Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity

GA 196 — 6 February 1920, Dornach

Tenth Lecture

In our recent reflections here, we have been speaking of the necessities of the time. Today, man must be content to absorb the impact that wants to enter the physical world. We have seen how, for about sixty years, there has been a struggle in the most intense way in European life, which began in the last third of the 19th century and contains the causes of all the confusions of these last times. I have pointed out to you the fact that what is happening is still being taken too lightly, in that people do not want to admit that old Europe has led a sham existence in the 20th century, has broken up and cannot be glued back together. This crisis can be compared to a crisis such as occurred in the ancient Roman Empire, when Christianity gradually broke into this Roman Empire and swept away everything that existed. Something completely new has developed. Anyone who has insight into life will realize that everything that has been built up since the first Christian century has been shattered.

Let us now take a look at what has been built up. The Mystery of Golgotha was there. But the Mystery of Golgotha and its understanding are two different things. Let us make this clear by means of a comparison. Suppose you look at a person who has this or that as the content of his soul or as the impulse for his actions. If a child looks at such a person, it forms a judgment; but this is a childlike view. A person who has learned something, who is an adult, will then also be able to form an opinion about this person; this will be a more mature view. But not everyone who has a mature view will be able to have sufficient knowledge or insight into the person in question, if that person is, for example, a genius. For this it would be necessary that in turn a genius would have formed his view about this person.

So we have a fact in this case: a person can be there, and there can be different understandings of this fact. — This is how it is in the course of time with the event that Christianity brought into the world. This event as such was once there, it stands at the starting point of our modern civilization. The understanding that has been shown for Christianity until now is rooted essentially in the views, in the ideas, in the concepts that people could have from those soul foundations that had taken the place of the soul foundations of the old Roman Empire. To substantiate this, you need only look at the lost Austria, which, with the exception of a few outstanding personalities, had a culture – not just a spiritual culture, but a culture in the full breadth of life – that basically went back to the first Christian centuries.

There the seeds of decay begin. People did not want to believe it, but anyone familiar with the circumstances could see it. And so it was in the rest of Europe. Europe was built on very old ideas, and thus in an old spirituality. And out of these ideas the Mystery of Golgotha was also understood. But these ideas are now worn out. They are no longer sufficient to convey an understanding of the event of Golgotha to the present-day human being. Man wants to stick to the old ideas because of his conservative tendencies. But in the depths of the soul there are definitely demands for a re-creation of Europe and the whole civilized world. This is the great struggle that has been evident at the basis of European culture for about sixty years. Something wants to be formed, but the preserved ideas of people are pushing it back. When a river current is dammed up somewhere, a rapid will eventually appear. This rapid has come to European culture. These are the years of terror that have befallen us, that are by no means over yet, and that are actually only just beginning. What is needed today is to establish a new conception of life based on spiritual principles. Those who today oppose such a conception of life are like those who, when Christianity spread from south to north, opposed it. The wave of evolution sweeps over such people.

But such people can cause much harm, and much harm will still be caused by such people. Let us take a concrete example. If you look at how the situation developed that could be seen before 1914 and also, in a sense, during the last few years, when the catastrophe began, you will see that there were certain so-called state borders on the map of Europe. Why these state borders have developed in this way over the centuries can be traced through history. But it is precisely from a true, unprejudiced consideration of history that you will gain the insight that these states, from the great Russia to the smallest entities, came into being under the influence of the understanding of Christ, that is, the understanding of Christ as it took hold in Europe at the time of the so-called migration of peoples, at the time of the decadence of the Roman Empire. In 1914, to give a date, these conditions, which found expression in these 'strokes' that demarcated states on the map of Europe, were all already unnatural. There was nothing true about these borders. There was nothing there that had any inner hold. And anyone today who believes that anything can be held together by what was no longer true in 1914 has clearly gone down the wrong path. Even that which has been or wants to be formed on the basis of these conditions is no longer tenable.

What do the people of Europe with their American appendage now want to do with the civilized world? Let us take an unbiased look at what the people of Europe with their American appendages currently want to do with the civilized world. They want to do what might have emerged in the first centuries A.D., in the migrations of nations, from the ideas that the Goths, the Vandals, the Lombards, Heruls, Cherusci, and so on had, and that the Romans had before they were seized by Christianity. It did not come about, although at that time people did not even resist the course of events as strongly with their consciousness as they do today. But let us hypothetically assume that in those days they would not have allowed Christianity to spread, but would have wanted a Europe glued together from the ideas of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the Vandals, the Lombards and so on, with the remnants of ancient Roman civilization – an impossibility, pure and simple! A possible Europe only arose from the fact that a spiritual impact came to this Europe. And this spiritual impact came through Christianity. Without this spiritual impact, which has made everything different, nothing would have come of Europe for the centuries from the 4th, 5th to the 20th century. Imagine Europe without the impact of Christianity in the past centuries: you could not imagine it. Just think of what remains of the Goths, the Heruls, the Langobards and so on in Europe. You have to admit: the impact of Christianity was enormous and everything changed.

If, in those days, the Lombards had rejected every new impulse just as much as, for example, the Czechoslovaks or the Poles or the French reject it today, then what I hypothetically assumed, the impossible, would have happened. And just as the Lombards would have behaved if they had said, “We do not want Christianity, we want to remain Lombard,” so today the Czechoslovaks, the Magyars, the French, the English and so on are behaving. They do not want a new spiritual impact.

But Europe is at rock bottom without a new influence. Nothing comes of it. Just as little comes of Europe as of a Goth, Lombard, or Vandal Europe when Christianity was ripe to make its impact on European civilization. This thought is one that the vast majority of people today fear. You may be surprised if I say that they are afraid, because you believe that it is for these or those reasons of life or logical or other reasons that they resist this thought. That is not the case. The reason why they resist is subconscious fear. When you have subconscious fear, you do not understand things. One invents logical reasons, one invents all kinds of observations that one believes one has made in order to refute this thought, while one is actually afraid of it. But man does not admit to fear! But the time is so great that it is necessary to look into these circumstances without fail. And it is necessary to speak words today that will certainly sound paradoxical to a large proportion of people. When it first spread, Christianity also sounded paradoxical to people. You should just imagine what it sounded like when the spreaders of Christianity came, say, to Alsace or Switzerland, where they still worshipped the images of Odin, the god Saxnot and so on. It was something paradoxical. Today it is paradoxical for people when one speaks to them of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must speak of as a new impact and at the same time as a new understanding of Christianity. Only today everything must become conscious, only today everything must be more willed than people in those days were capable of wanting. Above all, one thing must be grasped by humanity today with all its sharpness. We have a so-called scientific, intellectual life. In my last Sunday lecture I characterized one aspect of this intellectual life; I pointed out to you the character that this intellectual life has acquired through the English-speaking population. Do not believe that this intellectual life leaves anything to chance. What our children learn at school, from the age of six, shapes their souls, shapes the whole person, and people today walk around as they are shaped by our school system, which in its lower levels is strongly influenced, especially today in the age of the proliferation of the newspaper industry, much more than one might think, is influenced to a great extent by what is so-called science in the upper echelons of intellectual life. Science has had its great external successes. It has brought about the telephone and air travel, and it has brought about wireless telegraphy. In all these fields, it has made great achievements. But I have repeatedly drawn your attention to a peculiarity of this science, a peculiarity of our entire knowledge. This peculiarity consists in the fact that we can understand everything. We can understand machines, we can understand minerals, we can understand plants, we can understand animals, but we can least of all understand the human being through what our science presents. That one infers man directly from animality, that one says he is only a higher stage of development of animality, that comes only from the fact that one does not know anything about man. Not because man really comes from the animal, but because one does not know anything about the true man, but can only reveal the idea that one has, one leaves man coming from the animal kingdom. It is only a prejudice of the age that has no science with which to judge man. Therefore, we are also incapable in the present time of acquiring a real knowledge of human nature from our own education. By knowledge of human nature cannot be meant that conglomeration of all sorts of ideas that man today has of himself. A true knowledge of human nature could only arise out of the realization of what the true human being, the genuine human being, is made of.

Even if we study everything we have on earth, study with the means of today's science, we can build machines with it, we can design mechanisms with it, but we can never understand the human being with it. That is precisely what anthroposophical spiritual science is for: to make man comprehensible from extraterrestrial conditions. People feel this, but in their current ideas they do not admit that man today must be understood from extraterrestrial, from supersensible conditions. And so there is no science for this man. For centuries the world has been deluding itself about this fact in a strange way.

I would like to show you, using one example (of which there are many), how this fact has been ignored over the centuries. When the time had come to present to you, as an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, what has been developed here over the past few years, some people who had come close to what I, for example, had given on the basis of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, said: We prefer to delve into the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, into the mysticism of Johannes Tauler. There everything is much simpler; there one can comfortably say: I immerse myself in my inner being, I grasp the higher human being in me, my higher self has grasped the divine human being in me. — But that is nothing more than sophisticated egotism, nothing more than a retreat into the egoistic personality, a running away from all humanity, an inward self-deception. When, in the 14th and 15th centuries, people began to fail to understand their fellow human beings, it was clear that spirits such as Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart would have to arise to point to the human soul in order to seek the human being. But today that time is over. Today this deepening and sinking into the inner being is no longer good. Today it is about really understanding a Christ-word correctly - that is the example I mean - this one Christ-word, which is one of the most important, the most significant, that is: “If two or three are united in my name, then I am in the midst of you.” That means that if someone is alone, the Christ is not there. One cannot find the Christ without feeling connected to all of humanity. Today, one must seek the Christ through the path that all of humanity is walking. That is to say, inner satisfaction leads away from the Christ impulse.

This is the misfortune, especially for 19th-century Protestant theology, that the impulse arose to have a mere individualistic, egoistic inner Christ experience. There is a crowned head in Europe, one of those who are still crowned, who always replied when it came to contemporary spiritual knowledge: “I have my personal Christ experience!” This crowned head was satisfied with that. But many say similar things. That, however, is precisely the misfortune of the present time: people do not want a general interest in the impersonal human. You only get to know yourself when you know the human being as such. But you cannot get to know the human being as such without seeking his origin in extra-terrestrial conditions.

Consider how, in my book Occult Science, I describe the search for the origin of what we call man in extraterrestrial conditions. People dislike this “Occult Science” for no other reason than because all confused knowledge about humanity is rejected and man as such is derived from the whole universe, namely from the extraterrestrial universe. But this is precisely what is needed in today's world. The present time must decide to add the other, the spiritual sources of knowledge to all that is loved as sources of knowledge today.

Here lies, call it guilt, call it ignorance – either word may be used, words are not important – what must be characterized as emanating from our scientific universities, from those people who set the tone when it comes to what man can and cannot know. The so-called human wisdom, but also the social wisdom, the technical wisdom, etc., that emanates from our European and American universities regards the world with the exclusion of all those factors that, after all, include the human being as a matter of course. Anyone who seeks access to any leading position today, even a lowly one, has no opportunity to get to know anything that would enable him to gain knowledge of human nature. And without knowledge of human nature there can be no social life, and without knowledge of human nature there can be no renewal of Christianity. Today one can become a theologian without having the slightest idea what the Mystery of Golgotha means, for most theologians today have no idea who Christ is. Today one can become a lawyer without having the slightest idea what the human being actually is. One can become a physician today without having the slightest idea of how the human being is constructed out of the cosmos, without having the slightest idea of how a healthy and a sick body relate to each other. Today one can become a technician without having the slightest idea what influence the construction of any machine has on the whole course of earthly development, and today one can be a brilliant inventor of a telephone without having the slightest idea what the telephone means for the whole development of the earth. People lack an overview of the course of human development. And so every person has the need to form a small circle and acquire a routine within this small circle, to apply this routine in the sense of their own selfishness, so that they can distinguish themselves without considering how what they are inserting as a part into the whole world will turn out in this whole world. If we were to build houses in the world using the same method by which we establish our existence today, they would collapse immediately. If we were to form bricks and build houses using the same method by which we educate our theologians, our lawyers, physicians, philologists and so on, and in particular our philosophers, these houses would not be able to survive for a week in the whole of the world. In the grand scheme of things, people do not notice the collapse. It has been collapsing continuously since the last third of the 19th century. People know nothing about it; on the contrary, they talk about the great upturn, and some still talk about building a new world with the same bricks that have long since become unusable. A new world cannot be built in any other way than by bringing a new spiritual impact into the whole civilized world from the ground up. You can make a mockery of something, but you cannot build without this spiritual impact.

There are people - well-meaning people - who are terribly afraid of such an intensity of knowledge, of such an intensity of knowledge as is sought through spiritual science. They are afraid for a reason – I am not telling you something I made up, only things that correspond to facts – they say to themselves: How boring it will be when people will know everything that spiritual science claims to know; then one can no longer hope that the future will bring new knowledge, then one cannot even know that knowledge will help. They still think that it would be a terrible prospect for the future if everything were already known!

I am not saying that this is convenient information for those who are too lazy to approach knowledge, but I would like to point out that the moment man is seen as he can be seen through spiritual science, the possibility of thinking about social construction really begins. You cannot establish social construction in any other way than by first bringing human knowledge into the clear, so to speak. To make this clear, one must only say the following: Take everything that leads to our present-day communities. People do not owe it to their enlightenment; they do not owe it to the ideas that they have fully absorbed into their consciousness, they owe it to those spiritual forces that shine through the blood, which have sprung from the old blood connections, blood relationships. Even today we still have something that enters our world as a remnant of that old blood relationship, which is given to us by the national principle and comes to the fore in it. The reason why one person calls himself an Englishman, another a Frenchman, and a third a Pole, stems from all those relationships between people that have always been based on blood ties. This blood relationship had its good justification through the thousands of years of human development, because through this blood relationship that which brought people together, that which founded human communities, rose up into humanity. And as you can see from my “Occult Science”, at the beginning of the development of the earth, people were not at all so uniform. The human souls came to earth from the most diverse places, as you know, and did not truly love each other. They only learned to love each other by being born as souls into blood-related bodies. In earlier lectures I repeatedly showed how the beneficence of this blood relationship, blood community, has been fought by the powers opposed to man, by the luciferic-ahrimanic powers. That was in ancient times. Then people were dependent on having human communities founded on blood ties. Today, to believe that one only needs to translate the old principle of blood relationship into the abstract language and that one can say, by clothing the abstractness in “Fourteen Points”: To every single, even the smallest people, its right to self-determination! One must be Woodrow Wilson in his unworldliness, in his abstraction, if one can do such a thing. Today one must realize: that was once. Blood relationships once established human communities. Today, however, other forces are at work in the ahrimanic and luciferic powers that are opposed to humanity. Today, blood relationship is to be used to seduce people. Just as the Christ did not come into the world to abolish the law, but to take it up into Himself, so blood relationship is not to be done away with. On the contrary, blood relationship must first be guided in the right way. But whereas in ancient times the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings in human hearts opposed blood relationship and sought to split human beings into egoistic individuals, today the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers seek to seduce human beings are to be seduced into building only on the blood relationship. Today the time has come to recognize that every human being who really has body, soul and spirit and stands before us comes down from the spiritual world. He comes down from the spiritual world in such a way that he has gone through a pre-earthly life. He seeks out for himself the blood through which he wants to embody himself on earth. And a feeling for this spiritual community must gradually arise. In pre-Christian times, reincarnation existed as a feeling, for it was only a realization before the year 1860 before Christianity; after the year 1860 it was only an instinctive feeling in all of Egypt, in the Near East, in Roman times. But now the time is coming when the view of man as a spiritual being undergoing a development between death and a new birth will become a living feeling, a living sensation, when one must live with the idea of the supermundane significance of human souls. For without this idea, the culture of the earth will be killed. It will not be possible to develop a practical activity in the future without being able to look up to the spiritual significance of the fact that every human being is a spiritual being. And one will have to add, as paradoxical as this may still appear to today's man – less paradoxical in theory, for I do not want to theorize, but to parallelize, in terms of feeling, but it is nevertheless so – that one will have to learn not only to say to oneself: We as parents rejoice that a child is born to us, we rejoice at this addition to our family because this child is born to us – but one will have to say: No, we are merely the instrument through which a spiritual individuality, waiting to continue its existence on earth, finds the opportunity to do so through us! The aristocratic idea of the “Stammhalter” (the son who continues the family line) and the aristocratic idea of the mere continuation of the family bloodline, for example, will have to be among the antiquated things. And the feeling will have to extend to all humanity. Even today, aristocrats still have the attitude that their primary task is to continue their family line so that the physical person has descendants with the same name. The feeling will have to be reversed to the effect that one must have these successors in the service of all humanity, so that certain individualities, who want to descend to the world, can continue their existence here on this earth. The old sentiments in aristocracy, in family aristocracy, extend into our present time. The feeling of that general human knowledge must be opposed to this; then we will also be able to understand the Christ anew. For He did not come to earth for the sake of family egoism, but for the sake of all mankind. Nor did He come for the sake of any nationality, but for the sake of all mankind. He did not come so that those who call themselves the victors could establish nation-states, but so that the universal human element could be cultivated on earth within the framework of nationality.

These things are at the root of what is happening now. And they are so rooted that what is being sought in earthly existence today is opposed by what the majority of people still say and want today. But if people continue to want things, they will only establish things that lead themselves ad absurdum, that lead themselves into impossibility. Either one will realize this, or one will have to wade in the European chaos for a long time to come. It is the best means to continue wading in this European chaos by founding nation states.

For this reason, we had to speak of the great responsibility to those who will soon fall outwardly to world domination. This responsibility is there. The English-speaking population has this terrible responsibility before the world, no longer to reject the spiritual, no longer to be Baconian or Newtonian, but to take up the spirit in its new form. Picture to yourself today Newton, who formulated that astronomical world view of which Herman Grimm rightly says: “As one imagines it in the sense of this astronomical world view, that the earth and the planetary system of the sun emerged from a haze, a thin mist, that transformed and transformed, that then from this vortex also animals, man and plants also arose from this vortex, and that one day the whole will fall back into the sun, is a carrion bone around which a hungry dog circles, a more appetizing piece than this world view; and times to come will have a hard time understanding the cultural and historical madness of the Newtonian, Kant-Laplacean system that is taught in school today. People will ask: How could an entire age once be so insane as to praise this view? Today it is still considered madness to side with Goethe against Newton, to occupy oneself with Goethean conceptions about physical phenomena. But everything that lies within the tasks of our time is connected with these things. A few people are beginning to see these connections today, and it was a pleasant surprise for me when, in the last issue of our journal 'Die Dreigliederung', it was explained how what is in my book 'Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage' about the social understanding of the world means the same as what Goetheanism once meant for natural science. But just as people turned away from Goethe because he had to contradict the science of his time, so people today turn away from the threefold social order. Why? It contradicts what is customary, just as Goetheanism once did, so that it is also contradicted by this threefold social order.

These things can lead you to ask: But what should the individual do then? — First of all, it depends on one's attitude towards the matter, on a clear and objective examination. It is important that one really begins to develop a deep interest in the affairs of all humanity. You can look back on what you have experienced in the last four to five years, and never have you had more opportunities to meet a certain kind of know-it-all in the world over and over again, because basically every person was a know-it-all. Then the Germans came and knew exactly who was to blame for the war and that they were actually highly innocent; then the French came and knew exactly how everything was; then the Italians at least still stood for “sacro egoismo”. — People always knew exactly what it was all about. They all had their views, they had their thoughts, their ideas. It is indeed convenient to gain these ideas without any basis. One is French by blood, one is Polish by blood, one is Czechoslovakian by blood, and one has a certain view of life as it must develop in Europe. One does not need to do anything other than this or that, to feel it within oneself, and one judges, judges as one is confronted with the judgments. That is the great misfortune of our time: that people, without really making an effort, without taking an interest in the affairs of humanity, judge from their subconscious, consider this or that to be right, consider this or that to be indispensable. But the time is no longer there when one can consider this or that to be indispensable from one's subconscious. The time has come when we must judge only on the basis of facts, when we must make an effort to really get an overview of the necessity of the time and of what the time demands of us. Today it constricts one's heart when one meets people who are only interested in themselves. For that is the great misfortune of our time, while the only redemption of time could consist in people saying to themselves now, after the terrible things that have happened in recent years: We must take an interest in the affairs of all humanity, we must not stop at what is happening directly around us in the sphere of our own nation.

These things arise directly from spiritual science as intuitive perceptions, and I am speaking of them today in preparation for certain concluding thoughts. You see here this building, which is the representative of our Anthroposophical spiritual science. One can have feelings for one or other of the elements in this building, and one will be right. But the only person who has the right feeling for this building is the one who sees something in every single line that is demanded by the most urgent needs of our time. The person who sees that the building must stand because our time demands this or that, because this or that must be sensed in these or those columns, in these or those rows of windows; because it is necessary for humanity today to take this building, what it wants to be, out of the whole configuration of time. And anyone who feels this new style at the same time, once they have felt it through, will recognize that this style has absolutely nothing to do with anything that is specified for this or that, but that it has only to do with the most general human aspects. There is nothing about this entire structure that the American, the Englishman, the German, the Russian, the Japanese, or the Chinese cannot say yes to, because it is not shaped from the sensibilities of a single person. I will not be able to be portrayed, at least not by those who know me, as an immodest person when I say: I myself know of nothing that is currently being made of this kind that is as independent of differentiated human will and would merge into the most general knowledge and understanding of human nature as this building.

But this must be taken up if the things that arise from our motives for the future of humanity are to serve that future well.