The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] My esteemed guests and dear friends! You have also gathered here from distant places this Christmas to engage in and process, within the Goetheanum, matters pertaining to the field of spiritual science, and as we begin our contemplative work, I would like to extend my warmest greetings—and my warmest Christmas greetings—especially to those friends and supporters of our cause who have come from afar. What I myself—being occupied with a wide variety of tasks—will be able to offer at this particular time can only be suggestions in one direction or another. However, what may emerge alongside such suggestions—which will come through my lectures and those of others—is a harmonious feeling and thinking among the individuals gathered here within our Goetheanum. And so I may well hope that those friends who reside here at the Goetheanum permanently or at least for extended periods, and who are permanently connected to it in some way, will welcome warmly those who have come from afar. For it is in this harmonious collaboration, shared thinking, and shared feeling that what is to stand, as it were, as the soul of all work at the Goetheanum is to develop: the recognition and feeling of the spiritual weaving and essence of the world, and the working that arises from this spiritual essence and weaving of the world. And the more that which must shine before us as an ideal—that the walking side by side of the individual adherents of the anthroposophical worldview may also become a genuine social interaction and interplay—becomes a reality, the more that which is meant to come to light here can truly come to light.

[ 2 ] In light of these hopes, my dear friends here today, I extend the warmest of welcomes to all those who have come from afar, as well as to those who are permanently connected to the Goetheanum.

[ 3 ] What I will attempt to offer in these course lectures through individual insights may at first glance seem unrelated to the spirit of Christmas and the feelings associated with it; but inwardly, I believe, there is a connection. After all, in everything that is to be developed from the Goetheanum, we are striving for a certain rebirth, a spiritual insight, a feeling consecrated to the spirit, and a will sustained by the spirit. And this is, even if only as a later reflection, indeed in a certain sense the birth of the supersensible-spiritual and symbolizes, in a real sense, the Christmas spirit—the birth of that spiritual being that has brought about a renewal of the entire development of humanity on Earth. And so I would nevertheless like to regard these reflections as imbued with the character of a Christmas meditation.

[ 4 ] If the topic is intended to highlight the specific moment in history when the scientific way of thinking entered the course of modern human development, this does not contradict the intention I have just expressed; for anyone who recalls what I presented many years ago in my book: “Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and Its Relationship to the Scientific Mode of Thought,” will be able to say that what applies to me is what I would like to call the perception of the embryonic life of a new spirituality within the framework of scientific modes of thought. My view, based on objective observation, must be that the scientific path taken by modern humanity—when properly understood—is not an erroneous one, but a correct one; yet, when viewed correctly, it carries within itself the seed of a new spiritual insight and a new spiritual activity of the will. And it is from this perspective that I would also like to deliver these lectures. They are not intended, for example, to emphasize opposition to natural science; rather, they are intended precisely for the purpose and with the intention of finding within the fruitful scientific research methods of recent times the seeds of a spiritual life. I have, after all, expressed this on various occasions and in various ways. And individual lectures I have given in various fields of scientific thought also illustrate in detail the path that I wish to characterize more broadly through these lectures.

[ 5 ] Anyone who wishes to understand the true meaning of modern scientific research—along with the underlying, or at least the potential, human way of thinking behind it—must go back several centuries. For it is easy to misunderstand the inner nature of scientific thought if one attempts to grasp it solely from the immediate present. One can only come to know this true essence of scientific research by tracing its development over several centuries. And when we seek to do so, we are led back to a point in time that I have often characterized as a pivotal one in the entire modern development of humanity, we are led back to the 14th and 15th centuries, to that era in which a wholly different mode of human thought—one that remained active throughout the Middle Ages—was supplanted by the first dawn of the very thinking in which we are fully immersed today. And as we look back at this dawn of the modern era, we encounter a figure in whom we can, so to speak, see everything that constitutes the transition from an earlier way of thinking to a later one; we encounter him in this dawn, in which, however, much still lives on in memories of what has gone before: Nicholas of Cusa, who on the one hand was a great man of the Church, and on the other hand was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. And we encounter this in Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who was born in 1401 in western Germany as the son of a boatman and a winegrower, and who died in 1464 as a persecuted man of the Church; in him we encounter a figure who probably understood himself exceptionally well, but who, in a certain respect, presents extraordinary difficulties for the later observer to comprehend.

[ 6 ] The future Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa was thus born in the Rhine region of western Germany as the son of a winegrower and a boatman. He received his early education in the community known as “The Brothers of the Common Life.” It was there that he absorbed his first impressions of youth. These youthful impressions were of a rather unusual nature. Certainly, even as a boy, Nicholas already possessed a certain degree of human ambition; however, this was tempered by an extraordinarily brilliant gift for discerning what was truly necessary in the reality of social life—that is, in Nicholas of Cusa’s social reality. The Brothers of the Common Life were a community that brought together people who, from the very depths of their hearts, were dissatisfied both with ecclesiastical institutions and with what at that time more or less constituted opposition within the Church itself; they were also dissatisfied with monasticism and religious orders.

[ 7 ] The Brothers of the Common Life were, in a certain sense, mystical revolutionaries. They sought to achieve everything they regarded as their ideal solely through the internalization of a life lived in peace and human brotherhood. They did not want a rule based on violence, as the external Church had and, at that time, truly did not embody in any sympathetic form. Nor, however, did they want to become detached from the world like the members of monastic orders. They placed great importance on outward cleanliness; they insisted that each of them fulfill his duty in outward life—in the details of the profession in which he was engaged—faithfully and diligently. They did not wish to withdraw from the world; they merely wished, within a life devoted to real work, to withdraw into the depths of their souls so that, alongside the external reality of life—which they recognized as the full practice of life—they might find the depth and inwardness of a religious and spiritual sensibility. And so this community was one that, above all, fostered human qualities as the atmosphere in which a certain divine and spiritual nature was to thrive. In Deventer, Holland, Nicholas of Cusa was raised within this community. The other members—at least the majority of this community of the Brothers of the Common Life—were for the most part people who fulfilled their duties within narrowly defined circles and then, one might say, sought their path to God and the spiritual world in the quiet privacy of their own rooms.

[ 8 ] Nicholas was a person who was predisposed to step forward and bring about organization among people in social life through the power of his insight and through the power of his will, which sprang from that insight. And so the inner urge inherent in Nicholas of Cusa soon added to the intimacy of monastic life the aspiration to be able to step out into the world to a greater and stronger extent. This was initially achieved through his study of law. It must be borne in mind, however, that in those days—the first half of the 15th century—the various fields of knowledge had far more points of contact with one another than was the case later on, or even in our own time. Thus, Nicholas of Cusa practiced law for a time. Yet the very era in which he lived was one in which social chaos permeated all spheres of life. And so he soon grew weary of legal practice and was ordained as a priest of the Catholic Church. He was fully and completely what he had become. And so he was now, too, fully a priest of the papal Church of that time. He served in this capacity in the various ecclesiastical offices entrusted to him, but he was particularly active at the Council of Basel. There he placed himself at the head of the minority—that minority which, in the end, actually sought to uphold the absolute power of the papal see. The majority, consisting largely of bishops and cardinals from the West, sought—I would say—a more democratic form of church administration. The pope was to be subject to the councils. This, of course, led to the schism at the council. Those who were followers of Nicholas of Cusa moved the council’s seat south; the others remained in Basel and installed an antipope. But Nicholas remained steadfast in his defense of the absolute papacy. If one has sufficient insight, one can well imagine the feelings that drove Nicholas of Cusa in this regard; one can imagine how he told himself: What may emerge today from a majority can, in a sense, only become a somewhat sublimated form of the general chaos we already have. What he wanted was a firm hand to bring about organization and order. He certainly wanted the actions of this firm hand to be guided by insight, but he still wanted this firm hand. And he asserted this demand when, later, after being sent to Central Europe, he advocated for the consolidation of the papal church. Thus, one might say, he was naturally destined to become a cardinal of the papal church of that time.

[ 9 ] I said earlier that it is somewhat curious that Nicholas probably understood himself very well, but that the later observer has difficulty understanding this personality. This becomes particularly clear to us when we see him traveling far and wide as a defender of absolute papal authority and recognize in him—at least if we take his words at face value—a fanatical defender of this papally colored Western Christianity, for example, against the looming Turkish threat of that time. And on the one hand, there were fiery words spoken by Nicholas of Cusa—who had likely already been secretly appointed a cardinal at that time—against the infidels; fiery words with which he called on European civilization to take a stand against what was coming from Asia in the form of the Turks. But it strikes us as strange again when, on the other hand, we pick up a text by Nicholas of Cusa that was likely written in the midst of these fanatical battles he waged against the Turks, so that we can imagine: There, Nicholas of Cusa preaches in the most impassioned manner against the encroaching Turkish threat and stirs up the spirits to rally against this threat and save European civilization. Then he sits down at his desk and writes a treatise on how, fundamentally, Christians, Jews, pagans, and Muslims—all of them—if only they are properly understood, can be educated to live together in peace, to worship and recognize the one God common to all humanity, just as, fundamentally, there exists a commonality among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagans—that it merely needs to be discovered in order to establish peace among all people. And so, in the quiet confines of this individual’s mind, we see the most peaceful attitude toward all religions and denominations, yet when she speaks in public, we see or hear the most fanatical words calling for battle.

[ 10 ] These are the kinds of things that make it difficult to understand a figure like Nicholas of Cusa. Only those who truly look at that era with discerning eyes can understand them. And they are most easily understood when viewed in the context of the entire course of the inner spiritual development of his era. We do not wish to criticize; we wish first to look at this outwardly dynamic man—who was so active, as I have described—from one perspective, and now to examine what lived within his soul; we simply want to set these two sides side by side.

[ 11 ] The best way to understand what was going on in the soul of Nicholas of Cusa is to study the state of mind he was in when he returned from a mission he had been sent on by the papacy to Constantinople, where he was to work toward the reconciliation of the Western and Eastern Churches. On the return journey, while he was on the ship, gazing at the starry sky, the fundamental idea—or, one might say, the fundamental feeling—of that treatise came to him, which he then published in 1440 under the title *De docta ignorantia*—“On Learned Ignorance.” —What mood is expressed in this *docta ignorantia*? Well, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had, of course, long since absorbed into his soul all that had been achieved in spiritual insight throughout the Middle Ages. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa was well versed in everything that revived Platonism and revived Aristotelianism had developed during the Middle Ages. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa was, of course, deeply familiar with all of this—such as how Thomas Aquinas spoke of spiritual worlds, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for human understanding to ascend from sensory knowledge to spiritual knowledge. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa combined all of medieval theology with a thorough knowledge of the mathematical insights available to people at that time. Nicholas was an exceptionally gifted mathematician, so that the fabric of his soul was composed, on the one hand, of the aspiration to rise, through fundamental theological concepts, to that spiritual world which reveals itself to humanity as divine; on the other hand, this soul embodied all that comes to a person in terms of inner intellectual discipline, inner rigor of thought, and inner certainty of thought when he immerses himself in the realm of mathematics.

[ 12 ] Thus, on the one hand, Nicholas was a deeply devout thinker, and on the other, a clear-headed one. As he gazed upon the starry sky while traveling from Constantinople toward Western Europe, that which had hitherto flowed within the characterized duality—that which had hitherto lived in his soul as a mood—dissolved into what followed. From that journey onward, he perceived the Divine as something lying beyond human conceptual and ideological knowledge. He said to himself: With our conceptual and intellectual knowledge, we can live here on earth; we can use our understanding, through these concepts and ideas, to extend our grasp over what surrounds us in the realms of nature. But these concepts become increasingly feeble when we seek to turn our gaze upward toward that which reveals itself as the Divine. And what in Scholasticism had opened up as an abyss between human knowledge and revelation—viewed from an entirely different perspective—became, for Nicholas, the innermost mood of his soul, the most personal matter of his heart. He must have often taken this view within his soul and traced the path in thought: how thought first extends over what surrounds us in the realm of nature, how thought then seeks to rise from this realm of nature to the divinity of thought, how it grows ever thinner and thinner there and finally dissipates completely into nothingness—and now knows: Beyond this nothingness, into which it has dissolved as a thought, lies the divinity. And only when a person, through the deep love they cultivate apart from intellectual life, can extend the path that this thought traverses in the gaze just a little further—when love gains the upper hand over thought—can this love reach into that realm where intellectual knowledge does not extend. And so it became a matter close to the heart of Nicholas of Cusa to point to the truly divine realm as that before which human thought falters, before which human knowledge dissipates into nothingness: docta ignorantia—learned ignorance. And if scholarship, if knowledge, Nicholas of Cusa told himself, takes on its noblest form by surrendering itself at the very moment it seeks to reach the spirit, then this knowledge becomes the best; then it becomes docta ignorantia. And it was in this spirit that Nicholas of Cusa published his *Docta ignorantia* in 1440.

[ 13 ] Let us now turn our attention away from Nicholas of Cusa for a moment and enter the secluded little room of a medieval mystic who preceded Nicholas of Cusa. I have described him in my book on mysticism, insofar as he is relevant to spiritual science. Let us enter the little chamber of Meister Eckhart. We then find ourselves before a figure who was declared a heretic by the institutional Church. One can read Master Eckhart’s writings in a wide variety of ways and delight in the depth of his mysticism. But one is perhaps most deeply moved when one repeatedly returns to a fundamental mood of the soul found in Master Eckhart. I would therefore like to characterize this fundamental mood: Master Eckhart, even earlier than Nicholas of Cusa, is imbued with what medieval Christian theology sought as an ascent to the divine, to the spiritual world. When we study Master Eckhart’s writings, we can recognize Thomistic turns of phrase in many of his expressions. But whenever this master’s soul, stepping away from theological thought, surrenders itself to such an ascent toward the true spiritual world—with which, however, this soul feels connected—it always falls back into telling itself: “To that which is my innermost being, the divine spark within me—I cannot reach it through all this thinking, through all this theology.” This thinking, this theology, these ideas—they give me a little of this, a little of that, and a little of the other; everywhere, this or that little something. But none of these little things is anything like what lies within me as the spiritual-divine spark. And so I am cast out of all that which fills my soul with thoughts—and initially also with feelings and memories—out of all worldly knowledge that I can absorb up to the highest levels. Thus I am cast out of all of this when I wish to seek the deepest essence of my own being. I am nothing when I wish to seek this deepest essence of my own being. I have sought and sought. I have traversed them—these paths that lead me to ideas, to sensations drawn from the world—and on these paths, where I did indeed find much, I sought my “I.” And in this search for the “I,” before I found this “I”—the search for which led me through all the realms of nature—I fell into “nothingness.”

[ 14 ] And so, in his search for the self, Meister Eckhart felt as if he had fallen into nothingness. And from this feeling springs a word from this medieval mystic that touches the heart and the soul deeply, deeply. It is this: And I immerse myself in the nothingness of the Divine and am eternally, through this nothingness, through this “not,” an “I.” I immerse myself in the nothingness of the Divine and become, in the “not,” an “I,” an “I.” I must draw the “I” from the “not” of the Divine for all eternity. In utter stillness, a powerful word comes to meet us through this mystic. And why, then, did this urge toward the “not”—to find the “I” in the “not”—resound in the innermost chamber of this mystic’s heart when he sought to turn away from the search for the world and toward the search for the “I”? Why? Yes, if we go back to earlier times, we find that in all the knowledge of those earlier times, when looking into the soul, there lived the possibility that this inner contemplation might be illuminated from within by the Spirit. This was still the legacy of ancient pneumatology, which will be discussed further here. When, for example, Thomas Aquinas looked into the soul, he found the spiritual weaving and living within that soul. Not in the soul itself, but in what weaves and lives as the spiritual within the soul, Thomas Aquinas—and his predecessors—sought the true “I.” They looked through the soul toward the spirit, and in the spirit they found the “I” as the “I” given to them by God. And they said—or at least they could always have said, even if they did not always articulate it—they said: I penetrate into the innermost part of my soul, look into the spirit, and find the “I” in the spirit. —But what had happened in the development of humanity was that, in its progress toward the realm of freedom, it had lost the ability to find the spirit when looking inward.

[ 15 ] Johannes Scotus Erigena could not have spoken quite as Meister Eckhart did. Johannes Scotus Erigena would simply have said: I look within myself. Once I have traversed the paths that have led me through the realms of the external world, I discover within myself, in my soul, the Spirit, and thereby find the “I” that permeates and animates the soul. I immerse myself in the Divinity as Spirit and find the I. — It was simply human destiny that the same path, which had still been passable for humanity in earlier centuries, was no longer passable in Meister Eckhart’s time. By following the same paths as John Scotus Eriugena—or even simply the same paths as Thomas Aquinas—Master Eckhart did not immerse himself in God the Spirit; rather, he immersed himself in the “nothingness” of the Divine and had to extract the “I” from that nothingness. But this means nothing less than this: in its introspection, humanity has lost sight of the Spirit. And Meister Eckhart draws the “I” out of the “nothingness” from the depths of his heart. And his successor, Nicholas of Cusa, admits with the utmost certainty: All those thoughts and ideas that guide us on our previous quest—they falter; they come to naught when one seeks to enter the realm of the Spirit. The soul has lost the ability to find the realm of the Spirit within itself. And Nicholas of Cusa says to himself: When I perceive all that theology can offer me, I am led into this nothingness of human thought, and I must unite myself with that which lives in this nothingness in order to be able to experience the Spirit at all through docta ignorantia. — But then this knowledge, this insight, cannot be put into words. Then a person must fall silent when he has reached the point where, through docta ignorantia, the experience of the spiritual first arises.

[ 16 ] Nicholas of Cusa is thus the one who, in his own personal development, senses that medieval theology has reached its end and enters into *docta ignorantia*. But he is also a skilled mathematician. He has internalized the rigorous way of thinking that stems from his engagement with mathematics. But I would like to say: he has become inwardly reluctant to apply what he has absorbed in his soul of such mathematical certainty to the realm where docta ignorantia had revealed itself to him. He attempts, with all manner of mathematical symbols and formulas, to approach—timidly and symbolically—the realm into which his docta ignorantia has led him. Yet he is always aware: These are symbols that mathematics provides me. I have gained this mathematics within my soul. It has remained to me as the last remnant of the old knowledge. I cannot doubt its certainty in the same way as the certainty of “theology,” for I experience mathematical certainty by absorbing mathematics within myself. But at the same time, the other burden within him—arising from the nullity of theology—has become so heavy that he does not dare to apply mathematical certainty to the realm of docta ignorantia in any way other than through symbols. Thus ends an epoch of human intellectual activity. Nicholas of Cusa is, in his inner state of mind, almost as much a mathematician as Descartes would later be, but he does not dare to grasp with mathematical certainty that which had characterized him as he described it in his *Docta ignorantia*. He sensed, as it were, how the realm of the spirit had withdrawn from humanity, how it had vanished further and further into the distance, how it cannot be attained by human knowledge, and how one must become ignorant in the deepest sense in order to unite with this realm of the spirit in love.

[ 17 ] This sentiment emanates from what can be gleaned from Nicholas of Cusa’s *Docta ignorantia*, published in 1440. Humanity within Western civilization had, in a sense, developed to the point where it once believed it had the spiritual realm within close reach. Then this spiritual realm receded farther and farther from those who contemplated and observed it, until it vanished. And the *Docta Ignorantia* of 1440 is an open admission that the ordinary human gaze of that time could no longer reach into those distant perspectives into which the spiritual realm had withdrawn from humanity. Mathematics, the most certain of the sciences, now dares to approach only that which can no longer be seen inwardly or spiritually, using symbolic formulas. And it is now as if this very realm of the spirit, receding further and further into the distance, had vanished from European civilization in a direct sense, but another realm had followed in its wake—the realm that European civilization now takes up in its inclinations and in its power of observation: the realm of the sensory world. And what Nicholas of Cusa timidly and symbolically did in 1440 with mathematics in relation to the spiritual realm that was slipping away from him, Nicholas Copernicus boldly and defiantly applies to the external sensory world: mathematical thinking, mathematical knowledge. And just as the *Docta ignorantia* was published in 1440—acknowledging that even with the certainty of mathematics one can no longer perceive the realm of the spirit—so too did Nicolaus Copernicus’s *De revolutionibus orbium coelestium* appear in 1543, in which the universe is presented with bold audacity in such a way that it must yield to the certainty of mathematics.

[ 18 ] If we conceive of the realm of the spirit as so far removed from human understanding that even mathematics can approach it only through stammering symbols—so stated Nicholas of Cusa in 1440; if we conceive of mathematics as so powerful and certain that it subdues the sensory realm, and the world of the senses can be scientifically and cognitively expressed in mathematical formulas—so spoke Nicolaus Copernicus to European civilization in 1543. A century lies between them. In that century, Western natural science was born. Before that, it was in an embryonic state. And anyone who wishes to understand what led to the birth of this Western natural science must turn their gaze insightfully to that century lying between *Docta ignorantia* and *De revolutionibus orbium coelestium*. The spiritual enrichment that took place there, and the sacrifices to which the human soul had to submit—these must be studied if one is to understand the meaning of the natural sciences even today. One must go back that far. That is where we must begin, looking back just a little to the embryonic stage that preceded Nicholas of Cusa, if we are to stand firmly within the scientific mindset today and if we are to see clearly what science can offer humanity, as well as how a new spiritual life can blossom from science. Of this, ladies and gentlemen, I shall speak tomorrow.