Appendix to the Public Lectures
GA 85
8 February 1906, Berlin
Translated by Steiner Online Library
4. Art and Theosophy
[ 1 ] Some believe that a deepening of the soul might cause one to overlook art: the seemingly abstract intellectual realm appears to the artist as something] that leads him away from the forms of life and from the joy necessary for creation. Art has to do with the creations of the imagination; the question is] whether those who] have spoken of a lofty truth in art] have not drawn their insight from truer sources]. – Goethe saw a revelation of secret laws of nature. For Goethe, art was the recreation of what nature itself creates. Art appears to him as the solver of the riddles of what is hidden in nature, a necessary elemental force that is indispensable to a full life.
[ 2 ] Theosophy is not meant to be a collection of concepts; it is meant to be a reflection on the sources of human existence, in which religion, science, and art do not exist in isolation. We must go back to the mystery cults. History provides no account of this; only intuitive insight does. These were schools in which human beings rose to a higher spiritual insight. The initiate experienced the revelation of God in the material world (enthusiasm: to be in God). He experienced religion—the union of the human soul with its primordial source. It was both wisdom and knowledge. And it was art, for it stood before him spiritually, not yet in forms, but an elevated spiritual power was present in the vision—the imagination. The task was to awaken God in thoughts, feelings, and forms. Man is a god in miniature, and the story of the suffering, dying, and risen God is the destiny of man on a grand scale. – From this arose tragedy. Art was thus] one aspect of the reality of the mysteries.
[ 3 ] In the pyramid, you see a rigid, yet] artistically rendered worldview. From the eye of the Sphinx, the solved riddle of the future also gazes back at us. – There is a deeper] meaning in the fact that the ancient wisdom of the mysteries has become art. All arts are a reflection of the invisible God. First, humanity had to take the divine world into itself; then it had to shape it through its own power. The conquest of the audible, visible world. Its ennoblement. Imbuing matter with the divine … [Transcript breaks off]