The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I tried to show you how one can find a simple way to bring to mind the relationships of the human being—in body, soul, and spirit—to the entire cosmos. By the way in which I then brought yesterday’s lecture to a climax with a few imaginative images, I wanted to draw your attention to a few things. I wanted to show how, for example, in images such as that of Christ as the Lamb of God, there lie correctly expressed, inspired imaginations; I wanted to show that in the times when such images were formed, indeed, when they were still expressed with full understanding and applied to human soul life, there was a genuine awareness of how human beings work their way up from the soul experiences they have in ordinary consciousness to soul experiences of a consciousness that connects them with the spiritual world. I have pointed out how, during the first four centuries of Christianity, what we might call Christian doctrine was still so shaped that it was universally grounded in a vision of the spiritual, and that the mysteries of Christianity themselves were presented in a way that could be perceived by those who had elevated their inner life to the point of perceiving the spiritual. After the 4th century, the ability to understand the direct expression of the spiritual gradually faded from people’s general consciousness. And we see how, with the encounter between the Nordic-Germanic and the Latin-Greek worlds, the difficulties that arose at that time in the course of Western culture actually grew ever greater. We must certainly realize how, immediately after the fourth century, people still regarded with a certain reverence what had emerged in inspired imaginations as a representation of the Christian worldview from earlier times. People revered tradition. People revered what had been passed down to posterity through tradition in the form of such images. Yet the evolving human spirit took on ever more forms through which it asked itself: Yes, something like this has been handed down to us—such as the image of the dove for the Holy Spirit, or the image of the Lamb of God for Christ himself. But how are we to understand this? How do we come to understand this? — And it was precisely out of this impossibility—or rather, out of the belief in the impossibility—that the human spirit, by its own power, could work its way up to a perception of the spiritual worlds, that the scholastic doctrine arose: that the human spirit, through its own power, attains knowledge of the sensible world and also reaches conclusions that follow directly from the concept of the sensible; but that what can be revealed to human beings from the supersensible world must be accepted as an unreasoned revelation.

[ 2 ] But it was not without difficulty that this—I would say—dual form of belief in human spiritual life developed: on the one hand, belief in knowledge limited to the earthly realm, and on the other, belief in knowledge of the supersensible that can be attained only through faith. Nevertheless, it was sensed—albeit more or less vaguely—that one could no longer relate to supersensible knowledge in the same way as had been the case in earlier, ancient times. In the early period following the 4th century, people felt in their hearts: This supersensible world can nevertheless be attained, in a certain sense, through the human soul life; but not everyone is capable of raising their soul life to such a height; one must be content to accept certain aspects of the ancient revelations.

[ 3 ] As I said, the reverence for these ancient revelations was too great for people to have wanted to immediately apply the standard of human knowledge—which no longer measured up to them, or which, at least, was believed in no way to measure up to the revelations. And the strict scholastic doctrine of the dichotomy of human knowledge was, in fact, only gradually accepted. It was not until the 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries of the Middle Ages that the scholastic principle was fully accepted. Until then, there was still a certain degree of hesitation: Could this human knowledge—as it had eventually come to be attained in later times—not nevertheless be raised up to the realm of the supersensible world?

[ 4 ] This, however, marked a profound shift from earlier times. You see, in earlier times—let’s say, in the very first centuries of Christianity—a person who had been introduced to the mystery of God’s foreknowledge of all things or the mystery of the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ would have said, once he had brought himself to embrace Christianity: “This is hard to understand, but there are people who can develop their souls to the point of understanding such things. If I accept the omniscience of the divine being, then this omniscient being must also know whether one person is damned once and for all or whether another person will be saved. This—such a person would have said—is hardly consistent with the fact that a person does not necessarily have to sin, and it is through sin that he is actually condemned: if he does not sin, he is therefore not condemned; if he atones for a sin, he is also not condemned. So one must say: A person can, through his way of life, either make himself damned by sin or saved by sinlessness. But then again: The omniscient God must already know about this person whether he will be damned or saved!

[ 5 ] So a person confronted with this would have arrived at such considerations. But in those early Christian centuries, he would not have readily said: “So I must debate whether God foresees a person’s damnation or salvation.” — Instead, he would have said to himself: “That God, regardless of whether a person sins or does not sin, nevertheless knows who is damned and who will be saved—I could understand that if I were simply initiated.” — That is what a person from the early Christian centuries would have said to himself.

[ 6 ] Likewise, if someone had told him that, through transubstantiation and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ during the Mass, he would have replied: “I don’t understand that, but if I were initiated, I might be able to grasp it.” — That is what people would have said in earlier times. For in earlier times, people would have thought: What can be observed in the sensory world is an illusion; that is not reality; reality lies in the spiritual world behind it. As long as one remains in the sensory world—in this world of appearances—it is a contradiction that anyone can sin or not sin, and yet that the all-knowing God knows from the very beginning whether any human being will be damned or saved. But as soon as one enters the spiritual world, this is no longer a contradiction: there one comes to understand how it is possible that God nevertheless foresees it. — Similarly, one would have said: In the physical-sensual world, it is a contradiction that something which, to outward appearance, remains the same—bread and wine—is supposed to become the Body and Blood of Christ after the consecration; but once one is initiated, one will be able to understand this, because one then stands with one’s soul life in the spiritual world. — That is what one would have said in earlier times.

[ 7 ] Now the struggles within human souls began. On the one hand, these human souls found themselves increasingly torn away from the spiritual world. The entire culture was moving in the direction of spiritual people recognizing only the intellect—which, however, could not enter the spiritual world. And out of these inner struggles arose all the uncertainties regarding the supersensible worlds. If we approach history symptomatologically, we can identify the points at which we see such uncertainties emerging particularly strongly into the world.

[ 8 ] I have often drawn attention in such lectures to that Scottish monk, Scotus Erigena, who lived in the 9th century in Franconia at the court of Charles the Bald and was regarded there as nothing short of a marvel of wisdom. In any case, Charles the Bald and all who shared his views turned to Scotus Erigena on all religious and scientific matters whenever they wanted a decision on anything. But it is precisely in the way Scotus Erigena relates to other monks of his time that we see how, back then, the struggle—I would say—raged between reason, which felt confined solely to the sensory world and certain conclusions drawn from it, and what had been handed down in the form of dogmas from the supersensory worlds.

[ 9 ] And so we see two figures facing off against one another in the 9th century: Scotus Erigena and the monk Gottschalk, who resolutely asserted the doctrine that God knows in advance with perfect certainty whether any human being will be damned or saved. This was gradually formulated as follows: God has predestined one part of humanity for salvation and another part for damnation. This doctrine was formulated in the same way that Augustine himself had done, according to whose doctrine of divine predestination one part of humanity is predestined for salvation and another part for damnation. And Gottschalk, the monk, taught that it was so: God had predestined some people for salvation and others for damnation, but none for sin. Gottschalk thus taught a contradiction as far as outward understanding was concerned.

[ 10 ] The controversy raged with extraordinary intensity at that time, in the 9th century. At a synod in Mainz, for example, Gottschalk’s writings were declared outright heretical, and Gottschalk was flogged for this teaching. Nevertheless, even though Gottschalk had been flogged and imprisoned for this teaching, he was able to argue that he wanted nothing more than to restore Augustinian doctrine to its true form. It also became apparent—particularly to French bishops and monks—that Gottschalk was actually teaching nothing other than what Augustine himself had already taught. Thus, in a sense, a monk like Gottschalk was ahead of his time in that he taught, drawing from the traditions of the ancient mystery knowledge, something that those who now wanted to comprehend everything with the emerging intellect could not comprehend and therefore opposed, while the others, who clung more to the veneration of the ancient, fully agreed with a theologian like Gottschalk.

[ 11 ] Today, people will find it extremely difficult to understand that such a thing could have been a subject of dispute. But it was not merely a matter of dispute. Back then, people were publicly flogged and imprisoned for such teachings if they did not please one side, and in the end, they were proven right. For it was precisely the orthodox believers who then sided with Gottschalk, and Gottschalk’s doctrine remained the legitimate Catholic doctrine. — Charles the Bald, of course, turned to Scotus Erigena—given his entire stance toward him—to secure a ruling in his favor. Scotus Erigena did not rule in favor of Gottschalk, but rather held that, in the development of humanity, the divinity is inherent in the fact that evil can actually be only an apparent entity; otherwise, evil would have to be inherent in God. Since God can only be good, evil must be nothing; but nothingness cannot be something with which human beings can ultimately be united. — Thus, Scotus Erigena spoke out against Gottschalk.

[ 12 ] But the teachings of Scotus Erigena—which are roughly the same as those of today’s pantheists—were in turn condemned by the orthodox Church, and Scotus Erigena’s writings were not rediscovered until later. Everything associated with him was burned; he was considered a true heretic. And when he made public the views he had presented to Charles the Bald, the Gottschalkians—who had by then regained acceptance—declared: Scotus Erigena is really just a windbag who adorns himself with all manner of trappings of external scholarship, and who actually knows nothing at all about the inner mysteries of the supernatural. — Another theologian wrote about the Body and Blood of Christ: “De corpore et sanguine domini.” In this treatise, he also articulated what was a transparent doctrine to the ancient initiates: that bread and wine can indeed be transformed into the real Body and the real Blood of Christ.

[ 13 ] Once again, this treatise was presented to Charles the Bald. Scotus Erigena did not exactly write a counter-treatise, but in his writings we find numerous indications of how he decided the matter, and there we find that this doctrine—which is, after all, the orthodox Catholic one: that bread and wine are truly transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ—must be modified because it cannot be understood. This is how Scotus Erigena expressed himself even back then.

[ 14 ] In short, it was precisely during this 9th century that the struggle over the relationship between the human soul and the supersensible world raged with particular intensity, and it was extraordinarily difficult for the serious minds of that time to find their bearings. For Christian dogmas were permeated with echoes of ancient initiatory truths; yet there was a lack of understanding. People examined what had been given outwardly in words—words that could only have been understood after the souls had developed into the spiritual world—they examined what had been given outwardly in words, based on what they were aware of in the development of human reason at that time. And from these examinations arose, at that time, the most severe struggles within Christian life in Europe.

[ 15 ] In what direction did these soul experiences tend to develop? They tended to bring about the development of two things within the human being that had not existed at all in the past. In the past, human beings looked into the sensory world, and as they looked into the sensory world, their faculties simultaneously gave them a perception of the spiritual that shone through the sensory phenomena: they saw the spiritual through the sensory phenomena. Just as the people of the 9th century did, the ancient human certainly did not see bread and wine, for that would have been a material perception. But the human being combined material perception with spiritual perception.

[ 16 ] Nor did people in those ancient times possess the kind of intellectualistic concepts and ideas that were already present in the 9th century. The superficiality and abstractness of these concepts and ideas did not exist. What people experienced as concepts and ideas was still concrete and essential in nature. I have drawn your attention to how gradually such things as grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astrology have become entirely abstract. In earlier times, these sciences—into which people immersed themselves—were viewed in such a way that people came into contact—as I said at the time—with real, concrete entities. But even back then, and even more so in later times, these disciplines—grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and so on—had become quite feeble and abstract, devoid of essential character and so forth; they stood, one might say, almost solely as mere “clothing,” so to speak, in contrast to what had existed in earlier times. And this trend continued to develop further and further. The abstract nature became more and more an abstractness of concepts, and the concrete became more and more merely the external-sensory. And these two currents, which we see in the 9th century and under whose influence people then fought such terrible inner struggles, these currents continued right up to the present day. It is just that they confront us more strongly in some areas and less so in others.

[ 17 ] They actually stand very vividly before the development of humanity in the contrast between Goethe and Schiller. I spoke yesterday about how Goethe, when he became acquainted with Linnaean botany, was compelled to envision the plant world in his mind in living terms. Living concepts—concepts that can transform, and thus approach the realm of the imaginative. But I also pointed out how Goethe stumbles when he attempts to ascend from the purely plant-like and living to the animal-like and sentient. He still approaches the realm of imagination, but no longer reaches inspiration. He sees external things. With minerals, he has no reason to advance to the level of imagination; with plants, he does so. He gets no further with this; abstract concepts are not his forte. Therefore, he also does not grasp that which is now a higher spiritual reality than the plant realm in abstract concepts. Consequently, he does not, in essence, philosophize in the manner in which people philosophized in his time.

[ 18 ] Schiller philosophizes. He even learns to philosophize from Kant, until Kant’s style becomes too outlandish for him and he abandons it. But Schiller does not do so without the abstract nature of the concepts, which in turn cannot get to the essence of things. And when we compare Goethe and Schiller, we perceive precisely this as the contrast that was never truly bridged between the two—a contrast that was merely balanced by the profound humanity that lived within both of them.

[ 19 ] But this contrast became apparent when, in the 1790s, both Goethe and Schiller were confronted with the question: How does a human being actually attain a life worthy of a human being? — Schiller approached the question in his own way, through abstract thought, and he expressed what he had to say in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” There he reasoned: On the one hand, human beings are subject to logical necessity, the necessity of reason. They have no freedom when they follow the necessity of reason. His freedom is lost in the necessity of reason. But he also has no freedom if he surrenders himself solely to his senses, to sensual necessity; there, his instincts and drives compel him, and once again he is not free. On both sides—toward the spirit and toward nature—human beings actually become slaves, unfree. And, according to Schiller, a person can only become free if he regards nature as if it were a living being, as if it possessed spirit and soul—that is, if he elevates nature. But then he must also bring rational necessity down to the level of nature. A person must, so to speak, regard nature as if it possessed reason. Then the rigid necessity of reason—the rigid logic—disappears from reason. On the other hand, when a person expresses himself figuratively, he creates rather than logically analyzing and synthesizing; and by creating, he strips nature of its merely sensory necessity. But all of this, Schiller said, can only be expressed through artistic creation and aesthetic enjoyment. If one simply faces nature in any way, one is subject to the instincts, the drives of natural necessity. If one moves within one’s mind, one must follow logical necessity if one does not wish to be untrue to what is human. When one combines the two, then rational necessity is tempered and yields some of its necessity to the sensory realm; the sensual realm relinquishes something of its instinctual nature. And we portray human beings in sculptural works, for example, as if the spirit were already contained within the sensual realm itself. We lead the spirit down into the sensual realm by raising the sensual realm up to the spirit, and thus art and beauty arise. Only by creating or enjoying beauty does a person live in freedom.

[ 20 ] Consider that, in writing these aesthetic letters, Schiller strove with all the strength of his soul to find something for human beings—for example, when a person might be free. And he finds the sole possibility of realizing human freedom—in living within the beautiful appearance. Human beings must flee crude reality—as Schiller already suggests, even if he does not state it explicitly—if they wish to become free, that is, to attain a life worthy of human dignity. Freedom can truly be attained only in the realm of appearance.

[ 21 ] Nietzsche, who was still steeped in all these things and yet was unable to arrive at a true understanding of the spirit, wrote his first book, *The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music*, in which he sought to demonstrate: The Greeks had invented art in order to have something through which they, as free human beings endowed with human dignity, could rise above the reality of the external senses—a reality in which one can never attain human dignity; they had transcended the reality of things in order to attain the possibility of freedom in appearance, in artistic appearance. Nietzsche interpreted this in the context of Greek culture. In this regard, Nietzsche merely articulated in a radical way what was already present in Schiller’s “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” One can therefore say that Schiller lived in an abstract spirituality, but at the same time, the impulse to grant human beings their dignity lived within him. Consider the grandeur, the magnificence, and the wonder of these aesthetic letters. In essence, with regard to poetry and the power of the human soul, they are greater than all of Schiller’s other works. They are, in fact, Schiller’s greatest achievement when we consider his body of work as a whole. But Schiller grapples with this from his abstract standpoint, from which—in keeping with Western intellectual life—he had also arrived at intellectualism. He was unable to move from this standpoint of his to true reality. He could only attain the appearance of beauty.

[ 22 ] When Goethe received these “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” he found it difficult to make sense of them. Goethe was not actually well-versed in the abstract workings of human reason. But even for him, it was a problem to understand how human beings attain their human dignity, how the spiritual entities must work together to bestow human dignity upon human beings, so that they awaken to the spiritual world and immerse themselves in it. Schiller could not move beyond the concept to reach reality. Goethe now wanted to express, in his own way, what Schiller had articulated in the Aesthetic Letters.

[ 23 ] He expressed this in his own vivid way in the “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” In all these figures, we are to see spiritual forces that work together to give human beings their free human dignity—to bestow their human dignity in freedom. But Goethe could not find the path from what he could express merely in imaginings up to the truly spiritual. Therefore, with Goethe, it remained at the level of the fairy tale, the image, a kind of higher symbolism—admittedly an extraordinarily vivid symbolism, but still only a kind of symbolism. Schiller coined abstract concepts but could not penetrate into reality; he remained at the level of appearance. Goethe, in his effort to comprehend the human being in freedom, created many images that were vivid—sensually vivid—but with which he, too, could not penetrate into reality. He remained stuck at the description of the sensory. See how beautiful this description of the sensory is in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily; but the liberation of the paralyzed prince does not actually become vivid—only symbolically vivid. The opposing currents that had emerged—and which I have characterized for you, none of which could actually penetrate the spiritual world—are expressed here in these two personalities. Both Schiller and Goethe, in essence, strove to enter the spiritual world from opposite sides, but they could not enter it.

[ 24 ] What was actually going on there? What I am about to tell you will seem strange to you, and yet anyone who looks at things with psychological objectivity will have to see them the way I am about to describe them.

[ 25 ] Consider the two currents present in Scholasticism. On the one hand, there is rational knowledge, which draws its characteristics from the senses but does not penetrate to the real. Through the most diverse forms, this current continues onward and onward, from one personality to the next, extending even to Schiller. He is, so to speak, drawn into a mode of knowledge of which Scholasticism has said: With it, one can only derive ideas from the sensory realm. — Yet Schiller is incapable—he is far too strong a complete human being for that—of recognizing in the sensory realm anything that a human being may be if he is to possess his human dignity. Scholastic knowledge brings forth only the ideas from the sensory world. Schiller sets aside the sensory world, and only the ideas remain. In them, he achieves no reality, but only a beautiful appearance. He thus wrestles with the question: What is one actually to do with this scholastic knowledge, derived from human beings, in order to somehow bestow dignity upon humanity? Here one can no longer hold fast to reality; one must take refuge in beautiful appearance. — You can see in what way Schiller embodies the offshoot of the scholastic current of rational knowledge.

[ 26 ] Goethe did not pay much attention to this rational insight. He was actually much more inspired by revelatory insight; you may find that strange, but it is nevertheless true. Logical reasoning was not Goethe’s forte. And even though he did not strictly adhere to Catholic dogma—the necessity of which later became clear to him for artistic purposes when he sought to complete his *Faust*—and even though he did not adhere to Catholic dogma in his youth, he did adhere to whatever approached the supernatural world as far as he could reach it. To speak of Goethe in terms of “faith”—that, in a certain sense, infuriated him. When Jacobi spoke to him about faith in his youth, he said: “I stick to what I see.”—Goethe wanted nothing to do with faith. Those who claim Goethe as a believer, for example, do not understand Goethe at all. He wanted to observe. And he was already on the path to moving from his imaginations upward toward inspirations and intuitions. Of course, this would not have made him a medieval theologian, but he could have become an ancient contemplator of God or a contemplator of the supernatural worlds. He was already on that path, but he was unable to ascend any further. He reached only as far as the perception of the supersensible in the plant world. Thus, as he studied the plant world, he was already exploring the spiritual and the sensory side by side, just as in the ancient initiation mysteries; but he stopped at the plants.

[ 27 ] What else could he do? He had no choice but to apply to the entire supersensible world the pictorial, symbolic, and imaginative approach he had come to know through plants. And so, in essence, he really only arrived at an imaginative representation of the world when he spoke of the soul in his fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily.

[ 28 ] Note: Where the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily evokes the plant-like—that which can be approached through the kind of imagination Goethe developed in relation to the plant world—there the fairy tale is especially beautiful. Just try to let all of that—everything in this fairy tale that is expressed in the style of plant imagery—sink in, and it becomes truly wonderful. And, fundamentally, even the other elements in the story always tend to take on a plant-like quality. The female figure, who is of particular importance, is called the Lily. He can no longer bring her to real, vigorous life; he portrays her in such a way that she has a kind of plant-like existence. And if you look at all the characters that appear in the fairy tale, they actually lead a plant-like existence; but when they must be raised to a higher level, the higher realm becomes merely symbolic, and up there, they actually lead a semblance of existence.

[ 29 ] The kings who appear there aren’t really real either. They, too, are reduced to a plant-like existence; they merely claim to have a different one. For something would have to be instilled into the golden king, the silver king, and the bronze king if they were truly to live in the spiritual world.

[ 30 ] Goethe, one might say, lives a life of revelatory knowledge, of supersensory knowledge, which he is able to master only to a certain degree. Schiller, on the other hand, lives out rational knowledge—the other kind developed by scholasticism—which he cannot tolerate, however, because he wants to bring it to a state of reality, yet he only manages to bring it to the reality of appearance in beauty.

[ 31 ] One might say: The immense inner truth in these two personalities is what makes them so sincere that neither says more than he can say. Hence, Goethe portrays the soul as if it were a form of vegetation, and Schiller portrays the free human being as if this free human being could live solely through aesthetics. Aesthetic society, the aesthetic community, is what Schiller ultimately sets forth in his Aesthetic Letters as the “social demand,” one might say: “Become such that social society presents itself as beautiful,” says Schiller, “if humanity is to become free.” — One can see in the relationship between Goethe and Schiller how these currents continue to live on. What they would have needed—in Goethe’s case, the elevation from imagination to inspiration; in Schiller’s, the enlivening of abstract concepts through the imaginative world—only then could they have fully come together.

[ 32 ] And if you look into the souls of both of them, you must admit: Both were predisposed to immerse themselves in a world of the spirit. How Goethe struggled with what he called “piety”! How Schiller put it: “To which of the existing religions do you profess your faith?”—“To none,” he says. “Why?”—“Out of religion!”

[ 33 ] We see how, especially for enlightened minds, as the supersensible expands beyond what human beings can experience through cognition, the religious dimension also flows out of it. Thus, the religious dimension, too, will first have to be regained by transforming today’s purely intellectual knowledge into spiritual knowledge.