The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] From last Sunday’s reflections, you will certainly have seen that human beings, as they are physically and through their upbringing in the present, do not easily bring into their current incarnation—even one as remarkable as the one I spoke of last Sunday—the spiritual content that seeks to enter from earlier incarnations. For we are, after all, living in the age of the development of the conscious soul—that soul development which particularly cultivates the intellect, which today dominates the whole of life, even though people often cry out for feeling and emotion; that capacity of the soul which can emancipate itself most fully from the elemental human nature—from what the human being carries within as his deeper spiritual essence.

[ 2 ] This awareness of the intellectual’s emancipation becomes evident when we speak of the “cold intellect”—through which people express their selfishness, their indifference, and their lack of compassion toward others, and often even toward those closest to them. The “cold intellect” refers to the pursuit of all those paths that do not lead to the ideals of the soul, but rather result in mapping out one’s life course based on utilitarian considerations, and so on.

[ 3 ] These things express a sense of how the intellectual, the rational, and the intellectualistic aspects emancipate themselves from the human element within a person. And anyone who fully comprehends the high degree to which today’s souls are intellectualized will then also understand, in each individual case, how karma must impart to these very souls that which they themselves experienced in terms of high spirituality during past ages.

[ 4 ] Just consider the following. Let’s take a very general example now—I showed you a specific example last time— but now, in very general terms, consider a soul who, in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha or in the centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, lived in such a way that the spiritual world was a matter of course to them, so that, based on their own experiences, they could speak of the spiritual world as a world that is just as real as the colorful, warm, or cold world of the senses.

[ 5 ] All of this lies within the soul. All of this exists between death and a new birth—or, during repeated such periods, in relation to the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies. Many things have been worked out within this soul.

[ 6 ] But now, precisely because of other karmic connections, let us say, such a soul is to incarnate in a body that is entirely attuned to intellectualism—a body that, therefore, absorbs from contemporary civilization only the commonly accepted concepts, which in fact relate solely to the external world. In that case, the only possibility is that, for this incarnation, whatever spirituality comes through retreats into the subconscious, and that such a personality, in the intellect it develops, may display a certain idealism—a inclination toward all manner of beautiful, good, and true ideals—but still fails to bring the things that lie within the soul up from the subconscious into ordinary consciousness. There are many such souls today. And for those who are able to view the world in the right way with an eye trained in the spiritual, many a face today contradicts what is revealed in the people in question. The face says: There is a great deal of spirituality at the core of the soul. But as soon as the person speaks, they do not speak of spirituality at all. Therefore, there has never been a time when faces have contradicted what people say to such a high degree as in the present day.

[ 7 ] Anyone who wants to understand that strength, energy, endurance, and sacred enthusiasm are necessary to transform what already belongs to the present age— intellectualism—so that thoughts and ideas may rise into the spiritual world, and one may find the path upward to the Spirit through ideas just as one does downward to nature—whoever wishes to understand this must be clear about the fact that, first and foremost, intellectualism presents the strongest conceivable obstacles to the revelation of that which is spiritual within the soul. And only when one is, so to speak, attentive to this will one, as an anthroposophist, find the inner enthusiasm to take in the ideas of anthroposophy—ideas that, after all, must already reckon with the intellectualism of the age and must, so to speak, don the garb of contemporary intellectualism. But such a person will also be able to be imbued with the realization that, through the ideas of anthroposophy—which do not pertain to the external sensory world—they are destined to grasp that to which these ideas refer: the spiritual. Nevertheless, immersing oneself in the ideas of anthroposophy remains the surest way to lead people today—if they are only willing—upward into spirituality.

[ 8 ] What I have just said as my final sentence, my dear friends, is something that has perhaps only been possible to say for the past two or three decades. Before that, it wasn’t possible. For before that—even though the Michael era had already begun at the end of the 1970s—it was still the case that the ideas the times presented to people, even among idealists, were so strongly focused on the sensory world that a transition from intellectualism to spirituality in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s of the last century was possible only in exceptional cases.

[ 9 ] Today I would like to illustrate the effect of this fact using an example. I would like to show you that in this age—into which anthroposophy, as the view of the spiritual, must be placed for the reasons I have just elaborated in this lecture series for members—it is exceptionally true that the spiritual, which has been flowing into souls from earlier times, has been held back and must be held back. Indeed, at the end of the last century, without being able to reveal itself in any way at all, it had to withdraw in the face of intellectualism.

[ 10 ] Please understand exactly what I mean. Let’s suppose that a certain individual lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and possessed a strong spirituality carried over from earlier incarnations: This person immerses themselves in the education of that time—which was intellectualistic, thoroughly intellectualistic. But in the individual I am referring to, the aftereffects of that spirituality are still so strong that it wants to break through—it truly wants to break through. Yet intellectualism cannot tolerate this. The individual is raised in an intellectualist environment; in the social circles they enter, in their profession—everywhere—they encounter intellectualism; and what the personality carries within its soul cannot fit into this intellectualism. It would be the kind of personality of whom one might say: This person is actually as if called to anthroposophy. — But the personality cannot become an anthroposophist, because precisely that which, had it been able to enter the intellect from the spirituality of a previous incarnation, would have become anthroposophy. It cannot become anthroposophy; it remains behind, suffering, as it were, a shock in the face of intellectualism. What else can the personality do but, at most, treat intellectualism everywhere as something she does not wish to approach, so that what is in her soul may emerge in some future incarnation? Of course, it will not emerge perfectly then, because it does not correspond to the age. It may even be like stammering; but one will see in the personality that it shrinks back everywhere from going too far, from being touched by the intellectualism of the age.

[ 11 ] I’d like to give you an example of this. First, I would like to recall a figure from antiquity who is often and repeatedly cited here in connection with a wide variety of topics: Plato. Plato, the philosopher of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., lives, in a sense, like a soul that anticipates much of what humanity would later contemplate over the centuries. And indeed, when I referred to the great spiritual teachings of the School of Chartres, I pointed out that the Platonic spirit had long been present in the development of Christianity and that, in a certain sense, it found its expression precisely in these great teachers of the School of Chartres, just as it could be expressed at that time.

[ 12 ] One must simply be clear about this: Plato’s mind is, first and foremost, turned toward the world of ideas. Yet, my dear friends, one must not imagine that, for Plato, an “idea” is the same abstract monstrosity that ideas are for us today when we succumb to ordinary consciousness. For Plato, the Idea was almost something like the Persian gods, the Amschaspands, who stood by Ahura Mazda as active genii; active genii that were accessible only through imaginative contemplation—that, for Plato, was what Ideas actually were: essential beings. Yet he no longer described them with the vividness with which such things were described in earlier times. He describes them, one might say, as shadows of beings. And this gives rise to the abstract notion that Ideas are perceived by people as increasingly shadowy. But Plato, as his legacy lives on, delves so deeply into his world of Ideas that one might say almost the entire wisdom of that era pours into it. One need only take his later dialogues, and one will find in Plato astrological and astronomical concepts, cosmological insights, marvelous psychological observations, and insights into the history of peoples—all within a kind of spirituality that refines the spiritual, so to speak, to the level of the idea, rendering it shadow-like.

[ 13 ] But all of this lives on in Plato. And above all, the following view lives on in Plato: Ideas are the causes of everything that exists in the sensory world. Wherever we look in the sensory world, whatever we see, it is the outward expression, the outward manifestation of Ideas. — Yet another element enters into Plato’s worldview, one that has also become known to the world through a catchphrase that has been widely misunderstood and also widely misused: the catchphrase of Platonic love. Spiritualized love—which has shed as much as possible of the selfishness that is often still mixed in with love—this spiritualized devotion to the world, to life, to humanity, to God, to the Idea—this is something that thoroughly permeates the Platonic view of life. And this is what recedes in certain eras, only to shine forth again and again. For Platonism is taken up time and again, forming here and there the very thing toward which people strive to ascend; it also provided the impetus for what was taught at the School of Chartres.

[ 14 ] Well, Plato has often been seen as a kind of precursor to Christianity. But to think that Plato was a precursor to Christianity is to misunderstand Christianity. For Christianity is not a doctrine; rather, it is a way of life that is rooted in the Mystery of Golgotha, and one can speak of true Christianity only from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha onward. One can, however, speak of there having been Christians in the sense that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, they revered that being—who was later recognized as Christ within the earthly life of humanity—as a solar being, seeing the same essence in the solar being. If one wishes to speak of precursors of Christianity in this sense, one must speak of many students of the Mysteries as such precursors; then one can also speak of Plato as a precursor of Christianity. But, of course, one must understand the matter correctly.

[ 15 ] Well, I mentioned this here some time ago: that while Plato was still alive—not exactly in Plato’s school of philosophy, but under Plato’s influence—I even mentioned it decades ago—an artist came of age, not out of Platonic philosophy, but from the Platonic spirit, who—after passing through other incarnations—was reborn as Goethe, and who, karmically, transformed in the Jupiter region that which came from his earlier incarnations, particularly from the Platonic current, so that it could become the very kind of wisdom that permeates everything in Goethe’s work. We can thus already glimpse a noble connection between Plato and this very individual—not a disciple of Plato, but a follower of Plato; for he is not a philosopher, as has been said, but an artist of the Greek era. Yet Plato’s eye still fell upon him, taking in the immense promise of this young man to whom reference is made here.

[ 16 ] Well, Plato actually had a hard time carrying through the ages that followed—through the supersensible world—what he carried within his soul during his incarnation as Plato. He had a very hard time. For although Platonism flared up here and there, when Plato looked down upon what was developing below as Platonism, it often meant a terrible disruption of his supersensible soul and spiritual life.

[ 17 ] Not that one would therefore wish to condemn or criticize what lived on as Platonism. Of course, Plato’s soul carried over, bit by bit, more and more of what lay within it into the ages that followed. But Plato in particular—who was, after all, still connected to all the mysteries of antiquity, and of whom I could say that his theory of ideas had a certain Persian influence—Plato in particular had a hard time, once he had completed his time on earth—and for him it was actually quite a long time—in coming to a new incarnation; he actually had a hard time entering Christian culture, into which he nevertheless had to enter. And so one can say: Even though, in the sense I have just expressed, Plato can still be described as a forerunner of Christianity, the entire orientation of Plato’s soul was such that, when he was ready to descend back to Earth, it became extraordinarily difficult for him to find an organization, a body, into which to carry his earlier teachings in such a way that they would now appear with a Christian hue, with Christian nuances. Moreover, Plato was Greek through and through, with all the Eastern influence that the Greeks possessed and that the Romans lacked entirely. In a certain sense, Plato was a soul who carried philosophy up into the realm of higher poetry, and Plato’s philosophical dialogues are artistic. Everywhere there is soul, and everywhere within it lies precisely that Platonic love—to be understood in the truest sense—which also unmistakably reveals its Eastern origin.

[ 18 ] Plato is Greek. The civilization within which he can embody himself—once he is ready for embodiment, once he has, so to speak, grown old enough for the supernatural world—is Roman and Christian. I would like to say, if I may put it simply: That is where he must now enter. There, too, he must muster all his strength to push back against what resists him. For inherent in Plato’s nature is a rejection of the prosaic, sober Roman world, of the legal Roman world—in fact, a rejection of everything Roman.

[ 19 ] And there is also a certain difficulty inherent in Plato’s nature when it comes to embracing Christianity, because he, in a sense, represents the very pinnacle of the pre-Christian worldview, and it was also evident from outward appearances that Plato’s true nature could not easily merge with Christianity. For what was it, then, that became absorbed into Christianity here in the sensory world? Neoplatonism. But that was something entirely different from true Platonism. Admittedly, a kind of “Platonizing” Gnosticism and the like did emerge, but there was simply no way to carry the immediate essence of Plato over into Christianity. And so it was also difficult for Plato to somehow submerge himself into the world from all the activity that he carried within himself as the Platonic essence and now had to bring back into the world through its results. He had to set that activity aside.

[ 20 ] And so, in the tenth century of the Middle Ages, he incarnated as the nun Hroswitha, that now-forgotten but magnificent figure of the tenth century who truly embraced Christianity in a genuinely Platonic sense and who, in essence, brought an immense amount of Platonism into the Central European spirit. She belonged to the Gandersheim Abbey in the Brunswick region and contributed an immense amount of Platonism to the Central European spirit. Essentially, only a woman could have done that at the time. Had Plato’s essence not appeared through a woman’s perspective, it would not have been able to be embraced by Christianity during that era. But Roman culture, which was, after all, pervasive in all areas of education at the time, also had to be assimilated—I would say, assimilated almost by necessity. Thus we see this nun develop into that remarkable personality who wrote Latin dramas in the style of Terence, the Roman poet, which are truly extraordinarily significant.

[ 21] Yes, you see, one might say it’s almost all too easy to misunderstand Plato when he comes up in conversation. I’ve mentioned several times how Friedrich Hebbel jotted down an idea for a play—it exists only as a rough outline—in which he wanted to humorously depict the reincarnated Plato sitting in a high school classroom. That’s poetic imagination, of course, but Hebbel wanted to depict this: reincarnated Plato sitting in a high school classroom while the teacher—the high school teacher—goes through the Platonic dialogues, and reincarnated Plato receives the worst grades for his interpretations of the Platonic dialogues. Hebbel jotted this down as material for a play. He never actually developed it further. But it is, so to speak, a hint of just how easily Plato can be misunderstood. He can easily be misunderstood. That is a trait, I would say, that has particularly interested me in my exploration of the Platonic tradition, because this misunderstanding is actually extraordinarily instructive for finding the right paths for the continuation of Platonic individuality.

[ 22 ] It is indeed highly interesting that a German philologist has come forward who has provided scholarly proof—I don’t recall the name right now, some Schmidt or Müller—who has provided irrefutable proof that the nun Hroswitha never wrote a single play, that nothing at all can be attributed to her, but that some advisor to Emperor Maximilian forged it all—which is, of course, nonsense. But the misunderstanding lies precisely with Plato.

[ 23 ] And so we truly see an intense Christian-Platonic spiritual substance, combined with a Central European-Germanic spirit, in the individuality of the tenth-century nun Hroswitha. The entire cultural heritage of that era lives on in this woman, so to speak. She is, in fact, an astonishing woman. And it is precisely this woman who is now participating in those supersensible developments I have spoken to you about: the transition of the teachers of Chartres into the spiritual world, the descent of those who would later become Aristotelians, and the Michael Schooling. Yet she participates in all this in a most remarkable way. One might say that here the masculine spirit of Plato and the feminine spirit of the nun Hroswitha are in conflict with one another, both of whom had their own contributions to spiritual individuality. Had one of these incarnations been insignificant—which is usually the case—such an inner conflict would not have taken place. But in the case of this particular individual, this inner conflict actually persisted throughout the entire period.

[ 24 ] So we see that when individuality is once again ripe to return to Earth in the nineteenth century, it develops into the kind I have just described hypothetically: Plato’s entire spirituality is held back, pent up before the intellectuality of the nineteenth century, unwilling to approach it. And to make this easier, the feminine capacity of the nun Hroswitha resides within the same soul. Thus, this soul manifests in such a way that everything she possesses from her female incarnation—from her significant, radiant female incarnation—makes it easy for her to reject intellectualism wherever she pleases.

[ 25 ] And so, in the nineteenth century, this individuality emerges anew on earth; it grows into the intellectuality of the nineteenth century, yet in reality it only ever allows that intellectuality to approach it from the outside, while inwardly it recoils from it to a certain extent; instead, in a non-intellectualistic way, it puts forward Platonism in consciousness and, wherever it can, speaks of the fact that ideas live in everything. This life in ideas became something entirely self-evident to this personality. But the body was such that one always had the feeling: The mind cannot actually give full expression to all that Platonism seeks to bring forth. On the other hand, this personality was able, in a beautiful, magnificent way, to bring to life what lies hidden behind Platonic love.

[ 26 ] But let’s go even further. In her youth, this figure had something like dreams that Central Europe—where she had lived as the nun Hroswitha—could not truly be Roman; she imagined this Central Europe as a new Greece—here Platonism comes through—and portrayed Macedonia, the rougher region that stood in contrast to Greece, as the European East. These were strange dreams that lived within this figure; one could actually see from them that she wanted to imagine the modern world—in which she herself lived—as Greece and Macedonia. Time and again, especially in her youth, this figure felt the urge to envision the modern world—Europe as a whole—as an enlarged Greece and Macedonia. It is very interesting.

[ 27 ] Well, the person I’m talking about here is Karl Julius Schröer. And all you need to do is go through Karl Julius Schröer’s writings with what I’ve now compiled for you: from the very beginning, he actually speaks in a quite Platonic manner. But he is wary—it was something quite remarkable—he is wary, I would say with a womanly fastidiousness, of intellectualism in those areas where he cannot make use of it.

[ 28 ] Whenever he spoke of Novalis, he always liked to say: “Yes, Novalis—he is precisely the kind of mind that cannot be grasped by modern intellectualism, which knows nothing beyond the fact that two times two equals four.”

[ 29 ] And Karl Julius Schröer has written a history of German literature in the nineteenth century. Take a look at it: wherever one can approach the subject with an emotional connection to Platonism, it is very good; but where intellectualism is required, the flow of the text suddenly dries up. He doesn’t come across as a professor at all. He also writes at length—many pages—about Socrates, who, in his more recent incarnation, was completely overlooked in the wider world and about whom the other literary histories are silent; ^{1The preceding sentence was corrected following a thorough re-examination of the original stenographic transcripts. For more details, see “Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe” No. 99/100, Easter 1988, pages 68–69.} As for those who are famous, he sometimes writes just a few lines about them. When this literary history was published, oh, all the literary bigwigs threw their hands up in horror! One very famous bigwig at the time was Emil Kuh. He said: “This literary history wasn’t written by a mind at all, but merely flowed from a wrist.” — Karl Julius Schröer also edited an edition of Faust. A professor from Graz—who, incidentally, was otherwise a nice man—wrote such a vile review of it that, I believe, ten duels were fought among the students in Graz, for and against Schröer. It was indeed a grave misjudgment. It went so far that I once encountered this low opinion of Schröer in a peculiar way at a gathering in Weimar, where Erich Schmidt was a highly respected figure and dominated everything whenever he was among others. The conversation turned to which princesses and princes at the court of Weimar were intelligent and which were foolish. This was being discussed at length. And Erich Schmidt said: “Yes, Princess Reuss—who was, after all, one of the daughters of the Grand Duchess of Weimar—is not a clever woman, for she considers Schröer a great man.” That was his reasoning.

[ 30 ] Well, you see, follow all of this through to that wonderful little book, Goethe and Love: there you will truly find what one can say about Platonic love in everyday life without resorting to intellectualism. The fact that there is something extraordinary in the style and tone of this little book Goethe and Love struck me so beautifully once when I was talking about it with Sister Schröers. She called the style “utterly sweet with ripeness.” And so it is. It’s a beautiful expression: utterly sweet with ripeness. Everything is so—in this case, one cannot say “concentrated,” but rather everything is so elegantly and delicately crafted. Elegance, in general, is particularly characteristic of him.

[ 31 ] But now, this Platonic spirituality—with its rejection of intellectualism, this Platonic spirituality that seeks to enter this body—also made a very special, a strange impression. When one looked at Schröer, one could perceive quite clearly: this soul is not entirely within the body. And as he grew older, one could see how this soul—because it did not really want to be fully within the body of that present moment—withdrew from that body bit by bit. First, his fingers became swollen and thick; then the soul withdrew further and further, and Schröer ultimately ended up with senile dementia.

[ 32 ] Not Schröer’s entire individuality, but specifically certain traits of his were then transferred to my Capesius in The Mysteries, Professor Capesius. One might well say: Here we have a brilliant example of the fact that the spiritual currents of antiquity can be carried into the present only under certain conditions. And one might well say: In Schröer, a reluctance toward intellectuality was evident. Had he attained intellectuality and been able to unite it with the spirituality of Plato, anthroposophy would have come into being.

[ 33 ] But here we see in his karma how his—I would say—fatherly love for his successor Goethe—which came about in the way I have told you, and Plato had a fatherly love for him at that time—how this love is transformed and how Schröer becomes an ardent admirer of Goethe. This emerges once again in this form. Schröer’s admiration for Goethe had something extraordinarily personal about it.

[ 34 ] He wanted to write a biography of Goethe in his old age. He told me about it before I left Vienna in the late 1980s. Then he wrote to me about it. But he never spoke of this Goethe biography he wanted to write in any other way than by saying: “Goethe always visits me in my living room.” — There was something so personal about it, which was, as I have hinted, karmically predestined in this way.

[ 35 ] The Goethe biography never came to fruition because Schröer succumbed to senile dementia at that very time. But one can certainly find an illuminating interpretation of the overall style of his writings if one is familiar with these antecedents, which I have just discussed.

[ 36 ] Thus we see how, in Schröer—who has in fact been all but forgotten—Goetheanism came to a standstill at the threshold of intellectualism, which had been transformed into spiritualism. What else could one actually do, if one were, I might say, inspired by Schröer, other than to carry Goetheanism further into anthroposophy! One had, so to speak, no other choice. And often this moving image appeared before my inner eye: how Schröer brings the old spirituality to Goethe, how he is able to penetrate it all the way to intellectualism, and how Goethe must be grasped anew through modern intellectualism elevated to the spiritual realm in order to truly understand him completely. This image did not come easily to me at all; for—because Schröer’s nature could not be immediately grasped—a certain opposition to Schröer always crept into my spiritual striving.

[ 37 ] For example, when Schröer was giving seminars at the university in Vienna—both in oral presentations and written assignments—I once offered a rather twisted interpretation of Mephisto, simply to refute Schröer, the teacher with whom I was not yet on such intimate terms at the time. And so some opposition began to stir. But, as I said, what else could one do but clear away the blockage that had arisen there and truly carry Goetheanism over into anthroposophy!

[ 38 ] So you can see how the course of world history actually unfolds. It unfolds in such a way that one can see: what we have in the present does indeed arise amid obstacles and hindrances, but on the other hand, it is also well prepared. And actually, when you read this wonderful, hymn-like portrayal of womanhood by Karl Julius Schröer—when you read his beautiful essay, “Goethe and Women,” which he wrote as an appendix to his literary history, German Poetry of the Nineteenth Century—when you take all of this in, yes, then you will say to yourself: There truly lives within it a sense of the value of women and the essence of womanhood, which is an echo of what the nun Hroswitha lived as her own essence. These two preceding incarnations resonate so wonderfully together in Schröer that their abrupt end certainly seems tragically poignant. But on the other hand, it is precisely in Schröer that a spiritual world of facts emerges at the end of the 19th century, one that has an immensely enlightening effect on the very question: How do we bring spirituality into contemporary life?

[ 39 ] That is what I wanted to use to wrap up this series of lectures.