The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. The Present and the Past in the Human Spirit

[ 1 ] First, let us listen today to a recitation of poems by Friedrich Lienhard and Wilhelm Jordan, and then I will take the liberty of following this recitation with some anthroposophical-literary reflections on the present and its challenges. This will then bring our evening to a close. I would just like to preface this with a few words.

[ 2 ] Friedrich Lienhard is one of those contemporary poets of whom we can already say that, through their own aspirations, they come close in a certain respect to the aspirations of Spiritual Science. On October 4 of the past year, 1915, Friedrich Lienhard celebrated his fiftieth birthday. We, too, joined in from Dornach at that time with the numerous greetings that came from all sides to this spiritually inspired contemporary poet, and I believe we have special reasons, particularly in the case of the poet Friedrich Lienhard—who, after all, has in a certain way aligned himself with our movement and shown us kindness—to take a closer look at the actual content and artistic substance of his poetic essence. He himself says that he, who hails from a French-Alsatian background, had to struggle through many difficulties to arrive at what he calls his worldview—which he sought to bring forth and develop more and more from the Central European German spirit, but in such a way that in his poetry he genuinely strives to bring the distinctive rhythm of this Central European German essence to life. And here, with Friedrich Lienhard, one must above all see how truly alive within him is that which he has strived for—that which is so intimately related to his essence, as I have just attempted to characterize it. Perhaps there is an element within him that can only be properly appreciated from the artistic-spiritual vantage point of Spiritual Science. Above all, in Lienhard’s poetry we find wonderful depictions of nature, nature poetry—but a nature poetry of a very special kind. Yet it is also nature poetry when Friedrich Lienhard attempts to make people speak. Here, too, there is something that springs directly and naturally from human nature and reveals the spirit within our existence in nature. Where does this come from? It comes from something that one can perhaps only truly perceive in Friedrich Lienhard if one—and this is something one should do with all art, though today it has, I would say, completely vanished from people’s consciousness: the art of viewing art in this way, particularly poetry—allows oneself to be moved not merely by the content and the conceptual aspects of his art, but by what is truly artistic and formal. In the way his feelings and mental images move within him, how they develop, how they intensify and subside—in this peculiar surging of his soul’s experiences expressed in poetic language—we perceive something like the reign of elemental spirituality, a harmonious movement of the poetic soul with that which, according to our views, lives elementally in the etheric world out there in nature, beyond mere sensory existence, and what lives in the etheric world when the human expresses itself in a natural way, as, for example, in the expression of a child’s inner life. If one follows Friedrich Lienhard’s words, they seem to one as if the very elemental spirits—which we know permeate, warm, live through, and interweave all natural phenomena—were moving forth from these words. And this permeating, warming, living through, and weaving of the elemental beings in relation to nature continues right into the poetry of a poet who truly understands how to live in harmony with the spirit of nature.

[ 3 ] Another aspect of Friedrich Lienhard’s work is that, precisely through his grasp of the grand contexts of humanity and the world—to which, I might say, he is deeply connected through his feelings—he seeks to grasp the driving, active forces and entities of national life without falling into any kind of narrow-minded nationalism, and, in turn, he attempts to grasp folk life not from the particulars of random individuals, but from the entire ebb and flow of the principle of the folk soul, placing the individual figures within the larger spiritual context in which they can exist within folk life. Through this, Friedrich Lienhard is able to grasp and portray a figure such as Pastor Oberlin of the Alsatian Steintal—who is imbued with a kind of atavistic clairvoyance—in a manner that is, on the one hand, truly vivid and, on the other hand, extraordinarily intimate and spiritual. And driven by this impulse, he was able to summon the divine figures of antiquity back into the present—not by merely drawing on the content of the ancient myths of gods and heroes, but by genuinely striving to find, in the language of the present, a way to reawaken that which, like the surge of a wave, has lived through that ancient life and continues to wash up into our own time. In this sense, Friedrich Lienhard is truly one of the distinguished poets of our time, because other contemporary poets have sought so earnestly—with disregard, I might say, for all that is artistic and spiritual—to focus on the naturalistic and the realistic in order to create something new; whereas the true poet does not seek to create the new in this sense through naturalistic quirks in our present age, but rather seeks to create it by grasping the eternal stream of eternal beauty in a new way—yet in such a way that art truly remains art. And true art can never exist without spirituality.

[ 4 ] This is likely also why Friedrich Lienhard has come closer to what he calls “Paths to Weimar.” For a long time, he published a journal that appeared at irregular intervals, “Wege nach Weimar,” in which he sought to turn his attention to the great ideas and artistic impulses of that momentous era spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in order to discern what truly holds value in this great period—a period that, as we may see in the concluding remarks, has been completely or largely forgotten and faded away in many respects, especially today. Consequently, he sought once again to deepen—I would say, to internalize—his later artistic periods, so that ultimately he was able to produce poems just as wonderfully intimate as those relating to figures such as Odilia and the like. He then knew how to combine all of this, in the genuine, true sense, with the Christian impulses that surge and weave through humanity. And it is remarkable that—not through the external content of his poetic work, but through the way in which the elemental beings carry him—he approaches, down to the finest detail, an element that, as it seemed, had been completely lost to German poetry; that he approaches — as you will be able to notice from the recitation in some places — the artistic element of alliteration.

[ 5 ] This alliteration—and what it shares with the German spirit, which is akin to the entire Central European German folk tradition—brings him close to a poet who, partly through his own fault but mainly through the fault of the times and their aberrations, has been little understood, and whom we wish to introduce to you today in the second part through a recitation: Wilhelm Jordan. Wilhelm Jordan sought, precisely through alliteration and assonance, to revive, as he put it, the “ancient flow of speech from the roaring past.” He could not help but reintroduce this formal element of ancient poetry into the present, which he sought to elevate beyond the trivialities of everyday life to the great, stirring impulses. And one must say: It is truly a pity—though it did not happen entirely without Jordan’s own fault—that a work of poetry such as The Demiurge, which attempts to establish a true connection between the world-shaking spiritual principles and the course of human history on Earth, could pass by so completely without making an impact. As I said, it passed unnoticed in the 1950s, though not entirely without Wilhelm Jordan’s own fault. I say this because the naturalistic, scientific way of viewing things had, in fact, already crept into his own worldview, and he thereby spoiled much for himself. Much was also spoiled in The Nibelungen by the fact that, instead of the principles that were previously viewed in a much deeper way, the naturalistic principles of heredity prevail—the material transmission of hereditary forces from one generation to the next—so that, I would say, blood prevails too much over the soul. In this way, Wilhelm Jordan certainly paid his tribute to the naturalistic-scientific view of the present. On the other hand, however, he has deprived his works of that which might, even in an earlier age, have provided the great spiritual impulses for humanity’s artistic endeavors, so that not everything would have had to sink into the inartistic barbarism that has in many cases replaced earlier spiritual principles in later times. We can see, after all, how what Wilhelm Jordan sought is now merely a subject of ridicule. But, I would say, it is up to us to truly allow these great impulses—wherever they have arisen—to take effect upon our souls, for the time will nevertheless come when these impulses will have a certain mission to fulfill in the overall development of the world and humanity.

[ 6 ] Certainly, the poet Friedrich Lienhard is widely recognized. But we should try to discover what it is about him that can perhaps be found specifically within our circles, for that, I believe, will be the very thing that carries his artistic endeavors—together with the wave of endeavors in the field of Spiritual Science—into the future. And now let us first listen to Friedrich Lienhard’s poems and some excerpts from Wilhelm Jordan’s Nibelungen epic—the Siegfried saga itself.

[ 7 ] (Recitation of the following poems by Friedrich Lienhard by Dr. Steiner:

[ 8 ] “Faith,” “Morning Wind,” “Greeting from the Forest,” “The Creative Light,” “Lonely Rock,” “Have You Also Experienced It?,” “All the Delicate Flower Bells,” “Migration of Souls,” “Elven Dance.” “Summer Night.” Odilia Songs: “Autumn on Odilia Mountain.” “St. Odilia.” — Recitation from the “Nibelungenlied” by Wilhelm Jordan.)

[ 9 ] It will always be a good thing to let poetic art of precisely this kind take its course. In Friedrich Lienhard, we have before us a poet who attempts to truly bring into the present spiritual-idealistic experiences of the soul—experiences he is strong enough to combine with experiences of nature. And in such works, one still senses that in art, the “how” matters more than the “what.” How wonderfully the magic envelops the area around the Odilienberg, and how beautifully the feeling radiated by Odilia, the patron saint of the Odilienberg Monastery, becomes lyrically and immediately present. That she was once persecuted by her cruel father, that she was blinded, and that it was precisely through the loss of her sight that she attained the mystical ability to heal the blind and restore their sight—that is, after all, the legend around which everything else is structured. And all that true, profound mysticism centered on this legend—lyrically intertwined with the natural world surrounding the Odilienberg in Alsace—is found precisely in the poems by Friedrich Lienhard that were recited to you. But you will find many, many poems of such power and, at the same time, such intimacy, of such a spiritual and soulful nature, in his work. And he truly gives us reason, through that which—I would say—vibrates and weaves in an elemental way with the form of his poetry, to remember the truly much-misunderstood Wilhelm Jordan.

[ 10 ] From the brief excerpt we were able to hear today, you will have seen, on the one hand, how earnestly this poet strives to create the figures he presents to us out of the great spiritual tapestry of life, and to weave them together with what we encounter in the outer physical world, at the same time allowing them to experience that which weaves and works from the surging spiritual world. It is precisely in Wilhelm Jordan, I believe, that one can experience how the poetic soul can connect with the currents of world history, so that in what confronts us poetically and artistically, the striving truly lives on—the striving that, as spiritual currents, permeates and interweaves the unfolding of the world.

[ 11 ] The last time we were gathered here, last Tuesday, I had to point out: What would become of humanity’s further development on Earth if no intellectual, no spiritual influence could find its way into that which is, so to speak, determined by purely external physical existence? And not only in the external realms of knowledge, science, social life, and so on, but also in the realm of art, it becomes strikingly clear to us that we are living in a critical time, insofar as a crisis is unfolding—not in the sense in which the word “criticism,” which is also related to “crisis,” is used in the trivial literature of the present day. For if the living essence of Spiritual Science does not grasp the life of the human soul, art—which cannot exist without spirit—must be lost to humanity; it must vanish in the manner in which it still resonates through figures such as Wilhelm Jordan, and as it is being attempted to be preserved by figures such as Friedrich Lienhard. Today, people do not yet recognize this looming danger of artistic decline, because in many respects, even in this field, that intoxication and that dreamlike existence prevail—the very ones I spoke of here last Tuesday—even though one could already see much today, if only one had the faculties of perception for it. One would wish that more and more people, precisely out of a spiritual science-based sensibility, would come to realize what it actually means for the present that an art form—the art of drama—which truly existed until relatively recently is now stagnating and decaying into that which is the very antithesis of all artistic sense. Reinhardtianism is a harbinger of what art will degenerate into if there is nothing left but that turning away from all spiritual life and spiritual sensibility, which is spreading more and more. One of the saddest phenomena of the present day is that a large number of people today are still capable of regarding such a charade as Reinhardtianism as art at all.

[ 12 ] To see clearly in this field today requires that strong impulse which can arise from an artistic sensibility kindled by Spiritual Science. For what is currently called “modern life” in the artistic realm is, in many cases, nothing more than a confused stumbling through the world. If one merely attempts to truly grasp contemporary life, one can already—I would say—identify the point where life, completely corroded by materialism, plummets today into the swamp of art, or, viewed from the other side, into the oblivion of everything that art actually is. For in order for true artistic sensibility to be perpetuated in the development of humanity, it is necessary that what has come from the past—what lives, for example, in Lienhard’s poetry and what is, in a certain sense, a kind of natural pantheism and spiritual pantheism—be able to develop into the concrete, so that people may learn to understand the diversity of life in such a way that they perceive, alongside the physical, the etheric, the astral, and the spiritual. For without this vision, humanity remains blind—blind, in particular, with regard to the artistic. And the world, one might say, is inclined—precisely with regard to artistic perception—to take only the very coarse, external, sensory realm, to view it as it is, and to describe it directly.

[ 13 ] Now, however, it is hardly possible to present such descriptions or such recreations in any other way than through the emergence of what I would call a lack of clarity regarding the perception of life—states of intoxication and dreaming in which, essentially, one never really knows what one is actually dealing with. And so one finds that it is precisely this nonsensical, unclear staggering in the face of life’s phenomena that is today often called “subtle psychology” and regarded as such. And it breaks one’s heart so often to see that so few people are capable of feeling strongly enough in this area and of rebelling against it in some way. Let us look at people as they appear to us when we gaze upon them—and the artist must indeed gaze upon them with a seeing eye, so that he can place them within the deeper life of the world—using those spiritual faculties that the history of human development has already brought to light; then we need the ability to say: Here is a person of such and such a nature, who experiences this or that, because we know that this person is more rooted in the physical body, another is more rooted in the “I,” and yet another more in the astral body. And we must have a living sense of how human characters are distributed, in that one is more influenced by the physical, another more by the etheric, another more by the astral, and another more by the ego. And if one cannot do this in the present, and wishes, for example, to describe people artistically in literature, then what emerges is precisely that confusion that is often regarded as art today.

[ 14 ] You see, one really must—I would say—approach the matter through its more significant manifestations so that an understanding can be awakened of what is actually the case. One might encounter four people who, let’s say, have been brought together in some way by karma. When four people are brought together, one can understand how they are linked to one another through karma in specific ways, but also how the stream of karma flows in the course of world history, and how these people, precisely through their karma, have chosen to place themselves in the world in a particular way. One will never understand anything from the perspectives available today if one is unable to see such karmic connections in the world.

[ 15 ] Well, take, for example, the four brothers—Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha Karamazov, and Smerdyakov—in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. If you can see with the eye of the soul, you will find in these four Karamazov brothers four distinct types whom you can only understand in terms of how they have been brought together by karma, so that one knows: A stream of karma carries these four brothers into the world in such a way that they must be the sons of a typical scoundrel of the present day, from one of the most seedy milieus, who has these four brothers as his sons. They are brought into the world by choosing precisely this karma. But they are also placed side by side, so that one can see how they differ. Thus one can understand them only if one knows: in one, the ego predominates—in Dmitri Karamazov; in a second, the astral body predominates—in Alyosha Karamazov; in the third, the etheric body predominates—in Ivan Karamazov; and in the fourth, Smerdyakov, the physical body predominates entirely. And a light of understanding of life shines upon the four brothers when one can view them from this perspective. And now imagine how a poet endowed with Wilhelm Jordan’s gifts—and possessing a spiritual worldview appropriate to our times—would place these four brothers side by side: how he would succeed in grasping them in their spiritual foundations and fundamental conditions! Dostoevsky—what does he understand? He understands nothing other than that he presents these four brothers as the sons of a thoroughly typical, drunken scoundrel from a certain degenerate contemporary society: The first son, Dmitri, as the son of a half-adventurous, half-hysterical woman who, after initially going through a rough patch with the drunken old Karamazov, beats him up, finally can’t stand him anymore, and leaves him only with their son, the older one, Dmitri. Everything is framed solely in terms of heredity—the drunkard and the abusive mother—and everything is, I might say, presented in such a way that one gets the impression: Here the author describes things much like a modern psychiatrist who focuses only on the crudest aspects of the principle of heredity and has no idea of the psychological conditions, and who would also present “hereditary burden” to our minds—this dripping word—I do not mean a word that drips, but one that has been concocted from drips in today’s scientific context. Then we have the next two sons: Ivan and Alyosha. They are by a second wife, for of course the “hereditary burden” must have a different effect on these two sons. They are by the so-called “Screaming Lise,” because she is not half but completely hysterical and constantly suffers from screaming fits. While the first wife used to beat the old drunkard senseless, the old drunkard now beats “Screaming Lise” senseless. The fourth son, in whom—I might say—everything inherent in the physical body predominates, is Smerdyakov, a sort of mixture of a wise, modest, and idiotic man—a man who is completely foolish and, in part, also quite clever. He, too, is the son of the old drunkard—that typical scoundrel—but his mother was a mute woman who wandered around Otte, a village idiot known as Stinking Lisaveta, who was raped by the old drunkard. She died in childbirth. Of course, no one knows that he is her son. Smerdyakov then remains in the house. And now all the scenes that are meant to unfold take place between these characters. And Dmitri becomes—due to “hereditary burden,” of course—a man in whom the entirely subconscious self rages and surges, driving him forward in life, so that he stumbles into life everywhere from the unconscious, from a state of unconsciousness, and he is portrayed to us in such a way that, fundamentally speaking, we are not dealing with a healthy, intellectual art, but with a hysterical one. But this stems from the natural development of the present—that present which refuses to be influenced or enriched by anything that might come from an intellectual worldview. Everything that does not quite know what it wants—unclear instincts that can unfold just as easily into the highest mysticism as into the most extreme criminality, indeed, that can easily transition from one to the other from within the unconscious—all of this, in a sense, Dostoevsky portrays in Dmitri Ivanovich Karamazov. He wants to portray a Russian; for he always seeks to portray true Russianness.

[ 16 ] Ivan, the other son, the younger one, is a “Westernizer.” “Westernizers” are those who have become more familiar with Western culture, whereas Dmitri knows nothing of Western culture but acts entirely on the basis of Russian instincts. Ivan was in Paris, studied all sorts of things, absorbed the Western worldview, and debated with people—this is how Dostoevsky wants to portray him to us—now completely imbued with the ideas of the West’s materialist worldview, yet with the brooding mind of a Russian. He debates these matters with people, as the fog of instincts mingles with all manner of thoughts from modern intellectual culture. He debates: Should one be an atheist, or should one not be an atheist? Can one accept a God, or can one not accept a God? Then he comes to this conclusion: One can, after all, accept a God! Yes, I accept that God—for in the end, that is what he advocates, accepting God—but I cannot accept the world! If I accept God, I cannot accept the world, for this world, as it is, as it appears, cannot have been created by God. I accept God, but I do not accept the world! That is how his discussions go.

[ 17 ] The third, Alyosha, becomes a monk at an early age. He is the one in whom the astral body predominates. But we are also shown how all manner of instincts are at work within him—including through the mysticism that develops in him—and how, fundamentally, it is through these very same instincts—which, in his older brother Dmitri (who is simply from a different mother), give rise to a nature with a criminal disposition that manifests differently in him—that he comes to be a mystic. Criminality is merely a particular manifestation of the same instincts that, on the other hand, give rise to self-flagellation and belief in the divine love that pervades the entire world; for both stem from the lower realm, from the base instincts of human nature, and simply take shape in different ways.

[ 18 ] Of course, there is not the slightest objection to using such figures in art, for everything that exists in reality can become the subject of art. But it is the “how” that matters, not the “what”; they must then be imbued with the interplay and essence of the spiritual. Through the peculiar circumstances that I have often discussed here—particularly in relation to Russian culture—it is precisely in Dostoevsky that what the development of humanity must be has found expression, if spirituality is to continue to prevail in Russian life purely through the further development of natural conditions, as I recently contrasted this with spiritual conditions. Dostoevsky was, after all, from the very beginning the incarnate hater of Germans, who instinctively made it his task to let absolutely nothing from Western European culture flow into his soul, who wanted only to stand there, in a frenzy, grasping the figures of the world as they passed him by, and who carefully avoided to see anything spiritual in the physical human tide that surged up and down before his soul, and who, instead of grasping the figures from the depths of the soul, brought them forth from the depths of purely physical nature, which was pathological in him. And this then had an effect on people who had forgotten the possibility of ascending into the spiritual. This had an effect on people such that another aspect of nature—I would say its pathological seething and boiling, which works within the human gut—was able to be transformed in art, to the exclusion of everything spiritual. That had an effect. Otherwise, of course, the mere depiction would simply be a depiction, a description; it would be straw-like and wooden. But because it springs from a subconscious that acts in a pathological, hysterical manner, it has become interesting—even very interesting in many respects—namely through that paradox that emerges when one, without a spark of spiritual life, so to speak, with feeling—for this is present to the highest degree in Dostoevsky—surrenders to the purely physical existence of the world.

[ 19 ] And so, woven into The Brothers Karamazov is that curious episode of the Grand Inquisitor, who is presented to us in such a way that the reincarnated Christ appears before him—that is, the Grand Inquisitor—it is portrayed as though Ivan Karamazov had written this novella, and it is then inserted into The Brothers Karamazov —the true man of Orthodox Christianity of his time, for he knows what is at work in Christianity and lives for his time—is confronted by the reincarnated Christ. Now imagine this man of Christianity, the true representative of Orthodoxy, standing face to face with the reincarnated Christ himself. What else can the Grand Inquisitor—who represents “true” Christianity—do but, as a matter of course, have the reincarnated Christ imprisoned! That is the first thing he does. Then he must conduct the inquisition; he must interrogate him. It also turns out that the Grand Inquisitor, who represents religion in the true sense and knows what Christianity needs in our time, recognizes: Christ has returned. So he says: “Yes, you are indeed the Christ—I can only describe this roughly—but you have no say now in the affairs of Christianity that we are called upon to uphold; you understand absolutely nothing about that now. As for what you have accomplished: Has it brought people anything that would have made them happy? We first had to make the right of it from what you presented to people in such a one-sided, impractical way. If only your Christianity had reached the people, then they would not have found in Christianity the salvation that we have brought them. For if one truly wants to bring salvation to people, one needs a teaching that has an effect on them. You believed that the teaching must also be true. But such things are of no use when dealing with people. Above all, what matters is that people believe the teaching—that it is presented to them in such a way that they are compelled to believe. We have established authority.

[ 20 ] Yes, there really was no other choice but to hand over the reincarnated Christ to the Inquisition. After all, in the Christianity represented by the Grand Inquisitor, there is no need for Christ if he were to have the misfortune of reincarnating within it, is there? It is a magnificent idea, executed even more magnificently. But it is set within a work of fiction that is merely a hysterical rendering of reality, so that nothing emerges of the great impulses that run through world events; nothing spiritual in Dostoevsky becomes vivid, but only that outward appearance of the reincarnated Christ appears there and is, in a sense, shattered by the Grand Inquisitor.

[ 21 ] Such things are related to many other things, and I would like to say: It is fitting for those who wish to understand Spiritual Science at its core to sense this connection and not to take the things of life too lightly. Isn’t it true that what we have come to can be characterized in many ways? One need only think, for example, of two books that appeared not too long ago, one of which is titled Jesus: A Psychopathological Study, and the other Jesus Christ Viewed from a Psychiatric Perspective. There, what is written in the Gospels is examined in such a way that it is dragged before the frameworks of the contemporary psychiatrist, and one looks to see how the individual passages of the Gospels—namely, the words of Jesus Christ himself—can be explained by focusing precisely on the pathological state of this personality, who stood at the starting point of modern development: the diseased psyche of Jesus Christ. The psychiatrist who examines Christ as an abnormal person according to the rules of modern psychiatry—he is already here! There are books on the subject.

[ 22 ] One should, after all, consider these phenomena alongside whatever else might otherwise come to mind. How many people, on the other hand, truly feel the entire quagmire, the entire stupidity of such a spiritual culture—feel it so deeply that they want to trace it down to its very finest details? Must we not experience it time and time again: There is a great psychiatrist somewhere, and people flock to him. He writes epoch-making works on psychiatry and is regarded as a great psychiatrist. It is his students or colleagues, without any further distinction, who write psychopathological studies not only on Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, and all sorts of people who have had some significance and achieved historical recognition, but also on Christ Jesus himself! And by crossing the threshold of a psychiatrist or any other scientific worldview with all that feigned—I won’t say reverence—and with all that belief in authority that, while not feigned, is nonetheless thoughtless, we are moving within the same current that, taken to an extreme and turned into a caricature, leads the world into stupidity. The desire to see the connections of life clearly is certainly something that, on the one hand, is often avoided in favor of the comforts of life, but which must be encouraged.

[ 23 ] We certainly do not make progress by sitting down together and allowing Spiritual Science to influence us with a certain thirst for sensation or mystical enthusiasm; rather, we make progress when Spiritual Science comes alive within us, when we learn to view life in light of the impulses it can awaken in us. We do not yet become Spiritual Scientists simply by letting what is said about elemental spirits, hierarchies, and so on run through us once a week—like a cold shiver or a warm shiver—I don’t know what it’s like! — run down our spines; rather, we become true practitioners of Spiritual Science when these things come alive within us, when we can carry them into every detail of life, and when we can truly reach the point where, for example, the artistic morass of the present day can feel revulsion—if we do not, for instance, take the position that, as Theosophists, we are obligated to practice universal love for humanity and therefore, of course, must not call the corrupt and the evil by their true names.

[ 24 ] It is strange how reluctant people are today to truly open their eyes. Of course, it is not always the fault of the individual, but rather the fault of the entire intellectual life of our time. It is made quite difficult for the individual to see clearly, for public education as a whole is often geared toward overlooking precisely the kinds of things I wanted to draw attention to this evening, which stands out as a singular, episodic moment. Just as one usually says that one “stumbles upon” something, so people are, as it were, swept past—not stumbling upon these things, but being drawn away from them. In this regard, we are truly living through one of the greatest periods of learning in human development, and we must not—I would say—simply be insensitive to the lessons we are experiencing in this context. Just think for a moment how, until recently, people managed to, I would say, enjoy everything in a jumbled way, without delving into the nature of how people relate to one another in the present day. For example, the principle that no differences exist must not—as I have said once or more often—lead to blurring all distinctions and making everything unclear, as was done by the leader of the “Theosophical Society,” who endeavored to erase the differences between the various religions as much as possible, so that only the Hindu essence, for instance, could shine in particular glory. But otherwise, she has obliterated the matter according to a logic that I have often compared to someone saying: “I must treat everything that is on the table as ingredients in the same way and not pay attention to the differences.” Thus, this approach of treating all religions equally, without seeing any difference between them, would be just like saying: Salt is a food ingredient, sugar is a food ingredient, pepper is too, because everything is the same—everything is a food ingredient. Just try it to see if it’s the same: pepper your coffee, sugar your soup, and try sprinkling paprika on your cake or something else! But the same logic underlies that position; at its core lies the inability to see the concrete development.

[ 25 ] And so many things are taken in such a way that people go to great lengths, I might say, to sweep people into a frenzy, a dream, an intoxication. When one says such things, one is all too easily misunderstood. That is why I say explicitly: Anyone who has listened to me for any length of time knows the greatness I see in Tolstoy. But that is precisely why we should never forget that there is something in Tolstoy that lives so naturally—something that must not be placed, as if it were merely another shade of gray, alongside Western European thought. I have often drawn attention to such differences in the past during lectures on Tolstoy. One can therefore acknowledge the greatness of a man like Tolstoy without having to do what actually happened in Tolstoy’s case. For if one had read Tolstoy with even a modicum of attention during the time when he was widely read—namely, when his comprehensive works, his first great literary masterpieces, were being read—one might perhaps—and I say “perhaps”—have said to oneself: Here we have a great spirit of the East, who nevertheless speaks of German culture with the bitterest hatred and utter contempt. — As you know, this was not done; it went completely unnoticed. Why not? Because Tolstoy’s first translators into German omitted these passages or rephrased them, so that—with the exception of the translation later done by Raphael Löwenfeld, which finally presented the true Tolstoy but came too late—German literature had a falsified Tolstoy.

[ 26 ] The point is that one either truly knows things or refrains from passing judgment! But whatever one judges, one should truly know. There is no need to overestimate Tolstoy. One can discern exactly who he is precisely from the fact that, first, he was a great figure, and second, a personality who was shaped entirely by his folk heritage. But one should be perfectly clear that one must not simply do what the petty critics of today’s corrupt journalism so often do—those who, while on the one hand extolling this or that figure, say Goethe or Schiller, use the same words to extol Dostoevsky, for example, without evoking any sense of how he compares, say, to Wilhelm Meister or Elective Affinities—or even simply in comparison to works such as those created by Lienhard—Dostoevsky, even The Brothers Karamazov, is nonetheless second-rate literature in light of the aesthetic principles we must uphold from earlier times. Looking deeply into what is leads one to clear, precise, concrete judgments, and we live today in a time when we must sharpen our judgment, when we must look deeply into what is. We live today in an age in which the hatred between peoples grows greater with each passing day. If one wishes to judge, one must learn to understand how this hatred developed from what has long, long been there.

[ 27 ] These are things that need to be said at least once so that we can truly begin to sense, even just a little, the significance that the pursuit of Spiritual Science should have. It can repeatedly evoke a bitter feeling when any random, sometimes foolish remark—found here and there in a newspaper, a journal, or a book—is brought up and repeated, claiming that theosophy already reigns supreme and so on, whereas what really matters is—without fanaticism, of course— to truly grasp the very fundamentals—that which Spiritual Science aims to be—so that we can integrate it into contemporary culture, and to realize how little the people of today are actually capable of loving what Spiritual Science seeks, because they simply cannot bring themselves to take even the few steps that are sometimes necessary to extricate themselves from the extreme frivolity that pervades spiritual cultural life in so many ways today. It seems perhaps justified to engage in serious reflection at a serious hour. For what moment in world history would be more suitable for serious reflection than this very moment today—a moment of which one may say that, in the course of human development, nothing more dreadful, nothing more terrible—though, of course, at the same time something great and necessary—has ever unfolded? What moment could be more suitable for stirring serious tones within our souls than this very moment! One needs only to form a mental image of the fact that experts have calculated that, in a single major battle in June or July of last year in the northern part of the Western Front, as much ammunition was fired in a single day as was used during the entire Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. And the time will likely soon come—so judge some experts—when, in these current global conflicts, as much ammunition will have been expended as in all previous wars combined, ever since gunpowder was first used!

[ 28 ] These are serious times—not a time that allows us to overlook what, spiritually speaking, is a major crisis in humanity’s spiritual development, so profound that it would be unforgivable not to consider, at such a grave hour, the full significance of what must happen for the development of humanity—especially if one is in a position to do so through a deeper engagement with the teachings of Spiritual Science.

[ 29 ] I wanted to add this as a kind of anthroposophical-literary reflection to this evening’s recitations.