The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Karma of Materialism VII

[ 1 ] I have already said that I intend to present some additions to the various reflections that have been offered here over the course of this winter during these summer evenings. In particular, there are some points that, from a certain perspective, will complement what has already been presented in a special way; I intend to elaborate on them here today and then, most likely for the last time, next Tuesday.

[ 2 ] When one considers the evolution of humanity from the perspective of the spiritual sciences, one gains—as you know—a view of this evolution that in many respects differs quite significantly from what the natural sciences alone can establish. In particular, regarding the development of the human soul itself—or rather, of human souls over the course of centuries and millennia—spiritual science provides a different perspective than that offered by the purely scientific approach. Not only was there, as we know, an ancient atavistic form of clairvoyance in earlier times—which, as I explained to you last time, gave rise to a consciousness in human beings quite different from today’s consciousness—but it is also the case that well into later times, into later centuries, remnants of the old clairvoyance were far more abundant than one might even imagine. In particular, one must not overlook the fact that well into the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and even the seventeenth centuries—albeit in a weakened, atrophied form—there existed across most of the earth, among human beings, not overtly atavistic clairvoyance, but atavistic clairvoyance whose aftereffects were clearly evident. And I have, after all, explained in earlier reflections that atavistic clairvoyance is still very much present in many people to this day; it is simply not recognized because people today are embarrassed to admit to most of their fellow human beings how revelations from spiritual worlds—of the kind we explored last time—have entered their consciousness. There is, after all, a great difference between what human souls experienced up through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and what souls in later times, right up to the present day, are able to experience directly from the spiritual world. In the seventeenth century, there were many people who could not have described the objects of clairvoyant vision so directly as to say, “I have seen this spiritual being, I have seen that spiritual being”—because their power of consciousness was not strong enough, when such spiritual beings appeared before them, to truly grasp them and bring them into their imagination. Their powers of consciousness were subdued, yet even so, in those days, the beings of the spiritual world still entered into people’s will, feeling, and imagination to a far greater extent than one might suspect today. In our time, it is indeed quite difficult for those who are initiated into the vision of the spiritual world and into the peculiar nature of what is seen there to speak to their fellow human beings in a completely uninhibited manner. For, as I have often explained, contemporaries would be far too shocked if one were to describe certain—even merely elementary—aspects of human knowledge of the spiritual world. For with so much of what people today believe based on their materialism, the initiate, drawing on his knowledge of the spiritual world, must state the exact opposite. This naturally leads to all sorts of conflicts with what people today accept as truth based on their materialistic perceptions.

[ 3 ] It wasn't like that in the fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth centuries—not even in the seventeenth. This stems from the fact that much of what is considered literature today—from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries—is completely misunderstood, truly misunderstood. Not only do people believe they know things differently and better than those people did, but they no longer understand their entire way of approaching life. Now, it is peculiar how this comes to light.

[ 4 ] On the one hand, one might even say it is a remarkable spectacle when modern philosophers, in their writings and lectures, repeatedly go on and on about the medieval scholastics and cannot get enough of emphasizing how far they have progressed beyond all the prejudiced, but also pedantic and petty conceptual nonsense of the scholastics. The truth, however, is that modern philosophers are infinitely naive when it comes to Scholasticism; they misunderstand it entirely. For consider this: In the age of the Scholastics, during Thomism and so on, even those who worked as philosophers—when they articulated their concepts with refined conceptual artistry—did so in connection with the spiritual world. For example, in the case of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, one cannot say that what is written in his books was arrived at in the same way that concepts and ideas are arrived at today. That would be a misconception. Rather, you must imagine what is written in his books as follows: he was continually inspired by a spirit from the hierarchy of the angels, and he wrote down what came from the consciousness of a higher spirit. In today’s world, it seems downright absurd to a philosopher if one were to expect him to sit down, wait until his angel inspires him, and then write down what he can thereby convey to humanity—as if, so to speak, his angel were sitting beside him, and he is the herald and messenger of what the angel proclaims—that there is a higher world, which the angel reveals to the physical world through the mouth of a physical human being. But only in this way can one comprehend all that is coming into being, all that is becoming. And I am now saying something extraordinarily significant and important, and I would be very happy if you would truly take this important point to heart: Only by listening—spiritually, in the way that inspires us or gives rise to imaginings—can we speak of becoming and of coming into being. With our present consciousness, dating from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and especially the eighteenth centuries, we are completely disconnected from the process of becoming. We approach things directly, but what do we actually take into our consciousness from them today? We see, for example, a blooming rose. Yet never, not for a single moment, can we truly see the process of becoming; rather, from the very beginning, from the formation of the seed onward, it is always the dying, the passing away on the outside that we perceive. The fact that I perceive the red rose of my own accord is connected to the fact that I grasp the passing-away aspect. One can only take in what is becoming if one is able to listen, or to receive impressions from higher beings. Only higher beings who are not incarnated in a physical body at the present time can perceive what is becoming in this rose. In the lowest realm of perception—the subjective light, which was almost as dim as the old clairvoyance and, when it occurs, still is today—we perceive something of the rose’s becoming; but not when we look at it with the physical eye and experience what we see with our conceptual being in our consciousness.

[ 5 ] From this we can see that a key characteristic of our materialistic age is this: that only that which dies, that which passes away, can enter the consciousness of the materialistic age. This was not yet the case, for example, during the Scholastic period, nor even in the seventeenth century.

[ 6 ] In the seventeenth century, a little-known philosopher named Henry More lived in England. This man, who was born at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in 1614, must—when we consider his outward life—simply appear to us as living proof that human beings do not develop their individuality through heredity, but rather by bringing with them qualities that do not lie solely in their parents and ancestors—the qualities of their previous earthly life. The parents and ancestors of this Henry More were orthodox Calvinists, and even as a very young boy, More was already challenging Zwingli’s rigid doctrine of predestination, rejecting it outright, even though there was no one in his immediate circle who would have asserted the opposite of this rigid doctrine of predestination espoused by Calvin and Zwingli. But Henry More had another distinctive trait: When one studies his writings—which are very interesting—one finds it remarkable that he speaks of the inner presence of the spiritual world in human consciousness in a way quite different from what is found in later thinkers. He knows—even as a seventeenth-century philosopher—that human beings, simply by possessing a more fruitful consciousness than ordinary consciousness regarding the transience of the world, come into contact with the true essence that expresses itself through becoming and emergence in inspired consciousness, and thereby become capable of knowing something about becoming and emergence, whereas otherwise one would know only of everything within existence that is always connected with the transitory. The nuance of transience is perceived everywhere by today’s consciousness. But even in Henry More, it is not entirely clear that he had contact with spiritual beings. He could no longer fully incorporate his contact with spiritual beings into his store of ideas. The images fade away. Just as a dream we have at night fades upon waking, so that we do not retain it but forget it again, so he could not bring the idea that he had encountered spiritual beings into his consciousness. He had only a dim awareness that the spiritual beings were alive within his soul; but the effects of this participation of the soul in the spiritual world were present within him. A very interesting statement by Henry More—one that is very familiar to us, which we have often heard—is this: If one wishes to attain a certain higher level of knowledge, one must learn to view oneself as a whole human being, as a member of a higher organism. Just as the thumb is a part of our hand, and just as it ceases to exist if it is cut off from the hand, so too is the human being nothing if torn away from a certain organic connection with the cosmos; only that this is more conspicuous in the case of the thumb than in that of the human being. But if the thumb could walk around on our body, it would probably also succumb to the illusion that it were an independent organism. The Earth as such is indeed there for humankind, but even in the immediately adjacent higher world, humankind is a part of the great Earth organism and cannot tear itself away from it, any more than the thumb can tear itself away from the hand. And this statement, which we often mention to combat the foolish egoism in human beings that plays such a major role, we find—as if suddenly arising in the soul—in the writings of Henry More. Why? Because he was so attuned to the spiritual world that, although he could not bring it into consciousness through mere imagination, he possessed—as in a dream one can still recall—knowledge of the living connection between human beings and the entirety of the cosmos.

[ 7 ] If one tries to find out what Henry More did to cultivate what was quite beautifully endowed in his soul, one discovers that he was particularly deeply influenced by a certain little book that also made a great impression on another man, who therefore made it available to a wider audience among the German people: I am referring to the *Theologia Deutsch* by a man from Frankfurt. — I also discussed this in my treatise on mysticism. — Luther republished it. Henry More was a student of *Theologia Deutsch*. Read what I said about it in my book on mysticism.

[ 8 ] The question may now arise in your mind: What is it, actually, that caused people to appear in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and even the seventeenth centuries who knew of direct communication with the spiritual world?

[ 9 ] The situation is this: those who, in these centuries, know the most about the connection between human beings and the spiritual world were—if not in their last, then generally in their penultimate—incarnation on Earth during the time when Christianity was being prepared in the secret schools, in the mysteries. Therefore, we can say: Spirits similar to Henry More were present in a life during the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, and then had an interim life in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries; but this inter-incarnational period gave them less than the impressions they received in their earlier incarnations from those mysteries that existed before the Mystery of Golgotha but prepared the way for it through their teachings. Those impressions were rooted much more deeply and intensely in their souls. Hence the many profound words spoken about Christianity precisely during this time. Through their contact with the spiritual world, these people gain an insight into the origin of the world that could no longer be attained from the seventeenth century onward. From that point on, one can increasingly rely only on external history; yet that contains only what is passing away. This is where spiritual science is needed once again to restore the insight into what is emerging. The way Christianity developed during those great, tragic centuries—and the fact that it had been prepared for more than half a millennium—made an immense, profound impression on these spirits, and all they really retained from it was an emotional impulse that they were able to translate into ideas. But they did express that impulse.

[ 10 ] It is very significant, precisely from this perspective, to let the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century in European spiritual development pass before one’s mind, to see how ideas—which today sometimes seem quite foreign because they are highly spiritualized and stem from spiritual experience—can also be found in those times regarding Christianity and the Bible. It is already extraordinarily interesting for people today to cast their gaze upon what was truly significant during that period. For this period I am speaking of—the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century—is like a time of profound reflection. The forces are still present in the soul through which what surges and weaves in the spiritual world can rise up within it. And we truly immerse ourselves in the spirits of that time when we do not forget this retrospective character of consciousness as we contemplate these spirits.

[ 11 ] It is essential, above all, to take what I am about to say into account if one wishes, for example, to understand Luther. A rather interesting book by Ricarda Huch has recently been published, *Luther’s Faith*; a very interesting book because it is, after all, written from a certain depth of contemporary consciousness, yet at the same time, in many respects, it is a highly unsettling book because it is intrinsically inadequate. In connection with this, an essay appeared in the July issue of the journal *Nord und Süd* titled: “Ricarda Huch and the Devil”—and which draws attention to how necessary it is in our time to look toward what lives spiritually in people’s consciousness in a way that the immediate consciousness of the present is no longer capable of understanding. That is why it is particularly interesting to examine, in the case of Ricarda Huch, Martin Luther’s belief in demons and the devil. She wishes to do justice to Luther’s belief in the devil; she does not wish to align herself with those who speak of it today in the conventional sense, for people today are very cowardly, and when they are called upon to take a stand on a book that seeks to address Luther’s belief in the devil, they are likely to say: “Luther was certainly a great man, but the fact that he spoke of the devil and believed in him stems precisely from the weaknesses of his time; he simply shared the superstitions of his era.” Such wisdom, however, is worth little more than the wisdom of that honest high school teacher who once read with his students what Lessing wrote about drama in the *Hamburg Dramaturgy* and then explained to them that Lessing had not actually been able to think through the ideas he had raised in the *Hamburg Dramaturgy* to their logical conclusion. “Yes, if only I had more time!” said the professor. And from such a line of thought also comes the superior knowledge that Luther shared the superstitions of his time. And yet: no one can truly understand Luther who does not know that his conscious perception of what, in the spirit of his time, was called the devil—what we today call Ahriman and Lucifer—constituted for him genuine spiritual experiences, not merely at that one place on the Wartburg, but everywhere Luther speaks of these things. Just try to grasp these things in their context, and you cannot help but come to the conviction: Only a person who has seen the devil, who has beheld him, and who knows this speaks of the devil in this way: “The common folk never sense the devil, even if he were to grab them by the collar.” Ricarda Huch argues against this “Dessoirism”—or, I mean, against this academic mindset—with extraordinary theoretical goodwill; a mindset so clever that it knows: the devil does not exist, so Luther must have been a superstitious man, entirely in keeping with the spirit of his time; one must excuse and forgive the great man for this.

[ 12 ] Ricarda Huch does not agree with those who pass such condescending judgment on the great minds of the past. But Ricarda Huch apparently knows nothing from personal experience about what the devil looks like. She believes in the devil, even though she has never seen him. How does she believe in the devil? She believes in him in such a way that she knows certain things clearly do not stem from scientific facts or human physiology, but come from the devil. But now she feels she must offer Luther some excuse. She says: One should simply not imagine, when speaking of Luther as a superstitious man, that Luther believed the devil walked around on the street with horns and a tail, For her, too, the sum of the characteristics of certain evil impulses is what she calls the devil, who appears as the foolish devil, the proud devil, and the lying devil. She speaks of abstractions, speaks of concepts, and believes that Luther did the same, because outwardly, what Ricarda Huch considers a mere image is also used by Luther. But Luther must use this image because it is the only way to express what one experiences in the spiritual world. Luther, however, had full experience with the devil. He had to get to know him through the inner struggles one must endure when facing the devil eye to eye. And what he experienced there, he captured in images, just as one captures what one otherwise experiences in words. If people are as foolish as Professor Dessoir—and just as corrupt—they might accuse someone who expresses himself through words of believing that the things one wishes to express lie within the words themselves. Professor Dessoir accuses me of exactly the same thing when he says that I derive certain stages of human development from images rather than from reality. One would not think that such a thing could happen at all, but here it arises not merely from a lack of insight, but also from ignorance. Especially since the second chapter of my forthcoming work deals with the impossible, morally corrupt scholarship that the present age brings with it and which contributes to the terrible misery of our times, there you will see what sort of people are parading around in official academia today—which, however, does not prevent the Royal Academy of Sciences, as I have already told you, from awarding the prize to that wretched little work on the history of psychology that Mr. Dessoir had submitted in response to its call for entries, and which he then withdrew himself. Take a look at what Dessoir’s esteemed colleagues have had to say about the shoddy and superficial nature of this scientific, maudlin “history of psychology,” and you’ll get an idea of what kind of work can make the rounds in official academia, even when scientific-academic prizes are at stake.

[ 13 ] Luther lived in an age in which he maintained a connection with the spiritual world within his soul. Everything that can be experienced in the world as Ahrimanic devilry was a reality for him. That was it. What he experienced in this way cannot be expressed in ordinary words, for those refer to physical things. It must be expressed in images, in imaginations. But these imaginations truly express what one beholds and sees. Ricarda Huch does not understand this. She believes that when Luther speaks of the devil, one need not immediately assume that, when one—as a person of insight—encounters numerous other people, the hunchbacked Ahriman is firmly seated with his horns between the other person’s shoulders, peering out with his head. But Luther knew these things, and the images he uses are merely forms of expression for specific experiences. He himself is not of the good-natured sort, like Ricarda Huch, who believe that he used only symbols for what in human beings are ascending and descending forces, perverted passions, and so on.

[ 14 ] Where does the power lie that emanated from Luther’s teaching, as it is often called? But Luther’s teaching is not merely a teaching. One does justice to it only when one regards it as something other than a doctrine, when one realizes: there stands Luther, and this soul looks back to those times when people maintained contact with the spiritual world, and he himself maintains contact with the spiritual world precisely in that realm which is Ahrimanic. If one sees Ahriman—read what is written about this in my Mystery Dramas—then that is precisely liberation from him; if one does not see him, that is the tragedy. To see him, just as Luther saw him, that is liberation. The power radiating from Luther gains immense strength when one approaches things—which are otherwise actually quite incomprehensible—entirely in the positive, experiential sense of the spiritual world. And even where he utters words that we may not like, this will seem entirely natural, because Luther is able to view things from a much broader horizon than any person today normally can.

[ 15 ] It is interesting that this figure, Luther, now appears as the one who most intensely condenses what is the result of those earlier mysteries; this is significant. And Luther was already one of the greatest initiates in the pre-Christian era—not to mention a later incarnation—during those preparatory mysteries, and from what he absorbed in those mysteries before the emergence of Christianity, he drew the power that then radiated from him.

[ 16 ] What, above all, does he have to say to the world regarding the revelation of his vision of Ahriman?

[ 17 ] Let us bear in mind: the Ahrimanic age begins afterward. Modern science has Ahriman, and Ahriman lives unconsciously within its findings. This is the defining characteristic of today’s materialistic world order: that the Ahrimanic lives within all its concepts. And Luther is destined to present this truth to the world at one of its most crucial turning points. But those who look into the spiritual world see something different from those who are unable to do so, and this world has a different effect than when it remains unconscious.

[ 18 ] When one sees in Luther, in this way, the great, mighty force that radiates from ancient developments—a force that cannot take effect in the age that followed—then one understands Luther’s position. He is the one who was to preserve for humanity a conception of Christianity that is not tainted by the unconscious Ahrimanic. That is why the conscious Ahrimanic manifests so strongly in him, and that is also why his horizon is so broad.

[ 19 ] Someone once wrote a book summarizing all the contradictions found in Luther’s various writings. There is such a book in which one can find the contradictions in Luther’s writings. Luther himself read the book, and he wrote a response to it, which is contained in a letter to Melanchthon. He says there: “Such a fool speaks of contradictions only because he understands neither one part nor the other of the contradiction, and he also does not understand that one can revere someone—who is also a prince—and at the same time speak of him as the devil and rebel against him.”—The passage where Luther discusses this in his letter to Melanchthon is very interesting; it expresses his stance toward his time. He also uses other expressions that cannot always be repeated today, but which are fully understandable and—contrary to what literary historians claim—are not merely comprehensible within the context of that era, but are fully comprehensible through engagement with the spiritual world, as Luther experienced it. Anyone who calls Luther’s expressions cynical or frivolous does so only out of their own frivolity or cynicism. What matters is that one comes to recognize from such things that, while individual details may repeat themselves, the great does not. Nonsense repeats itself, for it is subject to the times. The great does not repeat itself. And people will only be able to engage with Scholasticism again when they study it anew to see how a different, more refined, and particularly more finely structured way of thinking is possible than what is practiced today. And especially a spirit such as that which emerged in Luther cannot be repeated. It must be accepted as a historical phenomenon, just as it stands. It is wrong to believe that anyone can emulate Luther. Rather, what matters is that one delves deeply into him, that one attempts to study, through his historical personality, what actually took place there—how not only this one individuality, Luther, which can be found in those preparatory mysteries prior to Christianity, subsequently lived in another incarnation and then later appeared as Luther, but rather that the entire course of humanity’s development and the unfolding of the law is indeed expressed in this one manifestation.

[ 20 ] All of this, however, depends on the fact that Luther, in his time, still possessed a full, experiential knowledge of those regions of the world to which he banished the devil—or, as we would say, Ahriman. Yet this knowledge receded into the subconscious. It has become quite common to view Luther in the same way that the professors view him. For sometimes theologians are also professors. And this view has become quite prevalent—one that does not take Luther’s direct experience in the spiritual world as its starting point, but rather assumes that when he speaks of the devil, it was merely a weakness of the great man. Yet it is only a weakness of those who speak of Luther today when they speak of him in this way.

[ 21 ] Then came—and this is the meaning of evolution—the era that followed Luther, in which, in the material perception and life of the world—most strongly in the nineteenth century—Ahriman lived unconsciously, without people realizing it. And it is only from the East that the possibility will arise again for people to know what a human being enters into when he transcends the physical plane. It is very remarkable when one looks toward the East today, at these highly remarkable phenomena of Russian life—the Russian depravity, the Russian greatness, everything that is emerging in the East. For many years now, we have described what is coming, what is being prepared within the Russian people. It is remarkable when one looks at this and says to oneself: Yes, these people are still children today. And indeed they are. And those who are not children are possessed. — What do you think: Kerensky is possessed, even though he has, of course, risen above the prejudice that the Hunchback dwells within him! It’s just that the Hunchback has learned to generate a way of thinking from Western “science of death” that is not Eastern thinking. And not only does Western thinking understand nothing of Russianness, but even those in the East who wish to judge Russianness with Western thinking—the leading figures in the East—do not understand Russianness themselves! For there is something in it that is still childlike, something that looks toward the future. And in the future, it must come to look back into the spiritual world, to reestablish a connection with this spiritual world: the opposite of the great Luther, who prepared the way for our age. Our age looks back; it proclaims the power that still works from what lies behind.

[ 22 ] Here you see something very remarkable from a spiritual perspective: Here you simply see the contrast between Luther and, for example, how childlike the Russian revolutionary spirit will appear in Solovyov. Here we see two opposing poles, something that behaves like north and south, like positive and negative electricity—if one wishes to compare it to something abstract—two schools of thought and imagination that cannot understand one another. For the way Soloviev speaks shows that he is far from understanding Luther; and if one wishes to remain with Luther, it is quite impossible to understand Soloviev. But here we must come to terms with the need to broaden our horizons, to be able to accept the negative alongside the positive.

[ 23 ] I would like to leave this weighty reflection with you and hope that we will still be together next time. Then I will attempt to portray Luther’s unique individuality as a coherent whole, as it emerges not only from his time but from the entire course of human development—but from a perspective that can only be found through anthroposophy.