The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Reflections that touch upon human karma—and, of course, by their very nature do touch upon it—must be received with a serious attitude and processed spiritually. For, when all is said and done, it is not merely the knowledge of certain karmic connections that is significant, but rather what emerges from such reflections for the enlivening of the human being and for a full engagement with life. Such reflections can only be fruitful if they do not lead to greater indifference toward humanity than is otherwise the case, but rather, on the contrary, if they kindle love and understanding for humanity to a greater degree than is the case when, looking at human beings, one merely surrenders to the impressions of a single earthly life.

[ 2 ] Anyone who looks at the successive epochs of human development will certainly gain a clear impression that much has changed in the way people think, in their sensibilities, and in all their views and conceptions of life over the course of human history. Certainly, the past does not make as profound an impression on people as that which is yet to come—that which, in essence, has yet to be established. But anyone who grasps with the necessary depth how human souls have changed in the course of the Earth’s evolution will not shy away from accepting as necessary that change in their own mind which entails considering not merely a single earthly life for the sake of one person or another, but rather the succession of earthly lives, insofar as they can be comprehended.

[ 3 ] And I think that examples such as those we considered last time—Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Pestalozzi, and so on—can show how a purely human understanding of a personality and love for that personality can grow when one views the person’s last earthly life against the backdrop from which that life actually arose.

[ 4 ] Now, in order to get to the heart of the matter—the true fruitfulness of these things—I would like to return to the question I have already touched upon for many of those sitting here. It is the question that arises from the fact that, particularly in the context of spiritual scientific considerations, we often have to speak of how, in ancient times, there were clairvoyant, initiated individuals—individuals who were able to communicate the mysteries of the spiritual world, that is, initiates. It stands to reason that this gives rise to the question: Where do these initiates live in our age? What is the situation regarding their reincarnation?

[ 5 ] To answer this question, it is absolutely necessary to point out how different a subsequent earthly life can be from a preceding one in terms of knowledge and insight, as well as in terms of other activities arising from the human soul; in other words, how different successive earthly lives can be in this regard. For when, during the time a person spends between death and a new birth, the moment approaches when the person is to descend to Earth and unite with the physical-etheric organization, a great deal is actually taking place within the person. True, the direction toward family, nation, and so on has long been determined; but the decision to carry out this immense change in existence—which consists in the transition from the spiritual-soul world to the physical world—this decision requires an immense effort. For you need only consider, my dear friends: It is not like it is here on Earth, where a person, as they go about their normal life, gradually grows weak and, based on the experiences gained on Earth, contributes little more to the decision to assume a different form of life upon passing through the gate of death. This, so to speak, comes upon the person; it breaks in upon them.

[ 6 ] Here on Earth, death is something that suddenly descends upon us. It is quite different when one descends from the spiritual world. There, it is a bright, fully conscious act, a deliberation arising entirely from all the possible depths of the soul. It involves observing the immense transformation that takes place within a human being when he is to exchange the spiritual and soul-life forms of pre-earthly existence for earthly existence. And in this descent, the human being sees how he must simply adapt to the cultural and civilizational conditions, but also to the physical conditions that may be offered to him in a particular age. Our age, apart from cultural and civilizational conditions, does not readily provide bodies in which life can be lived again in the old way, as initiates once did. And when the time approaches when the human soul—even that of an ancient initiate—must make use of a human body, the task then is to accept this human body as it is and to grow into the form of upbringing and the surrounding life that happens to be present at that moment. Yet what once existed within the soul is not lost to the soul. It simply expresses itself in a different way. The basic configuration of the soul remains, but it manifests itself differently.

[ 7 ] You see, even in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D., the human soul was able to deepen itself greatly through knowledge of the truths of initiation, because in the 3rd, 4th centuries A.D., particularly in southern European and Near Eastern regions, followed the soul, since the bodies performed their organic functions in such a way that they could follow the soul. Today, someone who—with a deeply internalized, very wise soul—may have lived as an initiate in the early Christian centuries must now incarnate in human bodies that, above all, as a result of developments since then, are oriented toward the external world and live in that external world. Physically, this means that the great gathering of the soul’s powers—that great inner concentration—which was still possible in the 3rd and 4th centuries after the emergence of Christianity, is no longer possible. And so the following could take place in the development of the Earth. I am simply recounting things that reveal themselves to the beholder.

[ 8 ] Imagine, my dear friends, a Near Eastern mystery, a mystery site with all the characteristics that a Near Eastern mystery site would have had in the first centuries after the founding of Christianity. In those ancient times, traditions still existed everywhere in which participants were deeply initiated into these mysteries. But everywhere there was also, to a greater or lesser extent, an awareness of the rules that had to be applied to the soul in order to gain certain insights—insights that led, in particular, deep into the very core of the human soul and out into the universe. And it was precisely in these Near Eastern mysteries, in the first centuries after the emergence of Christianity, that a major question preoccupied them.

[ 9 ] These mysteries had, after all, witnessed infinite wisdom flowing through their places of sacrifice. And you need only read what is described in my book Christianity as a Mystical Fact—to the extent that it could be characterized in a public book at that time—and you will see that all this wisdom of the mysteries ultimately tended toward an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And there was, then, the great question in these Near Eastern mysteries: How will the immense magnitude of the content—the content of reality—that has flowed to Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha continue to develop within human minds? How will the ancient, the primeval wisdom—which ascended to the inhabitants of the stars and encompassed the knowledge of divine-spiritual beings of the most diverse kinds who guide the universe and human life—how will this primeval wisdom unite with that which has concentrated and coalesced in the Mystery of Golgotha, and with what is now to flow into humanity as impulses emanating from a high solar being—Christ? —That was the burning question of these Near Eastern mysteries.

[ 10 ] There was an initiate upon whose mystical wisdom and mystical experiences this question made a particularly deep impression. I may say that it makes an immensely profound impression when, in the search for karmic connections, one encounters this one individual—truly initiated into such a Near Eastern mystery during the first centuries of Christianity. There is something deeply moving about it because he was completely filled with the desire—despite all the knowledge of initiation science he possessed at the time—to now comprehend the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha: What will happen now? How will these weak human souls be able to take this in?

[ 11 ] And you see, this initiate, with the burning question of Christianity’s fate weighing on his soul, ventured one day beyond the immediate vicinity of his place of mystery, and he witnessed something that made an immensely shocking impression on him. As an initiate, he witnessed—seeing, so to speak—how Julian the Apostate was treacherously murdered by a man; he processed this through the knowledge of an initiate.

[ 12 ] He knew that Julian the Apostate had been initiated, to a certain extent, into the ancient mysteries; that he wanted to preserve and pass on to humanity, in a spiritual sense, what was practiced and lived within those ancient mysteries; that he wanted to unite Christianity with the wisdom of the ancient mysteries; and that he proclaimed, in the spirit of that wisdom: “Alongside the physical sun there is a spiritual sun, and whoever knows the spiritual sun knows Christ.” But this was something that was already regarded as very dangerous during Julian the Apostate’s lifetime, and it led to his treacherous assassination during his campaign against the Persians. That initiate was a part of this: this significant episode in world history.

[ 13 ] Those who have been involved for many years in various aspects of what relates to karmic connections in world history will recall that I once gave a lecture in Stuttgart—I also mentioned it here at the Christmas Conference—on several chapters of occult history, and that I spoke there of the full tragedy, the full tragic intervention of Julian the Apostate in human history.

[ 14 ] This is what this initiate experienced: I would say that the entire body of initiatory knowledge he had absorbed at a Near Eastern mystery site was overshadowed and drowned out by the question: What will become of Christianity? — And through this sign, it now stood before his soul quite clearly and distinctly: A time will come when Christianity will initially be misunderstood; when Christianity will live on only in traditions; and people will know nothing of the sublimity of the Solar Spirit Christ, who lived in Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 15 ] All of this weighed heavily on this person’s soul. And for the rest of his life at that time, he developed a state of mind that became sad and elegiac with regard to the development of Christianity. With the same dismay that such a thing would cause in an initiate, this symptom had a deeply unsettling effect on him. It is indeed something tremendously unsettling to become aware of this. And then one moves on. It was an impression that the initiate in question received, one that made it entirely possible for him to incarnate again soon afterward, even during the Thirty Years’ War; for many extraordinary and interesting incarnations that play a major role in the historical development of humanity occurred during that period.

[ 16 ] He was reincarnated as a woman—actually even before the Thirty Years’ War, at the beginning of the 17th century—and lived only into the period of the Thirty Years’ War, experiencing some of what the Rosicrucians sought to correct during that era, I would say, in a spiritual sense—but this was then drowned out by all that was crude and brutal during the Thirty Years’ War. You need only consider how shortly before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz was written. Alongside this, there were even more significant impulses that had entered humanity at that time, before the Thirty Years’ War had wiped everything out and brutalized it.

[ 17 ] And then came the 19th century. This personality, who had once taken on this significant Julian Apostata symptom through initiation—this personality, who had then passed through the female incarnation in the 17th century—was reborn. And now she poured out everything that had also been internalized through the female incarnation—everything she had held within herself at that time, not in the form of initiatory wisdom, but as a deeply moving emotional content—regarding this symptom that had affected the initiated soul. She now poured all of this, in the last third of the 19th century, into a unique way of viewing the world—a worldview that delved deeply into the discrepancies of human existence.

[ 18 ] Now, this very age of the immediate present tends to make it impossible for those who carry ancient initiatory wisdom from earlier earthly lives into the life of the 19th and 20th centuries to work in such an effective way through their deeds. Therefore, I would say, everything that is undergoing a profound metamorphosis—that appears to become externalized but is in fact becoming internal, that is shifting from the human heart, where the ancient wisdom of initiation once lived, toward the senses and their observations—all of this, undergoing a profound metamorphosis, is now urging itself to express itself through poetry and literature.

[ 19 ] That is why, after all, we have recently seen truly magnificent examples—which are merely incoherent, which, as they are, are not understood at all by the times in which they exist— on which not only did that aspect of the personality that existed at the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century work, but on which something like a shock—one that comes over an initiate, albeit an initiate in already degenerate mysteries, in mysteries that are already in a state of decadence—has also been at work. This emotional upheaval continues to have an effect, pouring forth into poetic and artistic creation, and that which radiates from it in such a peculiar way finds its full expression in Ibsen’s personality.

[ 20 ] And once one has this insight, the development of humanity—in all its mysteries—actually comes to life in what, especially at the end of the 19th century, cannot be the work of a single human being, but rather a situation in which the human being stands in such a way that earlier earthly ages are at work through him.

[ 21 ] One need only broach such a topic to ensure that one will not lose respect—neither for the course of world history nor for the individual who stands before humanity with greatness. One indeed experiences profound emotions in this realm when matters are approached with the necessary seriousness.

[ 22 ] And you see, you’ve probably heard before that there was a kind of alchemist in the early Middle Ages named Basilius Valentinus. When considering the karmic connections in world history—a perspective that can be linked to Basilius Valentinus, the Benedictine monk who produced immensely significant works in medicine and alchemy—something quite remarkable emerges, which truly shows just how difficult it actually is to understand our own time.

[ 23 ] In our time, we experience so many things that are often not only incomprehensible, but also repulsive, ugly, and, in a certain sense, horrifying—and those who consider only the immediate, sensory, and present reality cannot help but be moved by them—as I am—with indignation, disgust, and so on.

[ 24 ] But that is not how things stand for those who see the connections within human history. Things simply aren’t like that! And sometimes today, in some area of life, something occurs that people who see it—quite understandably—can only rail against, finding it repulsive and hideous; and yet there is something about the repulsive and hideous that compels one to stop and stare, terribly fascinated. This will be the case more and more often.

[ 25 ] Well, in the early Middle Ages there was this medical alchemist, Basilius Valentinus, a Benedictine monk who worked extensively in the laboratories of his monastery’s cellars and conducted a series of important investigations. Then there were certain people—his students—who, shortly after his death, wrote down what Basilius Valentinus had told them. And so there are actually hardly any genuine writings by Basilius Valentinus himself; but there are writings by his students that convey much of the true essence of his wisdom, of his alchemical wisdom.

[ 26 ] When I saw one of Basilius Valentinus’s students—who had particularly caught my attention—at a certain time in my life, it dawned on me: He is—in a remarkable way, transformed in terms of his spiritual nature—indeed back again! — He, too, returned in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century.

[ 27 ] But what lived within alchemical elements emerged in a disorderly manner, directed toward the senses, outwardly manifesting itself in a worldview that, so to speak, continually fuses alchemical concepts into sensory observation, so that this individual’s sensory observation yields a grouping of external facts regarding what people do, how things unfold among them, and how they speak to one another—a grouping that is repulsive in many respects. But it is repulsive precisely because the person in question engaged in alchemical work in a previous incarnation, following the teachings of Basilius Valentinus, and is now projecting that into his life. The way people relate to one another in life, what they say to one another, what they do—he does not view this like an ordinary philistine today—he is far from viewing it like an ordinary philistine—but rather he views it through what his soul’s eye has become by having absorbed the impulses from his alchemical past. And so he interweaves the events unfolding among people, turns them into dramas, and becomes Frank Wedekind.

[ 28 ] Isn’t it true that these things may well be viewed solely from the perspective of a longing for genuine insight into human nature? If so, life is not made any poorer by it; on the contrary, it is truly enriched. Take his Hidalla or any other Frank Wedekind play—the kind that makes your head spin when you try to connect the earlier parts with the later ones. But one can also be fascinated by it in a peculiar way, so that one is quite certain: This is not about the philistines sitting in the stalls and passing judgment. They are, of course, entirely justified in doing so from a philistine standpoint, but that is not the point at all. Rather, the point is that world history has brought about something remarkable: that alchemical thinking, carried over through the centuries, is being applied to human life, and human deeds and human speech are being concocted, just as one once did in alchemical laboratories—in an age when alchemy was already in decline—experimenting in retorts, mixing substances and forces, and testing their effects.

[ 29 ] And human lives are, in fact, determined—even as far as the exact moment of their appearance here on Earth is concerned—by fateful, karmic connections. To provide you with a concrete example of this, I would like to point out the following.

[ 30 ] Let us turn our attention back to the time when the Platonic School existed in Greece: Plato, surrounded by a number of students. These students of Plato were truly a diverse group of characters, and what Plato himself describes in the dialogues—where, after all, a wide variety of characters appear as the personalities engaged in discussion with one another—is in many ways a portrait of the Platonic School. There were the most diverse characters in this school at various times.

[ 31 ] Now there were two figures at this Platonic school who, in very different ways, took in what came from Plato’s lips to his students in such a magnificent, world-illuminating manner, and what also developed in conversations with the students.

[ 32 ] One of these two figures, who belonged to the circle of students, was—I would say—a finely chiseled personality during the Greek era, a personality who was particularly open to everything that led Plato, through his theory of ideas, to lift the human spirit away from the earth. We need only imagine, as Plato said everywhere: Opposite the transitory, which confronts us in the individual events of the human environment, stand the eternal Ideas. The material is transitory; it is merely an image of the eternal Idea, which, in ever-successive metamorphoses, passes through the transitory phenomena as the eternal. Thus Plato lifted his students up from the contemplation of transitory, external, sensory things to the eternal Ideas, which, in a sense, hovered as the heavenly above the earthly.

[ 33 ] In this Platonic perspective, human beings themselves were neglected. For in human beings—in whom the Idea becomes immediately alive and concrete—the Platonic way of thinking cannot really be applied: they are too individual. For Plato, the Ideas are, so to speak, something hovering above things. Minerals, crystals, and quartz crystals correspond to this Idea, as do the other external things of the inanimate sensory world. With Goethe, too, he traces the archetypal plant and considers the types. One can proceed in the same way with animals. But with human beings, the living individuality of the Idea must also be traced within each individual human being. It was Aristotle, not Plato, who first brought about the view that the Idea is active in human beings as “entelechy.”

[ 34 ] But there was one of the students who, with complete fervor and devotion, had in fact always followed this “flight to heaven” in Platonism; who, in terms of his spiritual views, could in fact only go along on this flight to heaven, this ascent, this rising above the earth; and who truly, I might say, spoke in sweet, mature words at the Platonic Academy of the sublimity of the Idea that lives and hovers above individual things. This student, who in truth always ascended with his soul toward these Ideas, nevertheless—when he was not living in contemplation but rather, as he so dearly loved to do, moving among the Greeks with his heart and spirit—had the warmest interest in every single person he encountered. He could only turn his affection toward the people he loved so dearly. When he was back in the midst of life, however, his feelings centered on the people—many of whom he loved—for his contemplation kept drawing him away from the earth time and again. He had many whom he loved. And so, in this one personality among Plato’s students, there existed a certain conflict between his emotional life toward living human beings and the soul’s aspiration toward the eternal Ideas in the Platonic sense—whether this student was listening to Plato’s words in the Academy or formulating, in his own sweet and mature words, what Platonism gave him in that aspiration. Something strangely sensitive had entered this personality.

[ 35 ] And now this person was friends with another from the circle of students at the Platonic School—close friends, in fact. But as their friendship developed more and more, and another trait—which I will describe shortly—began to emerge in that friend, the two drifted apart. Not because their love had grown cold, but because they grew apart in their entire way of thinking; life drove them apart. At first they got along well, but later they could no longer understand one another. So that the one I just described—as we would say today—became nervous even when the other spoke in his own way.

[ 36 ] And it was the same with the other man. He was no less inclined to look up to the eternal ideas that had been discussed so vividly in the Platonic school. He, too, was capable of rising above it all, but he lacked the intense emotional interest in the lives of many people that the first man possessed. In contrast, the other took the most intense interest in the ancient myths and legends of the gods that lived on among the people and with which he had become acquainted. He was deeply interested in what we today call Greek mythology—in the figures of Zeus, Athena, and so on. He, so to speak, more or less passed by living human beings, but was deeply, infinitely deeply interested in the gods who, in his view, had once lived on earth and who had to be regarded as the progenitors of the people living today. Thus, he wanted to apply what he was experiencing in the upsurge of his soul specifically to the understanding of the profound myths of the gods and heroes. The relationship to the myths of the gods and heroes was, of course, quite different in Greece—where all of this was still alive, where it existed not merely in books and through tradition—than it is today.

[ 37 ] This individual, who had been a close friend of the other, also outgrew that friendship. Both outgrew that friendship. But now they already belonged together as members of the Platonic School. And this Platonic School had a peculiar characteristic. Its students developed within themselves certain forces that pushed them somewhat apart—forces that, after they had been pressed together for a time in the Platonic School, then sought to push them somewhat apart. And as a result, distinct individualities emerged that were initially closely and intimately connected but then developed in different directions.

[ 38 ] These two figures were born as women during the Renaissance in Italy and returned in the present era in such a way that the first one I described actually came down to Earth too early, and the second one I described came down a little too late. This is precisely related to the strong resolve that is required for such a thing.

[ 39 ] In the case of the first one I described, when he had passed through the gate of death—because his spirit always ascended into the supernatural realm, but without the whole, complete human being, whom he perceived only in his mind— he was therefore able, between death and a new birth, to perceive everything that lived—let us say—in the first hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—as well as some aspects of the second hierarchy, but not the hierarchy closest to human beings, through which one understands how the human body is organized here on Earth.

[ 40 ] A personality developed that had little insight—pre-earthly insight—into the human body; consequently, when it was reborn, it no longer absorbed even the final impulses, descended incompletely into the human body, did not fully immerse itself, but actually always remained floating somewhat outside it.

[ 41 ] The friend from the Platonic School had to wait for the incarnation. The reason for this wait was that, had they actually met—had they been contemporaries—they would not have been able to stand each other. And yet, the one who had told the other so much about his encounters with people—the one who had not mingled with people but had occupied himself only with myths and tales of the gods—the one who had recounted these stories so vividly to the other in a mature, sweet voice—that one was bound to make a significant impression on the other, to lead the way, while the other followed in his footsteps.

[ 42 ] The other, however, because he had already lived on earth in imaginations—in the imaginations of the gods—had come to grasp too intensely, I might say, that which is in and of the human being. For this reason, going beyond his own time, he sought to gather impulses in order to grasp the human body very deeply. Then it happened that he grasped it too deeply, immersing himself too deeply within it.

[ 43 ] And so we see that, in two different fates of two members of the Platonic School, one does not fully embrace his body during his second reincarnation, while the other embraces it too strongly. One cannot fully enter his body; he is driven into it only in his youth, is then soon driven out, and must remain outside: Hölderlin.

[ 44 ] The other is drawn so deeply into his body—submerged by the particular way he was back then—that he becomes too deeply immersed in his organs and falls ill for almost his entire life: Hamerling.

[ 45 ] And so we have before us the great human destinies of the turn of the era and their impulses, and we can gain a sense of how these spiritual impulses actually work. For we must clearly hold this before our souls: An individual such as Hölderlin, who, emerging from the Platonic school, cannot enter his own body but must remain outside it—he experiences, in the dullness of his madness, preparatory impulses for future earthly lives that predestine him for greatness. Likewise the other, Robert Hamerling, through the illness of his body.

[ 46 ] When viewed in the context of destiny, illness and health naturally appear quite different from how they appear when considered solely within the confines of a single earthly life.

[ 47 ] I think, my dear friends, that it may well be that a holy reverence for the mysterious events brought about by the spiritual world arises in the human mind precisely through such a way of looking at things. Truly, I must say it again and again: these reflections are being presented not to satisfy a craving for sensation, but to lead us ever deeper and deeper into the understanding of spiritual life. And it is only through this deeper penetration into spiritual life that external, sensory life—the life of human beings—can be explained.

[ 48 ] I will continue these reflections tomorrow.