The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today I would like to add a few more thoughts to the reflections on art that were discussed in last week’s lectures. I have often had to emphasize how the overall spiritual development of humanity originated from something that was science, art, and religion all in one, so that when we look at our spiritual life today—with science on one side, art on another, and religion on yet another—we can, in a sense, look back to a time when these three currents of human spiritual life had a common mother. The nature of this common mother is perhaps most clearly revealed when we look back at what poetry was in the most ancient times of human development—say, perhaps four or five millennia ago—or, more precisely, at what we today call poetry. If we wish to fathom what poetry was—not among primitive peoples, in whom one today quite absurdly seeks this primordial culture, but among the civilized peoples of ancient times—then we must turn to what the spiritual development of humanity became in those ancient times through the mysteries.

[ 2 ] Let us consider those times when people on Earth had not yet sought much of what they wished to express as the content of their spiritual life, when they looked beyond the Earth toward the cosmos in search of content to satisfy the deepest needs of their souls. Let us consider the times when people, drawing on their clairvoyant abilities, observed the positions of the fixed stars, the movements of the planets, and everything on Earth as a reflection of what was taking place in the cosmic environment surrounding the Earth. We need only consider how the ancient Egyptians measured what the Nile had become for their lives according to the appearance of Sirius—the rising of a certain star—and how, in what the Nile had made of their lives, as the result of what they could only fathom by looking out into the cosmos and observing the position of one star in relation to another. What one star had to do with another out there in outer space was reflected for them on Earth in what, for example, the activity of the Nile was. This is one example among many, for such was once the view that only what takes place on Earth is a reflection, in every single place, of what can be observed out there in the cosmos in the mysteries of the starry sky. Of course, we must be clear that in those ancient times, people saw entirely different things in the starry sky than what is calculated or explored today through so-called celestial mechanics or celestial chemistry. But what should be of particular interest to us today is how people, in the era when they received spiritual nourishment for their souls and minds in this way, expressed themselves poetically, so to speak.

[ 3 ] We are thus also referring back to a time when the arts other than poetry were less developed. They existed, but they were less developed because, in those ancient times, people were aware that through the word—which they create from the innermost mystery of their being—they could express something supernatural, so that the word could best serve as the expression for that which appears supernaturally through constellations and the movement of the stars—better than if one were to make use of another medium in art, which, after all, would have to be drawn from the immediate material realm of the Earth. The word springs from the spiritual nature of the human being; that is how people felt in those ancient times. That is why it adapts most intensely to that which looks down upon the Earth from the cosmic expanses, revealing itself from above. It was only through poetry—which in ancient times was a direct offspring not of imagination alone, but of spiritual vision—that people learned, through words and through poetry, what was also poured into the other arts. But the poetic, which found its expression through words, was perceived as something through which one actually entered into a communion of souls with the otherworldly.

[ 4 ] This immersion in a communion of souls with the extraterrestrial, with the stellar, was essentially the poetic mood. Through this communion of souls, one sensed how the thought—which one had not yet separated from things—gained a pictorial expression in the human head, in the firmament-like vault of the upper head, and itself represented a spiritual firmament, a spiritual celestial vault. What one felt as thought, one felt transported into the entire cosmos. Individual thoughts were expressed through the way the stars were positioned in relation to one another, through the way the stars moved across one another. In those ancient times, people did not think solely out of the inner power of the human being itself. Only the free human being of later times did that. In every movement of thought, one sensed a reflection of a stellar movement; in every figure or form of thought, a reflection of a constellation in the sky. When one thought, one felt transported into the realm of the stars. Therefore, what was perceived as the true guide to wisdom was not the sunlight by day—which dazzles in comparison to what in the cosmos outside is the true guiding and orienting force of thought—but rather, while the sunlight was indeed the true light, it was perceived as it shines from the moon within the world of the stars. People used to say—and this is indeed ancient mystery wisdom—that by day one sees the light with the physical body, but by night one sees not only the sunlight; rather, the sunlight is caught in the silver cup of the moon. The moon was the silver cup that caught the sunlight at night. And this light of the sun, caught at night by the silver cup of the moon, was drunk as the Soma drink; the soul drank it. Imbued with this Soma drink, the soul was able to grasp those thoughts that were in fact the result, the image, of the starry heavens.

[ 5 ] Thus, by perceiving himself as a thinking being, man felt as if the power of his thought did not reside in his physical body walking upon the earth, but rather as if this power of thought were present where the stars revolve and form constellations. Man felt his soul poured out into the entire world. And he would not have sought logical laws if he had been investigating the connections or separations of thoughts; rather, he would have sought the paths of the stars and the images of the stars in the night sky if he had wanted to know how thoughts connect and how thoughts separate. He sought the laws and images for his thinking in the heavens.

[ 6 ] And then, when he looked at his feelings, when he became aware of his feelings, this was not that abstract feeling we speak of today in our abstract age, but rather that concrete feeling that was connected—along with what we today abstractly call “feeling”—to the inner experience of breathing, the inner experience of blood circulation, the entire lively weaving within the human body. One sensed how, through the connection between blood circulation and breath, the soul wove itself into the whole. But even there, one did not feel merely on the physical earth; one felt oneself in planetary space. One did not say, “Millions of blood cells circulate in the human organism,” but rather, “Mercury and Mars intersect with the Sun and the Moon.” One also felt one’s mind pouring out into the universe, except that when one was lost in thought, one felt closer to the fixed stars and their images, whereas in one’s feelings one felt more within the sphere of the planetary realm, among the moving planets. It was only through one’s will that one felt oneself on Earth. By perceiving the earthly as a reflection of the cosmic, one told oneself that when the forces of Jupiter, the Moon, and Venus, the Sun strike the Earth, penetrating the soil in its solid, liquid, and gaseous elements, then impulses of will flow from these solid, liquid, and gaseous elements into the human being just as the impulses of thought flow from the fixed stars and the impulses of feeling flow from the planetary movements into the human being.

[ 7 ] If one felt in this way, then through such a feeling one could still transport oneself back to that time when humanity’s primordial art came into being. What is this primordial art? It is nothing other than human language itself. Today we hardly feel anymore how language is the true primordial art, for our language is bound to the material and earthly. Our language no longer reflects what it once was, when people felt transported into the zodiac and, in their perception of the zodiac images, incorporated the twelve consonants, and in the movement of the planets past the constellations, incorporated the vowels. And when they did not seek to express what they experienced on Earth, but rather sought through language to express what the soul experienced—a soul that felt itself transported from Earth out into the cosmos—then language became what poetry was in ancient times. Then, through language, the image of what a person experienced in soul communion with the spiritual cosmos arose within them. All ancient poetry actually arose from this experience of soul communion with the spiritual cosmos. The last remnants of such poetry that remain are what is contained, for example, in the Vedas, and what is found—albeit in a highly abstracted form—in the Edda. These are still reproductions of what, however, arose in far greater glory, in far greater sublimity and majesty, directly from the very structure of language itself in those times when human beings were able to feel their own soul life in intimate communion with cosmic movement and experience.

[ 8 ] What remains of those ancient times in contemporary poetry? Poetry would no longer be poetry—and in our time, indeed, much poetry is no longer poetry—if it did not retain at least something of that shared life between earthly human beings and the cosmos. What remains of it is the transcendence of the prose meaning of the word into rhythm, into rhyme, into imagination, into the shaping of language—which we must always seek behind the prose meaning of the word. For, in truth, the only true poetry is that which does not consist of what is put into words. There is the poem, which we have as a written text—or rather, as something recited or declaimed—in its prose wording. Rhythm, meter, or imagination must resonate within that prose wording. It points to something not contained in the prose text—to a background that, in all true poetry, must be sensed and surmised, not understood, for one understands only what lies in the prose content of the words. The fact that poetry possesses something that lies beyond the words—for which the words are, so to speak, merely the means—and that poetry has a background of mood, a background that is, so to speak, an echo of the harmony and melody of the world and of cosmic imagination—this is what still makes poetry poetry today. In Homer, one can still sense what this means to him: “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.”—It is not his soul that sings; rather, it is the soul within him that is in communion with the movements of the cosmos. “The Muses dwell in the planets. The epic Muse dwells in one of the planets. Homer feels himself transported to this planet: ‘Sing, O Muse, resound for me, heavenly Melos of the planet; speak of what men on earth have done—Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, Idomeneus, Menelaus—sing to me as it can be perceived, not when the gaze is directed at it from a single point here on Earth, but when the gaze is directed at it from the world of the stars, when the gaze is directed at it from beyond Earth. Does anyone seriously believe that those comprehensively magnificent images depicted in the Iliad are rendered from a bird’s-eye view? No, they are not even rendered from an aerial perspective; they are rendered from a stellar perspective. Therefore, what is recounted from the stellar perspective in the Iliad cannot be told as a story in which humans deal solely with other humans; rather, the gods play a role there, and the actions of the gods continually appear among the characters at the same time. This is not the frog’s-eye view of the earth; it is the star’s-eye view of the heavens, toward which the soul of the poet sought to soar by declaring: “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus!”

[ 9 ] This, however, makes it abundantly clear that the earthly medium one can employ for art—in this case, poetry—is merely a means; that what is truly artistic lies in what can be sensed in the handling of that medium: a spiritual background, spiritual worlds into which the word—but also color, sound, and form—can lead. If one wishes to reawaken the truly artistic spirit within humanity, one must transport oneself back to those ancient times when the spirit of poetry was the spirit of heaven within the human soul. And when one does so, one gains a certain sense of how one can make use of other artistic means to bring art to the spiritual world in the way it must be brought if it is to be true art. You see, our sensibility has become so coarse today that we no longer truly perceive what, not so long ago, made art what it is.

[ 10 ] In our immediate physical surroundings, we see a mother carrying a child, holding a small child in her arms. Certainly, an immensely uplifting sight on Earth. But we are accustomed to the fact that when we see the mother with the child, the immediate impression of form that we receive is held for only a brief span of time—one might say, for a single moment. We are accustomed to the fact that, when we are in the physical world, the mother’s head posture in the next moment is different from what it was in the previous moment. We are accustomed to the child making some sort of movement in the mother’s arms; we are accustomed to something changing at every moment in what we see before us in the physical world. We turn our gaze to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. We see the mother with the child there. We look at her now, we look at her in an hour, we look at her in a year—nothing has changed. The moment is captured; neither the child nor the mother moves. What we are accustomed to capturing as a moment in the earthly world seems—but it only seems—to be frozen in that moment. Today we no longer feel what Raphael most certainly felt: “Am I allowed to do this? Am I allowed to capture a single moment with my brush?” Isn’t it a lie to capture a single moment? Am I allowed to be so untruthful as to evoke, a day later, the impression that the mother is holding the child just as she held it the day before? Am I allowed to expect anyone to have this moment set before them for a long time to come? — To people of the present, this question seems paradoxical, perhaps even nonsensical. Raphael certainly felt it. What arose in Raphael in response to this feeling? In Raphael, this feeling gave rise to an artistic obligation: whatever sin you commit against reality, you must atone for it in a spiritual way. You must lift that which belongs to a single moment out of time and space. You must not leave it in time and space, for in time and space it is untruth. You must bestow eternity upon this moment. Through what you paint onto the surface, you must allow the viewer to sense something that cannot possibly be on the surface.

[ 11 ] You see, that is what is today called Raphael’s idealistic painting in the abstract sense. This Raphael-like idealistic painting is his justification for capturing the moment. What he achieves through the depth of his color application and color harmony is accomplished by the fact that, from the outset, the third spatial dimension is excluded from the painting’s surface but is spiritualized, so that he has elevated what is otherwise seen materialistically in the third dimension into the spiritual realm through his use of color. Thus, what is not on the surface—what lies behind the surface through the blue color, what lies in front of the surface through the red color, and what emerges from the surface in a spiritual way, whereas the third spatial dimension otherwise emerges in the world in a material way—that is what gives the moment eternity. And eternity must be given to the moment. The eternal must emanate from art; otherwise, art is not art. I have met people in my life who hated Raphael—specifically, artists who hated Raphael. Why? Because they could not understand this at all; because they wanted to remain stuck in the immediate imitation of what the moment presents, but which is no longer there in the next moment. I met one such Raphael-hater who saw the greatest progress in his own painting in the fact that, as he put it, he was the first to dare to paint all the hairy areas on the nude figure, so as not to sin against nature in any way. One can understand how a person who presents this as great progress could become a hater of Raphael. But this testifies to how far our age has strayed from the truly spirit-bearing element in art—that spirit-bearing element which, in painting for example, knows why one must see in the surface the foundation, the very foundation of painting. And one must understand spatial perspective. In our age endowed with freedom, it was once necessary—in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—to understand spatial perspective, which actually seeks to conjure up the plastic into the plane, not the painterly. But what is real is color perspective, which overcomes the third dimension not through foreshortening and the like, nor through vanishing points, but through the spiritual-psychic relationship between blue and red or between blue and yellow. Color perspective, which transcends space in a spiritual way, must be mastered precisely in painting. Through such means, one returns in the artistic realm to what art once was—something that brought humanity into direct contact with the spiritual worlds.

[ 12 ] Back then, when people felt that way, they could also sense that harmony between science, religion, and art. Humanity must regain that sense. There was truly something of an echo of this feeling in Goethe. And that was the greatness of Goethe—that there was something of an echo of this feeling within him. Certainly, human beings, in their freedom, had to experience these three children separately: science, art, and religion. But as a result, they have lost the depth of all three; above all, they have lost their sense of communion with the cosmos. One need only look once at today’s relationship between art and science, poetry and science, taken to the extreme. You might say that I need not go to such extremes to illustrate to you today’s relationship—the current, so to speak, incongruous relationship between poetry, that is, art, and science. But it is in these radical, extreme manifestations that the entire incongruous relationship becomes apparent.

[ 13 ] You see, once upon a time there was a gathering of naturalists in a city. At this gathering of natural scientists, people spoke very seriously about the major materialistic problems of science. You know, of course, with what immense seriousness scientific problems are discussed at such gatherings—with such seriousness that people usually perceive it as so vast that they cannot even grasp it with their own personalities, that they do not even dare to approach this seriousness with their immediate personalities. That is why they place a lectern in front of them; they lay their manuscript on it, and then they read—or rather, in the case of a conference, the speakers take turns reading this serious scientific material aloud. The personal aspect is set aside. The gravity is so powerful that it is cast out of one’s personality and laid upon the lecterns, with immense gravity. And one sees this solemnity on every face at such gatherings. Admittedly, the faces seem like mirror images of the lecterns, but they are quite solemn. Now, at this gathering of natural scientists I am speaking of, someone—I don’t even know who, probably the acting secretary—turned to a group of contemporary poets. They were then to use their poetic art to craft the poems that were to be recited between the courses during the banquet of this naturalists’ gathering. Now these gentlemen—perhaps there were ladies present as well—had stepped away from their serious naturalists’ gathering, and later, between the courses, the whole affair was presented: nothing but satirical poems, each one targeting a single scientific discipline! You see, that was the incongruous relationship between science and art. The gentlemen first examined, with immense seriousness, the structure of the cockchafer’s mandibles or the chromosomes of cockchafer eggs, and then—between courses of meat and—what do I know—a satirical poem about such research was recited. At first, the gentlemen engaged in this with immense seriousness; afterward, they laughed. Yes, one cannot say that there is an intrinsic relationship there. Certainly, you might say I shouldn’t cite such extremes from our civilization. But I can cite them nonetheless, for they are characteristic. It merely stands out in a radically extreme way what today constitutes the relationship between the cognitive and the artistic—namely, none at all. The gentlemen who composed the songs for the banquet naturally understood nothing of what the gentlemen read aloud to one another during the naturalists’ meeting. It is perhaps not entirely possible to say the reverse—that the esteemed naturalists, too, understood nothing of the poems. The poets would certainly have assumed as much. I am quite certain of it, because they considered them to be very profound. But there is usually not much to understand in such poems, and so one can assume that even this illustrious assembly will have understood most of these poems, at least to a certain extent!

[ 14 ] But this is precisely what is most important for our time: to recognize how the unified human spiritual life has been divided into a trinity, and how this trinity has even fallen apart today. There is, in fact, the most urgent need to turn our gaze back toward unity. When a philosopher today speculates about unity and duality, monism and dualism, one might say the discussion takes place with a rather neutral mindset. Abstract concepts are put forward to support one position or the other. One can prove both with equal justification. In those times—of which I spoke to you today as being so closely connected to art, as I have outlined—when people spoke of unity and duality, for example, as was the terminology of that era, or of the one without a second, and of the one with a second, all the powers of the soul were stirred. That ancient dispute—whether the world owes its existence to a unified design, or whether good and evil are two powers fundamentally distinct from one another—that dispute between monism and dualism was, in ancient times, an artistic-religious matter that stirred up all the powers of the human soul, upon which people felt their salvation and bliss depended. What people today discuss with complete indifference was once what they felt their salvation and bliss were tied to. But unless a breath of that artistic, religious, and intellectual mood of the soul—which once existed—returns to our time, we will not achieve a genuine impulse toward the artistic, toward the truly great artistic!

[ 15 ] But there was something else that those times sensed. You see, people spoke of the Soma drink—that which was known as the sunlight caught in the silver moon cup, with which a person permeates their soul in order to understand the mysteries of the cosmos through the Soma drink. People spoke of this Soma drink, and they knew that through it they had a direct spiritual communion with the cosmos. The soul experiences this on Earth, but at the same time it lives in the cosmos; it is simultaneously within the cosmos when it experiences such things. And that is why people felt: Yes, the gods reveal themselves through the stars—through the fixed stars that remain at rest, and through the planets that move. Through the images formed on Earth by the configurations of the fixed stars and the movements of the planets, the soul experiences something cosmic. When the soul drinks the soma drink and performs the sacrifice in a ritual, artistic, and cognitive manner, it gives back to the gods—along with the rising sacrificial smoke, to which it entrusts the religious, artistic, and poetic word—what the gods need to continue shaping the world. For human beings were not created by the gods in vain; rather, they are here on Earth so that what can only be fully prepared within them may in turn be taken back by the gods for the further shaping of the world. Indeed, human beings are on Earth because the gods need them to think, feel, and will within themselves what lives in the cosmos. Then, when human beings think, feel, and will in the right way what lives in the cosmos, the gods take this back up and plant it further into the shaping of the world, so that human beings help build the entire cosmos when, through sacrifice and art, they give back what the gods offer them by revealing themselves through the starry worlds. Thus, human beings stand in relation to the course of the world by experiencing this course through a kinship of the soul.

[ 16 ] If one immerses oneself in this view of humanity—the kinship of the human soul with the divine-spiritual-physical course of the world—then one can indeed apply this view to the present as well. Indeed, let us then examine today’s understanding, which seeks only to fathom what is on Earth, and even applies celestial chemistry solely to the Earth, performing calculations of the stars merely through the mathematical operations that have been learned on Earth. This understanding, which is regarded today as truly scientific, is valuable only for the course of the Earth itself. It ceases to have any significance to the extent that the Earth is to evolve further toward Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. What is called science today has only an earthly significance; it exists only so that human beings on Earth may become free, but the gods have no use for it in the cosmic evolution of the world.

[ 17 ] We have arrived at the utmost abstraction, at the corpse of the spiritual world within our abstract thoughts. That which is carried out scientifically has significance only for the Earth; it acts upon the Earth as a mental phenomenon, is shattered, buried, and does not live on. And it must be said that when the grandmother of the poet Adalbert Stifter, Ursula Kary, spoke to the young Stifter about the evening glow, her words were more intimately connected to the cosmos than anything that can be read today in scientific books about the evening glow. Take everything that is said in scientific books today about the sun’s rays—which are supposed to behave in such and such a way in the clouds to produce the sunset—and take all the laws of nature described there; taken together, they have only an earthly significance. The gods do not take it back from the earth to use it in the cosmos. Adalbert Stifter’s grandmother said to the boy: “Child, what is the sunset? Child, when the sunset appears, the Mother of God hangs out her clothes, for she has many such clothes to hang out every evening on the vault of heaven.”

[ 18 ] Adalbert Stifter’s grandmother taught the boy that the clothes hung out to dry by the Mother of God are the evening glow. This is a statement from which gods can draw inspiration for the world’s continued development. Modern science seeks to define as precisely as possible what exists in the present. But this will never become the future; it is the present. Adalbert Stifter’s grandmother, who still preserved much of what lived in the souls of old, said something that, of course, only elicits a smile from today’s scientists. He may find it beautiful, but he knows nothing of the fact that it holds greater significance for the cosmos than all his science—that Adalbert Stifter’s grandmother taught the child that the evening glow is the Mother of God’s clothes hanging out to dry. For this is what the spiritual-divine powers draw upon to shape the present of the cosmos into the future. And from what is useful in this way—what does not create mental images derived from time and space, but rather creates eternally active mental images—all true art has arisen. Just as just as this statement by Adalbert Stifter’s grandmother—which made him a poet—stands in contrast to dry, materialistic thinking, so too does what Raphael created in the Sistine Madonna beyond the moment—by capturing the moment as something eternal—stand in contrast to what we see when we observe the mother and child sitting together on this physical earth.

[ 19 ] I wanted to mention this to you as a supplement to my previous remarks, in the hope that it might help to deepen your understanding of them a little.