The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Individuality of Elias, John, Raphael, Novalis

[ 1 ] It was impossible for me to speak to you yesterday or the day before. Yet the Michaelmas-Spirit of the present time, that in our hearts, in our souls, must certainly radiate out tomorrow, to this end I cannot allow the chance to pass by to have spoken to you, at least briefly, my dear friends.

[ 2 ] That I am able to do so, is possible only due to the devoted care of our physician friend Ita Wegman. And so I hope that today I will be able to say to you, what I would certainly like to say to you concerning this, or rather, on the occasion of this festival.

[ 3 ] Recently, my dear friends, we have had much to say about the influx of the Michael-Force into the events, the spiritual events, of human life on earth. And it will surely rank among the finest achievements—I might say, of the anthroposophical interpretation of the signs of the times—when we are eventually able to add properly attuned Michael festivals to the other festivals of the year. Yet that will only be possible once the tremendous power of Michael-Mind (which today is merely sensed or dimly perceived) has passed into a sufficient number of souls capable of forming the right human starting point for such a festival.

[ 4 ] At present, we can, so to speak, evoke Michael-Spirit around the time of Michaelmas by devoting ourselves to preparatory thoughts for a future Michael festival season for humanity. And such preparatory thoughts become particularly active within us when we turn our gaze toward what we have seen at work over such long periods, partly on Earth and partly in supersensible worlds, to prepare for what can be accomplished for the evolution of humanity, during the course of this century, by those souls who truly, and in the right spirit, feel drawn to the Michael stream.

[ 5 ] And my dear friends, to make it comprehensible that you belong among these souls, insofar as you sincerely lean toward the anthroposophical movement, was precisely my aim in recent weeks, and particularly in those discussions when I spoke about certain aspects of the karma of the Anthroposophical Society itself.

[ 6 ] We can point to something else—and wish to do so this very day—that brings before our souls beings who are intimately connected, and will become increasingly so, with what has been described here as the Michael-Stream; we can turn our gaze toward beings who make a profound impression on a large part of humanity—at least across two successive incarnations—yet who only coalesce into a unified whole for us when we recognize them as the successive incarnations of a single being.

[ 7 ] When we cast our spiritual gaze back to ancient times, we see the prophetic nature of Elijah (Elias in Greek) emerging within the Jewish tradition. We know the significance—in terms of setting a goal—that this purposive power of the prophet Elijah held for the people of the Old Testament and, consequently, for humanity as a whole. We have also pointed out, how over the course of time the entity which was present in Elijah reappeared at pivotal moments in the earthly evolution of humanity, reappearing in such a way that Christ Jesus himself could bestow upon this entity the initiation required for human evolution. We pointed out how the entity of Elijah appeared again in Lazarus-John. These two are actually one and the same figure, as you will already have gathered from my book Christianity as Mystical Fact.

[ 8 ] We have further seen how this entity reappears in that world-painter, who was able to let his artistic expression soar so powerfully around the Mystery of Golgotha. And we have seen how that which—driven by a deeply Christian impulse akin to the very essence of Christianity—strives to manifest in color and form, lived in Raphael, how it rose again in the poet Novalis, and how that which Raphael had set before humanity in the most beautiful colors and forms was revealed through Novalis in beautiful words. We see, thus following one another in time, beings who are brought together into a unity when incarnation is understood.

[ 9 ] We know—for I have frequently drawn attention to these matters—how a person, having passed through the gateway of death, enters the worlds of the stars, how that which we outwardly designate as stars in the physical sense is merely the external sign of spiritual worlds that look down upon us, yet actively participate everywhere in the deeds of human evolution.

[ 10 ] We know that man passes through the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in order to return to earthly existence once he has worked out his karma with the beings of these spheres and with those human souls who are also in the life beyond.

[ 11 ] Let us, from this perspective, consider Raphael as he passes through the gateway of death, how with an artistry that already shone with starlight here on earth, he enters the realm of the starry worlds, the realm of spiritual evolution. We perceive the following, my dear friends: We see Raphael entering the lunar sphere and connecting with the spirits who dwell there, spirits who are, in fact, the spiritual individualities of humanity’s great primordial teachers of old, whose wisdom had deeply inspired him during his incarnation as Elijah. We see him uniting, spiritually, with these lunar beings and with all the souls alongside whom he had traversed earlier stages of earthly existence, uniting with the spiritual origins of the Earth and with those essential realities that made humanity, and the divine permeation of the earthly realm, possible in the first place. We see Raphael truly among his own kind, united with those with whom he had most cherished being together during his life as Elijah, for they were the very ones who, at the dawn of earthly existence, had set the goal for this earthly life.

[ 12 ] We then see him traversing the sphere of Mercury, where, together with the great cosmic healers, he shapes—for the sake of his own spirituality—all that enabled him to create, out of his innate gifts, works of such health, such infinite health, in color and line. Everything he painted upon canvas or wall, works that brought such great solace and infinite inspiration to those with understanding, and that shone with such radiant light, all he painted revealed itself to him within the cosmic context made possible by his passage through the beings of the Mercury sphere.

[ 13 ] And so he—who on earth had unfolded such love for art, who had become wholly immersed in the love of color and line—was transported to the sphere of Venus. And Venus, in turn, lovingly bore him over to the Sun-existence which had lived within the incarnations known to us thus far, the Sun-existence through which, as the prophet Elijah, he imparted great and purposeful truths to humanity through his own nation.

[ 14 ] We see how he is able to live intimately once more within the sphere of the Sun—now in a different way than when he was a companion of Christ Jesus on earth—experiencing anew what he had gone through when, through the initiation by Christ Jesus, he was transformed from Lazarus into John.

[ 15 ] And we see how, in his cosmic reflection of the human heart, he beholds—in luminous world brilliance—that which he has depicted in such luminous light for the believers in Christ Jesus.

[ 16 ] And we then see, within the sphere of Jupiter, how he penetrates with wisdom that which he had carried within the depths of his own being. We see how he is able to synthesize—joining forces both with spirits like the later Goethe and with others who had more or less gone astray, yet who nevertheless carried the essence of world-being and world-thinking over into the realm of the magical—and lay the foundation of his magical idealism through sharing in the evolution of the later Éliphas Lévi. We see how he participates in all that lived over there within Swedenborg.

[ 17 ] And there is something else remarkable, my dear friends, deeply significant. Herman Grimm, a person utterly devoted to Raphael, set out four times to write Raphael’s life story. Yet he never managed, even though he so beautifully rounded off his biography of Michelangelo. He never managed to truly portray Raphael’s earthly life in a way that satisfied him. Time and again, Herman Grimm produced work regarding Raphael’s life that he himself deemed imperfect.

[ 18 ] And so his first book on Raphael appeared, a work that was originally intended to be a biography of the artist. What is it, in fact? It presents a re-telling of Vasari’s old anecdotes about Raphael. Yet it offers nothing regarding Raphael’s actual biography. Instead, it presents something entirely different: a description of what Raphael became here on Earth, but by means of the veneration, recognition, and human understanding that appeared only after his death. Herman Grimm recounts how people thought about Raphael, how Italians, Frenchmen, and Germans viewed him as the centuries unfolded. He narrates the biography of the “idea” of Raphael that lived on here on Earth after the artist’s death. He finds a way to approach what endured of Raphael in human memory, in human veneration, and in human understanding. He does not, however, find the means to portray Raphael’s earthly life.

[ 19 ] And after making four attempts, he says: What can actually be done for Raphael personally is simply to describe how one painting transitions into the next, as if they had been painted by a celestial being who had never truly touched the earth with its earthly life. The paintings exist, and one can look entirely past Raphael, the man who painted them, by focusing instead on the sequence of what is expressed within their inner content.

[ 20 ] And so, in fact, when Herman Grimm spoke about Raphael once more shortly before his death, when he once again attempted to put pen to paper, he spoke only of Raphael’s paintings, not of Raphael’s earthly personality.

[ 21 ] This earthly personality of Raphael was just what was fully taken up and fully there, my dear friends, through what Lazarus-John had given this soul, so that it might flow forth into color and line for humanity.

[ 22 ] And then this being lived again, living in such a way that in a sense this Raphael-life could manifest itself once again in Novalis, in turn in a less than thirty-year lifetime. We see Raphael die young and Novalis die young, a single entity, originating from the Elijah-John stream, manifesting itself to humanity in two different ways. In doing so, it prepared for the Michael-Spirit in an artistic and poetic manner, having been sent down to the people of Earth to bring premonitions of, to prepare the way for, to forebode (als Bote) the streaming of Michael.

[ 23 ] And then we see Raphael’s great artistry emerge in the captivating poetry of Novalis, poetry that speaks so deeply to the heart. Human hearts could become imbued with what human eyes had beheld in the paintings of Raphael, as it reappeared once again in Novalis.

[ 24 ] And when we consider this Novalis, how the life of Raphael, so sensitively perceived by Herman Grimm, resonates within him! His beloved dies while still young. He, too, is young. What kind of earthly life does he wish to lead now that she has died? He expresses it himself by saying that his earthly life is to be a following of her into death. He is already poised to cross over into the supersensible. He is already poised to lead the life of Raphael again, not truly bestirred by the Earth, but wishing instead to live out his magical idealism doing poetry, not inwardly being stirred by earthly life.

[ 25 ] And how do we perceive what he has poured into his fragments, how do we see it when we allow it to work on us with great effect? It has such a profound effect because everything one encounters in immediate sensory reality, everything the eyes can see and perceive as beautiful here on earth, everything appears in Novalis’s poetry, through the "magical idealism" living in his soul, everything appears in an almost celestial poetic radiance. Through this poetic-magical idealism, he knows how to make even the most insignificant material things rise again in a luminous, spiritual glow.

[ 26 ] And so, in Novalis, we see a brilliant precursor of the Michael streaming, my dear friends, which is destined to guide you all now while you are alive, and which will lead you, once you have passed through the gateway of death, to encounter all those, including the being of whom I spoke today, in the spiritual, supersensible world, to encounter all those with whom you are to prepare the work that must come to pass at the end of this century and that is to lead humanity beyond the great crisis in which it is currently immersed.

[ 27 ] Only if this work, this great, mighty permeation with Michael-Force, with Michael-Will, which is, after all, nothing other than that which precedes the Christ-Will and Christ-Force, preceding it properly to prepare the way to implant it into earthly life, only if this Michael-Force can truly triumph over the demon-dragon-helm, with which you are well acquainted, and only if all of you in the light of anthroposophical wisdom who have taken Michael-Thought into yourselves, only if you have embraced this Michael-Thought with faithful hearts and deep love, and only if you strive to make tomorrow’s Michael Festival the starting point for something that full of strength and power can reveal Michael-Thought in your souls but also can bring it to life in all your activities, only then will you be faithful servants of this Michael-Thought, and only then can you become noble partners in the Michael-Mindfulness that is destined to prevail in earthly evolution through anthroposophy.

[ 28 ] When (at least in the near future) the Michael impulse becomes fully alive in four times twelve people, individuals who can be known as such not by themselves, but through the leadership of the Goetheanum in Dornach, and if leaders arise from among these four times twelve to inspire the spirit of the Michael-Festival, then we can look toward the light that through Michael-Streaming and Michael-Activity will spread over humanity in the future.

[ 29 ] And so it is. And so, my dear friends, I have tried to summon the strength to tell you at least this much today. My strength would not suffice for more at this moment. Yet this is what I hope may speak to your souls through the following words. Embrace this Michael-Thought in the spirit of what a heart loyal to Michael can feel when Michael appears, clad in the Sun’s garment of light-rays, pointing the way to what must come to pass so that this Michael-Garment, this garment of light, may transform into these undulating waves of words that are Christ-Words, that are World-Words, that can be World-Logos transformed into Human-Logos.

Therefore, let these be my words to you today:

Sprung from powers of the Sun,
Luminescent, worlds grace-bestowing
Spirit-powers, to Michael’s radiant robe
You are by thought divine pre-ordained.

He, the foreboder of Christ, teaches you
Human-borne, holy Worlds-Willing;
You brightly unified beings of etheric worlds,
Carry the Word of Christ to humankind.

Thus the herald of Christ appears
To thirstily waiting souls;
To them your word of light should shine
In the world-age of Spirit-Man.

You disciples of spirit-knowing,
To take up Michel’s wise beckoning,
Take up world-will’s word of love
Actively into the soul’s lofty goal