The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. European Culture and Its Connection to the Latin Language: Greek and Roman Mysteries

[ 1 ] From the two lectures I gave yesterday and the day before yesterday, you will have seen how, from an anthroposophical point of view, it is important to properly build upon what took place in Europe during the 19th century. And we were indeed able to connect the phenomena we have set before our souls to many of the characteristics that have emerged as the defining features of the modern era—which, from the middle of the 15th century onward, we regard as the defining characteristics of Europe’s spiritual and other historical developments.

[ 2 ] Today, by viewing yesterday and the day before as a kind of foundation—or, I might also say, a starting point for perspective—I would like to turn my gaze toward something broader, including a broader perspective on time.

[ 3 ] We must be clear that, in the course of the 19th century, materialism emerged as one aspect of European development. And by materialism I mean everything that can turn only toward material phenomena when it seeks to say something about the world—that which feels no need to turn to the spiritual when it comes to what sustains human beings in the world and what guides their path. On the other hand, this materialism was accompanied by what might be called intellectualism, rationalism, or an intellectual perspective—a perspective that, I would say, seeks only to live and function within logical concepts.

[ 4 ] Now, please don’t take this to mean that I’m suggesting this logical way of thinking should be contrasted with another, non-logical—or even anti-logical—one. Of course, that would never occur to me. But logic alone is to reality what the skeletal system is to a human being, and in all things, logic actually represents not the living, but the dead. And so what humanity has naively brought upon itself—this mere intellectual logic, which contains dead concepts—has fostered materialism, which is tied only to dead substance.

[ 5 ] Today, nothing can truly help us further the development of human civilization except a completely unbiased examination of the true reasons that have given rise, on the one hand, to this materialism and, on the other, to rationalism. And to that end, we must also look a little further back in time today, so that the descriptions from yesterday and the day before can be placed in an even broader context.

[ 6 ] I have often pointed out the profound divide that exists between what was once Greek culture—that is, the culture that was partly expressed in the Greek language—and what subsequently developed to the west of it as Roman, or Latin, culture. Attention has often been drawn to the view of Herman Grimm, who says: Modern people can still understand the Romans, for they essentially still possess the same concepts as the Romans; the Greeks, however, appear to them as if they were inhabitants of a fairy-tale land. — Well, I have, in fact, discussed this very point in more detail in the essays that recently appeared in Goetheanum.

[ 7 ] Now, however, we must be clear that Eastern Europe—which I attempted to describe yesterday, so to speak, only in passing and perhaps in a way that some of you sitting here might find questionable—has experienced a wave of civilization that was strongly influenced by Greek culture in later times. In Eastern Europe, we encounter the late manifestations of the Greek sensibility, of the Greek way of feeling. In Western Europe, and also in Central Europe, on the other hand, Latin culture continues to flourish in a very intense way. And precisely that differentiation across Europe that I have described to you over the past two days is, in essence, entirely shaped by what existed in the East as a continuation of Greek culture and in the West as a continuation of Latin-Roman culture.

[ 8 ] We must not forget the following. We must be clear that the West was able to assimilate the Latin-Roman essence internally and spiritually in a completely different way than Central Europe. The West has absorbed the Latin element into itself. Central Europe, on the other hand, has become ill because of it. And only those who are able to properly grasp this phenomenon—which is now manifesting itself in its final stages in the most intense way imaginable—can truly find their way within contemporary concepts of education.

[ 9 ] Let us first consider the matter from a Central European perspective. I would like to draw attention once again to what the late Fritz Mauthner asserted based on language itself—specifically, on the critique of language. Unlike Kant, who wrote a Critique of Reason—that is, essentially a critique of concepts—Fritz Mauthner sought to write a critique of language. He made the supposed discovery that, when people speak of higher things, they essentially speak only in words and do not realize that they are speaking only in words. But if one considers how people use words—for example, God, spirit, soul, the good, and so on—one sees that people believe that when they use words, they also possess a thing; yet they are in fact merely using the words without pointing to any real thing.

[ 10 ] Now, I have already hinted—I believe here as well—that, of course, this entire view of Mauthner’s does not apply when it comes to things in nature, because in that case people are quite capable of distinguishing between the word and the thing itself. At least, I have not yet heard of anyone, for example, who intended—when wanting to ride—not to mount an actual gray horse, but merely to mount the word “gray horse”! So, when it comes to things in nature, people are indeed able to distinguish between the word and its meaning on the one hand, and reality on the other.

[ 11 ] But the situation changes—and this lends Fritz Mauthner a certain semblance of validity—the moment one enters the realm of the soul on the one hand and the realm of ethics and morality on the other. With regard to the psychological realm, words from ancient times have indeed been preserved and are still used by people, but the corresponding conceptions of these things have not been preserved. Thus, while people use words like “soul” and “spirit,” they lack a true understanding of what they signify. And since Mauthner observed this in the psychological realm, he believed he could generalize it. But in the realm of the soul—and also in the ethical and moral realm—it is the case that, for example, in the ethical and moral realm, moral impulses have gradually lost their substantive content for human beings and today actually function only as external commandments or even as external laws.

[ 12 ] So, for a good portion of our vocabulary, the concrete sense of the thing has been lost. That is why it takes so much effort today to influence the most important faculties of the human soul—thinking, feeling, and willing. For thinking, feeling, and willing are things that everyone discusses today, but people do not actually have a concrete conception of the corresponding realities. And the point is to discover what actually lies behind them.

[ 13 ] Now we must be clear that education—which actually led to intellectual life—was sustained by the Latin language throughout many, many centuries of the Middle Ages, and that Latin has truly become a dead language, not merely in the sense of an external label, but in a deeply intrinsic sense. The Latin language, which one had to master in the Middle Ages if one wanted to gain access to higher education at all, became more and more—if I may put it this way—a mechanism in and of itself. And it became precisely that: a logical mechanism in and of itself.

[ 14 ] This process can be traced very clearly if one views history in the same way we examined it yesterday and the day before for the 19th century. If one looks at the inner life of humanity as it has continued, one sees how, in the 4th century A.D., the Latin language gradually ceased to be experienced inwardly—how it no longer embodied the Logos, but only the outer forms of the Logos. What then remained of the Latin language as a latecomer—the Italian language, the French language—did indeed absorb much of the Latin language. In this way, they participated in the process of the Latin language’s decline. But they have also absorbed what radiated from the various peoples who migrated from east to west and settled in the West. Thus, in Italian and French, a completely different element lives on—not merely in the words, but above all in the structure of the language, in the drama of the language. In contrast, true Latin has died out. And in this state of obsolescence, as its worldviews gradually faded away, it has become the dominant language of scholarship. And it is precisely through language that one must inquire if one wishes to understand: Why did the medieval worldview take on the form that it has?

[ 15 ] Just consider for a moment that people were forced into this Latin system during their boyhood—that is, the process for them was not one in which they shaped the language from their living soul, but rather the language was poured into them as a ready-made logical instrument, and they learned logic, so to speak, from the way the words were grammatically connected. Logic became something that filled people from the outside in.

[ 16 ] And so the connection between the human soul and spiritual education became increasingly tenuous, and people no longer grew with enthusiasm from what they already possessed within themselves into education; instead, they were absorbed by a foreign element of education—that foreign element of education that had been “perrified” in Latin. This, so to speak, burst forth in the soul and drove what one originally possessed out of the person or deeper into the person, into a region where one made no claim to logic.

[ 17 ] Just think about how things were for many centuries during the Middle Ages, and how they were in our youth—the youth of those who are now as old as I am. Back then, if someone expressed something in their native language and it wasn’t clear to the people around them, they would quickly translate it into Latin, because then it became clear. But it also became cold and detached. It became logical. One understood immediately when something was expressed in a Latin case; one understood immediately just how precisely and exactly the matter was meant.

[ 18 ] But this was the practice throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages. People allowed themselves every kind of sloppiness in spoken language, because they attributed precision and accuracy precisely to thinking in Latin. But that was something foreign to human beings. And because it was foreign—and because human beings can only reach the spiritual realm through their soul—the Latin language became so fossilized that it was no longer possible to use a word in any way at all unless one had the thing itself right there in the physical world. In the case of a horse, for example, it wouldn’t have worked if one had merely had the word, because one wouldn’t have been able to ride it. But with those things that are supersensory, the content gradually evaporated from the word, and people were left with only the word. And then later, when their mother tongue emerged, they used only the word in that mother tongue as well—simply the lexically translated word. As a result, they failed to bring the visual perception into it. By combining anima and Seele (soul), and since anima had lost its reality as content, the content was also missing from Seele. And so it came to pass that the Latin language was applicable only to the outwardly sensory.

[ 19 ] Therein lies one of the reasons, rooted in language, why theology in the Middle Ages asserted: Science can only grasp external, sensory things—and at most their interrelationships—while supernatural things must be left to faith. For if these people had developed the full capacity to articulate what is true, they would have said: Human beings can know only as much of the world as can be expressed in Latin, and the rest must be left to a faith that cannot be fully expressed, but is felt.

[ 20 ] You see, in a certain sense, that is the truth, and the other is merely an illusion. The truth is that, over the centuries, the view has prevailed that only what can be expressed in Latin is scientifically true.

[ 21 ] And it was not until the 18th century, in fact, that the claim to the vernacular really emerged. However, at that time, as these claims to the vernacular were gaining ground, the various regions of Europe had quite different relationships to the vernaculars. Where Latin still exerted its influence, the vernacular found it easier to merge with the educated classes. That is why we see these phenomena in Western Europe—which we described the day before yesterday—where the interconnections in social life, the “social bonds” as I have called them, develop in a way that is popular and in which everyone participates; for there in the West, as folk culture emerged, this folk culture, so to speak, became embedded in Latin in a related form.

[ 22 ] In Central Europe, this was completely impossible, because there the vernacular had adopted nothing from Latin. There, the vernacular was something entirely distinct from Latin. And above that was the educated class, which had to learn Latin if it wanted to be educated. So here the difference was enormous. Indeed, it is precisely this difference that gave rise to the tragedy for Central Europe that I spoke of yesterday—the tragedy that existed between the masses, who did not learn Latin and therefore had no access to scholarship—for scholarship was defined by what could be expressed in Latin— and those who acquired scholarship—who, the very moment they acquired it, underwent a transformation. In everyday life, when they ate and drank and otherwise socialized with their fellow countrymen, they were uneducated people, because they spoke a language that contained no trace of scholarship. And when they were scholars, they were something entirely different; they donned an inner academic robe. So that, in fact, someone who was educated was, at heart, a split person.

[ 23 ] You see, this had a particularly profound effect on the spiritual life of Central Europe. For, due to all sorts of circumstances—which we will also touch upon at some point—the vernacular actually contained only what I hinted at yesterday: on the one hand, an astrological element, and on the other, an alchemical element. This was already alive in the vernacular, and the vernacular actually possessed an inner spirituality, an inner spiritual quality. The vernacular in Europe was not materialistic. Materialism was only imposed on the vernacular from the materialism of the Latin language, in that Latin—even after it was no longer the language of the learned—still left the people with the airs and graces that had developed when it became the language of the learned. And so the Central European language could not possibly achieve a balance or harmonization with what had become established in Latin as “education.”

[ 24 ] This is an immensely serious matter. It is still evident today in a very pronounced way. I will give a concrete example right away to illustrate just how pronounced this is. You see, so-called “political economy” is also taught at various universities today. This “national economics” actually grew out of legal concepts, and those are entirely a product of the Latin tradition. To think legally means to think in Latin—even today. And when it comes to economic concepts—well, that’s where, unfortunately for the Latin scholars, things really come down to earth. Just as one cannot ride the mere word “Schimmel,” one cannot “eat” mere economic concepts. One cannot manage an economy with mere economic concepts. But since science has developed solely out of Latin—people simply do not see the connection—the economic sciences of the present day have no substance left at all. Political economy, as it is taught today, actually deals only with something that no longer has anything to do with reality, because it derives from Latin but has failed to connect with present-day reality, instead spinning everything out of abstract concepts.

[ 25 ] One might say that a contrast is particularly evident in the field of political economy. I spoke to you yesterday about how, in Central Europe, there were people among the common folk who were called “Sinnierer”—they drew their inspiration from folk traditions and thus practiced ancient astrology and alchemy—Sinnierer, that is, those who ponder. Those who then carried Latin, in that sublimated form, further into political economy—these are the ones who no longer “ponder,” but rather “spin.” Yes, truly, this is not meant as a joke, but is meant quite seriously, because from a mere logical web—which the Latin language has become—is spun what is developed into a distinct science.

[ 26 ] Last fall, I taught a course here on economics. It was based on facts, not on empty rhetoric. And it’s becoming increasingly clear—precisely because the course was grounded in facts, that is, because it addressed the realities of economic life—that: Students of economics simply cannot reconcile this with what is merely theoretical! The two do not overlap. And now someone might suggest that a supplementary course should be offered to concretize the conceptual framework of modern economics by linking it to what has been drawn from reality. But that would be like trying to explain the fruitfulness of an orange to someone using the discarded orange peels—and that simply doesn’t work. When it comes to deriving knowledge from reality, one cannot draw connections to what is merely a figment of the imagination. One must actually start anew from the original, elementary principles if reality is to have an effect.

[ 27 ] And because in popular education—which was not permeated by Latin—the ancient sciences of astronomy and geography, astrology, and alchemy lived on, albeit in a form no longer in keeping with the times, the notion that knowledge is whatever can be expressed in Latin was gradually joined by other notions: Superstition is everything that cannot be expressed in Latin, but must be expressed in the vernacular. People just don’t put it that way, because they embellish things with all sorts of flourishes. But our entire education is permeated, on the one hand, by the principle: “Everything that can be expressed in Latin sentences is scientific”; and on the other hand: “Everything that cannot be expressed in Latin sentences but must be expressed in the vernacular is superstition.”

[ 28 ] This is something that has been experienced much less in the West, but which has been experienced in a terribly tragic way, particularly in Central Europe. In the East, however, this was less so. First, the East had allowed Greek culture—still thoroughly imbued with the vitality of reality—to flow into its civilization in many ways; and second, it did not take to heart very deeply what had now become the terrible inner struggle between the living, folk-based tradition and the dead Latin tradition, but instead sat back and said to itself: Oh, come on—only people who have fallen from paradise get caught up in such struggles of life; but we in the East have actually remained in paradise. It is only an outward appearance that we have fallen from paradise; we are inner people—inner people!

[ 29 ] You see, such matters must certainly be addressed if one is to understand this terrible division that exists today between people who live within what has been constructed in the Latin manner, and people who, as homeless souls—I used that expression here recently—wish to seek the path back to the spiritual from the elemental core of their own being. It is here that the immense authority of what is an offshoot of the Latin tradition confronts people. For the respect for the Latin tradition is embedded in the belief in authority that is accorded to our modern science.

[ 30 ] Just think for a moment what it meant for centuries when a farm boy like that came to the monastery school and learned Latin there! Then he’d come home for vacation, knowing Latin! No one understood a thing of what the farm boy had learned, but all the others knew—well, that one must not and cannot understand anything that leads to science or to knowledge. They knew that, after all. For the farm boy who had come to the monastery school spoke a language in which one seeks precisely that insight, and the other farm boys, who were peeling potatoes—well, that wasn’t the case in earlier times—who, let’s say, were working in some way in the meadow or in the field, had an immense respect.

[ 31 ] For one does not feel respect for what one knows, but for what one cannot know. And this took root as an immense respect for what one cannot know—something one renounces from the very beginning. Yes, this then continues, and such things take paths that one can follow only if one truly has the goodwill to follow the spiritual paths of humanity. That farm boy in the 13th or 12th century, who out in the fields did nothing but hold the plow and otherwise lend a hand—perhaps at most helping to chop pork fat into cracklings and so on—that farm boy knew: We can know nothing; we will never be able to know anything, because only those who learn Latin can know anything. — The farm boy says that, and then it takes secret paths, and then, in more recent centuries, a naturalist delivers a speech before an enlightened assembly of naturalists, and this speech culminates in the very same words that the farm boy spoke in the 12th century about the monastery farm boy: “We will not know—ignorabimus!” For if one were to have the insight today to trace the historical facts, then, going back centuries, one would find the origin of the Du Bois-Reymond impulse in the peasant boy who did not learn Latin, as opposed to the young peasant boy who did learn Latin.

[ 32 ] Now, when a language dies—a language that undergoes the regression that Latin underwent—it tends to lean toward death even in its words. But what is dead in the world is the material. And so, even where Latin was particularly dominant, it drove things toward death—namely, toward the material. Originally, as I have already touched upon, people everywhere knew what the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ meant, because they still understood the matter from living experience. The common people could have known it as well, but folk alchemy was considered superstitious—after all, it was not expressed in Latin. The Latin language, however, could not capture the spiritual. And so the trivial belief arose that what people imagined to be the material substance of the bread and wine was supposed to be transformed, and all the discussions about the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper arose in such a way that those who debated it proved nothing more than that they had adopted this doctrine in the Latin language. But by then the words had taken on only a lifeless character, and people no longer understood what was alive—just as today’s anatomists can no longer understand the living human being from a dead corpse.

[ 33 ] Central Europe went through this in a profoundly tragic way, in that its language lacked everything that the Latin language had brought forth. Central Europe had a language that would have needed to grow into the living world. But thought—since this thought, too, was a offshoot of Latin—was dead. And so the concepts could not find the words, and the words could not find the concepts.

[ 34 ] For example, the word “Seele” could just as easily have captured the essence of life as the Greek word “psyche” once did. But the cultural background was Latin, and in that culture people knew nothing of this living quality and thus killed off the living quality that was present in the vernacular. That is why it is so important today to look once again at the deep rift that had developed between Greek and Roman culture. And this deep rift becomes particularly evident when we look specifically at the world of the mysteries.

[ 35 ] If we turn to Greece, we find—I would say—that the most popular mysteries were the Eleusinian Mysteries, the mysteries of Eleusis. These were the mysteries that, so to speak, had most popularized the path to the spiritual. And those who were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries were the Telestai; they were initiated in Eleusis. Let’s take a look, first, at what lies behind the name “Eleusis,” and second, at what lies behind the name “Telestai.”

[ 36 ] Eleusis is, after all, merely a slight linguistic variation of Elosis and actually means: the place where the “Coming Ones” are—those who wish to carry the future within themselves. Eleusis means “that which is to come.” And the Telestai are those who are to come; the Eleusinian initiates are those who are to come. This suggests that human beings were aware that, as they stand, they are more like imperfect beings and must become those who are to come—those who carry the future within themselves. Telos anticipates the future—that which will only gradually come to fruition in the future. Thus, in the Eleusinian Mysteries, at the place of coming, at the place of those who are to come, imperfect human beings were transformed into perfect ones. They were the Telestoi.

[ 37 ] The entire meaning of this initiation suffered a rupture when it was adopted by the Romans. In Greece, everything in the initiation still pointed toward the future, toward the end of the world. One was to develop oneself through a strong inner impulse so that one might find the path to the end of the world in the right way. Then one was a Telest, one who was to develop in the right way toward the end of the world.

[ 38 ] As this concept was passed down from the Roman era, the term “Telesten” gradually came to refer to the “Initiates”—Initium, meaning “beginning.” The focus shifted, so to speak, from the end of the world to its beginning. The Telesten became Initiates. Those who had been initiated into the mysteries of what was to come became those who knew the past. Those who strove in the spirit of Prometheus became Epimethean, striving for knowledge of the past. But only abstract knowledge of the past can remain; if one wants to move toward the future, one needs a living, will-driven knowledge, for the will must develop within it. The past is past. One can gain a higher knowledge by returning to the Initium, to the past; but it remains merely knowledge; it becomes ever more abstract.

[ 39 ] And thus the impulse toward abstraction—that is, toward that dehumanization that began in the 4th century A.D. and then became increasingly prevalent—made its way into the Latin language. People longed to return to the past, when ideas were still connected to life, because they knew that now they are no longer connected to life; now, when one rises to the realm of ideas, one enters into lifeless discourse. And to be initiated in Greece meant to receive a higher life within one’s soul. To be initiated in Roman times meant resigning oneself to a higher activity in earthly life and merely reflecting on it: In the beginning of the earth, humanity once had a higher activity, but it had fallen from that; one cannot be a doer, but at most a knower with regard to the higher knowledge.

[ 40 ] You see, these are the difficulties we face today. When we form, say, the word “initiation,” it is so incredibly vivid, because “consecration”—that is embedded in the entire concept: immersing a person underwater, removing them from the sharp contours of physical life, and bringing them into the fluid element of the world, so that they can move with their soul within the weaving, living, fleeting, and fluid spiritual realm. To “initiate” someone is to introduce them into the inherently dynamic, fluctuating, fluid world of life. Now this has to be translated somehow. And it is translated into the opposite. For “Einweihung,” for example, one must say: “Initiation.”

[ 41 ] It is simply necessary to realize that such contradictions, such difficulties, are inherent in our present-day civilization; we must be clear about these “spears,” so to speak, that cause us so much pain in our present-day civilization. Only then can that which truly propels humanity forward in a vibrant way come to pass.

[ 42 ] Of course, it is far from my intention to turn these lectures into a tirade against the study of Latin. On the contrary, I would like people to learn even more Latin, so that they, too, might come to realize that Latin can only be used to describe what is dead, that Latin quite rightly belongs in anatomy, in the dissection room; but that if one wishes to get to know what is not dead but alive, one must take refuge in the living elements of language. Today, one cannot enter the future with some abstract will, but rather with an illusion-free understanding of what can once again draw forth the life of the spirit from the dead. And we are, after all, living at a moment when the matter has actually been driven to a decisive point in spiritual life. We are living in an immensely important moment.

[ 43 ] I do not know how many of you took seriously what I have explained in recent issues of Goetheanum—namely, that as recently as twenty, fifteen, or ten years ago, one could still quote a man like Herman Grimm as if he were still with us. Today he is a figure of the past, and one can speak of him only as such. I meant what I said in these four articles in connection with Herman Grimm with the utmost seriousness. As you know, I myself used to quote Herman Grimm with great pleasure in a completely different sense than I do now. I quoted him when his words could be used as a guiding spirit leading us into the future. Today he is a figure of the past; he belongs to history, and at most, in those instances where he refers to ancient Greece and Rome, one can quote what was still the present not long ago—but that, too, is already the past.

[ 44 ] But I admit that this strange way of living on in a time that is rapidly becoming the past demands something quite different in our own time—and much of it is gently slept through! For gentle slumber is, after all, something that people love so much today.

[ 45 ] But anthroposophy is the kind of knowledge that is not merely gathered in ideas, but rather one that is meant to awaken us. That is why there are so many debates, and even the ones I have just held are, in turn, intended precisely to have an awakening effect.