The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. The Harmonization of Art, Science, and Religion Through Anthroposophy

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Today’s lecture makes no other claim than to serve as a kind of introduction to the reflections I will be presenting over the next few days—reflections on the relationship between anthroposophy and the various fields of science and life.

[ 2 ] One of the most significant aspects of recent intellectual life is undoubtedly the coexistence, collaboration, and shared intellectual journey of Goethe and Schiller, particularly during the very early days of their friendship in the last decade of the eighteenth century. And it is extraordinarily significant that during this period, in which two of humanity’s greatest geniuses found each other in close friendship, a burning intellectual question was, so to speak, discussed and weighed from every angle between these two figures. Both Goethe and Schiller were, after all, artists at their very core. But it was precisely during this period that they were deeply preoccupied, on the one hand, with the relationship between artistry and knowledge as revealed in scientific inquiry, and, on the other hand—albeit somewhat less clearly, yet nonetheless in many respects—with the relationship between artistry and human religious feeling and sensibility. And when one allows the underlying tone that resonates throughout all of Goethe’s and Schiller’s discussions on the mutual relationship between knowledge, art, and religion to sink in, one is led to say to oneself: For these two minds, above all else, the question was this: How do the cognitive, the artistic, and the religious work together within the human being to lead people to live out and express their full, whole, harmonious human nature—for themselves and for the world?

[ 3 ] Anyone who delves into this lively treatment of the issue at hand will likely be most deeply impressed by what has come to light in Schiller’s discussion of this question in his, unfortunately far too little appreciated “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” and what Goethe added to Schiller’s reflections in his “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” which concludes the “Conversations of German Emigrants.” And I do not believe that one can delve more deeply, on an emotional level, into the question I would like to discuss briefly today than by first directing one’s attention to the positions taken on it by these two outstanding minds. For everything is, so to speak, characteristic of the fact I have cited; characteristic is the moment when Goethe and Schiller felt the deepest need to clarify this question for themselves; it is characteristic that they first used what their friendship and their life together had to offer to gain clarity on this question, which seemed so extraordinarily important to them at the time; and in many other respects, one can further emphasize the significance of deriving the connection to today’s topic from an examination of the exchange between Goethe and Schiller.

[ 4 ] On the one hand, Schiller saw the scientific perspective, to which he had, in a certain sense, been led by what was bound to become his external position at that time—his professorship in Jena—as well as by his desire to gain insight into the philosophical foundations of art based on Kant’s philosophy. But every such question took on, in Schiller’s case, a character that led toward the universal human condition, toward the broader question: What is the true essence of the human being, and what, within cultural and intellectual development, contributes most to this essence of the human being? And so the question arose: How does the human being attain the possibility of embarking on the path to his or her destiny—through knowledge, through scientific inquiry, and through artistic endeavor? This question became a burning one for Schiller. He posed it to himself in the very treatise he wrote on the aesthetic education of the human race. Schiller often told himself at this very time that scientific observation had something unsatisfying about it when one sought the highest, purest unfolding of the human being. There are some curious statements by Schiller in this regard. For example, when he received a chapter from Goethe’s *Wilhelm Meister* and read it with the utmost interest, he wrote a letter to Goethe in which he expressed his feelings about Goethe’s artistic treatment of the subject in this work, adding the sentence: “The artist is, after all, the only true human being, and the best philosopher is, when it comes down to it, merely a caricature beside him.”

[ 5 ] What did Schiller mean by such a radical statement? He meant: When a person is either engaged in artistic creation or immerses themselves in works of art with an appreciation for their artistic value, they feel their full humanity as inwardly active and alive; and compared to what they experience in true works of art, what they can experience through scientific knowledge is, after all, something thoroughly unsatisfying. It was from such feelings that the unique solution arose which Schiller offered to this question in his Aesthetic Letters. He told himself something like this: When we, as human beings, are engaged in the highest pursuit accessible to us here in earthly life—when we are devoted to the contemplation of ideas about the world, as is ultimately the goal of all scientific endeavor—then we feel the necessity of being logical; we must not deviate from the laws of reason, which, in a sense, takes possession of our mind and soul and dictates our path. By engaging in this kind of intellectual activity, we are not truly free inwardly, and yet it is only in inner freedom that true humanity comes to life.

[ 6 ] In this cognitive activity, Schiller sees, so to speak, one pole of human activity; he sees the other pole in man’s devotion to the natural necessity of his own being, to his instincts, his drives, and to his capacity for desire, which in ordinary life arises from his lower organism and his drives. It is out of these impulses that man acts and initially organizes his life. Yet one is devoted to the natural necessity of one’s own being only when one is devoted to one’s drives and instincts; one follows one’s drives and instincts, as it were, just as external nature follows its natural conditions; once again, one is not free. Between these two states—surrender to rational necessity and surrender to natural necessity—Schiller seeks that “middle state” in which the human being can find itself, and which he calls the aesthetic state, that state in which a person is an artist or an artistic connoisseur. How, then, does Schiller describe this middle state based on his own experiences and perceptions of art?

[ 7 ] He says: When we, as human beings, enjoy a work of art, we do not feel the rigid, strict necessity of reason that must guide us in our cognition, nor do we feel the mere capacity for desire that lives in our drives and instincts; for when we strive to rise to the free enjoyment of beauty, we must not remain stuck in what our sensual drives alone provide. The mindless sensual drives can never rise to a true understanding of the work of art. But in devoting ourselves to the artistic, we do not live in something abstract, intellectually detached, and non-sensual, as is the case with scientific cognition when it advances to the level of ideas; we then live—since what appears sensually is also the artistic—in that middle state of devotion to the sensual; yet we live in such devotion to the sensual that, at the same time, our own sensual nature is set aside, that we are not surrendered to its necessity, that we have spiritualized and imbued it with soul. We have brought the rigid necessity of reason down into the sensuous realm, which is appropriate and appealing to us in the artistic; we have torn ourselves away from the rigid necessity of reason; but on the other hand, we have also torn ourselves away from the natural necessity that oppresses us. In this middle state, we are, in truth, free human beings. When we create art, for example, we do not follow the kind of methodological rules that we must observe in science; we surrender ourselves to the free play of what reigns within our own soul. The inner, free lawfulness—which appeals simultaneously to our sympathy and antipathy—guides us as we produce art. We are in a free state of mind.

[ 8 ] Drawing on such foundations, Schiller now dares to speak out radically, particularly in these aesthetic letters. From this activity, which reigns in the sensual realm and is nevertheless spiritual—as spiritual as the necessity of reason, without surrendering to this necessity of reason— and which is as sensual as life itself in the realm of the senses, without losing itself to natural necessity—from this activity, Schiller’s gaze is drawn to the free play of the child, who does not yet know the necessity of knowledge, but who is also not yet so deeply immersed in his sensuality, as he indulges in his free play, which unfolds from his sympathies and antipathies. From this mood, Schiller coined the radical statement: “Man is fully human only as long as he plays, and he plays—in the true sense of the word—only as long as he is fully human.”

[ 9 ] What Schiller expressed there belongs to a higher stage of intellectual development. There, the German spirit, so to speak, attempted to shed light on humanity from an extraordinarily high vantage point. The German spirit sought to grasp the entire inner essence of art through the question: What can art be in order to elevate human beings as high as possible in their development through the artistic essence?

[ 10 ] This was the question facing Schiller. It presented itself to Goethe with hardly any less intensity. Goethe followed with close attention all the thoughts and ideas that Schiller, in a sense, developed regarding the question: How is a person set free through the content of their spiritual life? But, by his very nature, Goethe could not bring himself to accept the more abstract lines of thought in Schiller’s aesthetic letters. For Goethe, who was an artist in a very different, broader sense than Schiller, the question was not as straightforward as it was for Schiller. Goethe might have said to himself: Schiller sees three forces at work within the human being: the necessity of reason, the needs of nature, and, in between, the aesthetic state; from their mutual relationship, he seeks to discern the free human soul in a spirit-filled way. But the matter is not so simple, Goethe might have told himself. For this human soul is something infinitely complex; one cannot fathom it by merely fixating on three such abstract forces, no matter how ingeniously one may philosophize about them. Goethe could not simply follow Schiller’s philosophy. For him, the answer he could give himself to this very question became an image—that powerful image with its manifold sub-images—which confronts us in his “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” I will now skip over all the other characters featured in this fairy tale and describe the actual situation: how the soul seeks, through various paths, to reach its goals—its freedom and the experience of its true nature.

[ 11 ] The paths that the individual characters—there are about twenty of them—take in Goethe’s fairy tale are, at their core, all paths of the soul; they are not intended to be allegorical or symbolic, but rather are presented exactly as Goethe felt compelled to describe these paths of the soul. Anyone who sees allegories or symbols in something like this “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” has not yet penetrated into a true, genuine spiritual life, such as that which prevails in Goethe, for example. If someone says, “In these characters I see only allegorical or symbolic representations of states of mind or the like,” they have no inkling of how rich Goethe’s experiences were along the individual paths of the soul, and how Goethe could express what he wished to reveal about the paths of the soul in no other way than through images that are ambiguous yet also deeply evocative. But I would like to point out only the central figures: All the various personalities in this fairy tale ultimately make their way toward the temple of the four kings—the temple of the golden king, the silver king, the bronze king, and the king who is an irregular mixture of these three substances. And we see how Goethe seeks to direct the entire plot toward the goal that, in the end, a certain relationship emerges with the Golden King, the Silver King, and the Bronze King, who, in a sense, by influencing another character in the fairy tale—the beautiful Lily—radiate the essence of the world in threefold ways onto the deepest human nature; and as these three powerful personalities radiate the innermost essence of the world onto humanity, we see how the fourth king—chaotically mixed from the substances of the other three—collapses in on himself.

[ 12 ] If one tries to express in somewhat abstract terms what Goethe felt during this encounter between the fairy-tale characters—the beautiful Lily and the four kings—one must say: He wanted to show how the human soul, if it is to attain true humanity, must ultimately arrive at a certain relationship with what the golden king represents: knowledge, that which leads human beings to wisdom; how it must arrive at the silver king, who gives human beings beauty and artistic sensibility; and how it must arrive at that which is represented by the bronze king—the good, true, and devout action. Thus, for Goethe, humanity ultimately arrives at knowledge as it lives in science, at beauty as it lives in art, and at the good as it exists in religion. But as Goethe depicts how the three kings—this threefold world-being of wisdom—radiate beauty, and goodness—it becomes evident at the same time that, as humanity thus attains its true humanity, that which previously influenced it—the composite king, chaotically blended from the three substances—collapses within itself and ceases to exist. Goethe seeks to show how true humanity can be attained only through a very specific balance of wisdom, beauty, and goodness—or, as one might also put it, of science, art, and religion—as these three manifestations of the world act upon human beings.

[ 13 ] What Goethe means by this should not really be expressed in abstract sentences; for it represents, one might say, the very sum total of Goethe’s experience in relation to wisdom or science, to art or beauty, and to religion as it manifests itself in human goodness. Goethe had to attempt to portray in individual images what Schiller portrayed more in abstract, philosophical ideas. That alone is significant. It is significant because, emerging from his entire era with its characteristic intellectual life, Goethe—just like Schiller—came to the question: How must science, art, and religion fit into human life? And he found no way to express this other than, at first, in a fairy-tale-like manner. Nevertheless, it is clear that for him this was a burning question, just as it was for Schiller. Schiller saw in the mere knower a caricature of the true human being. Goethe, however, ever since he had truly arrived at a genuine, awakened consciousness of humanity, had always strived to seek the foundations of artistic being and artistic creation—and the significance of this artistic being and creation for humanity—in the very essence of the world itself. And one arrives—I would say—at extraordinarily intense ideas and feelings in the realm I have indicated when one follows how Goethe, together with Herder, intensively studied Spinoza’s philosophy, how he read Spinoza’s *Ethics* together with Herder, and how he sought to gain insights from this *Ethics* into how divine necessity, in its lawfulness, reigns and weaves its way through the world. God, so to speak, at work in the world—this is what Goethe seeks to bring to life within himself through his study of Spinoza. Deep down, he remains unsatisfied. And just how unsatisfied he remains can be seen from the extraordinarily characteristic remarks he made to his friends in the letters he wrote from his Italian journey to his friends in Weimar. There in Italy, faced with works of art that gave him a sense of the Greek artistic spirit, he felt as though he were in an element that suddenly began to satisfy him. In the letters he wrote back to Weimar, we read the following words: “Now, in the presence of these Italian works of art, I am developing a sense for Greek art; I suspect that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, followed the same laws that nature itself follows—and which I am on the trail of.” — Thus, Goethe believed he had recognized: That in nature there reign the eternal, ironclad laws which he had sought to sense in Spinoza’s philosophy—but could not find there—which he nevertheless sensed through his own studies of nature, and which he was then able to trace into his art, in order to perceive science and art as a unity. He could only perceive this unity where he believed he was beholding the essence of Greek art. He believed that the Greeks, through their very nature, had deeply immersed themselves in the meaning and essence of natural necessity, that they had elevated this meaning and this essence into their works of art, but in such a way that within these works of art—albeit in a transformed form—lives the very same force that is otherwise active only within nature. As Goethe sensed this—as he perceived the necessity of artistic creation in what he now conceived of as Greek art—he arrived at the stirring declaration that he then wrote to his friends in Weimar, standing before the works of art he was able to see at that time: “There is necessity; there is God!”

[ 14 ] We see the path in Goethe: Intellectually, he sought in Spinoza’s philosophy the necessity of divine lawfulness in the nature of the world; he stood before the works of art that he regarded as the most perfect, and from them he sensed what he longed for with every fiber of his being. In the presence of these works of art, he experienced what he perceived as a sense of the divine. But we also see from this that Goethe could not simply regard art as a mere arbitrary addition to life, but that he genuinely strove to recognize how art, in its forms, is deeply rooted in the foundations of the universe. And perhaps a statement by Goethe is particularly characteristic—one that, I would say, leads quite deeply into what Goethe experienced and felt in this realm. He once objected—as you can read in his *Prose Sayings*—to speaking of the “idea of the true,” the “idea of the good,” or the “idea of beauty.” He said: There is only one Idea, and it lives in nothing other than the perceived, all-encompassing spirituality—the form in which it can appear to human beings. — He says that this Idea can manifest itself at times as truth, at times as beauty, and at times as goodness. Goethe wanted, so to speak, to ground in the roots of the world, in the essence of the world, that which he shaped artistically; he did not want what the artist creates to have sprung solely from free human whim, but rather for the human being, as a free artist, to be simultaneously immersed in the essence of the world. And so it was that not only did the question of true humanity develop for him from the question of art, but also the other question: How does the essence of the world operate within a human being when he is truly an artist? How do the laws of the world continue to operate within the creative, free artistic human being?

[ 15 ] I wanted to discuss what I have just mentioned here simply because it shows how, in the intellectual life of the modern era, as exemplified by Goethe and Schiller, the full depth of the question regarding the harmonization of science, art, and religion within human nature itself comes to the fore. I believe that it is precisely those who approach the spirit of Goethe and Schiller with both an open mind and deep devotion who must feel this question—the question of the harmonization of science, art, and religion. For these two outstanding geniuses of humanity regarded it as one of the most important questions of their lives to fathom how the universe is a unified whole, and what relationship human beings establish with this universe when they are engaged in intellectual activity, when they are engaged in artistic activity, and when they are engaged in religious activity. Now, however, I would say that the deepest inspiration for a proper, intensely profound approach to this question can be drawn from Goethe and Schiller. But it cannot be denied that, in an era that lies so far behind Goethe and Schiller, we must also freely confront what they perceived as a significant question for humanity. And so, precisely from a deeper, from a truly—I may say this without being immodest—devoted contemplation of Goethe and Schiller, the question of humanity appeared to me as a question of freedom at the time when I was setting out to write my *Philosophy of Freedom*. After all, it did not make sense to me that human beings are truly free beings only insofar as they live in the realm of art. What Schiller asserted is indeed the case: that in the cognitive contemplation of the world, one must follow the necessity of reason—that is, a kind of intellectual compulsion. But there is something else at work here: When one follows this rational necessity, when one devotes oneself to scientific observation in this sense, then one lives, after all, in what one experiences as ideas—be it nature, the world in general, or even the ideas of the laws of nature.

[ 16 ] With this, one lives in images, and one feels that one cannot truly fathom anything in nature unless one allows free inner human activity to take its course, and that, even if natural necessity compels us, it cannot force us into action, but rather that one must freely embrace that activity. One senses the imagery inherent in what nature and the world always are, and one then feels, in the act of cognition, one’s free human nature in a very special way. That is what I sought to portray in my *Philosophy of Freedom*. When one rises to the true impulses of moral action, and when these impulses of moral action become pure thought, then human beings once again live—moved to action—in images. We feel the pictorial nature of our cognition, and when we bring our morality into contact with this same pictorial nature, we feel ourselves to be in freedom. This is, in fact, what first enabled human beings to attain freedom in their development—namely, in the very age in which science, in the modern sense, emerged.

[ 17 ] Only life within that which does not actually submerge itself in nature—and therefore also has its limits in relation to nature—only life within the realm of thought and imagery frees human beings from the necessities into which they are placed as natural beings; and only then could scientific activity possess the possibility of full inner freedom as it truly led human beings to the inner experience of images. One cannot be unfree in the presence of images. When confronted with any other forces, one can be physically, emotionally, or spiritually driven or compelled to act. Consider whether a mere image—compare here mental images with linguistic images—can prompt you to do anything; they are powerless and lack force. And so our images are powerless and lack force in a moral sense. But if we proceed from mere images, we are free human beings in our moral actions. It must therefore be said that human beings are truly free beings not only in the aesthetic state, but also when they elevate themselves through their morality to such heights that they can exercise their will, when they devote themselves to a truly free activity of cognition.

[ 18 ] It thus becomes necessary to seek, in a new way, the inner harmonization of knowledge, art, and religion in the post-Goethean era. And anthroposophy, which does not merely seek to be some abstract, detached worldview, but rather aims to be a spiritual content that affects the whole, complete human being—because it is drawn from and flows from the whole, complete human being— Anthroposophy must, above all, be concerned with relating what it has to offer to knowledge as well as to artistic creation and religious experience. However, I would like to say that this is not achieved through some artificial embellishment of the anthroposophical path; rather, the anthroposophical path leads to this quite naturally, and by standing on anthroposophical ground, one can be fully in harmony precisely with the particular way of posing questions in this field, as it appeared in the works of Schiller and Goethe.

[ 19 ] Ladies and gentlemen, I must refer to something here that, while it belongs to the realm of anthroposophical research, I would nevertheless like to sketch out in broad strokes to demonstrate how anthroposophy achieves a harmonization of knowledge, art, and religion—not through some contrived intellectual construct, but in a completely natural way.

[ 20 ] When one wishes to describe how anthroposophy proceeds, one must necessarily always point out how the powers of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul—and which are not active in ordinary human life or in conventional science—must be developed through certain intimate soul exercises; and one must also speak in the most varied ways about the significance of such soul exercises for human life. Here I would like merely to suggest that these soul exercises consist of meditation and concentration, but of a completely different kind than those once practiced in the East; in such meditations and concentrations, where the cultivation of thought is carried out in a very special way, thoughts are made more vivid and intense; through special exercises, one comes to live not in mere shadowy thoughts, as in ordinary science, but to live in such invigorated thoughts just as one otherwise lives only in external sensory experience, where one is absorbed in sensory perceptions through one’s eyes and ears. This is the essence of meditation: that one is immersed in the life of the imagination in an intense way, unlike any other form of mere thinking. Through this, thoughts come alive. One feels how one gradually breaks free from the physical conditions of thinking and, in a sense, learns to think without the body. Thinking becomes, without becoming pathological, more inwardly rich and more intense. One arrives at images. What I have called in my writings “imaginative cognition” comes into play. Through this, one arrives at the first significant results of the anthroposophical worldview.

[ 21 ] Once one has strengthened one’s thinking in this way for some time, so that it has become more intense and vivid and no longer needs the body for support, then one no longer experiences in one’s thoughts a mere tableau of memories, but rather an overview of the workings of forces within us that are present precisely because we are earthly human beings; in this vision, we have a tableau before us in which we see [how] our thought life has become intense, has become connected [with] what acts within us as forces of growth—forces that themselves act within us as metabolic forces. We come to recognize that, in addition to our physical body, which already exists in space, there is a body of time, a body of formative forces within us that permeates our physical body and is in perpetual motion. We perceive this body of formative forces in a single tableau. And as we thus elevate ourselves to become acquainted with the first supersensible aspect of the human being in this body of formative forces, we come to know a form of thinking that is far more alive than ordinary, abstract thinking, so that through it we also come to share in the experience of all those realities where temporal thoughts flow into organic growth. We gain insight into the workings of a spiritual body that has permeated us since our birth. By rising to this level, we come to look with particular clarity at that epoch in our human development that otherwise always lies outside our consciousness. In ordinary life, we recall our early childhood back to a certain point. Before this point, up to birth, lies a time that is about as obscure to us in relation to earthly life as the soul’s experiences during sleep.

[ 22 ] A kind of sleep-like state reveals itself to us when we look back from the point at which our memories begin all the way back to birth, during this period of our lives. This epoch of our earthly life begins to dawn in its essence before imaginative insight, before this gaze into the spiritual world. I would like to say that, alongside what is experienced as insight—that a spiritual body, a body of formative forces, reigns within us—one also receives the great, powerful, and profound impression of what has been at work within us during our earliest childhood years, ever since we entered the physical world through birth. It was then that the forces were at work most intensely—those that, drawing from the wisdom of the world, shape our brain so plastically that it can become an instrument of wisdom; it was then that these plastic forces worked formatively from the brain out into the rest of the organism. As we rise to the knowledge of the body of formative forces, we experience what was at work and weaving itself together in the very earliest years of childhood, and how everything that once acts in human life—even if it weakens during other epochs—reappears later. Thus, what acts in the earliest years of childhood has a particularly intense effect on the shaping of the human being during those years; it remains active later on, but only faintly, whereas in the earliest years of childhood it is powerfully and mightily active. And we learn to observe the forces that are at work in these earliest years, when the human being has just emerged from infancy and still requires special care from the outside world; we learn to observe how, emerging from the first earthly sleep and weaving dreams, the human being shapes the physical organism; we learn to observe something that now strikes us as artistically greater and more sublime than anything we can develop as art in the world. And as we gaze upon this, we learn to recognize what actually constitutes the essence of artistic imagination, as well as the essence of artistic appreciation. Only now do we come to know the real connection between later human life and earlier life, learning to recognize it in artistic creation and in artistic appreciation.

[ 23 ] When we observe an artistic genius, it becomes immediately apparent that this genius has more of that early childhood period radiating into his later life than any non-artistic person. Likewise, a person who is particularly capable of artistic enjoyment has more of these forces radiating into their life than someone with an abstract disposition—a dullard. Without wishing to sound sophistical in any way, we learn to apply a biblical saying in the following form: Until you come to recognize the significance of early childhood, you cannot enter the realm of artistic experience. — The very first life, with its special organic forces, simply pours itself into artistic life. That is why we feel art as such a life-giving element in the whole of human being—because art brings to life within us what was the strongest life at the very beginning of our earthly existence.

[ 24 ] I would like to say this: The primal forces of artistic creation arise quite naturally within the human being when, through anthroposophy—purely through cognition—we ascend to the first supersensible realm, to the human being’s body of formative forces, to imaginative cognition. And if we then wish to ascend to the next level of knowledge, we must develop it in the following way. We develop the first, imaginative level by repeatedly placing certain images meditatively—as concentrations—at the center of our imagination, thereby enlivening our powers of thought. But we must also develop the opposite activity. We must learn to remove from our consciousness the images to which we have initially directed all our attention—so that they might, in a certain sense, remain fixed in our consciousness—thereby enabling us to create a completely empty consciousness. This creation of an empty consciousness is the second important step on the path to supersensible knowledge.

[ 25 ] But once we have developed this empty consciousness to the point where we know, while awake: we now have nothing in our consciousness—neither external impressions nor internal memories—and we have made our consciousness completely empty, then a spiritual world hitherto unknown to us enters this consciousness; we thus become acquainted with a spiritual world in the same way that we become acquainted with the ordinary world through our external senses and ordinary consciousness. Inspired insight sets in, and with it the second result of anthroposophical research. We can now also suppress the entire body of formative forces—everything that particularly organizes that from which we can ultimately derive our sense of the artistic—and create an empty consciousness in relation to the body of formative forces. But then we have the essence of our spiritual-soul nature before our soul’s eye, as it was before we descended with this spiritual-soul nature from a spiritual-soul world into the earthly world through birth or, let us say, through conception, before we took on flesh and blood through our parents. We are now learning to recognize the eternity of the human soul—on one side, on the side of pre-birth.

[ 26 ] But we also learn—when we direct our feelings and sensations toward what presents itself to us as a vision of the eternal spiritual-soul nature—to recognize how this human soul lived in a purely spiritual-divine environment before its earthly existence, how, in a sense, divine forces radiated through it in its existence, just as natural forces do here in earthly existence. Just as the substances and forces we take in during our earthly existence give rise to those forces that in turn live within our organism, so do the divine-spiritual rays of light live within our spiritual-soul existence before we descend into earthly life. There we are permeated by divine forces, just as we are permeated by natural forces here in our physical earthly life.

[ 27 ] We can certainly limit ourselves to anthroposophical spiritual science alone; in that case, we arrive at the body of formative forces. But we can also turn our feelings, our inner life, toward what the knowledge of this body of formative forces gives us; then we are met by the vitality of the full human scope of that which, in the first years of our existence, permeates us like a dreamlike, sleeping life, yet which works in the formation of our physical body. Likewise, we can remain purely at the level of intellectual-scientific understanding when contemplating the spiritual-soul aspect within us, as it is permeated by divine-spiritual forces prior to earthly existence. But we can turn our attention to this being itself and direct our emotional world toward it; then we learn to recognize what this soul experienced inwardly at that time. It experienced the urge to embrace earthly existence together with the divine-spiritual forces that surrounded it.

[ 28 ] The reason why the soul has immersed itself in the earthly body is to connect with the physical realm through the divine-spiritual. This reason is none other than that which lives in the shadowy reflection of earthly existence—in religious feeling and religious piety. If we have religious piety—we may not delve into what the perception of this soul-life is before it descended into earthly life, or what those powers of feeling and sensation are toward which the soul strove in order to live the divine-spiritual into earthly existence—that is, when it strove for physical embodiment; but when we conceive of these powers in the lingering image of earthly life, they find their expression in religious life. Just as art is a radiance of the powers of early childhood into later life, so religious life is a lingering echo of what the soul last experienced before descending into physical earthly life.

[ 29 ] And so we find that, if we remain within the realm of knowledge and rise from there to the idea: As long as we remain in mere earthly life, where we must use our organism for cognition, we find only a form of knowledge alongside which stands art—which can at most be viewed aesthetically—and alongside which stands religion—which can be viewed theologically. However, physical earth science does not lead us to a living transition into artistic feeling or religious experience. If we rise to anthroposophical knowledge, we certainly have true scientific knowledge, but this rises to the level of imagination. Imagination can certainly remain purely scientific. By remaining so, it does not become artistic. Therefore, no one need fear that, by creating artistically, they will fall into allegories and symbols if they are imbued with anthroposophy; they would do so only if they were to remain merely at the level of ideas.

[ 30 ] But anthroposophy is not like other sciences in that it does not stop at mere conceptual content; it proceeds further, through intuitive perception, from the contemplation of the body of formative forces to the experience of the laws governing that which first shaped us in our earliest childhood years and continues to influence our lives even beyond that, and through which we feel so inspired in our imagination. This is not meant to speak against the elemental nature of imaginative creation; but the imagination can be stimulated by advancing, in the manner described, to epochs of life that otherwise elude external observation. And by proceeding further to the soul’s experience prior to its descent into earthly existence, we come to sense what lives here on earth as a reflection of religious life and experience—if we wish to live in such a way that life, through what God is within us, is at the same time something willed by God—so that the mood of doing what God wills is the echo of what was an important, God-willed deed when God Himself, before the soul’s descent into earthly life, was working within it as a spiritual act.

[ 31 ] When we consider the whole of human life in its fullness, together with the eternal nature of the human soul, we find that there is a natural transition from science into art and into the realm of religion. For what first appears as a matter of knowledge—if one traces it only as far as the corresponding human realms—appears in art; it appears in religion. I would say that anthroposophy cannot help but inspire people artistically when it engages them through their powers of sensation and feeling. And when anthroposophy engages a person in their life of the will, it cannot help but allow them to feel, within that life of the will, an echo—however unconscious it may be, it is nevertheless present—of how, in a certain sense, they wished to commit themselves in their earthly existence to the divine that shapes the world and to do what is willed by God. Then the will is stirred to religious experience.

[ 32 ] Ladies and gentlemen! In the ancient mysteries, that which later—for the sake of humanity’s enrichment—divided into three parts originated from a single unity. In the ancient mysteries, in the schools of wisdom of the distant past—a past scarcely known to external history but which anthroposophy is coming to know—science was so imbued with spirit that, in relation to the human soul, this spiritual imbuement strove in such a way that it was, at the same time, beauty. Whatever the human being recognized, he gave form to; he transformed his wisdom into something creative and artistic. And as the initiate perceived what he learned in its liveliness as the divine-wise principle pervading the world, he offered it to the world through his ritual act, in a sense transforming sacred art into worship. Science, art, and religion were one. Humanity could not remain within this unity. For the sake of human enrichment, the threefold division into art, science, and religion had to come into being—in scientific certainty, in artistic taste, and in religious faith.

[ 33 ] Today, however, we have once again reached a point in time where the inner harmonization of science, art, and religion has become a matter for the most outstanding minds. We have seen this in Goethe and Schiller. Today we must once again strive to bring together what has presented itself to us in outward differentiation. Anthroposophy does not seek to contribute to a chaotic reuniting of religion, science, and art now that they have historically differentiated themselves—and this differentiation has its justification—; in doing so, it would fall into the trap of the fourth king in Goethe’s fairy tale. It seeks to develop, through ideal separation, wisdom—the gift of the golden king—beauty—the gift of the silver king—and virtue and religion—the gift of the bronze king; then they can radiate together into the human being. When a person directs their attention to the whole human being, then what lives within them as the totality of life—and which manifests itself particularly in the early years of childhood—becomes a source of nourishment and also a source of inspiration for art. But what the soul experienced before its descent to Earth becomes the source of inspiration for religious life.

[ 34 ] Without chaotically mixing these three realms together, anthroposophy, in particular, will be able to lead people in a completely natural way toward science, art, and religion—toward the True, the Beautiful, and the Good—by allowing each to exist in its own distinct way, yet allowing them to influence human beings in such a way that, in human experience, what is found to be truth may encounter the beautiful, the artistic—and may speak to it as something directly related, as another manifestation of the world’s essence—and may in turn encounter the good, the religious, and may likewise speak to it as another manifestation of the world’s essence. Goethe, even though he had not yet adopted the perspective of anthroposophy, felt this particularly keenly. “Whoever possesses science and art also possesses religion; whoever possesses neither, let him have religion!”—so spoke Goethe; and this is essentially how anthroposophical spiritual science must speak again today, forming three interrelated elements within the essence of the world: religion, art, and science. And human beings find their true humanity only by allowing their souls to be permeated by the essence of each of these manifestations of the world, while maintaining their full individuality. Within them, however, these elements come together in full inner harmony as they thereby become whole human beings. And in this harmonization of science, art, and religion, human beings can find their full humanity and their dignified development through all the stages of their existence.