The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Anthroposophy and Worldview

East-West in History

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Goethe, who expressed so many profound and moving ideas in simple terms, also wrote the following: “Let each person ask himself with what means he can and will influence his time!”

[ 2 ] If one allows such a statement—along with everything we can know about what might have stirred within Goethe’s soul as he uttered it—to sink in, one is transported into the whole relationship of the human being to historical life. Certainly, for most people today this still takes place more or less unconsciously: they seek to find their own particular standpoint, through which they discover the possibility of applying their powers in the right way to the course of human development—so that this application arises from the spirit of the epoch in which they live. But it is safe to say: even a superficial observation of human life in its development shows that people are ultimately dependent on shaping their lives with ever greater consciousness. Instinctive living was the hallmark of ancient cultural epochs. The transition to ever greater consciousness is also a historical factor. And in the present day, one can already sense how life—which has become increasingly complex—demands that human beings engage in the development of humanity with a certain degree of consciousness, even if they occupy a position that may seem insignificant. Yet, precisely in the pursuit of such a perspective, we still have, in essence, few points of reference today when considering the historical development of humanity.

[ 3 ] This approach to the historical development of humanity, in the modern scientific sense, is actually not particularly old. And one might say that the youthfulness of this historical perspective is evident in what has recently come to light in the field of historiography.

[ 4 ] This approach to historiography has produced magnificent results. Simply by evolving from the unscientific chronicle-writing that still prevailed even in the 18th century, it sought—because it coincided with the age of natural science—to adopt increasingly scientific forms. And so we see that the historical perspective has increasingly converged with the view that what follows must always be understood in terms of the causes of what preceded it. But anyone open-minded enough can see that, while such a causal analysis of humanity’s historical life goes a long way, there still remain countless facts of this historical life that cannot be seamlessly integrated into a simple causal framework without contradiction. And then an image emerges that can help us visualize historical life: the image of a flowing river, in which, however, we cannot always derive what is at a particular point in its course merely from what lies a little further upstream, but must take into account that all manner of forces are at work in its depths, forces that can surge to the surface at any point and create waves that are not determined by the preceding ones.

[ 5 ] Thus, the historical life of humanity also seems to point toward unspeakable depths; it appears to us as a surface against which an immeasurable number of forces are pushing. And human observation can hardly presume to look completely into everything that is particularly characteristic of any given epoch. Therefore, historical analysis will likely have to move ever closer to what I would like to call a symptomatological approach. After all, even when it comes to the human organism—which is a totality so richly differentiated within itself—we must ascertain much about its healthy and diseased states by observing the symptoms through which this organism manifests itself. Likewise, we must gradually accustom ourselves to practicing a historical symptomatology: to interpret what announces itself on the surface as pointing us toward particular aspects, and through the ever-increasing number of symptoms that we bring into our understanding, come to allow the inner vitality of historical becoming to affect us in such a way that, through an inner, spiritual grasp of the historical forces of humanity—which, after all, also act upon our souls through all manner of detours—we are enabled to find our place in the development of humanity.

[ 6 ] It is precisely this kind of view of the world and of life—as I have been able to outline for you—that can truly teach one to sense how historically significant phenomena find expression even in what one experiences in one’s innermost being. It is precisely what I have described to you, the awakening and stirring of cognitive faculties that are not present in ordinary consciousness but lie dormant deep within the soul in everyday life—precisely this awakening and stirring of cognitive powers, as befits modern human beings—leads us to realize that we must not only develop these cognitive powers differently in the present than they were developed in the past. But when we develop such powers—when we lead this intimate inner life up to a point of spiritual vision—then the fundamental nature of this spiritual vision presents itself to modern people in a completely different way than it did to people of, for example, ancient Eastern times, which we touched upon the day before yesterday when the yoga exercise was described.

[ 7 ] When we look at these ancient Eastern views—as they were developed by those who sought to draw forth from within themselves powers of knowledge that reach into the supersensible—we must say: Everything we know about this indicates that such insights, by taking root in the soul, took on a thoroughly lasting, enduring character within the soul. What a person thinks in ordinary life, what they take in as the effect on their soul of the experiences of earthly existence, and what then becomes fixed in memories—this is what has permanence in the soul; and we are simply not mentally healthy if we have significant gaps in our ability to recall what we have experienced in the world from a certain point in our childhood development onward. Everything that was attained in ancient Eastern spiritual culture in terms of insights into the spiritual world was integrated into this mental continuity. It formed, so to speak, memory images in the same way that ordinary daily experiences form memory images. This was precisely what was distinctive about the ancient Eastern seer: that he found himself more and more immersed in a lasting communion with the spiritual world as he made his way into that world. He felt, so to speak, at home once he was inside the divine-spiritual world. He knew that this world represented something enduring for his soul as well.

[ 8 ] Yet in a certain sense, one can already say that the opposite is true for those who, drawing upon the forces of human nature—which humanity has developed from those ancient days right up to the present—rise to a certain spiritual insight: He develops his perceptions of the spiritual in such a way that he experiences them; but he cannot possibly transform them into memory images in the same way that the thoughts we experience in everyday life regarding the external world become memory images.

[ 9 ] This is a great disappointment, especially for many who, using today’s methods, strive to attain a certain level of spiritual insight: although they do gain glimpses into this spiritual world, these glimpses are fleeting—like beholding a reality in the external world that is no longer present in our perception once we turn away from it. What takes place in the life of the soul is not an incorporation into memory in the ordinary sense, but an instantaneous connection with the spiritual world. If one then wishes to experience this connection again at a later time, one cannot simply retrieve the experience from memory, but can only do the following: One can, of course, recall what pertains to ordinary experiences in the physical world—such as how one, through the development of spiritual powers, brought about such an experience from the spiritual world. Then one can retrace that path and have the experience again, just as one returns to a sensory perception. This is precisely one of the most important points that attest to the reality of modern vision: that what we look into does not unite with our physicality; for it is always said that thoughts, when they acquire a certain duration as memories, become united with physicality and anchored through the organism.

[ 10 ] If I may insert a personal remark here—perhaps to clarify matters—it is this: Someone who has a slight connection with the spiritual world and wishes to communicate what he has experienced is not able to do so from memory in the ordinary sense. They must always make a certain effort to bring themselves back to direct spiritual observation. That is why even someone speaking directly from the spiritual world—I would say—could give the same lecture thirty times: for them, it would not be a repetition of what came before, but they must always be drawn directly out of the experience itself.

[ 11 ] At the same time, there is something here that I would like to say can alleviate certain concerns that might arise in anxious souls when faced with this modern vision of the spirit. Many people today still see—and with some justification—the greatness of the profound, enigmatic questions of existence precisely in the fact that these questions can never be completely resolved. They fear the philistinism of spiritual insight when they are confronted, for example, with the assertion that the mysteries of existence could be definitively “resolved” by some worldview. Well, the view of life under discussion here cannot speak of such a “solution” either, precisely for the reason just stated: What is, in a sense, forgotten time and again must always be reacquired.

[ 12 ] But this is precisely where vitality becomes evident. In a sense, we are once again approaching what manifests externally in nature as the character of the living, as opposed to what we otherwise experience internally when we see our thoughts become memories. Perhaps what I am about to say may sound trivial to some; but I do not mean it to be trivial. Just as no one can say, “I ate yesterday, so I am full and need not eat today, tomorrow, or ever again”—so, too, no one can say of modern spiritual insight that it is ever complete, that it is then conveyed to memory, and that one now knows for all time what one has.

[ 13 ] Yes, not only is it the case that one must constantly strive anew to bring into the present what seeks to reveal itself to human beings, but it is even the case that when one broods over the same ideas from the spiritual world again and again for a long time, seeking them out time and again, doubts then arise, uncertainties arise, and that one must constantly overcome these uncertainties and doubts in one’s living inner soul life—precisely in the very act of spiritual vision. One is therefore never, I might say, condemned to the tranquility of completion when one strives for spiritual vision in the modern sense.

[ 14 ] And there is one more thing that must be said. Above all, this modern spiritual vision also requires what might be called presence of mind. The spiritual seer of ancient Oriental times could, so to speak, take his time. What he attained remained permanently in place. Anyone who, from the perspective of modern human nature, wishes to look into the spiritual world must, I would say, be quick-witted with his spiritual organ; he must become aware that what reveals itself from the spiritual world is sometimes present for only a moment and then disappears again—and must therefore be grasped with presence of mind at the very moment of its emergence. And many people who carefully prepare themselves for such a spiritual vision fail to attain it because they do not simultaneously seek this presence of mind in their preparatory exercises. For only in this way is one able to avoid the situation where one has only just developed one’s attention by the time the experience has already passed.

[ 15 ] I have thus described to you some of the peculiarities of what the modern seeker encounters in the spiritual world. Other such peculiarities will arise in the course of these lectures. Today, because it will lead directly to a certain historical consideration of humanity, I would like to draw your attention to just one of them.

[ 16 ] If, as modern human beings, we wish to find our way into the spiritual world in a sure manner—so that we do not become fantasists—in this sense, which is in turn characterized from a certain perspective, it is best to proceed from the concepts and thought processes that we have acquired through thorough observation of nature and by immersing ourselves in rigorous natural science. No concepts are as well-suited to the meditative life, as I have described it, as those derived from modern natural science—not merely to absorb their content, but to process that content meditatively. As modern human beings in the strictest sense of the word, we have learned to think through the natural sciences. We should bear in mind that it is precisely through the natural sciences that we have learned the kind of thinking appropriate to our present age. Now, however, all that we can gain in terms of thought processes from modern natural science can only serve as preparation for true spiritual insight.

[ 17 ] We can never, through any logical consequence or philosophical speculation, use the ordinary thinking—which we train through the things of the external world, through experiment and observation—for anything other than to prepare ourselves. We must then wait until the spiritual world chooses to approach us in the manner I described yesterday and the day before. We must first become ready for each individual step in the observation of the spiritual world. We cannot, out of our own inner whim, bring about anything other than making ourselves, so to speak, an organ to which the spiritual world wishes to reveal itself. We must await this objective revelation. And anyone with experience in such matters knows that one must wait years, even decades, for certain insights to unfold before them. It is precisely this circumstance, however, that guarantees the objectivity of what is real in the spiritual world for the purpose of knowledge.

[ 18 ] This was not the case, however, for those who, in ancient Oriental times—in the world of the East—sought the path into the supersensory world through their spiritual practices. From the very beginning, his way of thinking was such that, in a sense, he merely needed to continue it in order to find that path into the spiritual world which I described the day before yesterday. Thus, even in ordinary life, he was already immersed in a mode of thinking that merely needed to be continued in order to lead, through its own continuation, to a certain kind of clairvoyance—which, however, precisely because it had developed out of the ordinary life of that time, was a more dreamlike form of perception, whereas the kind of vision we as modern people strive for is one that proceeds with full lucidity, similar to that present when solving mathematical problems. Precisely by turning to what the spiritual researcher must intimately experience, we see in this an expression of tremendous transformations in the whole of human nature over the course of historical times. These times are historical in the sense that not only can the person who, through spiritual contemplation—as I shall describe later—can examine historical life, both that of humanity and of the cosmos, all the way back to the most distant primeval times, come to this realization, but so can the person who examines the external documents in an unbiased manner. We can also look to these external documents to glimpse the ancient times of humanity’s spiritual life and see how they differ from what we ourselves—what our time must strive for—in terms of being immersed in this spiritual world.

[ 19 ] Not because our thinking can readily continue on its own to lead us, through its own flow, to spiritual insight, but because it can merely lay the groundwork—preparing us, as it were—so that we may be ready, when the spiritual world presents itself to us, to perceive it; it is precisely for this reason that our thinking is suited to operating and weaving within the realm of experiments and observations—within the realm that the natural sciences have made their own. But precisely as we recognize the inner rigor and inner strength our thinking has attained, we will apply it all the more confidently to our training, so that we may then await the revelation of the spiritual world in the true sense of the word. This alone shows that our thinking today is different from what it was in ancient times.

[ 20 ] I will have repeated opportunities to digress into historical topics. In those instances, many of the points concerning the external world will build upon what I have to say today. Today I will focus more on what the inner forces of human development are. Ultimately, this will lead us to thinking and to the transformation of this thinking over the course of the epochs of human development.

[ 21 ] But since all external historical life ultimately depends on this thinking, and since human beings bring about their historical achievements through their thoughts—alongside their emotional and volitional impulses—we must turn to human thinking if we wish to address the deepest historical impulses.

[ 22 ] However, this form of human thought—which we can utilize today for the natural sciences on the one hand and for the expression of human freedom on the other—differs quite significantly from the thought we find in earlier epochs of human history. Certainly, there will be some who say: Thinking is thinking, whether it occurs in John Stuart Mill or in Soloviev, whether it occurs—for the sake of argument—in Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, or whether it occurs among the thinkers of the ancient Orient. But anyone who, with a certain inner intuition, is able to begin to grasp the way in which thought has worked within humanity will say to themselves: Our thinking today is, after all, fundamentally quite different from the thinking of earlier epochs. This touches upon an important problem of human development.

[ 23 ] Let’s take a look at our way of thinking today. I will have the opportunity later to substantiate what I am now developing from a more historical perspective, drawing on the natural sciences as well. What we call “thinking” has actually evolved from the use of language. Anyone who has a sense for what is at work in the language of a people—for the logic at work in language, the logic we internalize during our childhood—and who then has sufficient psychological insight to observe this in life will find that our modern thinking actually arises from what language does to the constitution of our soul. I would like to say that we gradually extract thoughts and the laws governing thought from language; our present-day thinking is a gift of speech,

[ 24 ] But it is precisely this kind of thinking—which is a gift of language—that has flourished among civilized humanity since the days of Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno; it has flourished in the era when humanity has primarily turned its attention to the study of nature in the modern sense. Thinking applied to observation and experimentation must, I would say, be so intimately part of our lives that we refine—in an ideal sense—what we acquire through language as a common heritage of the people, so that it becomes an abstract thought within us, through which we then grasp the external world.

[ 25 ] But we need only go back a short period of time—relative to the entire course of human development—and we find something quite different. Let us go back, for example, to ancient Greece. Anyone who can immerse themselves in what was at work in Greek art, Greek poetry, and Greek philosophy—in short, in what resonates with us from ancient Greece—will find—and this can be done in a purely empirical way—that the Greeks still experienced what was thought as intimately interwoven with the word. Thought and word were one. When the concept of the Logos was developed, people spoke of something different from what we mean when we speak of a thought or a train of thought. They spoke of the thought in such a way that this thought possessed the linguistic element as its self-evident physicality. Just as we in the physical world cannot conceive of our soul as spatially separated from the physical organism, so too, in Greek consciousness, thought was not separated from the word. The two were felt as a complete unity, and thought flowed along on the waves of words.

[ 26 ] But this also implies a completely different attitude of the human being toward the external world in his consciousness than our own, with thought that has already detached itself from the word. And so, when we go back to Greek civilization, we must, in essence, adopt an entirely different state of mind if we wish to penetrate the actual experiences of the Greek soul. But this is also why everything that Greek civilization produced—for example, in the form of science—no longer appears to be science by today’s standards. Today’s natural scientist will say: The Greeks did not, after all, have a natural science; they had a natural philosophy. And in that he is right. But the problem is actually only—I would say—addressed in a quarter of its essence. There is something much deeper underlying it. And what lies at the root of it, we can only explore again through spiritual insight.

[ 27 ] When we employ the mode of thinking that is particularly suited to the natural sciences today—the one we have trained ourselves in through heredity and education—and when we use this mode of thinking to develop what we call scientific concepts, then, by the very nature of our consciousness, we strictly separate these scientific concepts from what we call artistic experience, and from what we call religious experience. It is precisely a fundamental characteristic of our time that modern human beings, in a certain sense, demand a science that incorporates nothing from any form of artistic expression, any artistic perspective, nor anything from what claims to be the object of religious consciousness or religious devotion to the earthly and the divine. We must say that this is a defining characteristic of our present-day civilization. And we find this characteristic becoming more and more pronounced the further west we go and the more we examine the fundamental nature of human civilization there. This is the defining characteristic: that modern man holds science, art, and religious life as coexisting side by side within his soul. And he does indeed strive to form a specific concept of knowledge, to prevent art from encroaching upon science at all, to exclude imagination from everything that is “scientific” with the exception of that which aims at inventions; and then to assert a different kind of certainty of faith, which is to play its role particularly in religious life.

[ 28 ] If one attempts, in the sense I have described, to rise to a spiritual level of insight, then—starting entirely from the trained scientific thinking of the present—one arrives at what I have characterized as living thinking, as pictorial thinking. With this pictorial thinking, one now feels equipped to grasp—I would say in a manner as mathematical, but now qualitative—that which cannot be grasped by ordinary mathematics and geometry: the living. With living thought, one feels capable of grasping the living.

[ 29 ] When we consider what is at work, say, in the mere chemical compounds of the inorganic world—if I may put it in layman’s terms—the substances and forces at work there are in a more or less unstable equilibrium. The more we ascend toward the living, the more unstable this equilibrium becomes, and the more complex the interplay of forces grows. And to the same extent that the equilibrium becomes more unstable, the living entity eludes quantitative experience; and only to the living thought does it become so accessible that it can connect with the living entity in the same way that mathematical thought connects with the inanimate. But through this—I have already pointed out in one of my earlier lectures that, for many contemporary thinkers, what I am saying is actually quite shocking— thereby we ascend to a point of insight that continuously transforms ordinary, logical, abstract thinking into a kind of artistic thinking, into a kind of artistic intuition, which is, however, internally just as precise as mathematics or mechanics could ever be.

[ 30 ] I know how much the modern scientific mindset shies away from transposing that which claims to be exact into the realm of art—into that which, through the interplay of quality, takes shape within human beings as a kind of qualitative mathesis. But what good is all that epistemology which proclaims that we can only arrive at a knowledge of objectivity if we proceed from conclusion to conclusion and must be careful incorporate anything of such an artistic nature into our understanding—even if nature and reality, at a certain level, operate artistically, so that they would yield only to artistic cognition.

[ 31 ] In particular, we cannot attain what shapes the human organism from within, as I described the day before yesterday—what acts within us as a kind of first supersensory human being—unless we allow what constitutes synthetic thinking to flow into a kind of artistic creation, unless we can recreate the human creative form on the basis of qualitative mathematics. We need only retain the spirit of scientific rigor and embrace the spirit of art.

[ 32 ] In short, we must give birth to an artistic way of seeing from what we today call science, while upholding the entire spirit of science. But when we do that, we move closer to the reconciliation of science and art, as Goethe foresaw when he made a statement like this: “Beauty is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that, were it not for its appearance, would have remained eternally hidden from us.” Goethe knew full well: If one persists in attempting to comprehend nature—or the world in general—through the forms of thought that prove to be sound and correct for the inorganic world, the totality of the world simply does not emerge. And one will not find the transition from the science of the inorganic to that of the organic until one transforms abstract knowledge into inwardly animated knowledge, which is at the same time an inner process of interaction and activity.

[ 33 ] By turning, in this way, toward an understanding of the living within the context of modern intellectual endeavor, we nevertheless draw closer to what was present—not in the kind of deliberateness and consciousness we strive for, but rather instinctively—in Greek consciousness. And no one truly understands what was already expressed in Plato, but especially in the presocratic philosophers, unless they realize that there was still an interplay between the artistic element in human beings and the philosophical-scientific element. It is only at the end of the Greek era—philosophically speaking, roughly with Aristotle—that thought, born out of language, becomes separated and later, as it develops through Scholasticism, becomes scientific thought. It is only in later Greek civilization that thought is distilled. In earlier Greek civilization, thought is an artistic element. And Greek philosophy, in essence, can only be understood if it is simultaneously grasped with an artistic sensibility.

[ 34 ] But this leads us, in fact, to view Greek civilization as one in which science and art were still inseparable. This is evident both in art and in science itself. Of course, I cannot go into all the details now. But if you study Greek sculpture with sound human judgment and with a healthy, spiritually attuned eye, you will find that the Greeks did not work from a model in the sense that we do today; rather, when they worked sculpturally, they drew upon an inner experience. As he shaped the muscle, the bent arm, and the hand, he was recreating what he felt within himself. He felt his inner, living “second human being”—I would say, this etheric human being; he lived through himself spiritually and thus sensed the boundaries extending outward. What he experienced inwardly was transformed into sculpture. Art was a revelation of what was thus perceived. And this perception, carried over into these thoughts living in language, became a science that still retained an artistic character because it was one with what the Greek spirit of language revealed to the Greeks.

[ 35 ] And so, together with Greek culture, we enter a world that only opens up to us again when we ourselves rise from our science—which is separate from art—to a level of understanding that in turn flows back into the artistic element. I would like to say that what we later develop with full deliberation was once present in an instinctive experience. And we can actually see how, within the course of history, this coexistence of art and science then transforms into what exists in our time: the complete separation of art and science.

[ 36 ] As humanity evolved through the Roman era and into the Middle Ages, education—the cultivation of a higher level of human culture—was approached from a completely different perspective than was later the case. Later, in the age of the natural sciences, the main focus was on communicating to people the results derived from observation and experimentation. Indeed, our education is based almost entirely on assimilating results drawn from observation and experimentation. If we look back at the time when a certain influence of Greek culture was still evident, we see that even in scientific education there was still something present that was closer to the human being, something that was more directed toward developing practical skills in people. We see how, in the Middle Ages, students had to study the so-called seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. What mattered was skill. What one was to become as a scientist was acquired through the seven liberal arts, which were, however, already well on their way to becoming knowledge and science, as indeed happened later.

[ 37 ] And one can indeed see, when studying the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages—which is so widely frowned upon today—how precisely this scholasticism, which stands at the transition from ancient times to our own, is a marvelous training in the art of conceptual thinking. One can only hope that modern people would absorb something of the Scholasticism that was common during the best times of the Middle Ages—a Scholasticism that cultivated a technique and art of thinking in people. This is precisely what is needed if one wishes to arrive at the clearly defined concepts to which we must arrive. However, by starting from today’s standpoint—which strictly separates science, art, and religion—and moving upward through the Middle Ages in the development of humanity, one approaches Greek civilization, where, the further and further back one goes, the more and more one becomes convinced that science and art have merged into one.

[ 38 ] But in Greek culture there still exists a phenomenon distinct from science and art: religious life. It approaches human beings in a completely different way than scientific or artistic experience. What lives in art and science exists in space and time as an object; the content of religious consciousness lies beyond space and time. It belongs to eternity—which, though it gives rise to space and time, remains beyond our reach as long as we remain within the confines of space and time.

[ 39 ] What the humanities—albeit in a much more precise sense—must develop today regarding these matters can also be gleaned from external documents. And I would like to repeatedly draw attention to a work that has just been published in Austria and is exceptionally useful in this regard: Otto Willmann’s *History of Idealism*, a book that stands out above many others dealing with similar issues today. One can judge such matters impartially, even if they arise from opposing viewpoints, as long as they lead to something that fosters spiritual life.

[ 40 ] In Greek culture, on the one hand, there is that unity of art and science, and on the other, that religious life to which the Greeks devote themselves—a life they express through imagery in popular religion, but which they experience in a deeper sense through initiation into the mystery religions. But everywhere we can see that the religious does not intrude into the soul forces that develop in science and art; rather, in order for the soul life to enter into religious life, it must first attain that devout mood, that universal love, in which what is revealed from the divine-spiritual realm can be grasped—and with which the human being can unite in religious devotion.

[ 41 ] But let us turn our attention to the East. The further back in time we go, the more we find that spiritual life is, once again, something entirely different. And here, too, we can be guided by what we ourselves achieve through modern spiritual training: When we rise from the experience of the living concept to those inner pains and sufferings that we must overcome so that we may become fully sensory or spiritual beings as whole human beings—and cease to experience the world merely through the physical body by standing within the world independently of the physical body—then we stand in the world in such a way that we learn to experience a reality beyond space and time. There we also experience the reality of the spiritual-soul aspect as it works its way into the temporal realm, in the manner I have described. But when we attain spiritual vision—which is achieved by overcoming inner pain and suffering—we have thereby already introduced into our knowledge an element that leads us, in a completely continuous manner, into religious experience, in that this knowledge, as true insight and genuine understanding, remains firmly rooted in the spirit. And as we experience what has remained from ancient times as the content of religion in venerable traditional conceptions, we also experience something newer of a similar spiritual content when we strive to attain a kind of insight that can now live in the sphere of religious piety.

[ 42 ] Only then, however, do we begin to understand from what depths of the human soul sprang that which lived in the world of the ancient East as a unified whole of religion, art, and science. These were once a unity. What human beings recognized, what they absorbed into their world of ideas, was another aspect of what they set before themselves so that it might shine down upon them in artistic beauty; and what he thus grasped through cognition and allowed to shine in beauty was also a spiritual reality to which he offered his ritual acts, in relation to which he also conducted his actions as if devoted to a higher order. Here we see religion, art, and science realized as a unity.

[ 43 ] But this takes us back to a time when human thought itself did not merely drift along on the waves of the word, but when it was a human experience that thought dwelled in regions even deeper than the word itself—that thought was connected to the innermost fabric of human nature. That is why the Indian yogi drew thoughts from the breath, from that which is more deeply rooted than the word. Thought only gradually rose to the level of the word and then beyond it in modern culture. Originally, however, thought was connected to a more intimate, “deeper human experience,” and that was in the era when the unity of religious, artistic, and scientific life could unfold in profound harmony.

[ 44 ] Of what I have been able to describe to you as a harmonious unity of religion, art, and philosophy—as it presents itself to us, for example, in the Vedas as a guiding principle—there is still an echo today in the Orient. But it is an echo that we must understand—one that we cannot easily grasp if we merely elevate ourselves to what exists in Western culture as a separation of religion, art, and science; yet we understand it in the fullest sense of the word when, through a newer spiritual science, we rise to a perspective that in turn brings about a harmony of religion, art, and science. But in the East we still have before us the remnants of that ancient unity. Let us look across: even where its influence extends into Europe, we still have this echo before us. What was once an earlier historical epoch has, in a certain sense, remained present in a certain corner of the earth. And we can perceive this presence in a great philosopher of Eastern Europe, Soloviev.

[ 45 ] This philosopher of the second half of the 19th century makes a very special impression on us. When we turn to Western philosophers—such as John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, or others—we find that their point of view has grown out of the scientific way of thinking that I have described today. In Soloviev, however, there is still something that presents religion, art, and science as a single unity. One does see, however, when one begins to read Soloviev, that he uses—as a philosophical language—the concepts found in Kant and Comte; he has completely mastered the modes of expression of these Western and Central European philosophers. But if one immerses oneself in his meaning—in what he expresses through these forms of expression—then one experiences him differently. One gets a sense of history from him: he strikes one as a person who has risen anew from the discussions that took place before the Council of Nicaea. One can literally sense the tone that prevailed in the discussions of the early Christian Fathers, and in those first Christian centuries there was still very much an echo of the unity of religion and science—that unity in which the will still flows together with thought. All of this flows and ripples through Soloviev’s Eastern European worldview.

[ 46 ] And when we look today at what surrounds us in terms of culture and civilization, we find that in the more Western regions there is precisely this separation of religion, art, and science; yet what truly belongs to our historical moment—what truly is the foundation from which we must act and shape the world—is that science which is strictly built upon the natural-scientific thinking described earlier, while in artistic styles and religious content we draw upon old, traditional elements. We see today how unproductive art is in new stylistic forms, how old stylistic forms are reviving everywhere. What is alive in our time is what lives in scientific thought. We must first await an era that, in the manner I have described, possesses this animated, imaginative thinking—which in turn leads to the living—and which, in turn, can become artistically and immediately creative even in new stylistic forms, without becoming insubstantial, allegorical, or inartistic.

[ 47 ] We therefore view scientific thought as the driving force of the present day, and this becomes all the more evident the further west we go. And in the East, we see an echo of what once was the unity of religion, art, and science.

[ 48 ] Eastern Europeans carry this fundamental religious element, this nuance, within their hearts. They view the world through this fundamental lens. They can understand the West only indirectly, through a spiritual development such as that found here in our spiritual science movement; they have no direct understanding of the West, because in the West, in particular, there is a clear desire to separate the religious and the artistic from scientific thought.

[ 49 ] And in the middle—we cannot deny this—human beings must allow the external sensory world to impose itself upon them and experience the thoughts appropriate to that world; yet they cannot help but look back upon themselves and experience their inner world, and for that inner world they need religious experience. I would like to say, however, that hidden deeper within human nature than the religious experience needed for the inner self and the scientific experience needed for observing the external world is the link between the two: the artistic experience.

[ 50 ] This artistic experience is therefore also something that exists in life today in such a way that it is not primarily asserted as a demand on life. We see how Western culture is shaped by scientific thought and Eastern culture by religious thought. We see how we are immersed in an artistic culture, yet how we cannot fully settle into it, and how artistic culture is, in many ways, a renaissance. Nevertheless, it must be said that the longing for such a balance is certainly present at the intersection of East and West. And we see it, for example, when we look specifically to Goethe.

[ 51 ] What, then, was Goethe’s greatest longing when he—I would say—was confronted with the mysteries of nature as a result of his innate artistic inclinations? His artistic sensibility naturally evolved into his scientific worldview. And one might say that in Goethe, the quintessential Central European, we find art and science fused into one, and we find them further fused into one as we trace the development of Goethe’s life and as we come to understand how to properly situate Goethe within the development of the modern era. Goethe immerses himself in this interplay of art and science. Thus a longing arose within him that can be understood only historically: the urge to go to Italy, to southern culture. And from his observation of the works of art that presented themselves to him in the south, he wrote to his friends in Weimar something that drew upon what he had come to know there in Weimar as philosophy and science. In Spinoza, he had found the divine order presented in a philosophical manner. That was not enough for him. He wanted a more expansive, a more spiritual immersion in the world and in spirituality. And upon seeing the southern works of art, he wrote to his friends: “There is necessity; there is God!” And: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to the very same laws by which nature itself proceeds and which I am now tracing.” Here, Goethe seeks to fuse science and art into one.

[ 52 ] If I conclude with a personal anecdote, it is only to give you an idea of how a single symptom can reveal the way in which the “middle world” can position itself between East and West. I experienced this symptom about forty years ago here in Vienna. In my youth, I met Karl Julius Schröer; at the time, he was lecturing on the history of German literature since Goethe’s first appearance. In his introductory lecture, he said various significant things; but then he uttered a phrase that is so characteristic of the Central European yearning of the finest minds, from which they spoke more instinctively. Schröer, too, spoke more instinctively. In fact, however, he expressed the longing for a union of art and science—for a union of Western scientific thought and Eastern religious thought within artistic vision—by summarizing what he wanted to say in the words that hold such significance for me: “The German has an aesthetic conscience.”

[ 53 ] This certainly does not express an immediate, general reality. But it does express a longing—the longing to view art and science together. And then, when one is able to view them together, another Central European—whom I have just described—had the feeling that he expressed in beautiful words: that when one can view science and art together, one can also rise to a religious experience, provided that true spirituality is found in science and art in this Goethean sense. In this sense, he spoke these words:

Whoever possesses science and art,
Also possesses religion;
Whoever does not possess those two,
Let him have religion.

[ 54 ] Anyone with an aesthetic conscience will also develop scientific and religious conscientiousness. And that can show us where we stand today.

[ 55 ] Today, I do not like to use the oft-cited term “transitional era”—every era is a transitional one—but today, in a transitional era, what really matters is the nature of that transition. In our time, we have witnessed—brought to its highest triumph—the separation of religion, art, and science. But what must be sought, and what alone can bring about understanding between East and West, is the harmonization, the inner unity of religion, art, and science. And the worldview and philosophy of life that has been discussed here—and will continue to be discussed—aims to lead to this inner unity.