The Theosophical Movement Is the Answer to the Spiritual Longing of Our Time

GA 138 — 30 August 1913, Munich

The individual who, through the feelings and longings of his soul, feels the urge to approach the theosophical movement will – perhaps without always being fully aware of it – seek the satisfaction of what his heart personally , which can bring him personal peace of mind about the great riddles of existence, about those questions which he feels he cannot live with in the era in which he is placed through his present incarnation without their being answered. If the individual then finds here or there within the spiritual life of his epoch that which he can accept in order to arrive at these satisfying answers to the anxious and necessary questions of his soul, then he should also endeavor to penetrate to an understanding of the fact that such spiritual life, which places itself in some epoch, can only really bring to the individual soul that which connects this individual soul with the spiritual in the right way, without this rightness always becoming conscious to the individual soul, if such spiritual life is in harmony with the overall evolution of mankind and is able to give an account of itself before the overall evolution of mankind. Here and there a spiritual movement may arise, individual souls may believe that they can find what they need in such movements. But what the soul receives, and in which it believes to be satisfied, may be worthless for the soul's true development, for the real powers that the soul must seek, if what it encounters as spiritual life can assume full responsibility for the spiritual guidance and direction of humanity in any given epoch, when this spiritual movement cannot approach those powers that are in charge of the spiritual life of humanity and answer to them by receiving, so to speak, their approval: “Yes, the spiritual movement is doing what the time demands, what the spiritual forces demand, which reach into the time.” The individual theosophist may now and then feel the need to see how what he receives relates to the spiritual life as a whole or how it manifests itself in the most diverse fields. However, this may express more a yearning than a need to expect from time the solution of the riddles that are to be gained through spiritual science. The theosophical soul, when it looks at what it receives with some satisfaction from spiritual science, may sometimes look with dissatisfaction or perhaps even dislike at what surrounds us everywhere as intellectual life in our time, because this intellectual life presumes to have something to do with the highest existential questions, the highest riddles of human existence. Some of the things that appear and struggle to solve the riddles of existence, to answer the questions of existence, may be perceived as materialistic, superficial, insufficient by many a soul that takes up spiritual science. But in this outer life there are many an unprejudiced observers who know nothing of spiritual science, many an one who cannot even suspect what lives in what we call spiritual science, and who sincerely and honestly struggles for the truth in our epoch, whose soul honestly and sincerely feels the deepest longing for the riddles of existence. We should not survey our world, what is outside of us, with a superficial, all-leveling gaze, but with a discriminating gaze, because only through this can we gain the opportunity to tie in the right way with what is there. Of course, in a lecture lasting an hour much of what the spiritual leaders of our movement have to take up today, what they have to take fully into account, cannot be mentioned. Therefore, only a few individual points can be emphasized, and by way of individual examples it will be shown how the riddles of the world are pulsating, and how spiritual science is preparing to answer them, to satisfy them.

If you observe the world, you will find in particular that searching souls - souls for whom the riddles of existence press so firmly into the heart - say to themselves: What do we need today, what do we have to ask, where can we get prospects about the goals of life? - Souls that feel this way are found in large numbers, especially among those who work their way out of practical technology, the practice of life, the practice of work. Not even among those inclined towards philosophy are there so many who think in an angst-ridden way as there are among those who practice life, who toil with their hands under the mechanization of life, but who look instead to what often fills the soul when it has to ask about the riddles of life. We must indeed listen to such souls, for we must imagine that spiritual science will one day have to answer, to give account to the guiding powers of the world. But such souls are among the best seeking souls of the present day, and there may come an epoch when they will approach the leaders of spiritual life, and when these will have to answer the riddles of life that have emerged under the pressure of the practical concerns of life. We just need not delude ourselves, we just need to have a sense of what is going on in life, and it will come to us wherever the true voices of the soul-seekers are.

Anyone who has recently either walked past bookstores or looked around at the bookstores at the train station, what was on display there, and not just went there with the intention of only choosing what they wanted to buy, will have found a book clearly displayed everywhere that they might , if he is a theosophist, read with much interest if he is only thinking of satisfying the needs of his own soul, but which he will read with interest if he says to himself: how must things be presented if we want to meet the seeking souls with answers to the questions about the riddles of life? Here is a book by a man who has distinguished himself in practical life, and if you read the first few pages, you can see that he has a good overview of our age, that our time is moving towards the mechanization of the outer life, that the forces of human labor are being pushed more and more into machine-like work. This is the book 'On the Criticism of the Times' by Walther Rathenau. It is a book by a man who knows our time, and who should be known by anyone who wants to have a say in spiritual science. It shows how everything is being mechanized in our time, and why it had to come to that. For the most part, it is presented inaccurately in terms of comprehensive concepts; indeed, it is perhaps impossible to agree with any of the expressions in it. But that is not the point. Rather, it is about what the seeking souls are saying in our time, and what the forces are with which they are seeking, especially when it is a person of practical life, as the author of this book is. I would like to begin our reflection by reading something from a passage in this book that seems to me to speak from the very center of the soul mood of the souls of Europe and America. In it one hears what countless souls cannot express, what can prompt questions in them when one understands such a personality, where they speak of time and the soul of the times and say: “She who seeks time - soul and will find it.” Yet in the whole book you will not find a single clue as to how time might find its soul, only longing, the urge toward something unknown, ”of course against the will of mechanization. This epoch was not concerned with developing the soul in man; it aimed to make the world usable and thus rational, to push back the boundary of wonder and to obscure the otherworldly. Yet we are surrounded by mystery as ever; it emerges from every smooth surface of thought, and from every everyday experience it takes a single step to the center of the world.” Nowhere in this book is it suggested how this step is to be taken from the mysteries surrounding us to the center of the world. “Mechanization could not rob the individual life of the three emanations of the soul: love of creature, of nature, and of divinity; for the life of the whole they were evaporated into insignificance. Human love... – says a contemporary practitioner who, with a sober eye, confronts his time as much as he can, who for decades has attacked the very threads of economic life in Europe and beyond, and who himself has worked on them – “Human love has been reduced to cold pity and the duty of care, and yet it signifies the ethical summit of the entire epoch; love of nature became a sentimental Sunday pleasure; love of God, covered by the management of mythological-dogmatic rituals, entered into the service of interests in this world and the next and thus became suspicious, not only to ignoble natures. Rathenau goes on to say words that anyone who wants to meet the spiritual needs of the time, with goodwill, must listen to, even if they are partially incorrect, because they express what justifiably wells up from the soul and will well up from the soul more and more in the future: Feelings against which no one who practices spiritual science may rebel without being struck by the karma of the time. “There is probably not a single path by which it would not be possible for a person to find his soul, even if it were through the joy of aeroplanes. But humanity will not take any detours.” That is the need of the time. We can hear how time will refuse to accept anything that speaks directly to the depths of the soul, that speaks supersensibly to the depths of the soul. This time will say: “There will be no prophets and no founders of religions, because this deafened time will no longer allow a single voice to be heard: otherwise it could still listen to Christ and Paul today. No esoteric communities will take the lead, because a secret teaching will be misunderstood by the first disciple, let alone the second. No unified art of the world will bring its soul, because art is a mirror and a play of the soul, not its creator.” One would like to say: That is what a man said a few months ago. And what have we done in the last ten years? We have tried to find answers to what is emerging from the times as its forces weave. And he continues: “The greatest and most wonderful thing is simplicity. Nothing will happen except that humanity, under the pressure and urge of mechanization, of bondage, of fruitless struggle, will cast aside the obstacles that weigh on the growth of its soul. This will come about, not through brooding and thinking, but through free comprehension and experience. What many people talk about today and a few people understand will later be grasped by many and finally by all: that no power on earth can withstand the soul.

That no power on earth can withstand the soul! That requires our trust that we grow into the future with what we have and know that we are in harmony with the best of the time, who know nothing about us or want to know nothing about us. But we do not want to be tempted to do anything against what our time thirsts for, because we know that the leadership of humanity is left to higher, spiritual powers, and that which expresses itself in humanity comes from these spiritual even if it appears to be different from what we ourselves want, if it is not produced by any arbitrariness, but appears to come from the center of souls with the impulse of time, as if with elemental force. This is how our time speaks to us. What do the phenomena that have brought about our time speak?

I would like to start with something that my thoughts have already turned to during this lecture cycle. Among the many personalities I encountered before I joined the Theosophical Society was the art historian Herman Grimm, who, with all his individual achievements, wanted nothing more than to consciously place himself in the needs of our time. One could experience very strange things with him. Herman Grimm set out to write a biography of Michelangelo in the 1860s. Anyone who picks it up today, if they are not prejudiced, will find it to be the best work ever written about Michelangelo. Herman Grimm spent many years endeavoring to create a well-rounded picture of Michelangelo's work and creativity. He also succeeded in creating a picture of the times. He then began to write a life of Raphael. It was one of the constant admissions that one could hear from Herman Grimm that he felt quite differently about Raphael. He was able to describe Michelangelo in such a way that he was able to present a complete picture of this personality, but Raphael only in such a way that it was never enough for him. Why? Herman Grimm was a person who, in everything he wanted to understand, always sought the original causes, and in the case of Raphael he simply could not find the original causes. When he had somehow finished with something about Raphael, he had to find that the matter had been resolved in a highly imperfect way. Nevertheless, he started again and again, even shortly before his death, to write a life of Raphael, but it was never finished. A short fragment about it appeared in his posthumous fragments. Herman Grimm himself said to himself: “Whether I will succeed differently this time, if I live long enough to accomplish something that coincides with what one wants to know about Raphael?” It was shortly before his death that he began again with it, for it was the fragment on which he laid down his pen and died. It is only a fragment, when he himself had come to write a “Life of Raphael”. When I read these words in his estate, I myself had to think of a moment when I was with him in a small circle and spoke, as I wanted to, of the spiritual matters of humanity. I loved Herman Grimm very much and will always love him equally. He was a personality, strictly enclosed in the spiritual realm that he had prepared for himself, and he had an answer to what I would have liked to have incorporated. It consisted of the following: it was a mere hand movement of rejection towards anything that might have moved into the island of his spiritual life from outside, anything that could not be absorbed by him with the powers that one could have in his time. Those who knew how to deal with him understood him and his hand as it was around the corner of the table in a rejecting movement. For me, this hand movement was the boundary between what a spirit can achieve that wants to revitalize the spiritual elements of its era, and what must flow into our time as new forces. That was in 1892.

Why – I would now like to suggest everything else only in your souls – could Herman Grimm not come to terms with the life of Raphael from the spiritual elements that lived in his soul? Give yourselves the answer with all that will be necessary for the spiritual life of an age that will want to understand something like the life of Raphael. I am not saying that the life of Raphael must be something higher than, for example, the life of Michelangelo, but I am merely presenting a fact for the human soul. Try to give yourself an answer. You can do so by letting your gaze wander over the first picture that opens our third mystery drama, 'The Guardian of the Threshold'. There you will find four pictures: Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis. With what has been able to come to light in the course of our many years of spiritual scientific work, so that it could appear plausible and conclusive, we have endeavored to show how an identical individuality of soul - reincarnating from Elijah to John the Baptist, is reborn in Raphael, then reappears in Novalis. However fantastic this may seem today, it will be found to be true in the not too distant future that we will fail to understand the world if we do not take the idea of reincarnation of the human soul and karma, which passes through the various earthly lives, which is called the spiritual context of the world. Only he will describe Raphael's life who starts from the life that is recognized through spiritual science. In our time, the connection of spiritual life in the whole world is urgently approaching the human soul, asking questions such as: How is it that thoughts suddenly arise in human life that seem to come from one's own soul, but which were present in times far removed from it and are now recurring? One can see how the spiritual life really works, how it makes thoughts appear again and again in successive epochs, if one knows the spiritual thought processes that spiritual science is able to reveal.

In the last few weeks, something highly significant has appeared in German intellectual life. It will seem strange to you that I consider it significant. But I must consider it significant because it is symptomatically significant. When I was working on Goethe in Weimar, I got to know many leading figures who set the tone for German scholarship. Among the many German scholars, one in particular stood out to me as someone from whom I could expect extraordinarily significant work in his field. It is Konrad Burdach, who was a professor in Halle at the time, but then left this post to live as a private scholar. Now, in the last few weeks, Konrad Burdach has presented a highly interesting paper at the meetings of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. It is initially listed only under academic writings, but it raises an important question – a question that cannot be answered with the means of Konrad Burdach, but only with the means of the humanities. You will see that it is very close to the needs of the individual soul when reflecting on the interrelations of life to ask: How does the Faust poem relate to the modern soul? Have we not portrayed in Faust the practical man of our time who, at the end of his long life, has above all a practical ideal before him? Let us look at Goethe in his practical work: we can follow it as he speaks to Eckermann, his faithful secretary. Goethe is obliged to describe the spiritual development of Faust. The spiritual content of Raphael's Sistine Madonna comes to his mind; he was only able to grasp this in his later life because he had not yet grasped it, for example, on his first visit to Dresden. He wanted to show how, in the end, Faust's immortal is accepted into the higher worlds. We see that he wrestled with his problem to such an extent that he once said to Eckermann: “It is remarkable how demonic forces go through the world and give rise to figures like Raphael from an unknown supersensible realm, how one cannot come to terms with figures like Raphael without explaining them in terms of their origin in the supersensible. One can have a feeling for how Goethe struggled with the gradual transition of the entelechy, of the gradual transition of the forms into the higher worlds, until he finally created a human being whom he also portrayed as a practitioner of life for the coming centuries.

Konrad Burdach has made a remarkable point for philology. Anyone who reads his essay has the feeling that it is indeed strange how pure philology has succeeded in providing a parallel image from earlier centuries to go alongside Faust. The old figures are only presented in a modern form, as if Goethe had created them. The whole story of Moses is presented in this way, as if Goethe had conceived it for his time. With this, Konrad Burdach wants to show how everything that has been structured around the figure of Moses flows into Goethe's way of thinking.

Thus a man stands at the gate beyond which lies the supersensible world, which provides answers to the question: To what extent are thoughts, spiritual powers real forces that work through time and emerge again in the most diverse times, appropriate to these epochs? Today, everywhere we look, the world is knocking at the gate of the supersensible world. It is our duty, it is part of our sense of responsibility, to hear the world, where it asks honestly and sincerely, not out of personal arbitrariness, as it is appropriate to the feelings and emotions of the souls. What we ourselves imagine the true development of humanity should be is out of the question. But we should read from the truly best and longing souls how they themselves want to enter the spiritual world, and hold back what we ourselves consider important for ourselves, in order to be able to give it to those who are seeking. In view of the culture we are working from and in which many foreign friends in Europe and America are working with us because they know that it has nothing to do with nationality, it is not appropriate to argue about what is oriental and what is occidental, in which a leading spirit said, “God's is the Orient, God's is the Occident!” These are words of Goethe that live in our souls and from which we work. But not only do our arbitrary thoughts live in our souls – not just ours, but also those of those we need to listen to – prescribing what we have to give to others, but feelings also live in our souls that the spirits of the centuries have created. Let us visit one of the groups we are approaching. Come with me to one of the performances which, like those of Goethe, are extraordinarily significant for the life of feeling in relation to the spiritual world and to the figures who work in the spiritual evolution of humanity. Come with me to a chapter of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister”. Let us follow it together, as he consciously wanted to present Wilhelm Meister as a representative of humanity. We see how Wilhelm Meister arrives at a castle, how he is led by the castle's guide and shown the castle's beauties, including the picture gallery. This also contains what can represent the development of humanity through the various epochs, and one can see how humanity has developed from ancient times, ever further and further, until the destruction of Jerusalem. The idea is that the successive pictures help us understand how the forces at work in the evolution of humankind led to the destruction of Jerusalem. The man being shown around, Wilhelm Meister, whose spiritual education we are to be shown, asks his guide: Why is the course of human development depicted here up to the destruction of Jerusalem, and not, within this course, what occurred shortly before in this development: the life of Christ with all that he accomplished in Palestine? Then the Guide says to Wilhelm Meister: “To depict this in the same way as the rest of the course of human development is forbidden to us by what is most sacred to us. What you see depicted here is the working of forces in world history, and it works in such a way that it concerns the groups of people, the nations, in their interaction, but not the forces that have intervened in the lives of individual people. It would be wrong to include the Christ in this series of pictures, for the Christ addresses each individual soul intimately, and each individual soul has to deal with him. Then the leader leads the Wilhelm Meister into a second, more secret chamber, where is depicted what cannot be placed in the ordinary sense in the epochal course of human development. There are pictures again: what is presented there is what ties in with the Mystery of Golgotha. In pictures, everything that ties in with Christ is presented to Wilhelm Meister, up to – yes, to the Lord's Supper. What follows the Lord's Supper as the actual Mystery of Golgotha is not there. Why, asks Wilhelm Meister again of his guide, is it represented here in this more secret cabinet what leads up to the Lord's Supper, and not what follows it? He is informed that, for the time being, no human soul is able to represent what follows in such a way that it does not hurt the human mind. Even in his time, Goethe sensed from his spiritual self the powerlessness to depict the great mystery, because he knew that one would want to say, even from still unconscious activity, that the deepest feelings of the soul's life must be brought out if one is to strive for the most sacred for the soul and present it to the soul. Thus his Wilhelm Meister shows us how to cross a twofold esoteric threshold if we want to approach this sacred part of the soul.

What was it that found expression in Goethe's soul at that time? It found expression that when in modern culture the soul grasps itself aright within itself, this modern culture lays in the soul a most sacred, most exalted something that Goethe could not fail to sense. But what has not yet been given in his time to represent this most sacred part must come. It must work in souls with quite different means. He who feels the responsibility for what has produced such feelings in the time, now stands before the spiritual world with a full sense of responsibility and believes he can only serve this sense of responsibility by pointing out to the souls how in our time the epoch is ripening that the souls, when they grow up to spiritual life, will attain that which for the gaze of Wilhelm Meister is to open up only after twice crossing the portal to the higher mysteries. Thus would be the atmosphere that flows from the spiritual life of the time into our souls, if we wanted to speak of the Christ-secret, that should reveal itself to us, wanted to speak of the intimacy that will exist between the soul and this mighty power of world development, when every single soul matures, that the Christ, newly revealed from the spiritual world, will approach every single soul.

We knew that we could not act differently than to follow the guide of Wilhelm Meister. It first leads to what characterizes the epochs, then to what is locked in the more secret chamber, and then to the special preparations for the holy of holies, which, for each individual soul, when we have crossed the second gate, may not speak to the souls in any other way than in free resolution. If we disregard what otherwise speaks to the souls from the times, then, unless an external disaster or the like is at work, one cannot make a human soul aware of what it is to experience or expect, but rather of what will come to life in the soul through the grace of spiritual guidance in the development of humanity. We feel the combined effect of what spiritual life has prepared and then become the spiritual life of our time. There we stand and feel our responsibility to those who were the genuine seeking souls, and feel how we can answer for what we have done. But we also learn that we cannot say out of our own arbitrariness: this is how it should be done, or this is how it must be done! For why should not this or that also be justified in this or that way? No, we feel obliged to do what the creative powers of the time demand of us, not what we ourselves demand or can demand. We feel obliged to continue creating in the spirit of those who spoke before us, and say: We want to hold nothing sacred but what you held sacred and longed for. But we want to be true to what flowed for you through the spiritual powers. Then you will understand this and not say, with reference to the many questions which may have arisen in the minds of individual souls in these days, that something has been done here in disharmony. You will say to yourselves: these people could not have acted differently, but they also knew what they were doing.

Everything was pressing towards the most comprehensive spiritual life that spiritual science will give to the world, when we consider the past times. Do not look at what flows out of arbitrary endeavors of the time, but look at what the times themselves bring as necessities. Do not ask how this or that person, who believes himself to be standing on the firm ground of natural science, wants to think about the riddles of time and the human soul, because he cannot overlook what comes into consideration. Ask the great ones who have long since died, who speak to our soul with objectivity. Ask a person who did so much for 19th-century science, such as Alexander von Humboldt, who wanted to give such a comprehensive picture of the development of nature in his “Cosmos”, ask him where he wanted to go beyond what interested the naturalist, where for him the deepest riddles of all natural questions were touched upon. And his answer is: It is the one hundred and fourth Psalm of David! But this same Alexander von Humboldt was again a soul yearning, a soul that - completely in possession of the natural scientific culture of its time - from the nineteenth century directed its view to what flowed out of the fervent feeling of the spiritual world, as it comes to light in the one hundred and fourth Psalm of David. Ask now how much of what is spoken to the human soul in the hymn-like language of the 104th Psalm can be found in concrete form in spiritual science, as is necessary for our time! If we bear this in mind, we may say: What is the soul of Alexander von Humboldt's reply to what we are doing? It would answer us thus: We have longed for what you are attempting, and we sensed that it must come! And Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander's brother, the great linguist, the last of the time when the great poetry of which I spoke yesterday, the Bhagavad Gita, became known in Europe, this great spirit, spoke in a way that he said he had already lived enough after the acquaintance of the Bhagavad Gita had fallen into his life.

Thus, the 19th century prepared those souls who were most searching to receive objectively and without prejudice what spiritual treasures have been given to humanity throughout the world. Thus it prepared itself not to fall into one-sidedness.

I did not want to give you theoretical arguments. I always consider theoretical discussions to be very one-sided, even if they are the very best. I wanted to show you by way of examples what the facts are like and how souls feel under the force of real facts. I would like to come back to something that Herman Grimm had in mind, something he spoke to me about on a walk from Weimar to Tiefurt, something that lived in his soul like a building that he wanted to construct, and of which he himself he speaks of it in the introductory remarks to his posthumous fragments in such a way that it has always hovered before his soul, and that all his individual works have flowed out of what lived in his soul in this way. What was it that always hovered before him? It was nothing less than a history of the development of humanity, which he wanted to present as a history of the development of the national imagination of humanity of all peoples and times. That was his goal. He wanted to examine how, for example, the creative power of the imagination worked in Greece, how it produced a Homer, an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, how it progressed through the ages until the modern era and produced everywhere what was to be represented. A man was walking beside me who had faith in the truth of imagination, in the creativeness of imagination; but all around was a world that had no capacity to believe in the creativeness of imagination, in the descent of imagination from the Father of truth! The feeling that you now find in the third mystery play, 'The Guardian of the Threshold', where Mrs. Balde appears like a ghost in the heavenly realms - but like an inverted ghost, because ghosts usually ghosts come from the supersensible world, but Mrs. Balde looks up and appears there in the same way that supersensible beings descend to earth. This feeling pressed into my soul at the time and took shape as the destiny of fantasy. One must bear this fate of fantasy in mind if one wants to get into what Herman Grimm had in mind, without knowing anything about the descent of fantasy from the father of truth. What Herman Grimm had in mind never came about. He sensed vaguely that something would come about if he succeeded in doing what he wanted. But it did not work. Why not? It did not work because imagination, if you only want to look at it in a general human sense as a creative world power, continually slips away. One always senses how the power that one calls imagination, though it comes from the truth, cannot itself lead to the truth, but only to Maya, and how behind everything to which imagination leads stands the spiritual world, at the mention of which Herman Grimm made that dismissive hand movement.

In the last days, this feeling came to my mind again towards the man who wanted to describe the course of human development out of imagination, so that I said to myself: He had the ideal of finding something satisfying about the riddles of the world out of spiritual life, out of the spiritual means that his time gave him. But what he could attain in his time, what he could honestly and sincerely take up into his soul, did not give him the solution. And because he was honest, he refrained from it! From this we see how our time longs for what can reveal the riddles of the world, what can give enlightenment about the creative forces and creative powers that lie behind sensual phenomena and create the signature of sensual phenomena. Why did this come to my mind recently? I have never been afraid to mention the personal, even when the personal is objective, and everyone is free to think about it as they wish. I try to look at the personal quite objectively. It came to my mind because it compared itself to me, what a spirit wanted and could not, and what has now come about in a certainly beautiful way through the book by our revered Edouard Schure, “L'Evolution divine”. Read it and resolve to read it in such a way that you penetrate the spiritual power that stands behind all appearances, but which has also worked as creative imagination in the course of the epochs. And you will see how our time begins to respond to what were ardent, sometimes not even fully conscious, questions of our spiritual life. Then you will find the answer in your soul as to what spiritual science should be, but also the answer as to how spiritual science should be.

How we must think in order to achieve a harmonious interaction in the spiritual life of the present day was something I felt the need to tell you about during the course of this morning.