The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. The Supernatural Origin of Art

[ 1 ] What humanity needs to take on board, in light of the necessities of its development, is an expansion of consciousness to encompass all areas of life. Humanity today lives in such a way that what drives it and what it does is, in fact, linked only to the events that occur between birth and death. In everything that happens, people ask only about what takes place between birth and death, and it will be essential for the restoration of our lives that we ask about more than just this span of life, which we spend under very special conditions. Our life encompasses not only what we are and do between birth and death, but also what we are and do between death and a new birth. In today’s materialistic age, people are largely unaware of how the life between death and birth—which we went through before descending into this life through birth or conception—plays a role; nor are they aware of how, in this life here in the physical body, events are already unfolding that in turn point toward the life we will spend after death. Today we would like to point out a few things that will show how certain cultural regions will adopt a different attitude toward the whole of human life as human consciousness expands—and indeed must expand—to encompass life in the supersensible worlds as well.

[ 2 ] I believe a certain question might arise in a person’s mind when they consider the full scope of our artistic life. Let us today take a look at the spiritual life from this perspective. This will yield insights that can later be applied to our understanding of social life as well.

[ 3 ] We generally regard sculpture, architecture, painting, poetry, and music as the true high arts, and—precisely on the basis of certain foundations of anthroposophical life and knowledge—we add something like eurythmy to these arts. The question I have in mind—one that might arise for a person in relation to artistic life—would be this: What is the positive, actual motivation that leads us to bring the arts into life? Art is actually concerned with the immediate reality that unfolds between birth and death only in the materialistic age. In this materialistic age, however, people have forgotten the supersensory origin of the artistic and more or less limit themselves to imitating what is found in external, sensually perceptible nature. But anyone who truly has a deeper sense of nature on the one hand and of art on the other will certainly not be able to agree with this imitation of natural existence in art—with naturalism. For one must ask oneself this question again and again: Can even the finest landscape painter, for example, somehow conjure up the beauty of a natural landscape on canvas? Anyone who is not deluded will, even when faced with a landscape rendered in the most naturalistic manner, have to share the sentiment I expressed in the prologue to my first Mystery Play, *The Gate of Initiation*: that no imitation of nature will ever be able to capture nature itself. Naturalism will, for the more sensitive observer, inevitably prove to be contrary to feeling. Such a person will therefore certainly regard as legitimate in art only that which in some way transcends the natural, that which attempts—at least in the manner of representation—to offer something other than the mental image that mere nature can present to human beings. But how do we, as human beings, come to develop art in the first place? Why do we go beyond nature in sculpture and poetry?

[ 4 ] Anyone who develops an understanding of the interconnections of the world will see, for example, how sculpture works in a unique way to capture the human form, how it attempts to express the human in its design; how we cannot simply incorporate the human form—as it appears to us in the natural human being, imbued with inner animation, with the incarnate, with that which we see beyond the form in the natural human being—into the form when we are creating a human figure in a work of sculptural art. But I believe that the sculptor who creates human figures will gradually rise to a very special sensibility. And I have no doubt that the Greek sculptor possessed the sensibility of which I am now speaking, and that this sensibility was lost only during the naturalistic era.

[ 5 ] It seems to me that the sculptor who shapes the human form experiences a completely different kind of sensation when sculpting the head than when sculpting the rest of the body. These two things are actually fundamentally different from one another in the creative process: sculpting the head and sculpting the rest of the body. If I may put it somewhat dramatically, I would say: When one works on the sculptural form of the human head, one has the feeling of being constantly absorbed by the material, as if the material were trying to draw one into itself. But when one sculpts the rest of the human body artistically, one has the feeling that one is, in a sense, unjustifiably piercing and pressing into the body from all sides, that one is pushing in from the outside. One has the feeling that one is shaping the rest of the body from the outside, forming the shapes from the outside. One thus has the feeling that, when shaping the body, one is actually working inward, and one has the feeling, when shaping the head, that one is working outward.

[ 6 ] This seems to me to be a peculiar sensibility in sculptural creation, one that was certainly still characteristic of the Greek artist, and which was lost precisely during the naturalistic period, when artists began to become slaves to the model. One wonders: Where does such a feeling actually come from when one intends to shape the human form with an orientation toward the supernatural?

[ 7 ] All of this is connected to much deeper questions, and before I move on to that, I’d like to mention one more thing. Just consider how strongly one feels a certain inner quality of experience when it comes to sculpture and architecture, even though sculpture and architecture seem to take shape externally in the material: In architecture, one experiences the dynamics internally; one experiences internally how the column supports the beam, how the column extends into the capital. One experiences internally what is shaped externally. And the same is true of sculpture.

[ 8 ] This is not the case with music, and it is certainly not the case with poetry. In poetry, it seems quite clear to me that in the shaping of the poetic material—and I’ll put it bluntly again—it is as if, when one begins to shape the words—which one still holds, if necessary, in one’s throat when speaking prose—into iambs or trochees, when one puts them into rhyme, they would run away and one would have to chase after them. They populate the atmosphere surrounding one more than one’s inner self. Poetry is experienced much more externally than, for example, architecture and sculpture. And this is likely true of music as well, if one directs one’s attention to it. Musical tones, too, enliven one’s entire surroundings. One actually forgets space and time—or at least space—and lives oneself out in a moral experience. Unlike with poetry, one does not have the feeling that one must follow the figures one creates; rather, one has the feeling that one must swim into an indefinite element that spreads out in every direction and, in this swimming, dissolve into it.

[ 9 ] There, you see, one begins to distinguish subtle nuances in one’s feelings toward the very essence of art. One assigns very specific characteristics to these sensations. What I have just described to you—and what, I believe, those with a refined artistic sensibility can empathize with—cannot be believed when one looks at a crystal or any other natural mineral product, or a plant, or an animal, or a physically real human being. One’s perceptions and feelings toward the entire external, physical, and sensory world differ from the perceptions and feelings I have just described in relation to individual branches of artistic experience.

[ 10 ] One can speak of supersensible cognition as a transformation of ordinary abstract cognition into intuitive cognition and can point toward experiential cognition. It is nonsensical to demand that, in higher realms, one should prove things in the same logically pedantic, philistine manner as one does in the crude natural sciences or the like, or in mathematics. If one immerses oneself in the sensations that arise when entering the realm of art, one gradually enters into remarkable inner states of mind. Very distinct, nuanced states of mind certainly arise when one truly experiences the plastic and the architectural inwardly, when one goes along with the dynamics, mechanics, and so on in architecture, when one goes along with the curvature of form in sculpture. A remarkable path emerges here through which the inner world of sensation travels: one is confronted with a spiritual experience that is very similar to memory. Anyone who has experienced the act of remembering, the experience of memory, notices how the perception of architecture and sculpture becomes similar to the inner process of remembering. Yet, at the same time, remembering is on a higher level. In other words: Through the way of architectural and sculptural feeling, one gradually approaches that soul sensation, that soul experience, which the spiritual researcher knows as the recollection of prenatal states. And indeed, the way one lives between death and a new birth in connection with the entire universe—feeling that one moves as a spiritual spirit or spiritual soul in directions, one crosses paths with beings, one is in balance with other beings—what one thus experiences and lives through between death and a new birth is initially recalled subconsciously, and this is indeed reflected in architectural art and sculpture.

[ 11 ] And when we relive this sense of the self through our inner presence in sculpture and architecture, we discover that what we actually seek in sculpture and architecture is nothing other than to somehow conjure into the physical-sensory world the experiences we had in the spiritual world before our birth—or rather, before our conception. When we build houses not purely according to the principle of utility, but rather when we build them with architectural beauty, we shape the dynamic relationships in the way they arise from our memory of experiences—experiences of balance, experiences of vibrating forms, and so on—that we had in the time between death and this birth.

[ 12 ] And in this way, one discovers how humankind actually came to develop architecture and sculpture as arts. The experience of the period between death and new birth stirred within the human soul. People wanted to express it somehow and set it before them, and so they created architecture, and they created sculpture. The fact that humanity has produced architecture and sculpture in the course of its cultural development is essentially due to the lingering influence of life between death and birth—to the fact that this is what human beings desire from within: just as a spider spins its web, so too do they wish to express and shape what they experience between death and this birth. They carry the experiences from before birth into their physical, sensory life. And what we see before us when we survey the architectural and sculptural works of art created by human beings is nothing other than the realized, unconscious memories of life between death and this birth.

[ 13 ] Now we have a real answer to the question of why humans create art. If humans were not supernatural beings who enter this life through conception or birth, they would certainly not engage in sculpture, and certainly not in architecture.

[ 14 ] And we know what a peculiar connection exists between two successive—or, let’s say, three successive—earthly lives: What you have today as your head is, in fact, the headless body of your previous incarnation, transformed within the formative forces; and what you have today as your body will be transformed into your head by the time of your next incarnation. The human head has a completely different meaning: it is old; it is the transformed body from the previous incarnation. The forces experienced between the previous death and this birth have formed this outer shape of the head; the body carries within itself, in a state of fermentation, the forces that will take shape in the next earthly life.

[ 15 ] Therein lies the reason why the sculptor feels differently toward the head than toward the rest of the body. With regard to the head, he feels something like this: The head wants to draw him in, because the head was formed in the previous incarnation by forces that reside within its present forms. With the rest of the body, he feels something like this: He wants to enter it—that is, to press into it and so on—by shaping it sculpturally, because within it reside the spiritual forces that guide through death and carry the soul over to the next incarnation. It is precisely this radical difference between the past and the future within the human body that the sculptor senses particularly clearly. That which constitutes the formative forces of the physical body—how they carry over from one incarnation to the next—finds expression in the plastic arts. What lies deeper within the etheric body, which is the bearer of our balance and the bearer of our dynamism, finds greater expression in the architectural arts.

[ 16 ] You see, it is actually impossible to fully comprehend human life in its entirety unless one also casts a glance at the supersensible realm, unless one answers the question in all seriousness: Why do we engage in the study of architecture and sculpture? — The fact that people do not want to look toward the supersensible world stems from the fact that they do not want to view the things of this world in the right way.

[ 17 ] Basically, how do most people relate to the arts, which reveal a spiritual world? Actually, just like a dog relates to human language. A dog hears human speech; it probably takes it for barking. It does not perceive the meaning contained within the sounds—unless, of course, it is “Rolf from Mannheim.” This was a docile dog that caused quite a stir some time ago among people who engage in such useless arts. So it is with human beings when faced with the arts that actually speak of the supersensible world that humanity has experienced: they do not see in these arts what these arts actually reveal.

[ 18 ] Let us consider, for example, poetry. Poetry is clearly evident to those who can feel it deeply—though when characterizing such things, one must always bear in mind that, with some variation, Lichtenberg’s observation holds true: that ninety-nine percent more poetry is written than the people of our globe need for their happiness, and than is actually true art—true poetry springs from the whole person. And what does it do? It does not stop at prose: it shapes prose; it brings meter and rhythm into prose. It creates something that the prosaic pragmatist considers superfluous to life. It further shapes that which—even in its unadorned form—would already convey the meaning one wishes to associate with it. When, through a recitation that is true art, one gains a sense of what the poetic artist makes of the prose content, one arrives once again at a distinctive character of the emotions. After all, one cannot perceive the mere content—the prose content—of a poem as a poem. One perceives as a poem the way the words roll in iambs, trochees, or anapests, and the way the sounds repeat themselves in alliterations, assonances, or other rhymes. One perceives many other things that lie in the manner in which the prose material is shaped. That is precisely what must be incorporated into the recitation. If one recites in such a way that one merely extracts the prose content—no matter how seemingly profound—from within, then one believes one is reciting “artistically”! If one can truly keep in mind this peculiar nuance of feeling—which encompasses the sense of the poetic—then one comes to say to oneself: This actually goes beyond ordinary perception, for ordinary perception clings to the things of sensory existence, whereas poetic form does not cling to the things of sensory existence. I expressed this earlier by saying: The poetic creation then lives more fully in the atmosphere that surrounds one; or one feels the urge to burst forth from oneself in order to truly experience the poet’s words outside of oneself.

[ 19 ] This stems from the fact that one creates something from within oneself that one cannot experience at all between birth and death. One shapes something spiritual that one could just as well leave alone if one simply wanted to live between birth and death. One can live quite well until death and die without doing anything other than making the sober, prosaic content the substance of life. But why does one feel the need to add rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and rhyme to this sober, prosaic content? Well, because one has more within oneself than one needs until death, because one wants to give form to what one has more of within oneself than one needs until death, even during this life. It is a foresight of the life that follows death: Because one already carries within oneself what follows after death, one feels compelled not merely to speak, but to speak poetically. And just as sculpture and architecture are connected to prenatal life—to the forces within us that stem from prenatal life—so too is poetry connected to the life that unfolds after death, or rather to the forces within us that are already present for life after death. And it is more the “I”—as it lives here between birth and death, as it passes through the gate of death and then lives on—that already carries within itself the forces expressed by poetry.

[ 20 ] And it is the astral body that already lives here in the world of sound, shaping that world into melody and harmony—which we do not find in our daily lives out in the physical world, because what the astral body “lives through” after death is already present within it. You know, this astral body that we carry within us lives on for only a time after death; then we shed it as well. Nevertheless, this astral body contains the true musical element within itself. But it possesses it in the same way that it experiences it here between birth and death in its life element, the air. We need the air if we want a medium for musical perception.

[ 21 ] When we have now reached the stage following death, where we shed our astral body, we also shed everything that reminds us, through music, of this earthly life. But at this moment in the world, music transforms into the music of the spheres. We become independent of what we experience as music in the air and rise into a musical reality that is the music of the spheres. For what is experienced here as music in the air is, up above, the music of the spheres. And now the reflection lives itself into the element of air, becomes denser, becomes what we experience as earthly music—what we imprint upon our astral body, what we shape, what we relive as long as we have our astral body. After death, we shed our astral body: then—forgive the banal expression—our musical essence soars up into the music of the spheres. Thus, in music and poetry, we have a foretaste of what, after death, is our world, our existence. We experience the supersensible in two directions. This is how these four arts present themselves to us.

[ 22 ] And what about painting? There is another spiritual world that lies beyond our sensory world. The crudely materialistic physicist or biologist speaks of atoms and molecules beyond the sensory world. These are not molecules and atoms. Behind them are spiritual beings. There is a spiritual world—the world we experience between falling asleep and waking up. This world, which we bring over from sleep, is what actually inspires us when we paint, so that we can bring the spiritual world that surrounds us spatially onto the canvas or the wall. That is why one must be very careful, when painting, to paint from the color itself, not from the line, for the line lies in painting. The line is always something derived from the memory of prenatal life. If we are to paint within a consciousness expanded through the spiritual world, we must paint what emerges from color. And we know that color is experienced in the astral world. When we enter the world we experience between falling asleep and waking up, we experience this world of color. And however we wish to create color harmony, however we wish to apply the colors to the canvas, it is nothing other than what impels us: we plunge into it; we allow what we have experienced between falling asleep and waking up to flow into our waking body. That is there within us, and that is what the artist seeks to bring onto the canvas in painting. Again, what emerges in painting is the representation of the supersensible. Thus, the arts actually point everywhere to the supersensible. For those who can perceive it in the right way, painting becomes a revelation of the spiritual world that surrounds us in space and permeates us from within that space—the world in which we find ourselves between falling asleep and waking up. Sculpture and architecture bear witness to the spiritual world we experience between death and a new birth—before conception, before birth; music and poetry bear witness to how we experience life post mortem, after death. Thus, that which is our share in the spiritual world penetrates our ordinary physical earthly life.

[ 23 ] And if we view what human beings present as art in a philistine manner—as connected solely to what takes place between birth and death—then we are actually stripping artistic creation of all meaning. For artistic creation is, in fact, the bringing of spiritual and supersensory worlds into the physical and sensory world. And it is only because human beings are driven by what they carry within them from their pre-birth life, because they are driven in the waking state by what they carry within them from the supersensible life during sleep, because they are driven by what is already within them and what seeks to shape them after death, that they bring architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry into the world of sensory experience. The fact that people generally do not speak of supersensible worlds stems solely from the fact that they do not even understand the sensory world—and above all, do not even understand what spiritual human culture once knew, but which has been lost and has become mere outward form: art.

[ 24 ] If we learn to understand art, it is true proof of human immortality and of the fact that humanity has not yet been born. And we need this so that consciousness may expand beyond the horizon bounded by birth and death, so that we may connect what we possess within our physical earthly life to the superphysical life.

[ 25 ] If we now create—based on an insight that, like anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science, sets out directly to perceive the spiritual world and to incorporate that spiritual world into mental images, thinking, feeling, sensation, and volition—then we will have laid the foundation for an art that, in a sense, synthetically synthesizes the pre-birth and post-death realms.

[ 26 ] And let us consider eurythmy. We set the human body itself in motion. What do we set in motion? We set the human organism in motion, so that its limbs move. The limbs are what primarily carry over into the next earthly life; they point to the future and to the afterlife. But how do we shape the limb movements we produce in eurythmy? We study, through both the sensory and supersensory realms, how the larynx and the entire speech apparatus have been formed from the previous life, emerging from the head through the intellectual faculties and the emotional faculties of the chest. We directly link the prenatal to the post-death realm. In a sense, we take from earthly life only what is now the physical material: the human being himself, who is the tool, the instrument for eurythmy. But we bring to manifestation in the human being what we study inwardly—what is preformed within him from a previous life—and we transfer this to his limbs, that is, to that in which the post-death life is preformed. In eurythmy, we provide a form and movement of the human organism that serve as direct external evidence of the human being’s participation in the supersensible world. We connect the human being directly to the supersensible world by having them perform eurythmy.

[ 27 ] Wherever art is created out of a true artistic spirit, art bears witness to the connection between human beings and the supersensible worlds. And when, in our time, human beings are called upon, so to speak, to take the gods into their own soul forces—so that they do not merely wait in faith for the gods to bring them this or that, but rather wish to act as if the gods lived within their active will— then that is the moment when humanity wishes to experience a transition, as it were, from the objectively shaped arts of the external world to an art that will take on entirely different dimensions and forms in the future: an art that directly represents the supersensible. How could it be otherwise? Spiritual Science, after all, also seeks to represent the supersensible directly; therefore, in a sense, it must also create such an art from within itself.

[ 28 ] And the pedagogical and didactic application will gradually educate people who, through being educated in this direction, will find it self-evident that they are supersensible beings, because they move their hands, arms, and legs in such a way that the forces of the supersensible world are at work within them. It is, after all, the human soul—the supersensible soul—that is set in motion through eurythmy. It is, after all, the living expression of the supersensible that comes to light in eurythmic movements.

[ 29 ] Everything that is conveyed through Spiritual Science is truly in harmony within. On the one hand, it is presented so that the life in which we are immersed may be understood more deeply and intensely, so that we may learn to direct our gaze toward the living evidence that exists for pre-existence and immortality; and on the other hand, it introduces into human volition that which is the supersensible element within the human being.

[ 30 ] This is the inner logic that underlies the pursuit of Spiritual Science, when it is oriented toward anthroposophy. Through this, Spiritual Science will expand human consciousness. People will no longer be able to go through life as they did in the materialistic age—with only a general overview of what exists between birth and death, and perhaps still hold a belief in something else that exists beyond that—something that brings them bliss, that redeems them—but of which they cannot form any mental image, about which they allow themselves to be preached to only in a sentimental way, and of which they actually possess only an emptied-out content. Through Spiritual Science, human beings are to regain a genuine understanding of the spiritual worlds. People are to be liberated from a life in the abstract—from that life which seeks only to remain at the level of perception and thinking between birth and death, and which, at most, still takes in, through words, some vague references to a supersensible world. Spiritual Science will instill a consciousness in human beings that broadens their horizons and enables them, as they act and live here in the physical world, to perceive the supersensible world. Today, when we have reached the age of thirty, we go through the world knowing that what we possess at thirty was instilled in us at the ages of ten and fifteen—we remember this. We remember that when we read at the age of thirty, our learning to read twenty-two or twenty-three years ago is linked to the present moment. But we do not realize that at every moment between birth and death, what we experienced between the last death and this birth vibrates and pulses within us. Let us turn our gaze to what has been born out of these forces in architecture and sculpture: If we understand this in the right sense, then we will also apply it to life in the right sense and will in turn regain a sense of that poetic form—superfluous in the face of philistine, prosaic life—in which prose is transformed into rhythm, meter, and rhyme, into the alliteration and assonance of poetry. Then we will bring this nuance of feeling into proper connection with the immortal core of our being, which we carry through death. We will say: No human being could become a poet if it were not for what lies within all people—that which actually creates the poet: the power that only comes to life externally after death, but which is already within us.

[ 31 ] This is the incorporation of the supersensible into ordinary consciousness, which must be expanded once again if humanity does not wish to sink further into that state into which it has plunged as a result of consciousness having contracted so much that it actually lives only in what takes place between birth and death, and at most allows itself to be told in words about what exists in the supersensible world.

[ 32 ] As you can see, Spiritual Science comes up everywhere when discussing the most important cultural needs of the present.