The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Human Beings as Earthly and Celestial Beings I

[ 1 ] If we first survey the historical development of humanity, it reveals what we have been discussing: a downward trajectory from the primordial wisdom that originally existed—a wisdom instinctively embraced by human beings, which at the same time served as a source of vitality for humanity—and which was then stifled at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. And then comes the ascending current of development in which we now find ourselves, which begins—as has already been described on several occasions—with the Mystery of Golgotha. The task now is to properly consider what initially emerges as a certain inner characteristic of historical development, specifically for our own time, in which we are living and which we must understand.

[ 2 ] In our time, there are the most diverse phenomena that exist within people’s feelings and sensations; one might even say that, in a certain way, they make people healthy or sick, yet they are not brought to consciousness and are not properly related to the great principles of evolution. We must focus our attention on these contemporary phenomena, for the recovery of many aspects of human development into the future depends solely on them.

[ 3 ] One could cite various examples here. Today we want to highlight one in particular: the difficulty we face in fostering a genuine understanding with the younger generation. After all, this difficulty—that of adults today in communicating with young people—lies at the very foundation of our anthroposophical educational endeavors. We are witnessing a distinct youth movement emerging today. As soon as children approach the age of puberty and move slightly beyond it, they develop an emotional and feeling life that is extraordinarily difficult for adults to understand today—and even more difficult to deal with. We see agitation movements emerging among young people, with rebellious sentiments asserting themselves against all parental or educational authority. And when we finally look at all of this with an unbiased mind, we cannot deny that much of it is entirely justified. We must admit to ourselves: there is something alive today in the adolescent that has lost its connection to external life and also to the manifestations of inner life among adults. — In this regard, some things appear to the philistine today in such a way that, when he notices them, he simply begins to rant in a peculiar manner. He may not always mean it that way, but he begins to rant. He says: “Young people today have lost all sense of authority; they have almost become Bolshevik; they rebel against everything that older people consider reasonable; they do not obey.” — These are all things that make life today seem hopeless. And especially among teachers—among that segment of the teaching profession that would like to preserve the old routine—such remarks are heard very, very frequently. Once again, one can only understand such a thing by recognizing the developmental impulses of humanity.

[ 4 ] Since the 15th century, humanity has been evolving toward intellectualism—toward a rational conception of the world. We are not always aware of just how deeply we actually live today within this intellectualism, within this purely rational, increasingly abstract form of worldview. Although people always believe that they are proceeding from experience, from reality, from practical life, in reality they actually proceed everywhere solely from conceptual life, from definitions, rather than from facts. People believe they have understood something when they have formed a concept of the matter. People speak—and I have mentioned such examples often—of how one understands death. Well, death is understood—even if this sometimes happens in quite a complicated way—as the end of a being, of a form. When this form dissolves into itself, when it no longer holds itself together, then one says it dies, and one forms a concept intended to answer the question: What, in fact, is death? And then one applies this concept—which one has formed and carefully defined—to plants, to animals, to human beings. One says: Plants die, animals die, human beings die. But the fact that this dissolution of inner cohesion can be something entirely different in plants, animals, and human beings is overlooked, because one gets stuck on the outer aspect of the matter. It is just as I have often said: Someone says that a knife is for cutting meat—and then he takes a razor and uses it to cut meat; a knife is simply a knife. That is more or less how we handle the concepts of death, life, and so on today. We live in abstractions, in intellectualism. This is particularly evident in scientific life, where one does not start from facts, but from the grasping of concepts, from definitions.

[ 5 ] Well, the faculties that a person needs to lead such a life—in other words, to think in such terms—actually do not emerge until the age of fourteen or fifteen, when sexual maturity is reached. It is virtually impossible, when viewing life with an unbiased perspective, to speak of a child as having the capacity for an intellectualistic conception of the world. A child simply cannot think about the world in a way that leads to the abstract. A child develops an entirely different inner life. After all, the child brings with it developmental forces—inner formative forces—from its prenatal life, from the life between death and a new birth. These forces shape the physical organism, above all during the first seven years of life, and then to a somewhat lesser extent—though still significantly—right up to sexual maturity. And as long as the physical organism is being shaped in this way, it is entirely impossible for a human being to develop to the point of pure intellectualism. Now, in its development, humanity has increasingly come to a point where everything one receives from the world, everything one is taught, consists of intellectualistic concepts. We receive, so to speak, the garments of the soul in such a way that we can only grow into them by the time we are fourteen or fifteen years old. It is only an illusion when we say, for example, that we want to focus primarily on observation with children. What we allow them to develop through observation at that stage is something they actually only begin to grow into by the time they are fourteen or fifteen. The result of this is that in today’s adults there is no living connection between what actually emerges as soul life after puberty and what was there before. One remembers only superficially what one experienced as a child. One does not delve deeply into those childhood experiences. One does not delve so deeply into these childhood experiences as to inwardly rejoice at the joys one experienced as a child, or to feel intense sadness at what was against one. One actually forgets childhood—not intellectually, but emotionally and volitionally—so that one does not look back on childhood in a living way.

[ 6 ] But the child itself does not yet possess the predisposition toward intellectualism; it possesses within itself those forces that are still at work on the organism. This actually makes it a completely different kind of human being, and hence the impossibility of adults understanding children. Teachers speak to children as if they were terribly clever—these teachers—but the children are wise. Teachers are clever and children are wise, and cleverness cannot understand wisdom; it cannot build a bridge from one to the other. If we had to do with our cleverness all that children do with their inner organism, well, we would naturally be completely unable to cope with it.

[ 7 ] Jean Paul was right when he said that one learns far more in the first three years of life than in the three years of academic study. Anyone who has gone through their academic years with an open mind and can then look back on their childhood years in an appropriate way knows that this is absolutely true; for the three academic years deal merely with cleverness—let’s say that’s the case—but in any event, they do not deal with wisdom. The three childhood years, however—and the very first ones most of all—truly revolve around wisdom. There, wisdom is at work within the human being, even if it remains in the subconscious; wisdom is at work within the human being. It does, of course, subside later on, but it is still present, and we then experience what we are experiencing today: the rebellious feelings of youth toward adults. One really understands this matter all the more when one looks back at eras of human history when things were different. And they were indeed different during that period of human development extending into the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. And I would like to describe how things were different.

[ 8 ] Let us consider an ancient Egyptian from earlier times or a member of the Chaldean human race: they did not perceive the mineral realm as we do. They perceived it quite differently—the mineral realm. He perceived it in such a way that when he saw ordinary soil, he felt relatively neutral; but he felt quite differently—vividly—when he saw a mountain range or watched a river flow. Then everything alive within him stirred. That is how he gained the insights he actually needed from the outside world. He felt, let’s say, that when he saw a crystal, the crystal spoke to him, revealing a secret of nature. Today, however, we are driven toward mineralogy and crystallography in an intellectualistic way. We are expected to learn all sorts of things about edges and angles and the like. Well, that’s all well and good, but it can’t possibly compare to what people once felt when they looked at a crystal. Back then, elemental beings truly spoke to them; they felt that they were not alone in the world, that there was something within nature that spoke to them. And especially when people approached plants. Certainly, one approached the grass around us more or less neutrally. But if, say, one saw a henbane plant by the wayside and walked past it, then one had a specific experience. Henbane has a specific shape; today, the teacher or botanist introduces a child to this shape: it is described. This is an intellectualistic way of approaching the matter, and when this intellectualistic approach takes hold, one actually remains more or less neutral toward almost all plants. One certainly finds them pleasing—an aesthetic response arises—but that fully living quality that used to be there does not arise. For anyone in ancient times—an ancient Egyptian or an ancient Chaldean—who had passed by a henbane plant would have turned pale; they would have grown somewhat pale. Anyone who passed by a foxglove plant, a digitalis plant, would have blushed. Anyone who passed by Colchicum autumnale, the autumn crocus, would feel their skin grow stiff. So people did not go through the world indifferently. They felt themselves participating—in their blood circulation and, to use today’s terminology, in their nervous experience—in what was expressed outwardly in form. It was a living participation with nature.

[ 9 ] And when people saw animals, they experienced the animal’s form with particular intensity within their own overall inner sensation. They therefore understood nature in a completely different way. They understood it directly with their whole being. Anyone who saw a snake felt something like an urge to writhe throughout their entire being and to slip away with their soul from all sorts of things that were unpleasant to them. Everything that is expressed in the Bible—that the snake was the most cunning of all animals—was an inner experience upon seeing the snake. The mineral kingdom spoke to human beings from the outside. The animal kingdom spoke in such a way that this speaking was equivalent to a shared experience with the form of the animal.

[ 10 ] All of this has vanished from humanity, and in its place has come a kind of feeling of being cast aside by nature—a sense that nature has closed its windows. We can no longer see into it. We stand there, isolated. This is part of humanity’s natural development. What earlier generations of humanity experienced in relation to nature is present to a high degree as a need in the child. And one need only pay attention to how the child actually asks questions. The child does not ask in such a way that our modern, intellectualistic answers to the child’s questions truly fit. In fact, they do not fit at all. The child usually feels unsatisfied. And when we encounter children who ask questions and claim to be satisfied with intellectualistic answers, this is something that occurs today particularly in a skewed and erroneous upbringing, to the detriment of developing humanity. For when the child declares itself satisfied with our intellectualistic answers, this actually corresponds to a certain coquetry that develops within the child. In reality, the child does not feel satisfied at all when given the answers customary today, and we merely train the child to often feel satisfied, thereby making the child inwardly insincere, inwardly coquettish. The child then flirts with that sense of satisfaction. This points to the fact that something lives within the child that is similar to what all of humanity once experienced as a shared experience with the cosmos in ancient times, and which has been dulled by the intellectualistic spiritual life of modern times. If things were to simply continue as they are today, the gulf between adults and children would grow deeper and deeper.

[ 11 ] A well-known socialist agitator once wrote an essay—for which she was heavily criticized—about revolutionizing children. That was long before the war—at that time, there were outright demands that children be revolutionized. Well, people want to revolutionize everything these days—so why not children, too? But if all this happens without an understanding of human nature, it can only lead to the greatest calamity—and indeed, it does lead to the greatest calamity. One must simply recognize that, as necessary as intellectual development—the development toward the abstract—was for humanity, it has nevertheless cast human beings out of nature; and today we grow up by satisfying our minds through the development of the intellect, while leaving the rest of the human being—namely, the rest of the soul life, which is nevertheless very active in the subconscious—unsatisfied. This becomes evident to anyone who can now observe the whole human being through the methods of spiritual research, especially today in the sleeping human being.

[ 12 ] This sleeping person of today, in a sense, lacks everything he actually needs. His great shortcoming is that from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up, he not only sleeps physically—as he is supposed to—but also, in a certain way, sleeps spiritually. For people in the past, it was the case that as they fell asleep, they awoke spiritually. Of course, this did not transition into ordinary consciousness, but they awoke spiritually in such a way that they absorbed certain forces from their surroundings—for they were then connected to their surroundings, no longer to the body they had left behind—and through this consciousness, they absorbed certain forces that they could not absorb in ordinary consciousness. These forces are lost to people today. Human beings are physically present in the outer world, yet their souls are not truly present there. They can no longer blush when they look at the crimson foxglove, nor can they turn pale when they look at henbane. They can no longer feel so vividly that it is a blessing to be born near oak forests, because the oak pours courageous forces into people, as was the case with the ancient Germanic peoples. These things cannot be grasped merely in the abstract, as we do today when we retell—in such a thoroughly philistine way—how the ancient Germanic people loved the oaks. It is philistine the way we tell this story today, for we have no idea what effect the oak had on older people, or how a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old lad, when faced with the oak as certain powers within him awoke, could do nothing but stiffen his knees and loins, how he straightened his neck—as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

[ 13 ] Please don't misunderstand me; I don't mean that we should bring this up today. That's out of the question, because if we were to bring it up, it would be something unnatural. It is simply something that has been lost to humanity, something that no longer exists. But we must recognize that the need for it has nevertheless remained in the subconscious life of the soul—that this need is still there.

[ 14 ] So what did the ancient man say about nature? He said: “I was born”—of course, he didn’t put it that way, but that was the sentiment— I was born; what lives within me is rooted out there in the stones that speak to me, in the plants that make me blush and turn pale, make me feel alert and so on, in the animals that fill me with inner strength or make me feel listless; that is where I am rooted. That is where I will be received again with my soul when my body falls away from me. — And it was the kind of sensation that, let’s say, plants might have when they bloom. If a plant could develop a soul life when it blooms, it would say: I must now develop the seed into fruit; that is the end of me, it cannot go on from there, I must let my leaves wither and finally fall off. — But then, if the plant were to develop a spiritual life, it would turn gratefully toward the earth and say: “Yes, there is the earth; it takes in my seeds, it nurtures my seeds. There I live on.” — That is roughly how the ancient human felt toward the whole of nature. He did not merely derive his soul-life from physical heredity; rather, he knew himself to be rooted in the whole of nature. And because he knew himself to be rooted in the whole of nature, he also knew, in turn, how he would be received into the whole of nature once his body had fallen away from him. He viewed all of nature just as a flowering plant views the earth that takes in its seed. This world that the ancient human felt all around him is actually no longer there; it has withered away; it is dead. And this—even if it is not understood—is a fundamental feeling of modern humans: that they feel cast out of nature.

[ 15 ] And now let us bring something entirely different before our soul. Let us imagine, for a moment, an initiate in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch who has been initiated into the dawn of intellectual life. What is generally regarded today as intellectual life was, in a certain sense, the result of a specific initiation during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Certain initiations were aimed at leading human beings to an understanding of intellectualism. You see, such an initiate was naturally led to the consequences of intellectualism, whereas today, out of fear of intellectualism, people simply get stuck—they do not go all the way to the consequences. But such an initiate was led to understand this. In ancient times, it was simply the case that human beings sensed the soulfulness of all of nature. They lived their spiritual lives in such a way that they knew that, in death, the soulfulness of the cosmos would take them back again. A tragic mood already hung over many initiations of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and the initiates of this kind of mystery had, in fact, lost all hope in nature. They expected nothing at all from what nature could say to human beings. They said that nature had ceased to speak to human beings, that nature had ceased to receive human beings in death. A completely different world must come into being so that human beings might once again have hope through their soul life. And it was made clear to these initiates: whoever looks into nature finds nothing there that could give them such hope. They had to see in nature that there is nothing there that saves human beings spiritually—not merely physically, where they have offspring—but that saves them spiritually. These initiates came to understand that wisdom takes on an intellectualistic form. For us, this is already a truism, but these initiates came to understand how wisdom transforms into an intellectualistic form. And this gave rise to a tragic mood within them; that was what made them lose all hope. For the ancient initiates experienced one thing with full awareness: they knew that wisdom is not merely something abstract living within a person; wisdom is light within a person, in that the person thinks and forms inner images. For the very same thing that constitutes the inner images within a person is, outwardly, the light that gives life. Our concepts cannot create light—so these initiates told themselves—and that is why they themselves have taken on the form of death; that is why they are dead, our concepts. And that was the tragic wisdom of a large part of the mysteries of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch—that the following statement was deeply felt: Human wisdom can no longer be light; it becomes dark within the human being; for light is creative. The abstract thought is uncreative; it is dead.

[ 16 ] And now imagine such an initiate, who has been educated entirely within this perspective: comfort can only return to humanity when, from some corner, the conviction arises that wisdom can shine again, that wisdom can once more become light—it is not dead; it is something that can also be seen out there. It can become light. You see, this comfort became a reality for Paul when he experienced the event on the road to Damascus. It was then that he first grasped the mystery of Golgotha. It was then that he first understood: through Christ, something has come into the world that cannot merely be thought of, something that shines, something that possesses the power of light—that is, creative power. And from that moment on, he knew: although nature has died for humanity, Christ is present on earth with his power. He has permeated it. And in Christ, humanity can now find what it once found in nature. That was Paul’s great experience on the road to Damascus. And there he understood: people have lost nature as a source of comfort; nature has become merely aesthetic to them. But Christ steps in. Christ, properly understood, provides what once lived in the entire complex of speaking minerals, of plants that cause one to blush and turn pale, and of the animal kingdom that inwardly penetrates and stirs the human soul. A spiritual cosmos has united with the Earth. The power of the sun, which once appeared to human beings in minerals, plants, and animals, is now present in a moral sense. It is there for inner experience. The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near.

[ 17 ] What are people all talking about regarding the interpretation of Christ’s proclamation: “The end of the age is here; a new kingdom is dawning.” — Yes, those who have understood this to mean that the ears of grain in the fields will now be five times as plentiful, that the grapes on the vines will be five times as large—we know, after all, that this is how it has been understood—they simply do not understand what was meant; that in fact, a permeation of purely natural existence had come about through what lies in Christ’s descent to earth. This is what Paul came to realize through the event at Damascus. And so we must see this second world: a second, entirely new world has come with Christ. It is not merely this abstract concept, as it is often viewed, but it is an entirely new world—a world that, when properly understood, restores what nature once provided. Intellectualism scoffs when one speaks of gnomes in minerals—which is meant to express nothing other than what I said earlier: “The minerals spoke to one”—or of undines in plants. People who can no longer turn pale or blush at the sight of plants naturally know nothing of the Undines either; for intellectual concepts and definitions say nothing about the Undines. But blushing and turning pale—that which lies in the blood—speaks of them, once spoke of them. Today it speaks of them only unconsciously. But all of this can come to life again when Christ truly enters humanity as an experience. And in Christ, old age will once again be able to communicate with youth. For Christ cannot be grasped by the intellect. You see, the way we judge the world intellectually today, we speak of right and wrong, of true and false. But that has significance only for the physical world in which we live between birth and death. The people to whom one must speak about the higher worlds do not want to engage with what is essential. Certainly, one must carry the concepts of true and false, of logically correct and incorrect, up into the higher worlds as well. But that is not the essential point. What is essential is that something living must be added to this—that the concepts of “healthy” and “sick,” for example, must come into play. Here in the physical world, something is simply right or wrong; in the higher worlds, what is right is also healthy. We perceive it as vividly as we perceive health in the whole human being here in the physical world. And what is false, what is incorrect, is there what is sick; and if we really want to describe things accurately in the ordinary world, we are actually better off speaking of healthy and sick than of right or wrong, and we must also acquire some sense of what is healthy or sick. Here we judge logically in terms of right or wrong; in the higher worlds we sense: something is growing, it is developing. We do not speak of mere correctness; we perceive that as healthy. And when we form a concept of it, we also feel this concept as something healthy, not merely as something correct. And in the same way, we perceive what is incorrect in the spiritual world as sick. Now, for the physical world, we make do today—such is our nature—with “right” or “wrong.” For history, this is not the case. For history, we cannot make do with the concepts that modern historians have developed based on the model of mere physics. There we must speak of a state of health at the starting point of humanity. In the Greco-Roman era, we must speak of a disease of culture. And we must speak of the therapy of history by developing the efficacy of the Mystery of Golgotha. We must therefore speak of it as we speak of a healthy and a sick human being; we must portray history according to the model of a disease and a healing.

[ 18 ] Something like Ranke’s history is infinitely abstract when compared to reality. And this Rankean history—or any other history as it is written today—is roughly like a doctor stepping up to a patient’s bedside or facing a healthy person and simply trying to reason with them. We must approach history with an eye toward health, illness, and healing. And this happens precisely when we view history in such a way that we start from the health of primeval times, gradually perceive a genuine cultural illness, and sense the great Healer who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, truly brought healing from beyond the earth. In this way, the study of history is brought to life. But in this way, Christ is also placed within the course of historical development. Only through historical development is it possible to approach Christ in the same way that physiology and pathology must approach the material world. One must be able to carry into spiritual life those concepts that today can only be applied in physical life—and even there, poorly, for example, when one examines a person after they have died and derives the most important laws governing their life from the corpse. So one applies this poorly as well, but at least one applies it. Yet in the study of history, this has been completely forgotten. At most, when people observe very specific exceptional states—such as, say, when a sect appears that flogs itself—then one speaks of something pathological; or when events occur, as has happened in recent years, for example, where someone began firing machine guns at Venus because he believed it was an approaching enemy balloon. Then one speaks of war psychosis. So in specific cases, people talk about whether what is healthy or unhealthy is at play. But they do not consider health and illness within the broader historical context. That is why they cannot truly come to understand the principle of healing—the great historical therapy that emerged with the Mystery of Golgotha. Of course, one could say that people today are actually still quite very sick. Well, yes, but that doesn’t hold true, because one would have to have an idea of what it would be like if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place. And if people believe that faith alone is what matters, then they are also mistaken, for what matters is the objective reality that came about in human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. Certainly, faith is of some benefit to the sick, but the physician’s skill is still essential. Therefore, it was already a mistake to seek the true essence of Christian piety solely in faith. That would be like saying: The medicine can stay wherever it wants; one need only instill in the sick person the belief that he can be healed by this medicine.

[ 19 ] Everywhere, people have come to rely on abstractions, to an inability to see how what a person experiences within is connected to what is objectively happening outside. And so it will be necessary for our conceptions to become more and more alive. For the mystery of Golgotha cannot be grasped through the lifeless conceptions with which we have gradually become accustomed to viewing the external world. In the face of such conceptions, Christianity would fade away more and more. Christ would increasingly become merely the human being Jesus, as he has already become for many “theologians.” Christianity would disappear. A true revitalization of Christianity requires that the entire development of humanity and human perspectives be permeated with more living concepts than intellectualism can provide. We had to have intellectualism for the sake of human freedom. But we must bring intellectualism to the fore again for the sake of human existence, so that this human existence may once more come alive. Freedom required a process of dying, for freedom can arise only from the exercise of the will in that which has died—that is, from the highest exertion of the will’s power. When life within us overwhelms us, consciousness—in which freedom alone can flourish—fades away. But once intellectualism is in place, life must come to intellectualism; that is, the concrete concepts of health and illness must accompany the abstract concepts of true and false.

[ 20 ] And we need to apply these specific terms first and foremost to history. Then we will be able to identify the Mystery of Golgotha as the most important component of Earth’s historical development.