| 171. Inner Impulses of Evolution: Lecture I
16 Sep 1916, Dornach Translated by Gilbert Church, F. Kozlik, Stewart C. Easton |
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| Within the last three months I have been regarded by one party as a rabid Germanophile, whereas others say I have no understanding of the German nature and am able only to understand the classical world, the only world whose strengths I feel within myself. |
| We must observe such things without sympathy or antipathy if we want really to understand them. It is important to understand them because they play so large a part in our cultural life today. |
| As you know, after she had absorbed Greece and Christianity, a time came when Rome could no longer understand what she had received, and she no longer desired to understand them. They were felt to be foreign elements. |
| 171. Inner Impulses of Evolution: Lecture I
16 Sep 1916, Dornach Translated by Gilbert Church, F. Kozlik, Stewart C. Easton |
|---|
During the coming days I shall endeavor to continue the study we have made of the relationship of man with the universe. I want to take you today into a new and more general domain and speak to you of forces that are operative in human evolution, especially those that are working in the development of our own age. First, however, I must begin with a historical introduction that will, of course, accord with the points of view presented in the science of the spirit. We have, as you know, often emphasized the extent to which the ordinary method of observing the stream of history is no more than a fable convenue, and we have shown how it is only from spiritual scientific observation that clarification, can also be thrown upon the historical evolution of humanity. You well know that when we study evolution in its main features, we have always to consider among the processes at work in the present, certain elements that have remained from the past. As you will have seen from recent studies, we call them luciferic or ahrimanic, depending upon their nature. Thus, our study will only lead to full comprehension when we take into account what is progressing in a normal and regular manner, and also what has remained from the past. Today I would like to direct your attention again to the Greco-Latin age, the fourth post-Atlantean age of civilization, and to present certain things that can open the way to an understanding of how this earlier age works over into our own. Thus may we perceive how the forces of that age are still active today. This will help us to understand how man, standing in the midst of present evolution, can find his way through the various influences that are at work. Only when he does find his way and is thus in a position to know how to act aright at each moment of this life, is he worthy of being called a man. Where actual concrete events are concerned, I am, of course, in a strange position today because of the possibility of misunderstanding, and, as we have frequently experienced lately, even a deliberately intentional one. Within the last three months I have been regarded by one party as a rabid Germanophile, whereas others say I have no understanding of the German nature and am able only to understand the classical world, the only world whose strengths I feel within myself. Accordingly, you will not be surprised to see that I am quite aware that there may be some difficulties in understanding me. Regardless of how it may be received, I continue to speak what I know to be the truth. Today, then, we will turn our attention to the Greco-Latin age, which shines in all that has found its way into the present from Greece and Rome. Let us try to picture to ourselves what the Greek world means to us. So many ardent souls have a longing for this world, which has been the object of deep study by so many distinguished minds. In fact, everyone knows something of this world either from history or from the many remains of Greek culture. We know, on the one side something of Greece from history books in which the deeds of the Greeks and their social organizations are recorded. Such descriptions often start with the Trojan War and then proceed further to the Persian War, to the Peloponnesian War, and so on, leading finally to the fall of Greece to the Romans. All such history is, however, only one chapter of the great world book of history that speaks to us of Greece that I have so often spoken of. Another chapter includes the poems of Homer, the poetical works of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus insofar as they have come down to us, the songs of the great Pindar, our memories of the great art of Greece, and what is left of the Greek philosophy. That is the other chapter, which speaks about an infinite treasure of human experiences, feelings, points of view and ideas relating to the structure of the world. And running through all this, like light shining over it all are the Greek myths, those divine sagas that express so wonderfully in pictures what the Greeks were able to perceive of the secrets of the cosmos. And something from the Greek mysteries has also come down to us, and belongs indeed to this other chapter of Greek history. Here, anyone who wants to lift his soul into the sphere of the spirit will find far more to interest him than he will in the first chapter. Today, when we ask what the Greeks mean to us, we must give far more attention to this chapter than the first, which can only provide information of the past deeds for which the heroes became famous, but little of this remains that is of real significance for the soul at the present time. The contents of the second chapter, however, can become living for us, who enter willingly into that enthusiastic and creative element of the Greeks. This is the one side of the Greco-Latin epoch we can put before our soul. Then we begin to see how Greece moves rapidly toward its full ripening in spiritual spheres. It is a wonderful experience to follow this in detail. Take Greek philosophy, that extract of the spiritual life of Greece. See how it develops from the great philosophers belonging to what Nietzsche called “The Tragic Age”—Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaximander, Anaxagoras,—to Socrates, who heralded a new age, and finally to Plato, who raised man in such a wonderful way to spiritual ideals and ideal points of view. Then we come to Aristotle, who formed the most comprehensive and penetrating ideas so strongly that, centuries later, men who have had to rethink his thought after him are still unable to make full and right use of his ideas. We know that Goethe later changed the phrase, “Faust's entelechy”, in the last scene of Faust, into “Faust's immortal part.” The original Aristotelian idea found in “entelechy” expresses in a far more intimate way than “immortal part” the element of man's soul that passes through the gate of death. “Immortal part” is a negative expression whereas “entelechy” is positive. Goethe, however, realizing that “entelechy” would not give a clear idea of what was meant, later changed it to the more common term “immortal part.” Nevertheless, he had a feeling for the depth of the idea of entelechy. We are not yet done with this and similar ideas of the Greeks. They elaborated them in a truly plastic manner, taking them right out of reality, but the men of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and also the early Middle Ages, had enough to do trying to understand the coarser ideas of outer material reality. Those more refined ideas, which according to Aristotle unite outer material reality with spiritual reality, were somewhat beyond their grasp. Thus we see something wonderful and beautiful unfold in Greek life and culture. As this culture continued to progress, becoming almost overripe in part, it was conquered, in an outer sense by Rome. An extraordinary process, this so-called conquest of Greece by Rome! In these two streams of civilization we have what constitutes the fourth post-Atlantean age. An understanding of them can throw a flood of light in an external, exoteric way on what works and weaves inwardly during this epoch. Externally, Greece was subjected to Rome in such a way that the chronicle of their relationship forms a wonderfully interesting chapter in world history. Now let us look at Rome, which stands in a different relation to our present age than does Greece. Many souls among us are seeking the Greek world. But we must look for it. We have to draw it up from the gray depths of the spirit, so to speak. It is not so with Rome, which survives in the whole European present with far more living strength than is usually believed. Recall, for example, how long the whole thinking of the peoples of European civilization and culture, and of those peoples who lived with it, was carried on in Latin. What vast significance Latin, this crystallized Romanism, still has today for those who have to prepare to take leading positions in life! How very many of the ideas and conceptions that we form in our souls are taken from the Roman world! To a large extent we still think in the style of the Romans. Nearly all legal thought, and a great many of our other concepts and ideas are conveyed in this way. Those who prepare themselves for leading positions in life have, in the course of their education, to absorb along with Latin a whole host of feelings and ideas belonging to the Roman age. The result is that our public life today is everywhere permeated with concepts and ideas that spring from Rome. People little realize the extent to which this is true. The peasant may mutter against all this Latin influence but he, too, accepts it in the end. After all, he allows the Mass to be said to him in Latin. This Roman-Latin influence is, as it were, injected into the blood of those who are preparing themselves to take leading positions, and thus the thinking of the European upper classes who are involved in history, politics, law and government, is permeated to a high degree by Rome. This is true not only in the names and terms used, but also in the method and character. So you see that a European stands in a different relationship to the Roman stream, the other stream in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, than to the first, the Greek stream. Let us now place ancient Rome side by side with ancient Greece, which we must do if we really want to understand things rightly. Placed side by side, we can hardly find among the factors of recent evolution (I am taking Greece and Rome as belonging to modern times) a greater contrast in the sphere of the spirit. As we look at Greece from a certain distance in time, it seems to us to be immersed in fantasy, art and philosophy, radiant in its forms and inner significance, eloquent of soul and spirit. Rome, on the contrary, had nothing in its own nature of what is so deeply characteristic of Greece. The Romans were a people devoid of fantasy. Unlike the Greeks, their souls were not steeped in a profound realization of the directly cosmic nature of human life. In spite of the fact that the Greeks kept slaves, as a civilization Greek life reveals itself as one of exceptional freedom. Then we see this marvelously free Greek life made subject to Rome, a civilization utterly devoid of fantasy and imagination in every sphere of law, military and political culture. Were they to speak from Knowledge and not from a lack of it, even those who love the Roman element in modern history would confess that neither in the sphere of science nor of art was Rome in any way original. When Rome conquered Greece politically and militarily, it acquired Greek art and science. Even if we think of the greatest poets of Rome, compared with the greatness of Greek art and poetry, they are nothing but imitators. Rome, however, became great in quite another sphere, one in which the Greeks were not much interested. Because of the peculiar constitution of the Romans, they developed such forceful perceptions and feelings in the legal, political and military domain that they still continue to work in the present. This distinction between Greece and Rome is especially revealed when we consider the Greek and Roman languages in their inward spiritual aspects. Men who have looked more deeply into these things as, for instance, Herbart in the nineteenth century, were anxious that secondary education should not be so overwhelmed by the waves of that powerful stream of Rome as it has become. He wanted college students to learn Greek first rather than the customary Latin because in his opinion Latin deadened a man's soul to the more inward and intimate working of the Greek idiom. Nothing has as yet come of his suggestion, but it is still an ideal held by many teachers with insight today. As you know, our age is not guided by insight and it thus must bear the karma of that failing. The Greek language repeatedly reveals a stream flowing behind the Greek spiritual life that comes from the old imaginations of the Egypto-Chaldean age. Our modern humanity is certainly not sensitive enough to feel this living element behind every Greek word, but for the Greek soul each word was rather an outer gesture of a full inner experience. Of course, imagination was no longer present to the same degree in the Greek as it was in the men of the Egypto-Chaldean age, but we can still detect in Greek words a strong feeling remaining from the inspiring force of the old imaginative ideation. An utter disregard of the mere word and a saturation of the language with soul can be felt in Greek. This inner soul element can still be sensed in those Greek words, which have been transmitted to us in the purest form. We see through the word; we do not just hear it but see through it to a soul process that takes place behind it. This comes to expression in the very sound and grammatical configurations of Greek. With the Roman-Latin language it is quite another thing. Even in Roman mythology you can recognize a characteristic of the Roman-Latin idiom. In Greek mythology with its traditional names for the gods you will find everywhere behind these divine names the most concrete events of the myth and, living with these events, the gods. The gods themselves stand before us and we watch them pass. They show themselves to us in flesh and blood, as it were. (I am speaking, of course, of the soul.) But the divine names of the Romans—Saturnus, Jupiter, etc.—have almost become abstract concepts. The same is true of the entire Roman-Latin idiom. Much of what lies behind the Greek language has been lost, and attention is now focused on the word as it sounds and forms itself grammatically in speech. One lives in the word. The direct soul element, the kernel, the inner feeling that we sense in Greek has been cooled in Latin. It was not necessary for the Roman to hear behind his language the echoing of the life of imagination. Indeed it was no longer there. Instead, the Roman needed passions and emotions to bring his word into movement because Latin is essentially logical. For it to be something more than a stream of cold logic, it had to be continually kindled anew by the emotional element that was always behind Roman life and history. The second chapter, as I set it before you for Greece, is not to be found in the same way in the history of Rome. It is the content of the first chapter that essentially takes place here, and it is this that is still studied today by our young people as the determining factor in evolution. To comprehend law and jurisprudence and to represent human relationships as they develop from the emotions has come to be the secret of Latin. We must observe such things without sympathy or antipathy if we want really to understand them. It is important to understand them because they play so large a part in our cultural life today. Consider without sympathy or antipathy but purely historically what is absorbed by our youth when Roman history is studied. Of course, much is not put into words, but the unexpressed is received by the astral body and lives on in feeling and sentiments. What we today call “right” existed, no doubt, in one way or another before Roman civilization. Nevertheless, the way in which we understand right was, in a sense, a Roman discovery. The right that lends itself to being written down, that can be laid out in paragraphs, that can be minutely defined, etc., is an invention of the Romans. Why should the Romans not have proclaimed to the world what right is and how to act in a right manner? This failure is directly illustrated by the fact that the Romans trace their history back to Romulus, who killed his brother and then collected all the available discontented persons and criminals and made them his first Roman citizens. They then propagated themselves through the rape of the Sabines. Therefore, it does seem that the Romans, thanks to the force that works by striving for the opposite, were indeed the people who were called to invent rights and extirpate wrongs. Here is a nation whose men trace themselves back to robbers, and the women to a rape! Many things in world history find their explanation in opposites. The Romans gradually built a mighty empire and we see how the seven kings, who were more than myths, ruled and met their ends finally through pride. We move on to the time of the Republic, which people will never admit has so little interest or importance today. This is the period that still plays such a large part in the education of our youth. The fights between the patricians and the plebeians, the somewhat revolting struggle between Marius and Sulla, Rome trembling under Catiline, the endless and most terrible slave wars—this whole string of unpleasant events still largely provides the material for the education and culture of our young. Then we see how, while all this is taking place on Roman soil, Roman rule gradually spreads until Rome is transformed into an empire that strives to embrace the entire known world and, as a matter of fact, finally succeeds. We also find how alone the Roman feels, a quality of his soul that is apt to be overlooked. How do the deeds of a Caracalla or anyone else accord with the discovery of right for the good of humanity? We tend to forget that these Romans combined their sense of right and their self-control with a terrible slavery to which they subjected their colonies and the peoples they conquered. Looking at Rome from this standpoint for once, we see that we must not correct the facts, but rather many of the feelings we have acquired in our study of Roman history. If one were looking at the matter with sympathy or antipathy, but in such a way that one was biased by the too frequent sympathies and antipathies that prevail today, one might ask, “Did not the Romans later give Roman citizenship to their colonials?” Now, however, if you look at the motive behind this, you will see it in another light. It was Caracalla who did this, and he was not a man to whom one could attribute selfless motives. He was a man of characteristically Roman egoism. That says enough about the soul's life in ancient time. There were, of course, upright lawyers who devoted themselves to jurisprudence with all their souls. Papinian, for instance, was a noble man, but Caracalla had him murdered. One could go on to present many such examples that could correct our usual feelings. In such ways as it could, this Roman civilization now took over Greece. Spiritually, Rome was conquered by Greece, but Greece had to pay for this conquest with its own downfall as a political community—one cannot say, “unity,” for that Greece never was. Bossuet rightly says—he marvels at his words but words can still be correct however one feels them, “One only hears of the greatness of the name of Rome.” In the very best time of Roman rule it was the greatness of the name, what had gone into the word and was felt as its quality that was important. As for social conditions, Rome shows us the infinite riches and treasures that flowed into it from its colonies, and side by side with this wealth, the terrible poverty of a large part of the population. In the first era of its conquests Rome took over Greece. Then we see how Christianity pervaded Roman civilization, allowing itself to be over-spread with the formal element that belonged to Rome. All the institutions of early Christianity were received into the structure of Roman legal administration and, perpetuating the ancient Roman element, preserved in the forms of the Church. Everywhere it shows in its institutions forms that have developed in Rome. It also adopted Latin as a language and thus came to Latinize its thinking. With the expansion of Christianity, this Latin-Roman element spread over all of Europe. As you know, after she had absorbed Greece and Christianity, a time came when Rome could no longer understand what she had received, and she no longer desired to understand them. They were felt to be foreign elements. At the time when Greece was conquered, the Grecian influence worked powerfully on Rome, but the Romans gradually strengthened their legal and political power. The Greek element was then felt to be a foreign body that it no longer wanted. As a final consequence, the Athenian schools of philosophy were closed by the Emperor Justinian, the sixth century ruler of the eastern Roman empire who codified the legal and political principles of Rome in the Corpus Juris Civilis. Justinian, who was a sort of incarnation of the Roman-Latin element, was the emperor who finally closed the schools and put an end to Greek philosophy, categorically forbidding its pursuit. He also put a stop to the original free expansion of Christianity by having the works of Origen, who united the wisdom of Greece with the depths of Christianity and also brought semi-occult communications into it, condemned by the Church. So we see how Rome flowed into the institutions of Europe by way of the Church. The other political institutions fell into line with it—we can even say took their origin from it, because the European rulers set a high value on their title of “Defender of the Faith.” Later on, of course, when they wanted to divorce themselves from the Church, they dropped the title and founded a church of their own. Well, it is not always that people take things in such dead earnest. So the rulers styled themselves “Defender of the Faith,” “the most Christian of Monarchs,” etc. Public institutions developed right out of Roman thought and custom, and Rome infected everything, grafting its own nature onto European culture. After Justinian had laid down the code of Roman legal and political thought, had wiped out Greek philosophy and had had Origen condemned, Rome continued to live on in the institutions of Europe without the Greek content. After it had driven the very sap of its life, its spiritual content, out of itself, only the external remained, petrified in the word and grown strong and stubborn in external institutions. Occultists with insight have always had a certain feeling which still remains today, a feelings shared by those who have no reason to hide it. This is expressed in the statement: “The ghost of ancient Rome still lives in the institutions of Europe.” Now we see over and over again in history how what has gone before is carried over into later events where it springs to life again in them. Thus, we find how Rome was fructified by Greece a second time. During the first time, the Republic was developing into an empire, and Greek art, philosophy and spiritual life flowed over into Rome. It was the age in which the Romans lived Greece, so to speak. They carried themselves like great lords and thought it an easy thing to take over the whole of Greek culture. They used well-educated Greeks, who indeed were slaves, for teachers of their children, which, by Roman standards was the way to acquire a conquered culture. Then another epoch followed after an epoch of stagnation, of which even history tells us but little. It was an epoch when right was permeated by the Church, when the Church was impregnated by politics and law. There followed something like a renewal of Greek culture from Dante to the fall of freedom in Florence, the age of the Renaissance when Greece came to life again in Rome, especially through Raphael and others. But it was a re-naissance, not a “naissance,” a birth, and for a long time Europe could do no more than look back to this Renaissance, this rebirth. When Goethe went to Italy, he sought there not Rome but Greece. He tried everywhere to recognize in Roman culture the Greek way of thought and life. During the Renaissance, Christianity and Greece so merged that today we can no longer distinguish Christian from Greek in Renaissance art. In connection with Raphael's famous painting, “the School of Athens,” the question is often raised as to whether the central figures represent Plato and Aristotle or Peter and Paul. There are just as good reasons for the one view as for the other. So, in one of the most outstanding paintings of the Renaissance, one cannot tell whether the figures are Greek or Christian. The two elements have merged in such a way that the wonderful marriage between spiritual and material in the Greek life of thought can just as well be expressed by Peter and Paul as by Plato and Aristotle. Plato, whom many would like to see in this painting, is depicted by an old man who points with his hand to heavenly spheres, and by his side stands Aristotle with his conceptual world, who points down into the material world looking for the spiritual in it. We can, however, just as well see Peter in the figure pointing upward, and Paul in the one pointing down. But during the Renaissance it is always for good reasons that we find this type of dichotomy. After the Renaissance, which was, as we have seen, a revival of Greece, something fresh and original had to come and this could only occur through a higher synthesis. Now, today, the two gestures, one pointing upward to the heavens and the other pointing down to the earth, will be found in the same person. Then we also need the luciferic and the ahrimanic in contrast to each other. What you see divided between two people in one of the greatest works of art of the Renaissance, you will have to see in the gestures of the figure of the representative of humanity in our group statue that is to be carved: both gestures!  The Middle Ages or the beginning of our new epoch required that re-animation of ancient Greece, the Renaissance. How many things since have derived their life from it. We see how, in a philosopher like Nietzsche, this Renaissance comes to life again in his best years. We see how wonderfully it lives in all the learning of Jacob Burckhardt. Right into modern times this Renaissance continues its influence, bringing a breath of early Greek times into our modern age. We can truly say that while Greece was externally annihilated by Rome, much of the spiritual force of Greece has remained. The influence of the Greek heroes of the spirit lasted until about 333 A.D.; their coffin was started in the 4th century, and Justinian later only drove the nails into it. Then, these heroes of the spirit reappear at the time of the Renaissance as impulses of the spiritual world that have remained behind. Just as in the evolution of earth and man certain moon forces light up again at a particular time, thereby making possible the birth of human intelligence and language, so does the Greek world light up again in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to create the Renaissance. We have here a living instance of how something that has remained over and continues to work on in a later time, even though luciferically, is nevertheless used for the progress of humanity. The Greece that reappears again in the Renaissance can indeed be called luciferic, for side by side with such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael stand the side-figures of Pope Alexander VI, Caesar Borgia and the rest! Europe needed the Renaissance, which gave much to it. Thus, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onward we have again the two streams with which we began, though now they are disguised. One was called to life again in the Renaissance, the other has always been with us in Romanism, having only undergone many changes of form. The two streams now flow side by side again and both have a profound influence on mankind. In describing these things we must learn to look on the world and life in such a way that we see things quite objectively without associating sympathy or antipathy with the words used. Many Renaissance ideas and conceptions come to us not so much from school but through our whole spiritual life. People do not think about these things, but Renaissance ideas live in everyone. They are a different element from the ideas and outlook of Romanism that have never disappeared but are always at work. The Renaissance was, in a way, the salvation of the imaginative element. It represents a liberation from the merely logical and the coldness of the Latin element, which, being so cold, always requires and emotional impulse to give it life. In contrast, we see the uprising, imaginative life that was brought to Europe Through the Renaissance and that had been brought over from ancient Greece. We shall see tomorrow what it really means that, as the fourth post-Atlantean age was passing over into the fifth, this imaginative life was rekindled. It stood as a kind of godfather to the birth of the fifth post-Atlantean age, which today must liberate itself from the Romanism we have described not through the use of emotional impulses, but through knowledge. We are not here belittling the greatness of this Romanism but things must be rightly balanced. The salvation and healing of evolution lies in balancing things correctly and not allowing them to go to extremes. There are many ideas in the intellectual life of Europe that deceive and tempt men. They have remained behind from the civilization of Rome and they evoke complexes of ideas and feelings in the soul of which men are not always fully conscious. As I have said, one cannot say that the Romans absolutely invented political-legal thinking, although they did so in the sense of which we have been speaking today. In contrast to what the Greek saw among men through his living imagination, or from his inheritance of living imaginations, Rome formed a definite concept that first came to life in Romanism. It is a plant that grows entirely on political-legal soil. This is the concept of citizenship; man becomes a citizen, a Roman citizen. Therewith, the concept of man is given a legal-political coloring. What thus passed over into the blood of the European peoples with the citizen concept is intimately connected with what I described in the last lecture1 as the “politicalization” of the world of thought. There have been lawyers in modern times who have based the connection of modern man with Rome simply on this citizen concept. By virtue of this, when it is livingly experienced, man takes his place in the community in a political and legal sense, even though he may not admit it to himself. Aristotle spoke of the Zöon politikon. He still connected the political with the Zöon, the animal. That was an altogether different kind of thinking, an imaginative thinking that was not yet political thinking, a politicalization of the concept. So this political-legal element grows in our thought of man. People are often unconscious of how man is placed in a political-legal category through the natural association of ideas. In the word “civilization,” which I would call a monstrous concept since it is something that had its proper meaning only in an earlier time—in this monstrous conception of “civilization” we feel, though often unconsciously, our close connection with the essentially political and legal Roman world. “Civilization” is derived from civis, and within and behind it stands Romanism. All this boasting of civilization that we often hear today is nothing other than an unrealized Romanism that is often felt. It often happens that a man may use a word to express something lofty and great without having any notion of how, in using the word, he connects with the great forces in history. When one is able to perceive the whole political and judicial background of the word civilization, then to hear it spoken, is often enough to make one shudder. These things must be said since the science of the spirit is not for the nursery as some people seem to think, but for revealing earnest knowledge of the world. In the presence of this knowledge many of the ideas man has taken for his idols and to which he prays fall from their altars. It is not the intention of spiritual science merely to bring the beings of the spiritual world near to man so that he may feel a kind of intimate intercourse with them as he might experience with poets, for instance. No, the science of the spirit is here for man himself to draw near to the spiritual world and its forces in all earnestness.
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| 171. Inner Impulses of Evolution: Lecture II
17 Sep 1916, Dornach Translated by Gilbert Church, F. Kozlik, Stewart C. Easton |
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| But they will take up their tasks again in the fifth post-Atlantean age with all the more determination. Here is the point at which we must gain an understanding of the forces that are operative in our age, insofar as such an understanding is possible today. |
| Let us take first a phenomenon in which we all necessarily feel the deepest interest. The kind of understanding men have of the nature and being of Christ is of great significance, and so we will select examples of various kinds of understanding of His nature and being that lie near at hand. |
| Christ Jesus, who should belong to all of mankind, becomes a Jesus who lives and walks in Palestine as an historical figure who is to be understood in relation to the Palestine of the years 1 to 33 A.D., that is, understood from the customs, views, opinions and landscape of the country—a right proper, realistic description. |
| 171. Inner Impulses of Evolution: Lecture II
17 Sep 1916, Dornach Translated by Gilbert Church, F. Kozlik, Stewart C. Easton |
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Yesterday, we tried to characterize the forces that permeated Greece and Rome in order to obtain an idea of the influences that have been carried over from the fourth into the fifth post-Atlantean age, and we gave some indication of where we have to look today for signs of continued activity of the forces of the fourth post-Atlantean age. I want to ask you now to turn your attention once again to our description of the civilizations of Greece and Rome. In the way it developed, the civilization of Greece was a source of great disappointment to the luciferic powers. One can, of course, only say these things out of imaginative cognition, and this will also be true of what is to be presented to you today. The development of Greek civilization was a great disappointment to the luciferic powers because they expected something quite different from it. Think what this means. They had expected the civilization of Greece, the fourth epoch of post-Atlantean times, to bring into being for them all they had striven for during Atlantean times. On Atlantis they had developed certain activities, certain influences and forces and they had expected to see the fruits of their labors appear in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. What was it they were really looking for? To speak of such a matter lets us look right into the luciferic soul. We come to know this luciferic life that continually strives, hoping that certain results may ensue, but that continually meets with fresh disappointment. A logician would naturally ask, “Why do not these luciferic powers stop trying? Why do they not see that they must be forever and repeatedly disappointed?” Such a conclusion would be human, not luciferic, wisdom. At any rate, the luciferic powers have yet to come to this conclusion. On the contrary, it is their practice to redouble their efforts whenever they experience disappointment. What was it, then, that the luciferic powers expected from this fourth post-Atlantean age? They wanted to obtain mastery of all the soul forces of the Greek people, those soul forces that were, as we have seen, directed to carrying over the ancient imaginations of the Chaldean-Egyptian period, and to incorporate them into the creations of their own fantasy. The luciferic powers made it their endeavor to work so strongly on the human beings of the Greek civilization that their imaginations, refined and distilled to fantasy, should fill their whole being. The Greeks would then have lost themselves in a soul world, in an everyday thinking, feeling and willing that would have consisted entirely of those subtle imaginations that had become complete fantasy. If the Greeks had developed nothing in their souls but these imaginations refined to fantasy, if these enticing imaginations had come to fill their souls completely, the luciferic powers would have been able to lift the Greeks and a great part of humanity out of human evolution to place them in their own luciferic world. This was the intention of the luciferic powers. From the Atlantean epoch on, it had been their hope to achieve in the fourth post-Atlantean age what they had failed to do in Atlantis. Humanity, at the stage it had then reached, would have been incorporated into the cosmos. They wanted nothing less than to create for themselves a separate world where earthly gravity did not exist, but where human beings would dwell with absolute super-sensible lightness, entirely given up to a life of fantasy. It was the hope of the luciferic beings to create a planetary body, which would contain those members of humanity who had reached this highest development of the fantasy life. They made every endeavor to lead the souls of the Greeks away from the earth. Had they succeeded, these souls would gradually have forsaken the earth. The bodies that still came to birth would have been degenerate. Egoless beings would have been born, the earth would have fallen into decadence and a special luciferic kingdom would have begun. This did not come to pass. Why? This condition did not come about because, mingled with the “self-deifying madness” of Greek poetry, to quote Plato, was the genius and greatness of Greek philosophy and wisdom. The Greek philosophers—Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—saved Greek civilization from being completely spiritualized in a life of fantasy. They kept the Greeks on earth, providing the strongest forces that kept Greece within earthly evolution. In considering the course of history, we must always take into account the forces that lie behind physical reality and are the true causes of all that happens. It was, then, in this way that Greece was preserved for earthly evolution. Now, the luciferic beings would have been unable to achieve anything at all without the help of the ahrimanic beings. In all their intentions and hope they reckoned on their support. Indeed, it must always be that two forces strive together in this kind of working. Just as the luciferic beings were disappointed in Greece, so were the ahrimanic beings disappointed in Rome and the way it developed. The luciferic beings wanted to lead Grecian souls away from the earth-planet and the ahrimanic beings wanted to contribute their efforts to the end that the Roman civilization would assume a particular form. The ahrimanic beings exerted their strongest efforts in Rome, just as the luciferic beings did in Greece. They calculated that a certain hardening would arise on earth brought about by an entirely blind obedience and subjection to Rome. What did the ahrimanic powers want to accomplish in Rome? They wanted to establish a Roman Empire that would extend over the whole of the then known world, embracing within it every human activity. It would be directed entirely from Rome with the strictest centralization and the utmost development of the rule of might. They sought to establish a widely flung state machinery that would include and make subject to it all religious and artistic life. Its goal would be to stamp out all individuality. Every people and human being would comprise merely some small part of this mighty state machine. Thanks to the clarity of its philosophers, however, Greece was not lulled into the luciferic dream, nor could Rome be hardened as these ahrimanic powers desired, because in Rome, too, something was working against them. This was described in the last lecture as Roman ideals, but the legal, political and military ideals that were then developing could not have withstood Ahriman alone. Within the Roman civilization the ahrimanic powers gathered for a stupendous onslaught. That attempt was like a repetition of their attempt made in Atlantean times, and it developed infinitely strong powers and forces. It was only from another side that Ahriman's intention was hindered. It was, at first, prevented by something that, at first sight, might be regarded as a lower trait in the Roman character, but that was not the case. As a matter of fact, the Romans had need of what I may have seemed to describe in the last lecture with some antipathy. They needed their ruthlessness, stubborn egoism, that continuous stirring up of emotions, to be able to march against the ahrimanic powers. Roman history—I beg you expressly to note this—is not a revelation of the ahrimanic powers. Although they stand in the background, it is a fight against them. If it is all confused and self-seeking, seeming to tend more and more toward a politicalization of the whole world, it is because only in this way could Ahriman's mechanizing be resisted. All this alone, however, would not have been of much avail. Rome had also received Christianity, which in Rome would have assumed a form that would have given Ahriman a splendid opportunity to achieve his aim since, through the spiritual decline of a Roman rule that had been transformed into a papacy, the mechanizing of culture could have been accomplished. So another external power had to be brought against Ahriman, who works with much more external means than Lucifer. Ahriman, as we have seen, diverted the forces of Christianity to his own service. Another power had to be brought against him. This was the onslaught of the Germanic tribes caused by the migration of peoples in Europe. Through this onslaught on Rome, the mechanizing of the world under a single, all-embracing Roman Empire was hindered. If you will study all that took place in the migration of these peoples, you will find that you can get a true insight into it when you see it from this point of view. Whenever the migration of peoples occurs in the Roman world, Roman history is not thereby brought to an end, but the ahrimanic powers, combated throughout their history by the Romans, are repelled. Thus did Ahriman meet with his disappointment, as Lucifer had met with his. But they will take up their tasks again in the fifth post-Atlantean age with all the more determination. Here is the point at which we must gain an understanding of the forces that are operative in our age, insofar as such an understanding is possible today. The fourth post-Atlantean age extends both backwards and forwards from its central point in 333 A.D. It ended about 1413 A.D. and it began about 747 B.C. These are of course, approximate dates. I have just told you that the disappointment of Lucifer and Ahriman in the forms the Greek and Roman civilizations had assumed, has led them to make still stronger efforts in our fifth post-Atlantean age. Their efforts are already at work in the human forces that have been active from the fifteenth century. It does not matter whether something occurs a few decades earlier or later. In outer physical reality, which takes on the form of the “great illusion,” things are sometimes misplaced. The fact that the Roman civilization could be retained in the evolution of humanity as it was due to the events brought about by the migrations of the peoples. If Rome had developed in such a way that a great all-embracing mechanized empire had arisen, it would only have been habitable for egoless human beings who would have remained on earth after Lucifer had drawn out their souls on the path of Greek culture and art. You see how Ahriman and Lucifer work together. Lucifer wants to take men's souls away and found a planet with them of his own. Ahriman has to help him. While Lucifer sucks the juice out of the lemon, as it were, Ahriman presses it out, thereby hardening what remains. This is what he tried to do to the civilization of Rome. Here we have an important cosmic process going on—all due to the intention and resolve of luciferic and ahrimanic powers. As I have said, they were disappointed. They have continued their efforts, however, and our fifth post-Atlantean age has yet to learn how strong these attacks are. They are now only beginning but they will become stronger and stronger. This age must learn, too, that the necessity to understand these attacks will become ever greater. At the beginning of an age the backward beings cannot work strongly. As yet, we are only in the beginning, and even though it became manifest only later, the luciferic and ahrimanic powers began to exert their forces before the expiration of the fourth post-Atlantean age. To understand how these powers work in the fifth post-Atlantean age, we must turn our attention for a moment to what is intended for man in the right and normal course of his evolution. It is rightfully intended that he shall take a further step forward. The step taken by humanity in the fourth post-Atlantean age is revealed in the culture of the Greeks and in the political development of the Romans, and it was through the battle with Lucifer and Ahriman that what was intended actually came about. These opposing forces are always such that they fit into the progressive plan of the world. They belong to it and are needed there as opposing forces. But what special qualities are the men of the fifth post-Atlantean age, our own, to develop? We know that this is the age of the development of the consciousness soul and that, to accomplish this, a number of forces—soul and bodily forces—must be active. First, a clear perception of the sense world is necessary. This did not exist in earlier times because, as you know, a visionary, imaginative element continuously played into the human soul. The Greeks still possessed fantasy but, as we have seen, after fantasy and imagination had taken possession of humanity, as it did of the Greeks, it then became necessary for men to develop the faculty to see the world of external nature without the illumination of a vision standing behind it. We need not imagine that such a vision has to be a materialistic one. That point of view is itself an ahrimanically perverted perception of sense reality. As indicated before, observation of sense reality is one task incumbent upon the human soul in our fifth post-Atlantean age. The other task is to unfold free imaginations side by side with the clear view of reality—in a way, a kind of repetition of the Egypto-Chaldean age. To date, humanity has not progressed too far in this task. Free imaginations as sought through spiritual science means imaginations not as they were in the third post-Atlantean age, but unfettered and undistilled into fantasy. It means imaginations in which man moves as freely as he does only in his intellect. That, then, is the other task of the fifth post-Atlantean age. The unfoldment of these two faculties will lead to a right development of the consciousness soul in our present epoch. Goethe had a beautiful understanding of this clear perception, which, contrary to the materialistic point of view, he described as his “primal phenomenon” (Urphänomen). You will find that this has been dealt with at length in Goethe's writings, and I have spoken of it in my explanation of the primal phenomenon. His is a clear, pure perception of reality and of his primal phenomenon. Goethe not only gave the first impulse for perceptions free of any visions but also for free imaginations.1 What he has given us in his Faust, even though it has not yet gone far in the direction of spiritual science, and in comparison with spiritual science is still more or less instinctive, is nevertheless the first impulse to a free imaginative life. It is no mere world of fantasy, yet we have seen how deep this world of fantasy really is that develops in free imaginations in the wonderful drama, Faust. So, over against this primal phenomenon, we have what Goethe calls typical intellectual perception. You will find it described in detail in my book, The Riddle of Man. This mode of thought must continue to develop. The men of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, however, must not merely behold reality. They must be able to live with reality. They must get busy, like Goethe, and, working in quite a different way from that of the materialistic physicists, really make such use of their laboratory apparatus that it produces the primal phenomenon for them. They will then have to devise some way of getting the primal phenomenon into practical life. As you know, it is at home in, and holds sway throughout, nature. The intentions of humanity that come from free imaginations will have to be included in this primal phenomenon of nature. On the one hand, men will have to direct their gaze quite selflessly to the outer world to work in it and to gain knowledge of it. On the other, by powerful application of their personalities, they will have to bring it all into inner movement in order to find the imaginations for outer activity and outer knowledge. Gradually, the consciousness soul and its culture will achieve this transformation. There will certainly be one-sidedness in this cultural epoch. That goes without saying. Our cognition will direct its efforts only outwards, as in Bacon, or only inwards, as in Berkeley. We have already spoken of this. The imaginative life welling up from within will not unfold without all manner of disturbing influences. But even now we can point to moments in this development when someone feels this free imaginative life springing up in his soul. In these beginnings it is still in great measure unfree, but we may see how so significant a man as Jacob Boehme, quite soon after the fifth post-Atlantean age began, felt how it was trying to develop in his soul. He brought this to expression in his Aurora, and we can feel as we read it how imaginative life was working within him. It must become free; Boehme still feels it to be a little unfree. Nevertheless, he knew it was a divine creative thing that was working in him. So Boehme was, in a sense, at the opposite pole to Bacon, whose endeavor always directed his attention to the external world. Jacob Boehme, however, was entirely engrossed in the world within, and described this world beautifully in the Aurora: “I declare before God,” he says because he is speaking of his inner soul, “that I do not know how it comes to pass in me.” He means by this how the imaginations arise in him. “Without feeling the impulse of the will, I also don't know what I have to write.” This is how Boehme speaks of the uprising of imaginations in himself. He detects the beginning of forces that must grow continually stronger in the men of the fifth post-Atlantean age. “I declare before God that I do not know how it comes to pass in me. Without feeling the impulse of the will, I also don't know what I have to write. The spirit dictates to me in a great and marvelous knowledge what I write, so that often I do not know whether I am in this world with my spirit, and I rejoice exceedingly that sure and continuous knowledge is thus vouchsafed to me.” Boehme describes the instreaming of the imaginative world. We can see that he feels harmony and rest in his soul, and he describes how men's souls shall, in the normal and right progress of their evolution, let themselves be taken hold of by these inner forces, which are to grow stronger in them in the fifth post-Atlantean age. But one must take possession of them in the pure inner being of the spirit and thereby avoid devious paths. In the seventeenth century one had to speak of these forces much in the way that Boehme, who spoke as a man completely and utterly devoted to divine righteousness, did. The entire aim in the work of the luciferic and ahrimanic powers in the fifth post-Atlantean age, concerning both the perception of the primal phenomenon and the development of free imaginations, is to hinder these forces from arising in man. The luciferic and ahrimanic powers are working in this fifth post-Atlantean age to disturb these forces in the human soul, to employ them to a wrong end, thus bringing men's souls out of the earth sphere to establish a new sphere of their own. Many things must work together to disturb the right, quiet and slow unfolding of these forces. Note well that I say the quiet and slow unfolding because the entire period of 2,160 years, starting in 1413 A.D., should be used for the gradual unfoldment of the forces I have named, that is, free imaginations and the gradual development of working with primal phenomena. At intervals—by fits and starts, as it were—the luciferic and ahrimanic powers throw the whole weight of their opposition against this right evolution. When we bear in mind that everything is prepared for by the world beyond the earth long before it happens, we shall then not be surprised to find preparations being made to bring the strongest possible forces of opposition against the normal evolution of humanity. We have already seen how the luciferic and ahrimanic powers poured what they had developed in Atlantean times into Greece and Rome. Now, in an altered form, they have tried to repeat these efforts before the arrival of the fifth post-Atlantean age. You will not be surprised when I say that for this fifth post-Atlantean age, too, a powerful impetus had to be present bearing along with it the after workings, in a luciferic and ahrimanic sense, from Atlantis. We know that the Atlantean influences spread out from a region that was called Atlantis even by Plato. Let us make a diagram and imagine Atlantis here, then over here on the right would be Europe and Asia, and here on the left would be America. The old Atlantean forces, including the old luciferic and ahrimanic forces, spread out from Atlantis. Some part of these Atlantean forces, however, was held  back, and it came to work in our fifth post-Atlantean age as luciferic and ahrimanic forces. That is, some part of the good forces, which were good and right in Atlantean times, have been carried over to our time to become luciferic and ahrimanic forces. Only the center was transferred to another region. Atlantis, as we know, is gone and the center transposed to Asia. You must imagine it on the reverse side of my drawing and the effects of the old Atlantean culture spreading out from it as a preparation for the fifth post-Atlantean age.  Its intent was to lucifericize and ahrimanicize it. It was actually the descendants of the old Atlantean teachers who were now working from a place in Asia. A priest there had been educated to behold—to have a belated vision, as it were, of what the Atlanteans called the “Great Spirit,” and to receive his commands. These the priest communicated to a young man of remarkable energy and strength who, by virtue of this authority, received the name “The Great Ruler of the Earth” from his community. This was Genghis Khan. The Great Spirit, through his follower and through that priest, gave to Genghis Khan the command to summon all the powers of Asia to spread the influence that would lead the fifth post-Atlantean age back into a luciferic form. These forces—and they were far more powerful than the forces established in Greek culture—were all employed to this end. Free imaginations were to be changed into old, visionary imaginations. Every effort was to be made to lull the soul of man to sleep in a dim and dreamy experience of imaginations instead of a free experience filled through and through with clear understanding. With the help of the special forces that had been preserved from Atlantis, it was the intended purpose to carry an influence into the West that would make its culture visionary. Then it would have become possible to separate the souls of men from the earth and to form a new continent, a new planetary body with them. All the unrest and disturbance that came into the evolution of modern man through the Mongolian invasions, everything connected with them that has gone on working into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—all this unrest, which was prepared long ago, is nothing more than the great attempt that is being made from Asia to bring about a visionary European culture. It would cut it off from the conditions of its further evolution and lead it altogether away from the earth, just as the East has experienced again and again this feeling of being filled with vision and of wanting to be estranged from the earth. Something was needed to counterbalance this tendency. An opposite trend had to be created as a counterforce that moves in the direction of the normal evolution of mankind. The influence of Genghis Khan's priest was intended to bring about a kind of buoyancy and lightness in the human race that would draw man away from the earth. Over against this, a corresponding heaviness had to come to man from the weight of the earth; this was provided through the discovery of the western world. America, with all that it holds, was discovered and thereby earth heaviness, the desire to remain on earth, was given to man. The discovery of America and everything connected with it, and the way man carried his life into the many new places of the earth, all this, when seen in wider connections, shows itself as a counterbalancing force to the activity of Genghis Khan. America had to be discovered so that man might be brought to grow closer to the earth, to grow more and more materialistic. Man needed weight and heaviness to counterbalance the spiritualization that was the aim of the descendants of the “Great Spirit.” Along with this normal process whereby the scene of action of man's life was extended to America, we find the other forces, the ahrimanic powers of the “Great Spirit,” intervening again. An influence came from America to Europe, and another came to permeate America from Asia. Thus, normal forces developed through the discovery of America and also powerful ahrimanic onslaughts. They worked less strongly at first, but will continue to work in our time and on into the future. We must learn to recognize these ahrimanic forces. What Rome had achieved in the Church and in the ecclesiastical state was grasped by the ahrimanic influence. While it is comparatively easy to see how the luciferic influence worked on Genghis Khan—we have exact knowledge of the fact that a priest was initiated by the follower of the “Great Spirit”—it is much more difficult to say how the ahrimanic spirit worked. This is because the ahrimanic influence is dispersed and scattered. But you need only study how Spain, strictly Roman Catholic as it was, was fascinated by all the treasures of gold that were discovered in America. What a hold it had upon her! You can observe how strong the specter-like working of the old Romanism still was in such a ruler as Ferdinand of Castile or Charles V, the ruler of the kingdom over which the “sun never set.” Study the reaction of Europe to the gradual discovery and opening up of America and you will see what temptations came from that direction. Taken all in all, it is a history of temptation woven in with a history that runs a normal course. Please do not go about saying that I have presented the discovery of America as an ahrimanic deed. In reality, I have said the very opposite. I have said that America had to be discovered and that the entire event was necessary to the progress of the world. Ahrimanic forces entered, however, and set themselves in violent opposition to what was happening quite rightly in the normal course of progress. Things are not so simple that we can say, “There is Lucifer, and there is Ahriman; they act and behave in such and such a way, and divide the world between them.” Things are by no means so simple as that. We find, therefore, many forces working together when we set out to listen to them in their field of action behind the physical plane. These forces take possession of other forces. They try to seize the forces in man that have continued on from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch in order to distort them and make them serve their ends. Look at a man like Machiavelli. You will find in him the symbol for the politicizing of thought that begins in the Renaissance. He is a veritable revelation of the whole process. He was a great and powerful spirit but one who, under the onslaught of the forces of which I have told you, brings to a new life again the complete attitude of thought and mind that has its source in the heathen Rome of ancient times. You have a true picture of Machiavelli when you study the history of his time and see him, not as a single personality, but as the outstanding expression of many who think in the same way. In him you can observe these forces trying to charge forward with all speed, bringing to their assistance the atavistic—and thus luciferic—forces that have been left behind. Had things gone as Machiavelli intended, all of Europe would have become nothing but a political machine. Opposing the violent onslaught of such forces are the forces that work in the normal direction. Over against a figure like Machiavelli, who was purely political and turned all man's thought into political thinking, we can place another great figure, Thomas à Kempis, who was also Machiavelli's contemporary. He stands entirely within the slow and gradual evolution, working slowly and gradually. He was anything but a man of politics. So we can follow the several streams in history. We shall find normal streams, and we shall also find currents that flow from earlier times and are made use of by the forces of which I have told you. Many forces work together in history and it is important to observe and study their connections. A man like Jacob Boehme felt free imaginations rising within him. We can say of such a man that he fortified himself against the attacks of Lucifer and Ahriman through the whole character of his life of soul and succeeded in going undisturbed along the straight path of evolution. East of Europe, however, in all the culture of the East, we find an untold number of people who suffer greatly under the disturbing influence of Lucifer. His influence is, as we know, to draw man again and again away from the earth, to draw him right out of his physical body so that he shall perpetually fall into a state where he becomes no more than a vision of himself and is completely soul. That is the tendency that has been grafted onto Eastern Europe. The feeling of being drawn in the other direction was given to the West. The world of imagination was pulled down into the heavy physical body so that what should rightly be free imagination working merely in the soul becomes instead something that rams the soul down into the organism, thereby causing the organism also to live on imaginations. You can hardly find a more telling description of what I mean than in the words of Alfred de Musset in which he attempts to give us a picture of the condition of his soul. De Musset is one who feels the presence of the imaginative life in himself, but he also feels the onslaught upon this life of imagination that seeks to thrust it right down into the bodily nature. This life of imagination, which does not belong in the bodily nature but should develop freely, hovering in and existing purely as a thing of the soul, is there taken hold of by earthly gravity and by what belongs to the body. In his book, Elle et Lui, which he was led to write from his relation with Georges Sand, you will find a fine description of his soul life. I would like to quote here a passage that will serve to show how he feels himself to be placed within an imaginative life that is the scene of conflict and dispute. He says: Creation disturbs and bewilders me; it sets me trembling. Execution, always too slow for my desire, starts my heart beating wildly. Weeping, and restraining myself with difficulty from crying out, I give birth to an idea. In the moment of its birth it intoxicates me, but next morning it fills me with loathing. If I try to modify and change it, it only gets worse and escapes me altogether. It would be better for me to forget it and wait for another. But now this other comes upon me in such bewilderment and in such boundless dimensions that my poor being cannot grasp it. It oppress me, tortures me, until it can be realized. Then come the other sufferings, the birth throes, really physical pains that I am quite unable to define. Such is my life when I let myself be ruled by this giant artist who is in me. Note the contrast with Boehme, who feels the God in him. With de Musset it is a giant artist. It were better that I live as I have resolved, committing excesses of every kind in order to kill this gnawing worm, which others modestly call inspiration and I quite often openly call illness. Almost every single sentence of this quote can be matched with a sentence in our quotation from Boehme. How singularly typical! Remember what I said just now, that normal evolution seeks to progress slowly. We shall have more to say about this tomorrow. Here, as described by de Musset, it is a Wild charge; it cannot be fast enough. The picture he gives us as he surveys himself is marvelous. “Creation disturbs and bewilders me; it sets me atremble,” he says, because this to will go faster and faster and comes storming in upon him from the ahrimanic side, disturbing what is still trying to progress slowly. “Execution, always too slow for my desire, starts my heart beating wildly.” Here you have the whole psychology of the man who wants to live in free imaginations and is distressed and vexed by the onslaught of ahrimanic forces. “Weeping and restraining myself with difficult from crying out...” Think of it! The imaginations work so physically in him that he feels like crying out when they find expression in him. “I give birth to an idea. In the moment of its birth it intoxicates me, but next morning it fills me with loathing.” This because it comes from his organism and not from his soul! “If I try to modify and change it, it only gets worse and escapes me altogether. Better I forget it and wait for another.” Here he wants perpetually to go faster, faster than normal evolution can go. “But now this other comes upon me in such bewilderment and in such boundless dimensions that my poor being cannot grasp it. It oppresses me, tortures me, until it can be realized. Then come the other sufferings, the birth throes, actual physical pains that I am quite unable to define.” Then, when he beholds this giant artist that works within him, he says he would rather follow the life he has marked out for himself; that is, have nothing to do with this whole imaginative world, because he calls it an illness. Now take by way of contrast, the saying of Jacob Boehme, “I declare before God, I myself do not know how it comes to pass in me.” Here you have an expression of joy and bliss. Confusion and bewilderment, on the other hand, can be heard in the words of de Musset, “Creation disturbs and bewilders me; it sets me trembling. Execution, always too slow for my desire, starts my heart beating wildly.” With Boehme all is of the soul and, when he wants to write, he does not feel as though a giant artist, who makes him unhappy, were dictating to him, but a spirit. He feels that he is transported into the world where the spirit dictates to him. He is in this world and he is supremely happy to be there because a continuous stream of knowledge is given him that flows slowly and steadily on. Boehme is inclined to receive this slow stream of knowledge. He does not find it too slow because he is not overwhelmed by the swift attacking force I have described to you. On the contrary, he is protected from it. If time permitted, we could present many more instances of ways in which individual human beings are situated in the world process. The examples I have selected are from those whose names have been preserved in history but, in a sense, all of mankind is subject to these same conditions in one way or another. I have only chosen these particular examples in order to express what is really widespread, and by taking special cases I have been able to give you a description of it in words. If you will try to make a survey of what we have been saying, you will then be able to understand much of what has come about in the course of evolution. It would be quite possible in this connection to study many other phenomena of life. If, however, we confine ourselves today to the spiritual life, and moreover to that special region of the spiritual life comprising knowledge and cognition, we shall be able to find in it qualities that are characteristic of modern man, the recognition of which will make many things in life comprehensible. Since it is not possible to say much about the external life of today, owing to the existing prejudices and because men's souls are so deeply bound up with the conditions of the times in which they live, you will readily understand that it is only in a limited way that I can speak of the things that are carrying their influence right into the immediate present. It cannot be otherwise, as I have frequently made clear to you. I would like, however, to indicate certain phenomena of our time that are less calculated to arouse passions and emotions. Let me describe some phenomena that I will select from the life of cognition and feeling. I think you will find them underlying all I have been saying about the forces at work in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We will first consider these phenomena in a purely historical way in order afterward to see their relation to these forces. Let us take first a phenomenon in which we all necessarily feel the deepest interest. The kind of understanding men have of the nature and being of Christ is of great significance, and so we will select examples of various kinds of understanding of His nature and being that lie near at hand. We have first of all a modern instance in Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus, which appeared in the 19th century and went rapidly through many editions. I believe the twentieth appeared in 1900 after his death. Then we have The Life of Jesus, which is really no life of Jesus at all, by David Friedrich Strauss. Then we have—we cannot say, a life of Jesus, but coming from the east of Europe it is a view and conception of Christ that is of deep significance. It is not a life of Jesus but an understanding of Christ that culminates in what Soloviev wrote about Him and His part in the evolution of the earth. How significant are these three expressions of the spiritual life of the nineteenth century: The Life of Jesus by Renan, The Life of Jesus by Strauss, which is no life of Jesus at all and we shall presently hear why, and Soloviev's conception of the meaning of the Christ event in the evolution of the earth, for it is true, at any rate, to say that all of his work culminates in the Christ idea. What is the fundamental premise of Renan's description of Jesus' life? If you want to appreciate rightly Renan's book, to understand it as a document of the times, then you must compare it with the earlier presentations of Jesus' life. Nor do you need to read only the literary accounts of His life; you can also look at the paintings of artists. You will find that the representation of the life of Jesus always takes the same path. In the early centuries of Roman Christianity, it was not only Christianity that was taken over from the East but also the manner in which Jesus was presented. The Greek art of pictorial representation was there in the West, as we know, but the ability to portray the Christ remained with the East. The Jesus countenance that is characteristic of Byzantine art was found repeatedly in the West until, in the thirteenth century, national impulses and ideas began to arise—those national ideas and impulses that later work themselves out in the way I have indicated in these last lectures. Owing to the national impulse, a gradual change came about in the traditional stereotyped Jesus countenance that had been portrayed so long. Each of several nations appropriated the Jesus type and represented Him in its own way, and so we must recognize many different impulses at work in the different representations. Study, for example, the head of Jesus as painted by Guido Reni, Murillo, and LeBrun, and you will see how strikingly the national point of view steals in. These are only three instances that one could select. In each case there is a strong desire to represent Jesus in a national way. One has the impression that in Guido Reni's, paintings, to a far greater degree than was the case with his predecessors, we can detect the Italian type in the countenance of Jesus; similarly, in Murillo's representations, the Spanish; in LeBrun's, the French. All three painters show evidence as well of the working of church tradition; behind every one of their paintings stands the power of the Church. Contrarily, you will find a resistance to this far reaching power of the Church, which we recognize in the art of Murillo, Lebrun, and Reni, in the works of Rubens, van Dyck, and Rembrandt—a resistance to it and a working in freedom out of their own pure humanity. Considering art in respect of its representations of the Jesus countenance, you have here direct artistic rebellion. You will now see that there is no standing still in this progression in the representation of Jesus because the forces that are at work in the world work also right into this domain. We can see how the breath of Romanism hovers over the paintings of the nationally minded LeBrun, Murillo, and Reni, and how in Rubens, van Dyck, and especially Rembrandt, the opposition to Romanism comes to such clear expression in their paintings of faces, not of Jesus alone but also of other Biblical characters. So we see how all the spiritual activities of man gradually take form among the various impulses that make themselves felt in human evolution. Similarly, you would find that in the times when painting and representative art have given place to the word, for since the sixteenth century the word has had the same significance in such matters as pictorial representation had in earlier times, you will find that the figure of Jesus, of the Christ, is again continually changing. It is never fixed and constant but is always conceived according to how the various forces flow together in writers. Standing there before us as the latest products, let us say, we have the Jesus of Renan, the Jesus of Strauss, who is no Jesus, and the Christ of Soloviev. These are the latest products and how vastly different they are! The Jesus of Renan is entirely a Jesus who, as a man, lives in the land of Palestine as a human historical figure. Palestine itself is marvelously depicted. With the aid of the best of modern scholarship it is described in such a way that one has before one the complete Palestinian landscape with its people. Wandering about this realistically rendered landscape and among its people is the figure of Jesus. The attempt is made to explain this Jesus figure on the basis of this landscape and its inhabitants; to explain how he grows up and becomes a man, and to explain how it was possible for such a man to arise in this land. The outstanding character of Renan's description will only be revealed when we compare it with earlier accounts and representations. These take the inner course of the events described in the Gospels and place them in a landscape that is really nowhere in particular. The facts as they are described in the Gospels are simply related over and over again and the landscape in which they occurred is totally disregarded. It is depicted in such a way that it might be anywhere. Renan, however, goes to work to portray the Holy Land in a realistic, detailed way so that Jesus becomes a true Palestinian in this Holy Land. Christ Jesus, who should belong to all of mankind, becomes a Jesus who lives and walks in Palestine as an historical figure who is to be understood in relation to the Palestine of the years 1 to 33 A.D., that is, understood from the customs, views, opinions and landscape of the country—a right proper, realistic description. For once, Jesus was to be shown as an historical person and was to be described as any other in history. For Renan, it would have been meaningless to portray an abstract Socrates who might have lived anywhere, anytime, and it would have been equally meaningless for him to portray an abstract Jesus who might have lived anywhere on earth. In complete accord with the science of the nineteenth century, he sets out to depict Jesus as an historical figure living between the years 1 and 33 A.D., and made absolutely comprehensible by the conditions prevailing in Palestine at that time. Jesus lived from the year 1 to 33 A.D. He died in 33 A.D., just as any other man might have died in this or that year. If He continues to work in the world, it is in the same way any other dead person might have continued to work. Fitted completely into the modern point of view, Jesus was an historical personality accounted for by the milieu in which He lived. That is what Ernest Renan gives us in his Life of Jesus. Now let us turn to the Life of Jesus that is in reality no life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss. I have said it is no life of Jesus. Strauss also works as a highly cultured and learned man. When he sets out to investigate anything, he does so with thoroughness akin to that of Renan in his domain. Strauss, however, does not turn his attention to the historical Jesus. He is, for him, only the figure to which he attaches something quite different. Thus, Strauss investigates all that was said of Jesus insofar as He was the Christ. He examines what is said about His miraculous entry into the world, His wonderful and miraculous development, His expression of great and special teachings, and how He undergoes suffering, death and resurrection. These are the accounts in the Gospels that Strauss selects for investigation. Naturally, Renan, too, used the Gospels but he reduced them to what he, from his detailed and exact knowledge of Palestine, could conceive of the life of Jesus. This approach has no interest at all for Strauss. He tells himself that the Gospels relate this or that concerning Christ, who lived in Jesus. Then he sets out to investigate the extent to which what is related of the Christ has also been living as myth in other parts of the world, for instance, how the story that is told of a miraculous birth and the development of Jesus Christ is to be found in various other folk myths, as is also the Mystery of Golgotha, which is referred now the one god and then to another. Thus, Strauss sees in the figure of the historical Jesus only the opportunity for concentrating the myth forming activity of mankind into one personality. Jesus does not concern him at all. The only value He has for Strauss is that the myths, which are distributed all over the world, are concentrated in this single man Jesus. They are all hung on Him, as it were. These myths, however, all spring from a common impulse. All of them bear witness to the myth forming power that lives in mankind. Where does this myth forming power arise? As Strauss sees it, in the course of mankind's earthly development, from the times of the first beginnings of the earth to its final end, mankind has and always will have a higher power in it than the merely external power that develops on the physical plane. A power runs right through mankind that will forever address itself to the super-earthly; this super-earthly finds expression in myths. We know that man bears something super-sensible within him that seeks to find expression in myth since it cannot be expressed in external physical science. Thus, Strauss does not see Jesus in the single individual, but rather the Christ in all men—the Christ who has lived in and through all men since their beginning, and who has brought it about that myths are told of Him. In the case of Jesus it is only that His personality gives occasion for the myth forming power to develop with extreme force and strength. In Him it is concentrated. Strauss, therefore, speaks of a Jesus that is in reality no Jesus, but he fastens upon Him the spiritual Christ force that lives in all humanity. For Strauss, mankind itself is the Christ, and He works always before and after Jesus. The true incarnation of the Christ is not the single Jesus, but the whole of humanity. Jesus is only the supreme representative for the representation of the Christ in mankind. The main thing in all this is not Jesus as an historical figure, but an abstract mankind. Christ has become an idea, which incarnates in and through all mankind. That is the kind of highly distilled thought that a man of the nineteenth century is able to conceive! The element of life in the idea has become the Christ. He is conceived entirely as an idea and Jesus is passed by. This is a life of Jesus that is no more than a record of the fact that the idea, the divine, incarnates continually in all humanity. Christ is diluted down to an idea, is thought of merely as an idea. So much for the second life of Jesus, The life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss. So we have Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus. which sets forth the historical figure of Jesus amidst the individuals around Him as well as by Himself. Then we have in Strauss's book the “idea of Christ,” which runs through all mankind. In this highly distilled form, however, it remains a mere abstraction. When we come to Soloviev, behold, Jesus is no more, but only the Christ. Nevertheless, it is the Christ conceived as living. Not working in men as an idea, with the consequence that its power is transformed in him into a myth, but rather working as a living Being who has no body, is always and ever present among men, and is, in effect, positively responsible for the external organization of human life, the founder of the social order. Christ, who is forever present; a living Being who would never have needed a Jesus in order to come among men. Naturally, you will not find this so radically expressed in Soloviev, but that is of no account. It is the Christ as such Who stands always in the foreground—the Christ, moreover, as the living One who can only be comprehended in imagination, but by this means can be truly understood as a real and actual super-sensible Being working on earth. There you have the three figures. The same Being meets us in the nineteenth century in a threefold description. The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan, completely realistic; realistic history a fortiori; Jesus as an historical figure; a book that is written with all the learning of the nineteenth century. Then came David Friedrich Strauss with this idea of mankind, working on, running through all mankind, but remaining an idea, never awakening to life. Lastly, Soloviev's Christ; living power, living wisdom, altogether spiritual. A realistic life of Jesus by Renan; an idealistic life of Jesus by Strauss that is also an idealistic presentation of the Christ impulse; a spiritual presentation of the Christ impulse by Soloviev. Today, I want to place before you, side by side as three expressions of modern life, these three ways of cognizing the figure of Jesus Christ. Tomorrow we shall see how they take their place among the various impulses that we have recognized as working in mankind.
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