The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. An Episodic Reflection on the Concept of Love in Relation to the Concept of Mysticism

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Today I would like to elaborate a bit further on the topic I have been exploring in my reflections over the past few days. Today I would like to begin with the question: How old is love, really?

[ 2 ] My dear friends, I have no doubt that the vast majority of people, based on a certain superficial view of things, will immediately answer: Love is as old as humanity itself. - But anyone accustomed to speaking from the perspective of cultural history—which they recognize as permeated by intellectual impulses—will give you a different answer to this question, because they strive to view things concretely rather than in general, vague terms. Love, my dear friends, is at most 700 years old! Read all of ancient Roman and Greek literature and poetry, and you will find nowhere what we today associate with the concept of love. And if you read Plutarch, you will find that he clearly distinguishes between the two concepts of Venus and Amor in a very characteristic way. The way love appears in literature—particularly in poetry—and how it forms the centerpiece of so many poetic outpourings, is no older than about 600 to 700 years. That is to say, the concept of love—with the meaning as it applies to people today, as it is taught to them today—has only been present in people’s minds for the past 6 to 7 centuries. In earlier times, people did not speak of this concept of love in even remotely similar terms.

[ 3 ] This should not surprise you—not even theoretically, not even from an epistemological standpoint. For the objection that people have, after all, always practiced love does not hold. It is exactly as if one were to say that if the Copernican worldview is correct—that the Earth revolves around the Sun—then it has been moving that way ever since the times of the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians, indeed for as long as the Earth has existed. —Yes, certainly, but people did not speak of the Copernican worldview. So the objection—that what is expressed in the concept of love already existed earlier, before the concept of love itself existed—does not hold. The phenomena, the facts of love, simply formed a complex of life facts, but people did not speak about them. But over the past 600 to 700 years, great progress has been made in this regard. Not only have we reached the point where love is regarded by many today as the center of all life—I mean in terms of worldview—but we have even reached the point where there is now a scientific theory, psychoanalysis, which, as I have shown you, “splashes about” entirely within the most mundane concepts of love. This is the course of development against which we, my dear friends, must rebel—a course we must transform into something else by cultivating the worldview of Spiritual Science.

[ 4 ] I would actually be surprised if many or all of you were truly surprised by the statement that the concept of love is only 600 to 700 years old, since some of you may know that I have expressed the same ideas in earlier lectures and characterized them from a historical perspective.

[ 5 ] Well, this convergence of the concept of love with all manner of worldviews—as it is so repulsively evident in the psychoanalytic worldview—has developed slowly and gradually over the course of the last few centuries, and it would take us a long time to truly get to the bottom of these matters. But through a few reflections—which I will offer here in an episodic, aphoristic manner—I would like to help set you on your way.

[ 6 ] Take, for example, a modern-day thinker who is so deeply entrenched in contemporary cultural concepts, so thoroughly steeped in them—in other words, one who cannot move beyond the supposed realization that the external, the sensually-physical reality, is, after all, the only thing one can reasonably speak of. I have already presented you with a very honest example of this type of person in Fritz Mauthner, the critic of language and author of a philosophical dictionary.

[ 7 ] You see, such a person is in a peculiar situation. Fritz Mauthner is a critic of language; he therefore knows that at least the word “mysticism” has always existed in the course of human development. And since he is a critic of language, he wants an answer to the question: What actually lies behind this word “mysticism,” behind mystical aspirations?

[ 8 ] Now consider, my dear friends, how we must wade through a vast body of literature in order to understand the nature of that relationship between the human soul and the supernatural worlds which deserves to be characterized by the term “mysticism.” Consider how seriously and respectfully we must approach such discussions, such as those found in the book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, in order to gain insight into how the soul must attune itself to face the higher worlds in such a way that one can say: This soul is that of a mystic, a person who has found union with what spiritually pulses and ripples through the higher worlds. So one must first acquire this, one must first immerse oneself in it. And in truth, today only someone who has truly engaged in the kind of reflections expressed in the book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*—that is, someone who has at least studied this book attentively several times—can know what mysticism means in the contemporary sense.

[ 9 ] Now, when a man like Fritz Mauthner comes across a book such as *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, it is, of course, utter nonsense to him, for he can see nothing in it but words. And he is right—he is, after all, honest—when, having read Swedenborg, he says: “Swedenborg speaks of Martians who can conceal their inner impulses—I can’t make head or tail of it.” He might just as well say: “Truly, when I read a book like *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds*, there is absolutely nothing in it for me; it may be that angels could understand it, but I cannot.” —One can judge this way, and I am convinced that Fritz Mauthner, as an honest man, could reach this conclusion. One must realize that, if he remains true to the truth, he must ultimately come to such a conclusion, for the concept of mysticism is entirely foreign to him; for him, there is nothing behind it. What is set forth in *Theosophy* or in *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* is, for him, nothing but words, words, words. And if he has, in his own way, a Faustian striving, he says: I seek all active power and seeds in the physical, external world and do not wish to rummage through words. — In his own way, that is quite correct.

[ 10 ] But now he is not only honest but also thorough, and so he asks himself: Have people really never had anything like mysticism in their souls? After all, they have always spoken of mysticism. So what is it in the human soul that has led them to speak of mysticism?

[ 11 ] You see, when I was a very young man, I once knew a theologian—he has since passed away—who was an outstanding theologian and also a man with a thorough philosophical education, and he quite rightly said: Actually, behind every error there is also something real or true that one must seek, and no whim is so great that one need not seek the reality that lies behind it. —Well, in this sense, Fritz Mauthner also tells himself: There must be something to mysticism after all. That is to say, Fritz Mauthner must tell himself that if there are still such eccentric fellows around today who write books like *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* and speak of a mystical relationship between human beings and the spiritual worlds, then that is, of course, utter nonsense; but there must still be something alive in human nature that gives rise to such feelings—which these eccentric, foolish mystics call their mysticism. There must be something like that. If one tries to figure out where Fritz Mauthner actually finds what underlies mysticism, one really doesn’t come up with much more than, at most, the realization—after reading through his article “Mysticism”—that “he’s got a pigtail hanging out the back of his head.” If one takes this article, one really finds nothing in it other than that everything revolves around words and definitions of words. But because I wanted to get to the bottom of where Fritz Mauthner, in his own way, is trying to get to the reality of this mysticism, I tried looking it up in his dictionary to see where one might find it... [gap in the transcript].

[ 12 ] And so I looked up not only the entry on “Mysticism,” but also the entry on “Love.” And I actually think that this entry on “Love” is one of the very best-written ones, because it’s actually quite nice. He begins by compiling the explanations of the term—Spinoza’s definitions of love and Schopenhauer’s brief, rough definition—and then explains that one must distinguish between true, heartfelt love and mere eroticism, the physical aspect confined to sexuality. Mauthner accepts all of this, and he even rises beautifully to the following:

“I believe that these one-sided intellectual geniuses have rarely, if ever, understood the pathological feeling of love—the highest degree of love—have not gained any personal experience, and have merely endeavored to categorize the poets’ descriptions conceptually.”

[ 13 ] So he says: the philosophers didn't know much about love; they just looked it up in the poets' works.

“I believe that the highest degree of the feeling of love has been experienced and described only by artists (beginning, perhaps, with Petrarch); through the power of imitation or fashion, it has entered the mental images of the general public; it has dominated the imagination of readers in poetry for six centuries and is now in the process of being supplanted by another fashion. The highest degree of the feeling of love is just as rare as a great work of art and as the religious union with God that Francis may have experienced; yet the whole world prattles on about religion, art, and love. What is called by these names is merely a surrogate for a feeling that, out of a million prattlers, hardly one has ever experienced.”

[ 14 ] All right, then!

“The highest degree of love—whose existence I do not deny—truly has something of a miracle about it; after all, people have sought to explain miracles as pathological phenomena. If the rarest of cases occurs, in which both partners feel the strongest degree of love, then—contrary to all laws of nature—the miracle takes place: one lifts the other, and both float above the earth. Archimedes’ ‘dos uoi nov orw’ is—or seems to be—suspended. Whether it be happiness or death, the longing of mysticism is fulfilled.”

[ 15 ] There you have it! So for someone like Mauthner, who stands firmly grounded in our modern worldview, the feeling of love is the only possibility—even though human beings can indeed experience the kinds of feelings that the convoluted mystic finds in his relationship to the spiritual realm. These feelings exist only in the feeling of love. For this is truly an honest statement from such a person, who has lost all connection to the spiritual world: “Whether happiness or death, the longing of mysticism is fulfilled.”

[ 16 ] Mauthner then goes on to say:

“In this brief examination, I have deliberately overlooked the many other meanings of the word ‘love.’ Now, however, I must point out that mysticism, too, experiences its union with God as the most ardent and spiritual enjoyment of love, and that Spinoza, in particular, uses his first definition of love (in Book 3 of the *Ethics* and then in Book 5) to proclaim *amor Dei*, *amor erga Deum*, as man’s highest bliss. The very essence of mysticism—the longing to express the inexpressible—has led to such a misuse of the concept of love; yet not only in Spinoza’s pantheistic excess, but also in Schopenhauer’s metaphysical cynicism, there lies something of this figurative mysticism, which Cousin also meant when he said: “We love the infinite and imagine that we love finite things.”

Throughout all degrees of so-called love runs the well-known feeling in which we call our sexual partner “dear” using an adjective; we have universally designated our sensation in this context—which is just as subjective—with the incorrectly formed verbal word “to love”: the attempt to form an objective, noun-like word for the sensation—the word “love”—has been so successful in language that people have convinced themselves that the sensation is just as common as the word.”

[ 17 ] So you see, my dear friends, when the modern world of materialism, driven by its fundamental impulses, attempts to form a concept of mysticism, it is compelled to say to itself: What the mystic dreams of can be found in reality only in the feeling of love; that is to say, everything spiritual is reduced to a refined form of eroticism.

[ 18 ] It is characteristic that Mauthner, for example, draws on the peculiar way in which Nietzsche’s spiritual nature was characterized by one of his friends, Lou Andreas-Salome, in her book about Nietzsche: namely, as a kind of refined eroticism. And it is interesting to see how Fritz Mauthner responds specifically to this portrayal of Nietzsche by Lou Andreas-Salome. He says:

“Recently, after so many men, a woman has also attempted to grasp the philosophy of love: Lou Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche’s friend who was thoroughly hated by the ‘Nietzsche Company’ because of her excellent book on Nietzsche. Ms. Lou is very subtle in her arguments; she dares to fundamentally deny that fidelity is a characteristic of love, and she bridges the gap between the artist’s imagination and the imagination of lovers (*Eroticism*, p. 25ff.). But even Ms. Lou spiritualizes the act to such an extent that a conceptual distinction between the sensation of lust and its spiritual accompaniment fails to materialize.”

[ 19 ] Men and women, then, express themselves in a way that reflects how, in the present age, even in our thinking, we are compelled to replace the soul’s relationship to the spiritual world with what pulses through the human soul as eroticism—more or less refined, depending on the person’s character.

[ 20 ] All these things are, after all, connected to the fundamental materialistic tendency of our time. This fundamental materialistic tendency of our time necessarily leads to a lack of truthfulness, particularly where people do not approach the subject honestly enough to say: “We actually know nothing of mysticism except its real side, which is identical with the erotic.” This insincerity becomes apparent when one means the erotic but drapes a veil of mystical concepts over it. A materialist who simply says: ‘I actually see nothing but eroticism in all of mysticism’—than the person who starts from eroticism but, to conceal it, climbs up into the highest realms using mystical formulas. One can sometimes actually see the ladders on which such people scramble up to the highest planes in order to mystically conceal what is actually nothing more than eroticism. So on the one hand, we have the theoretical linking of the concept of mysticism to the concept of eroticism; on the other hand, we have the trend of our time toward sinking into the erotic and infusing all sorts of as obscure as possible mysticism—obscure, misunderstood mysticism—into the sultry eroticism.

[ 21 ] My dear friends, so that clear mental images about these matters might spread within the Anthroposophical Society—that was why, some time ago, I called upon you to work toward eradicating that mystical eccentricity which arises from the confusion I have just described; so that, in a certain sense, precisely those who can clearly recognize the character of noble spirituality may in turn rise to the point of speaking of the spiritual where the spiritual is truly present, rather than cloaking subjective emotions in spiritual forms. And because I am aware that clear concepts do not prevail everywhere in this regard, my dear friends, I therefore addressed an appeal to the Society some time ago to shed some light on these matters. But time will tell whether we are capable of doing so.

[ 22 ] I hinted yesterday that in earlier times—indeed, right up to the present day—a different, much more radical means was chosen to fulfill the conditions that must underlie any society dedicated to the Spiritual Sciences, whatever form it may take: They simply excluded one part of humanity—one gender—so that the other might thereby be preserved from all manner of intermingling of higher spiritual concepts with concepts of natural human life on the physical plane. Thinking about the spiritual belongs to the spiritual world, and in a healthy sense we must rise above this to realize that it is far, far worse to speak of certain aspects of the natural coexistence of human beings in mystical terms that do not belong in this realm than to name this realm in full truth by its proper name and to admit to ourselves that this realm must indeed be a realm of the physical plane. For one who is a mystic in the true sense, it is a terrible thing when anyone simply acts on that impulse that leads them to fulfill what—forgive me—Schopenhauer, in his peculiarly crude characterization of love, describes with the following words: “All the love affairs of the present generation, taken together, are therefore those of the entire human race”—this is not my view, but Schopenhauer’s! “ernstliche meditatio compositionis generationis futurae, e qua iterum pendent innumerae generationes.”

[ 23 ] Thus, in his crude and clumsy metaphysics, Schopenhauer says: Taken together, all the love affairs of the present generation are, therefore, the entire human race’s serious meditation on the composition of the future generation, upon which, in turn, countless such generations depend.

[ 24 ] If someone does not acknowledge such an impulse for what it truly is, but instead disguises it by saying, for example: “I am obligated to do this or that in order to give a very significant individuality the opportunity to enter the world”—then this is something abhorrent to anyone who wishes to cultivate mysticism with seriousness and dignity.

[ 25 ] And this, too, must be taken into account, my dear friends: that mysticism should not be a crutch for humanity. Yet it becomes one when sound concepts are replaced by flawed ones in a mystical manner. Here on the physical plane, a person must earn their place through that for which they have the good will to work—to truly work. If one does not want to work and seeks to gain one’s worth by deceit—not by being judged by the value of one’s work, but by saying, “Well, I am entitled to be regarded as something special because I am this or that reincarnation”—then that means lying down on the mystical couch of idleness; one wants to be recognized for something without doing anything. That is the very ordinary, trivial understanding of the matter. And if the efforts of our time must be directed—my dear friends, must be directed today in our time—toward cultivating Spiritual Science unreservedly among both sexes, then, just as there was once a dam to hold back the flood, there must be a barrier today to ensure that both sexes seek knowledge of the higher worlds with the seriousness and dignity of their outlook on life, free from all fantasy—which is, after all, always connected to the lower instincts of humanity—with seriousness and dignity. Then it will not be possible for error upon error to spread regarding that which arises in this or that fanciful soul from the indulgence of the mystical lazihood. Mysticism, my dear friends, does not demand that one become lazier than other people out there in life who have no interest in mysticism, but rather that one become even more diligent than they are. And mystical morality cannot be a sinking below the views of other people, but rather an ascent above them. And if we do not strive to eradicate from our society things such as what I would like to call “Sprengelism”—if we do not strive to eradicate everything similar to “Sprengelism”—then, my dear friends, we will get nowhere!

[ 26 ] I will now continue these reflections, depending on how today’s meeting unfolds.^{1Since Rudolf Steiner did not attend, no stenographic record was taken.} We’ll see how far today’s meeting progresses, and then I’ll announce when I’ll continue these reflections.