The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Novalis and the Science of the Spirit

for the inauguration of the Novalis branch

[ 1 ] Circumstances dictated that a number of our friends here in Strasbourg establish a second branch alongside the existing one, to be known by the significant name “Novalis Branch.” Our friends from other places, who have gathered here in Strasbourg today in a spirit of affection, have demonstrated through their visit how well they understand that branches can coexist side by side in a single city, and that the diversity of work in various fields need not preclude what we must call the harmony and unity that must prevail among all those who consider themselves members of our society, which is spread across the globe. And so this branch, too, is to be integrated into the great current that we call spiritual science.

[ 2 ] You, my dear friends of the Novalis Branch, have chosen a significant name to serve as a signature, a symbol of your work. The name Novalis belongs to a personality who, in his last incarnation, was active as recently as the 18th century; a personality whose entire being is permeated and imbued with what we regard as a spirit-perceiving sense, as spirituality. And in doing so, you have shown from the very beginning that spiritual science is to be for you something immediately alive, which you seek wherever it can be found—not merely in this or that era, but as it lives through all ages, and as it can pour itself out into the world in many ways through one personality or another. In Novalis, in particular, we can see how the striving for spiritual knowledge is that which can permeate and interweave our ordinary everyday life. Of course, if we were to point to the sources of the theosophical spirit in Novalis, we would have to look into earlier incarnations of this noble spirit, and from these earlier incarnations it would become clear to us how that which can only be theosophical spiritual life in the deepest sense has carried over from earlier incarnations into that of Novalis. But even if we consider only that Novalis who barely reached the age of thirty and who lived at the end of the 18th century—if we consider only that one incarnation— then even in him it becomes clear to us that spiritual knowledge is not something that lifts a person up into a dreamy, fantastical world, something that draws them away and removes them from immediate reality; rather, in the most manifold ways we can see precisely in Novalis how the spirit of reality, how real life, derives its value and true content from being permeated by spiritual science.

[ 3 ] Novalis came from a Central German noble family in which there was, I might say, a certain materialistic piety—for such a thing does exist—but not really what one might call the heart’s longing for a true, living spirit. In order to fulfill Novalis’s karma in the proper way, it came to pass that Novalis’s father, the elder Hardenberg, even in his later years—though he was not imbued with spiritual life, yet through his joining the Herrnhut sect, a Pietist sect—was, in a certain sense, permeated with pious impulses. And from this Central German aristocratic milieu—which, as I said, possessed enough of the spirit that even old Hardenberg, in his later life, though sectarian, was able to attain a certain piety in the spiritual realm—from this milieu our Novalis grew up. He grew into—not what had been bestowed upon him by his family’s will, for that would have been some military or diplomatic position—he grew into a great era; into that era in which great, powerful minds were active in the chairs of the Central German University of Thuringia.

[ 4 ] Thus, even during that time in Jena, he was able to hear Schiller lecture on history. Let the history teachers of today say: Schiller was not a historian of scholarly stature. — What history should be in life—a permeation of the entire course of human development with spiritual life—that was what Schiller instilled in the souls of those who were able to hear him as a history teacher in Jena. Above all, a great personality spoke through Schiller. Spirit spoke through this personality; it awakened the spirit.

[ 5 ] There was yet another teacher when Novalis was young, a teacher who, through the great energy of his intellectual life, created philosophical works that belong to all of humanity but are still little understood today. Fichte was active at the time when Novalis was immersing himself in life. He was active in such a way that his entire demeanor—Fichte’s demeanor—had something spiritual about it. One might regard this as mere outward appearance. Anyone with a sense for this will not regard it as merely external that Fichte, when he gave a lecture in the dark hall in the evening with a candle burning on his desk, would first extinguish the candle, saying: “Well then, gentlemen of the audience, now the physical light is extinguished; now only the light of the spirit shall shine in this room.”

[ 6 ] To conjure up, at just the right moment, the relationship between the spiritual and the physical—not only before the soul but also before the eyes—means something immense to souls as receptive as Novalis’s. Such a soul can thereby become capable of maintaining an unshakable faith in spiritual life. It fills the soul with a noble feeling that remains with one for life when a figure like Novalis enters such an environment. One cannot say that Novalis was of a dreamy disposition. Those who believe he was a dreamer do not understand Novalis. No, the spirit that lived within Novalis said—as one can read today in his posthumous writings—: The state of sleep in a human being is different from the waking state. When a human being is awake, the inner soul—as it was called in the language of that time, what we would today call the astral body—is united within them with the outer body. The body enjoys the soul. - A beautiful phrase that Novalis used to express the relationship between the physical and astral bodies. And the soul is released from the body in sleep—so said Novalis—and the body digests the soul when a person sleeps. This, in turn, is a beautiful, short, concise expression for a relationship that we also encounter in spiritual science. It is beautiful when Novalis once writes the following in his notes: We are always surrounded by a spiritual world. Wherever we are, spiritual beings are around us. It depends only on the human being to project his self outward in such a way that he gains an awareness of the spiritual beings that surround us wherever we are. — It is also beautiful how he demonstrates a deep understanding of the course of esoteric human development and writes: In ancient times, people sought to elevate the soul to a higher stage of development through mortification of the body, through self-mortification, and so on. In more recent times, the strengthening of the soul must take its place: the energy of the soul. Through this strengthening, the soul must gain power over the body, must not be weakened by it, and must then exercise a certain dominion.

[ 7 ] We could go on talking about Novalis for hours. We would not, however, find a mind that expresses itself in words and teachings as we can today in the spiritual sciences, but a mind that expresses exactly the same thing with its words. He was no dreamer, no fantasist. Even though his lyric poetry reached the highest heights we can imagine and lifts us up to the highest emotional warmth, Novalis—and this applies to him, who did not live to see his thirtieth birthday — a practical mind who studied at the Bergakademie, a mathematician through and through, who perceived mathematics as a great poem, according to whose lines divine spirituality has composed the world, but who proved himself practically capable of everything a mining engineer needs. Novalis was a spirit who, despite this practicality, knew how to translate his theosophical disposition directly into life for his emotional life, for his heart. Truly, what we know of his relationship with Sophie von Kühn must not be understood as something connected with sensuality. He loved a girl who died at the age of fourteen. He actually only began to love her with such fervor after she was already dead. He felt that he now lived in the realm in which she had been since her “death.” He resolved to follow her in death. The rest of his life was a coexistence with a physically dead personality. All of this shows us what Novalis grew into through the powerful pull of his spiritual nature.

[ 8 ] We can see in Novalis that, as human beings, we essentially need only one quality to make sense of this spirituality that spiritual science is meant to bring us. One quality is all that is needed, and this one quality is so difficult for human beings to attain. Because it is so difficult for human beings to attain, people do not easily come to spiritual science. When this one quality is named, it seems to people as if everyone possessed it. Yet it is this very quality, the lack of which prevents people from coming to spiritual science: truthfulness—the honest acknowledgment, from the deepest depths of the soul, of what truly is. Apparently, so many people have it—in their own opinion. Yet Novalis himself gives us an example of how just a single moment of true honesty is needed, and how through this one moment of honesty a person must acknowledge what the spirituality of the world can be to the human heart. Novalis’s father had a certain inclination toward spirituality; otherwise he would not have joined the Herrnhut sect. But his soul was not as free and honest as is meant here. He was prevented from this by what lived in his soul from the external physical world. The physical world, with all its prejudices, did not allow him to ascend into the spiritual world. But his son possessed this truthfulness. What could be more natural than that the father could have no idea of what lived within this son? The physical world, with its divisive, disharmony, and its insincerity—which here erected a partition between what the young Novalis truly was and what the old Hardenberg wanted to be, but could not be due to a lack of genuine inner truthfulness—the physical world, with all that it makes of a person, did not allow him, as long as Novalis lived, to come to understand his son’s significance. A few weeks after his son’s death, the old Hardenberg was in his Herrnhut congregation. A hymn was sung in the congregation: “What would I have been without you, what would I not be without you.” And this hymn that was sung—the old Hardenberg had not heard it before, but at that moment it ignited everything of the spirit that was in his soul. He was captivated by the profound impact of what radiated from this song; in that moment, his soul, now made sincere, was filled with the spirit of the world, with spiritual life. And when the gathering was over, old Hardenberg asked someone whose song this was that had moved him so deeply. Then he was told: “It is, in fact, your son’s.” — It was first necessary that, for a moment, everything brought by the physical plane could be forgotten, and there, for a moment, without knowing the one who had brought it in, lived within him pure truthfulness, pure objectivity, not the prejudices of the physical plane. Thus would spirit find spirit if, free from the obstacles of the physical plane, we were to face soul with soul. In the moment when a human being, purely devoted to truth, can find the soul of another and the soul of the world—in every such moment—he must be permeated by what might be called theosophical spirituality.

[ 9 ] What might be called theosophical spirituality does not lie merely in some theory or doctrine—although we must never forget that for us humans, who are born to think, a doctrine is indispensable—but the very essence of theosophy does not lie in doctrine. Anyone who might wish to emphasize that doctrine is superfluous, and that the only thing that matters is to cultivate what is called universal brotherly love, must be repeatedly reminded that by preaching universal brotherly love, this universal brotherly love cannot be achieved anywhere in the world. If we preach only of love, then to the connoisseur of life this is just as if we were to say to a stove: Dear stove, it befits you, for the sake of your stove-love, to warm the room. — But the room remains cold, no matter how often we preach of love. But if we give it fuel, wood, and fire, then the wood and fire are transformed within it into warmth, and it warms the room. The fuel for the human soul is the great ideals, the great thoughts that we can absorb, through which we recognize the interconnectedness of the world, through which we can learn the mysteries of human destiny and human life. These are not thoughts that merely fill us theoretically, but those that warm us from within, and the result of theosophical wisdom is love. And just as surely as the stove warms the room through heat and not through preaching, so surely will the true teaching of the great thoughts that permeate the world make the soul loving. For that is the secret of true wisdom: that it transforms itself into love within the soul through its own power. Whoever has not yet found the path from wisdom to love merely shows that they have not yet progressed far enough in wisdom. But anyone who would believe that the ideas we take in about the evolution of the world, the evolution of humanity, about karma, and so on, are insignificant to human beings, should repeatedly and again and again make it clear to themselves in their soul that these are not merely human thoughts, that they are not merely thoughts that we first conceive, but that these thoughts, which penetrate our soul, are the very ones according to which the divine spirits have built the world.

[ 10 ] It is not our own thoughts that appear before our inner eye in spiritual science, but the thoughts of the divine architects, the divine spirits of the world. What the gods of the world thought among themselves before the creation of the physical world, we reflect upon in spiritual science and thus explore that which has flowed from the divine beings into the working and becoming of the world to which we belong. But that which the gods have thought is spiritual light. And whoever does not wish to think what the gods thought thereby, even if they do not realize it, does not direct themselves toward the light, but toward darkness. The only possible foundation for a true development of the human soul is that in which we proceed from what the divine thoughts of the world are. The spirits of the world have not given us these abilities as innate capacities to be left fallow. They have been given to us so that we may develop them. And since, in this cycle of human development, thinking is our most important and preeminent ability, we must start with thinking. But we must not stop at thinking. This, however, gradually leads us to translate spiritual science into a mindset that enables us to understand the mysteries of how knowledge leads to character traits and qualities of the soul. Correctly understood knowledge leads to character traits and genuine qualities of the soul.

[ 11 ] We can understand this through a single example: we humans undergo successive, ever-renewing incarnations. What purpose would these incarnations, these repeated earthly lives, serve if not to make human beings gradually more and more perfect? We must look back from our present incarnation to earlier incarnations and tell ourselves: What we have become today, we have become because, through one incarnation after another, this or that quality of our soul has been incorporated, because our soul has taken in new powers time and again, has had experiences, has gained insights. What is built into this soul in one incarnation then emerges in the following incarnation.

[ 12 ] We have now become what we were prepared to be in our previous incarnations. But then we can pause for a moment and say: We are not only looking back into the past, but we are also looking up into the future, toward later, more perfect life courses. What would this human life be, through all these many incarnations, if we could not say to ourselves: The further we develop into the future, the higher the levels will have been attained by that which today sits within us as our ‘I’.

[ 13 ] We can only guess at what we might yet become, for otherwise we would already be it. We must attribute to ourselves the ability to rise ever higher. — Yet we must look to the future with timidity and reverence; we must tell ourselves that even if we can already recognize this or that today, and are already able to experience this or that in the world today: With the greater abilities we can attain, we will be able to experience and recognize much more.

[ 14 ] How impossible it is for someone who takes a thought such as the one just expressed to heart—how impossible it is for him to say to himself: I can decide today what is true or false; I can ultimately judge what is true or false. — The only thing befitting him is to say: If I could decide today, then it would be impossible for even higher capacities to arise within me in the future. — But when this is put into practice in our attitude, it gives us, at every moment of our development, the great modesty, the true, dignified humility, that we need to be truly human. Thus, the knowledge of reincarnation is transformed into a feeling, a character trait: into dignified humility, into true modesty.

[ 15 ] One could put it this way: Anyone who recognizes today that they are passing through successive incarnations and continually ascending in their development would have to be a fool if they told themselves they were perfect; or if they told themselves: There is no need for me to learn today, for I will experience it quite differently tomorrow. — Knowledge transforms into a genuine character trait. And viewed correctly, every spiritual-scientific insight transforms into a character trait. But we can surely see this: If we were unable to apply our powers at any stage of our existence, then these powers would not have been given to us from the spiritual worlds. If we were to wait until the world had reached its stage of perfection, believing that we must first be so perfect that we can finally recognize and experience it, then we would not have to go through various incarnations. That is to say, we must be clear that we must apply our powers of knowledge in every incarnation. We must not say: We will only seek to know in the next incarnation, or at the end of our existence. — We should apply the power we have, despite our humility and modesty.

[ 16 ] Thus, alongside humility and modesty, there arises a justified sense of human self-worth that flows directly from our immersion in the divine-spiritual and tells us: True, our knowledge will not be complete until we have reached a high level, but it is precisely by becoming aware of our human dignity today and by applying our strength today that we can make it complete. — Thus our character will acquire something that can be compared to a scale. We can place humility and modesty on one side of the scale, and justified self-esteem and boldness in judgment on the other, and say: We have attained a step forward in knowledge and self-awareness. - In short, we will find that whenever you simply try to incorporate into your feelings what spiritual science teaches, the teachings or theories of spiritual science are transformed within our soul, because they contain thoughts of the divine spirits; they are transformed within our soul into our character, our will, and our feelings. This can show us that in spiritual science, the teaching, the theory, is not the main thing, but that it is, so to speak, the fuel for the development of the human soul; that it is precisely what is meant to bring forth higher qualities in our soul. And whoever demands these qualities without understanding lives in the worst of delusions, in self-deception—that self-deception which entered human evolution because, in the course of Earth’s development, other beings also entered and contributed to our evolution: beings who were not merely harmful, but also useful. But as useful as they were to us, in that they brought us freedom and self-awareness, we must nevertheless be clear that precisely these gifts of the so-called Luciferic beings—freedom and self-awareness—must not degenerate into extremes, into radicalism, for then they become pride and arrogance. And pride and arrogance in the face of knowledge lead that knowledge into darkness. Knowledge is the reception of the divine light, of the divine thoughts. Rejection of knowledge is something that leads into darkness and that cannot lead to higher qualities of the soul. If we view spiritual science in this way, then we will recognize it as one of the most important matters for humanity. We will recognize it as something we do not merely for our own sake, but because we are conscious of our duty to humanity and to evolution.

[ 17 ] We are not living in an unimportant era today; we are living in a significant era. It is often said by people living in this or that era that they are living in a transitional period. All periods of human development have been called transitional periods, but not all are such significant transitional periods. But of our present time, however, one can truly say that it is a transitional period. In what sense is this the case? Let us clarify the nature of another transitional period. For example, it was a transitional period for human development when the predecessor of our Lord Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, appeared. When John the Baptist appeared, he told the people what was later repeated in meaningful words by the Lord Jesus Christ: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

[ 18 ] What does this mean? We can understand what this means if we remember that, as human beings have evolved from one incarnation to the next, they have passed through various stages of soul development. In the distant past, people did not yet possess the qualities and spiritual abilities they have today. In ancient times, it was possible for all people to develop a dim, twilight-like, dreamlike clairvoyance, to look into the spiritual world. All people had the opportunity not only to see the physical world but also to look into the spiritual world. But in those days, when this clairvoyance was common, people did not yet possess something they have today: a clearly developed sense of self. Back then, people could not yet say to themselves in a clear way, “I am.” Standing firmly at the center of the inner self could only be achieved by the old clairvoyance disappearing for a while. People had to, as it were, accept being cut off from the spiritual world in order to develop a clear sense of self here on the physical plane. Later, this clairvoyance will develop again alongside self-awareness, so that the two qualities will reappear together and people will possess them once more. We can thus look back to a time in the distant past. There, at least for certain periods, when people were inattentive to the physical, when they closed their eyes and turned away from the physical, and left their ears inattentive to sounds, they would then look into the spiritual world and gain a direct conviction of the existence of the spiritual world. These qualities faded, but in their place came an ever-increasing capacity for thought, the capacity for self-awareness, for drawing conclusions, for independent judgment—that which constitutes our present-day everyday consciousness. The time can be roughly indicated when it gradually came to pass that the old clairvoyant abilities completely disappeared from human capacities. Before about the year 3101, almost all people on our Earth were still endowed with twilight clairvoyance. Then, from that year onward, it diminished more and more, becoming ever weaker. With this, however, ego-consciousness, self-awareness, judgment, reasoning, and self-conscious thinking grew. So, as it were, the light of spirituality grew dim, and that which is the human ego dawned; it grew brighter and ever brighter. Within, it grew brighter, but in the spiritual realm it grew darker. In this year begins what Eastern philosophy calls the Kali Yuga, the dark, black age. There was something that had, so to speak, reached a crisis, a turning point, in the time when John the Baptist appeared as a forerunner and then Christ Jesus. They had to tell humanity: You must now learn that spirituality exists, even though you do not see it with any spiritual eye. You must learn that the realms of heaven are there. You must grasp this from within your own self. — That is why the Christ had to incarnate into a physical body, for only on the physical plane could self-consciousness perceive spirituality during the Kali Yuga.

[ 19 ] That was a time of transition. The old abilities had faded away. If the people of that time had not heard the call of John the Baptist, of Christ Jesus, they would have fallen into decay at that stage and made no further progress. Those who heard these voices had to recognize the God who descended into the physical-material realm. They understood that the realms of heaven had drawn near to the I.

[ 20 ] Christ spent three years on Earth in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. That was the time when people could only see with their physical eyes when a god descended to them.

[ 21 ] We are once again living in a time of transition, in a crisis. The Kali Yuga came to an end around the year 1899. And now, even though people are unaware of it, new qualities are developing within them. New qualities are developing naturally in the human soul. The fact that so many people know nothing of this is no proof to the contrary. A hundred years after Christ, Tacitus was still writing about an unknown sect of Christians; and in Rome, even after Christ Jesus had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha seventy to eighty years earlier, people still spoke of a sect said to dwell in a side street and led by a certain Jesus. Yet the most important events had passed before the eyes of countless people. If people do not perceive something, that is no proof that this most important, decisive, and incomparable thing does not exist. Since about 1899, abilities have been developing unnoticed within people, which will emerge in the mid-1930s, roughly from 1933 to 1937. Then, because the time has come, these soul abilities will manifest in a whole series of people; abilities of etheric clairvoyance will arise. They will be there. Just as there were people with ego-consciousness driven to its highest peak when Christ Jesus was here, so in our century there will be people who will not only see with the physical eye, but who will experience, as a natural development, what is striving down from spiritual levels, so that spiritual -soul abilities emerge from their soul, enabling them to enter into etheric existence. And the blessing of these people will be to understand the new world they will see. One thing is true and, as true, important for our soul: that the Christ Jesus said, “I am with you until the end of our Earth cycle.” He is there. He has been within our earthly sphere since that time. And when the spiritual eyes are opened, they will see him, just as Paul saw him at the event near Damascus. This is what will happen around 1933: He will be seen as an etheric being, as a being who does not descend to physical existence but can be seen in the etheric body, because a certain number of people will then ascend to etheric vision. But people will be ignorant if they are not prepared by spiritual science for what they will see. That is why we are living in a time of transition, because we are growing into a new way of seeing.

[ 22 ] Spiritual science has the responsible task of preparing people for the great moment when the Christ will not appear in a physical body—for He was in a physical body only once—but He is there, and He will return in such a form that those whose eyes are opened will see Him in the world that is visible only to clairvoyant eyes. People will grow upward toward him. That will be the return of the Christ: a growing upward of people into the sphere in which the Christ is. But they would stand there bewildered if they were not prepared for this great moment through spiritual science. This preparation must be a serious one, for it is a matter of great responsibility. Humanity must be prepared for the fact that more will be seen than has been seen so far, provided that people do not lead this ability into darkness and cause it to wither away. For it could also happen that the entire 20th century would pass without bringing about the fulfillment of this goal. We have the responsible task of preparing people for this great moment through spiritual science. But we must prepare people spiritually, helping them understand that only the spirit will encounter the Christ with the spiritual eye open. A materialistic mind might believe that the Christ would appear again in a physical body. But that would not be spiritual, but materialistic. If we were to believe that, we would lack the will to work our way up to his spirit. That is why certain prophecies from the Apocalypse will be fulfilled in this time. Relying on and building upon the materialistic spirit, individuals will appear in physical bodies who will then claim to be the incarnated Christ. And those who have not been led to true knowledge through spiritual science will fall victim to them, for the illusion will be great and the possibility of self-deception immense. The temptations will grow to enormous proportions. Only a spiritual insight that is conscious of its responsibility will lead people to an understanding of what is to happen.

[ 23 ] These were reflections intended to show how spirituality is meant to work through spiritual science in the individual human soul, and that spiritual knowledge is a task of our time, for we can also say of the present age: The most important things lie ahead of us. But because the most important things could be completely overlooked by humanity in the darkness, because the great moment could pass without people seeing it, spiritual science must therefore work in the right way. Imbuing our spirit with what is conveyed to us through spiritual research will provide, in every branch, the spirituality we need to develop our own souls ever higher, in order to render ever higher and higher services to humanity.

[ 24 ] Let us try to reflect more often on the fact that, just as in Christ’s time, the same applies to our own: Change your ways, for the time is at hand. — If it was said back then, “The kingdoms of heaven are near,” then today, looking prophetically into the near future, we must say: For the human ego is near the kingdoms of heaven. — Let us prepare ourselves through true spiritual science so that we may enter worthily into the kingdom that calls to us. And we ourselves can only flourish if we find the path to the kingdoms of heaven. If we process what we experience on earth and, in turn, bring forth what we experience in the higher spiritual existence, offering it as a great sacrifice at the altar of divine existence, then we fulfill our destiny as human beings to the fullest extent with dignity. Let the work you do here be imbued both with the spirit of Novalis and with the spirit of spiritual science itself, which has stepped before our souls, and you will see that your work will proceed in a positive way. For when our work is imbued with such a spirit, then, as we are gathered in our branches, that which we call the light of the Masters of Wisdom and the harmony of feelings flows in. We are never without the help of these advanced individualities when we are united in the right spirit within one of our branches. May such a spirit unite you! May that spirit, which is at the same time the spirit of the Masters of Wisdom, inspire you! Work in this spirit, and your work will be part of the great spiritual-scientific work; your activity will be part of the spirit that is to permeate the entire globe.