, fiery, or warm. By this, one did not mean substances as they are understood today, but rather the state of the earthy, the liquid—water being the liquid as such—and so on. And people had a certain sense of this: by distinguishing in this way between the earth-like, the water-like, the air-like, and the fire-like, the entire framework they applied to the states of the world referred precisely to the non-organic, namely to the non-human. And with regard to the human, one did not assume at all that the same kind of constitution existed within the organism; rather, one assumed a different kind of constitution. According to the conceptions people held at that time, it was difficult to say exactly how the airy or the earthy elements were present in human beings. Human beings were viewed as a—I might say—constitution built within themselves, and whatever a human being was, for example, as a thinking being, was attributed to certain states of their physical organism. People simply said to themselves: Something physical takes place within a human being in that they are a thinking being or in that they are in the state of thinking. This process was seen as having a certain congruence or similarity with the solidification of the earthly. It was imagined that the state in which the earthly—the totality of the earthly—once existed in ancient times had not yet attained the solid earthly state, and that the solid earthly state had, so to speak, just been solidified from a less dense state. But this very same process of solidification, which was conceived as occurring in the non-human realm, was not attributed to the human realm as such. Instead, when the human realm was in a state of thinking, a process was attributed to it that was described as salt formation, so that these were parallel processes for the outer and the inner: earthification—salt formation in the human being; cosmic thought formation, the emergence of the solid, that is, the earthly—planetary inner-human thought formation, the corresponding physical process, the salting. And so everything that was understood as “salt” was conceived as related to what is physically present in the human being when he thinks, when he reveals himself as a thinking being.

[ 11 ] Of course, this led, in a sense, to the extension—by analogy—of what was initially attributed to human beings to the processes underlying the planet’s actual solidification: the formation of external salt deposits. Some of these terms are still in use today. People still use them, but they are no longer aware of their historical origins.

[ 12 ] Insofar as physical processes take place in human beings as sentient beings—or, to put it another way, if we summarize the sum of all those processes in human beings—which are evident as physical processes—that are the bearers of the life of feeling, we have the Mercurial. And if we consider everything in human beings that is the vehicle of the life of the will, we have the sulfuric aspect in human beings.

[ 13 ] And so such personalities conceived of the human constitution, the human organism, as consisting of these three interrelated processes: the salt-like process—which, in a sense, kills the human being—running parallel to the thought process—for in that we are thinking beings, we find ourselves in a state akin to that which continually leads us to death, that is, processes of deposition, salt-forming processes—and then the sulfur process, which, in a sense, stirs the human being, the sulfuric element that continually permeates him with a new state of growth that inhibits consciousness. And that which rhythmically balances the two is the mercurial element.

[ 14 ] When we go back to earlier times, we simply have to accept that we can no longer think in terms of the thought forms of modern science, but rather in terms of the thought forms that existed in the past—thought forms that were actually based on a state of mind quite different from our own today. We can only artificially transport ourselves back to the states of mind from which such concepts arose. It is not enough to take up terms such as Mercur, Sal, Sulfur, and so on from Paracelsus or Basilius Valentinus and simply look them up in our textbooks or in an encyclopedia; rather, it is necessary to transport oneself back into a completely different way of thinking. Only then can one begin to speak about these things.

[ 15 ] Are there any other questions like this that need a quick answer?

Participant: Isn’t the Song of Solomon a song that depicts an initiation? I came to this conclusion during my studies of Hebrew while attempting to align the text with Ritter’s original sources. Theological scholarship offers various, but unsatisfactory, answers. It seems to me that the biblical text is intentionally obscured, so that its esoteric meaning is no longer apparent to the general reader. Does the Song of Songs not belong to the tradition of initiation writings?

[ 16 ] Rudolf Steiner: You see, in general, when dealing with such matters, one really must follow the principle I have already mentioned here on another occasion: to interpret, but not to impose one’s own ideas—that is, not to look for falsehoods or the like in the texts in question. With works as ancient as the Song of Solomon, it really is essential that we first fully immerse ourselves in the way of thinking and the state of mind from which such a work arose. I mentioned this example just a moment ago: If one wishes to read the writings of the alchemists, one must immerse oneself in the entire state of mind from which these people conceived of matter and processes—and that is not so long ago. It is quite clear, for example, that in a sense that today’s translators do not take sufficiently into account, what Professor Beckh recently said here about the Oriental texts applies. One must first be clear that this abstractness—I would say, this “dilution” of the content of our concepts—is, when you get right down to it, not really all that old. You see, anyone who has lived in the countryside and knows the peasant dialect knows that even that dialect still had something about it that did not distinguish material processes from mental processes nearly as much as the intellectualistic way of life in today’s civilization does; people used to think of things as more intertwined—now that has more or less ceased; things are moving at a breakneck pace, giving way there too to a general materialism.

[ 17 ] Just think for a moment when today’s educated person says, “nighttime sleep.” Of course, they have vague notions, but please analyze for a moment the actual content of the ideas you have when you say “night sleep.” You will certainly draw one thing or another from your consciousness, then piece all sorts of things together, and in this way arrive at the concept of “night sleep” as a modern, educated person. But the farmer, when he spoke of “night’s sleep,” was speaking of something very clearly defined and specific; only it was not conceived in material terms, nor in spiritual or psychological terms, but rather it was both at the same time. When he spoke of “night’s sleep,” he was rubbing out what he had inside his eyes that morning, and that is what he called “night’s sleep.” In this physical act, he simultaneously embodied everything he associated with the word “night’s sleep” and what he believed had, so to speak, coalesced from what he had experienced during the night. And he could then wipe that away from his eyes. He had a conception in which the physical and the spiritual were one.

[ 18 ] I still remember that during my childhood, when I was surrounded by that kind of language, there was a phrase that came up very often when someone forgot to turn off the light early in the morning and it had already gotten light out; people would say: “You’re burning the day’s eyes out!” — There you have an idea expressed in very concrete images. You wouldn’t use abstractions for something like that: “You’re burning the day’s eyes out.” It’s something where you have material images that lean more toward the spiritual—yet characterize the spiritual—and through which you learned to use language. That’s something that’s still alive among us today.

[ 19 ] If we go back to ancient times, we must try to imagine ourselves in very different states of mind. And when we return to the time when the Song of Solomon was written—a time when everything of significance was merely a derivative of mystery culture—we must be clear that something translated using our modern methods may take on an erotic overtone, whereas within the state of mind of that ancient era, it was something entirely different. There is no doubt that, in a sense, a kind of dichotomy took place. Certain word meanings were originally unified, encompassing both the spiritual and the physical. Then the spiritual became abstract—I would say it was branched off in one direction, and the physical in the other. This is particularly the case with erotic concepts. Eroticism is, in essence, something that—as we understand it today—makes absolutely no sense at all for the time from which the Song of Solomon originates, not the slightest bit of sense, because concepts in this realm were not yet as firmly established as they are today. In this regard, one experiences the strangest things in our time. People come and tell you, for example, about all sorts of sexual sins committed by children, and when you ask them how old the child is, it turns out to be three years old. That is, of course, utter nonsense, because to speak of sexuality before a child’s permanent teeth come in is utter nonsense. The situation is entirely different, and only our present age—which, as a certain phase of analytical psychology shows, is capable of orienting itself one-sidedly in only one direction—brings these ideas into every context because it is unable to see the true, real circumstances.

[ 20 ] So we must be careful not to translate something like the Song of Solomon, so to speak, into our abstract language. We can certainly allow it its richness, but we must be clear that the state of mind of people back then was different, and that the state of mind of people today—because they lump everything together in this regard—may perhaps represent an erotic product. The state of mind of that era led into entirely different realms. In some circles, it is a popular notion to interpret the entire mystery tradition, for example, in erotic terms. Of course, one is standing on very uncertain ground here, because one is completely uninformed and has no idea what the spiritual constitution of people in earlier times was like. That is why it must always be said: The point is that, in order to understand such things, one must above all be able to put oneself in the spiritual constitution of the corresponding epoch. This also applies, for example, to our Gospels. For the translations of the Gospels that we have do not at all reflect what is actually written in the Gospels, because the translations were essentially produced from an entirely different state of mind, and because one must go back to the very state of mind from which these writings originated.

[ 21 ] That's all I can say about it. Of course, there isn't time to go into details. I'll answer the remaining eighteen questions in the next few days.