Nordic and Central European Spiritual Impulses

GA 209 — 12 December 1921, Dornach

V. The Human Being as an Earthly and Heavenly Being

If we first take a look at the historical development of humanity, we see what we have been talking about: a descending line from the original wisdom that was instinctively adopted by man, which at the same time had something invigorating for humanity, and then became paralyzed . at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. And then follows the ascending current of development, in which we are immersed, which begins in the manner already described several times from the Mystery of Golgotha. Now it is a matter of properly considering what initially emerges as a certain inner characteristic of historical development, for our time, in which we are immersed and which we must understand.

In our time there are the most diverse phenomena that live in the feelings and perceptions of human beings, which can even be said to make people healthy and sick in a certain way, but which are not brought to consciousness, which are not properly connected with the great principles of development. We must turn our attention to these phenomena of the present, for it is on this alone that the recovery of much within human development into the future depends.

There are many things we could mention. Today, we want to highlight one in particular: the difficulty we have today in establishing a true understanding with the youth of today. This difficulty in communicating with young people as an adult today is also the basis of our anthroposophical educational endeavors. We see a distinct youth movement emerging today. As soon as children reach the age of sexual maturity and then a little beyond, they develop a life of feelings and emotions that is extremely difficult for adults to understand today, but which is even more difficult to deal with. We see how agitation movements are emerging among young people, how revolting feelings are asserting themselves against all parental or educational authority. And when we look at all this with an unbiased mind, we cannot deny the justification for much of it. We have to admit that something is alive in today's young people that has lost touch with the outer life and also with the revelations of the inner life in adults. — In this respect, many things appear to the philistine today in such a way that when he notices them, he simply begins to rant in a peculiar way. He may not always mean it, but he starts ranting. He says: Today's youth have lost all sense of authority, they have almost become Bolsheviks; they rebel against everything that older people find reasonable, they disobey. These are all things that make life today hopeless. And especially among teachers, among those teachers who would like to preserve the old ways, such statements are very, very common. Again, such a thing can only be understood from an awareness of the developmental impulses of humanity.

Since the 15th century, we have seen a development of humanity towards intellectualism, towards an intellectual understanding of the world. We are not always aware of how strongly we actually live in this intellectualism today, in this purely intellectual, increasingly abstract form of world view. Although people always believe that they start from experience, from reality, from practical life, in reality they actually only start from conceptual life, from definitions, instead of from facts. People believe they have understood something when they have formed a concept of it. We often speak of how we understand death. Now, although it sometimes happens in a rather complicated way, death is understood as the end of a being, of a form. When this form dissolves into itself, when it can no longer hold together, then we say it dies, and we form a concept that is supposed to answer the question: What actually is death? And then we apply this concept, which we have grasped and also defined very precisely, to plants, to animals, to human beings. We say: plants die, animals die, human beings die. But the fact that this coming to an end of the inner cohesion can be something quite different in plants, in animals, in humans, is not taken into account because one gets stuck on the external side of the matter. It is just as I have often said: someone says that a knife is for cutting meat, and then he gets a razor and uses it to cut meat; a knife is a knife. This is more or less how we deal with the concept of death, life and so on today. We live in abstractions, in intellectualism. This is particularly noticeable in scientific life, where one does not start from facts, but from the comprehension of concepts, from defining.

Now, the abilities that a person needs to lead such a life in concepts do not actually come into play until the age of fourteen or fifteen, when sexual maturity really sets in. It is virtually impossible, when looking at life impartially, to speak of a child having an inclination towards an intellectualistic view of the world. The child is simply not able to think about the world in such a way that it can grasp the abstract. The child develops a completely different life in the soul. The child brings with it developmental forces, inner formative forces from its prenatal life, from the life between death and a new birth. These shape the physical organism, especially in the first seven years of life, but then to a somewhat lesser extent, and also significantly, even up to sexual maturity. And as long as the physical organism is being shaped in this way, it is quite impossible for the human being to develop into pure intellectualism. Now, in its development, humanity has increasingly come to a point where everything one gets from the world, everything one is educated in, are intellectual concepts. We receive the soul's garments, so to speak, in such a way that we can only grow into them in our fourteenth or fifteenth year. It is only an appearance when, for example, we say that we mainly want to look at things with children. What we allow to develop for them in this observation is what they only really grow into in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. The consequence of this is that in today's adults there is no living connection between what actually occurs as soul life after sexual maturity and what was there before. They only remember superficially what they experienced as children. They do not delve into their childhood experiences. They do not delve into these childhood experiences to such an extent that they exult inwardly at the joys they experienced as children or become intensely sad at what went against them. They actually forget childhood, not for the intellect but for the feelings and will, so that they do not look back on childhood in a living way.

But the child itself does not yet have the disposition for intellectualism; it has within itself the forces that are still working on the organism. This actually makes it a completely different breed of human being, and hence the impossibility of understanding adults and children. Teachers talk to children in such a way that they are terribly clever, these teachers – but children are wise. The teachers are clever and the children are wise, and cleverness cannot understand wisdom, cannot build a bridge from one to the other. If we had to do with our cleverness all that children do with their inner organism, yes, we would of course not be able to cope at all.

Jean Paul was right when he said that we learn far more in the first three years of our lives than in the three academic years. Anyone who has gone through their academic years with an open mind and can look back on their childhood years in a corresponding way knows that this is absolutely true; for the three academic years are concerned only with cleverness – let us say it is so – but in any case they are not concerned with wisdom. But the three childish years, the first even most, really move in wisdom. There wisdom works on the human being, even if it remains in the subconscious, wisdom works on the human being. Then, of course, it subsides later, but it is still present and we then experience what we are experiencing today: the revolting feelings of youth towards adults. One really only understands this when one looks back at the ages of humanity when it was different. And it was different in the developmental period of humanity that extends into the fourth post-Atlantic period. And I will describe how it was different.

Take an ancient Egyptian from an earlier period or a member of the Chaldean tribe of humanity: they did not perceive mineral nature in the same way as we do. He perceived it quite differently. He perceived it in such a way that when he saw ordinary ground, he perceived it relatively neutrally; but he perceived it quite differently, vividly, when he saw mountains or a flowing river. Then all life stirred within him. He received insights into what he actually needed in terms of insights from the outside world. He felt, let us say, when he saw a crystal, that the crystal told him something, that it revealed a secret of nature to him. Today, however, we are driven to mineralogy, to crystallography, in an intellectualistic way. There we are to learn all kinds of things about edges and angles and the like. That is all well and good, but it cannot be compared to what people once felt when they looked at a crystal. Then they really spoke to him of elemental beings; then he felt that he is not alone in the world, that there is something in nature that speaks to him. And even more so when a person approached plants. Certainly, one approached the grass that surrounds us more or less neutrally. But if, let us say, one saw a bilsenkraut plant on the wayside and walked past it, then one had a certain experience. The henbane has a certain shape; today the teacher, the botanist, introduces a child to this shape: it is described. This is an intellectualistic way of approaching the subject, and when this intellectualistic approach is adopted, one actually remains more or less neutral towards almost all plants. You like them, an aesthetic element comes into it, but the very living thing that was there once does not come into it. Because if you go back in time, if you were an ancient Egyptian or an ancient Chaldean, if you passed a henbane plant, you would go pale. If you passed a foxglove plant, you would blush. If you passed a colchicum, you would feel your skin stiffen. So you didn't walk through the world indifferently. You felt how you participated in the blood circulation and - in today's language we can call it that - in the nervous experience, which expressed itself externally in form. It was a living participation with nature.

And when people saw animals, they experienced the form of the animal very intensely in their own inner overall perception. They therefore understood nature quite differently. They understood it directly with the whole human being. When someone saw a snake, they felt something like an urge to writhe in their whole organism and to escape with their soul from all kinds of things that were unpleasant to them. The whole thing that is expressed in the Bible: the snake was the most cunning of all animals – that was an inner experience when looking at the snake. The mineral kingdom spoke to the human being from the outside. The animal kingdom spoke in such a way that this speaking was equivalent to experiencing the form of the animal.

All this has been lost to humanity, and in its place has come a kind of feeling of being cast away from nature, a feeling that nature has closed its windows. You can no longer see into it. You stand there alone. This is part of the natural development of humanity. What an older humanity experienced in nature is now present to a high degree in the needs of the child. And we should just pay attention to how the child actually asks. It does not ask in such a way that our present-day intellectualized answers really fit the child's questions. They do not fit at all. The child usually feels unsatisfied. And when we come across children who ask questions and feel satisfied with intellectual answers, this is something that occurs today, especially in a distorted and false education, to the detriment of developing humanity. When a child claims to be satisfied with our intellectualized answers, this actually corresponds to a certain coquetry that develops in the child. In reality, the child does not feel satisfied at all when given the answers we are accustomed to today, and we only train it to feel satisfied often, thereby making it actually untrue inwardly, inwardly coquettish. It then coquettishes with the satisfaction. This indicates that something lives in the child that is similar to what all of humanity had in ancient times as co-experience with the cosmos, and which has been dulled by the intellectualized soul life of more recent times. If this were to continue as it is today, the gap between adults and children would become ever deeper and deeper.

A well-known socialist agitator once wrote an essay that was much resented, about revolutionizing children. That was long before the war – it was downright demanded that children should be revolutionized. Well, yes, today they want to revolutionize everything, so why not children too? But if all this happens without an understanding of human nature, it can only lead to the greatest disaster, and it does lead to the greatest disaster. We must realize that, however necessary intellectual development, development towards the abstract, was for humanity, it has nevertheless thrown man out of nature, and today we grow up satisfying our head with the development of the intellect, while leaving the rest of the human being, especially the rest of the soul life, which works very strongly in the subconscious, unsatisfied. This becomes apparent to anyone who can observe the whole human being with the means of spiritual research, especially today in the sleeping human being.

This sleeping human being of today, so to speak, has nothing of what he actually needs. He has the great disadvantage that from falling asleep to waking up, he not only sleeps physically, as he should, but also sleeps spiritually in a certain way. In the case of the elderly person, it was the case that he awakened spiritually when he fell asleep. Of course, this did not merge into ordinary consciousness, but he awakened spiritually in such a way that he absorbed certain forces through consciousness that he could not absorb in ordinary consciousness. Today, human beings have lost these powers. Man is in the outer world, and yet, with his soul, he is not in it. He can no longer blush when he looks at the purple foxglove, he can no longer turn pale when he looks at the henbane. He can no longer feel so vividly that it is a blessing to be born near oak forests, because the oak pours courageous strength into people, as was the case with the ancient Germans. These things cannot be grasped merely in the abstract, as we do today, when we retell, correctly philistine retell, how the ancient Germans loved the oaks. It is philistine how we tell it today, because we have no idea what effect the oak had on older people, how the seventeen- to eighteen-year-old lad, when he awoke to certain forces, could not help but feel stiff in the knees, in the loins, how he tightened his neck, how that was a matter of course.

Please do not misunderstand me; I do not think that we should broach this subject today. It is out of the question, because it would be unnatural if we wanted to broach it. It is something that has disappeared from humanity, that no longer exists. But we must recognize that the need for it has nevertheless remained in the subconscious soul life, that this need is there.

So what did the ancient man say to nature? He said: I was born - he did not express it in words, of course, but it was in his feeling - I was born; what lives in me is rooted out there in the stones that tell me something, in the plants that make me blush and turn pale, make me taut and so on, in the animals that fill me with inner strength or make me limp; I am rooted in there. There I will be received again with my soul when my body falls away from me. And it was a feeling, as they, let us say, could have the plants when they bloom. If the plant could develop a soul life when it blooms, it would say: I must now develop the germ into the fruit; there it is over with me, there it does not go further, there I must let my leaves wither and finally fall off. But then, if it were developing its soul life, the plant would turn gratefully to the earth and say: Yes, but there is the earth, which takes in my germs, which develops my germs. There I live on. — This is roughly how the ancient human being felt about all of nature. He did not merely derive his soul existence from his physical inheritance, but he knew himself rooted in all of nature. And in that he knew himself rooted in all nature, he also knew how he is received into all nature when his body has fallen away from him. He regarded all nature as the blossoming plant regards the earth that receives its germ. This world, which the old man felt around him, is actually no longer there, it is dead, it is dead. And this is a basic feeling of modern man, even if it is not understood, that he feels thrown out of nature.

And now we want to put something completely different before our soul. We want to imagine an initiate in the fourth post-Atlantic period, who is initiated into the beginning of intellectual life. What is generally understood by intellectual life today was, in a sense, the result of a certain initiation for the fourth post-Atlantic period. Certain initiations were aimed at bringing people to an understanding of intellectualism. You see, such an initiate was, of course, brought to the consequences of intellectualism, whereas today, people get stuck in the fear of intellectualism – they do not go to the consequences. But such an initiate was led to understand this. In ancient times, it was simply the case that man felt that there was a soul in all of nature. He lived with his soul life in such a way that he knew that in death he would be taken up again by the soul in the cosmos. A tragic mood already prevailed over many initiations of the fourth post-Atlantean period, and the initiates of this kind of mystery had actually lost all hope in nature. They expected nothing of what nature could say to man. They said that nature had ceased to speak to man, that nature had ceased to receive man in death. A completely different world must come, so that man with his soul life can again have hope. And it was made clear to these initiates: He who looks into nature finds nothing in nature that could give him such hope. He had to see in nature that there is nothing that saves man spiritually, not only physically, where he has descendants, but that saves man spiritually. That wisdom takes on an intellectual form was something these initiates came to know. It is already a commonplace for us, but these initiates came to know how wisdom is transformed into an intellectual form. And that created in them a tragic mood, that was what made them hopeless. For the old initiates experienced one thing with full consciousness: they knew that wisdom is not merely something that lives abstractly in man; wisdom is light in man, in that man thinks, makes images within himself. For the same thing that is inwardly images within man is outwardly the light that quickens. Our concepts cannot create light – so these initiates said to themselves – that is why they themselves have taken on the form of death, that is why our concepts are dead. And that was the tragic wisdom of a large part of the mysteries of the fourth post-Atlantean period, that the sentence was felt: Man's wisdom can no longer be light, it becomes dark in man; for light is creating. The abstract thought is uncreative, is dead.

And now imagine such an initiate, educated entirely in this view: there can only be consolation for man again when, from some corner, comes the conviction: wisdom can shine again, wisdom can become light again, it is not dead, it is something that can be seen outside. It can become light. You see, this comfort came to Paul when he experienced the event of Damascus. Only then did he grasp the mystery of Golgotha. Only then did he understand: through Christ, something has come into the world that cannot only be thought, that shines, that in turn has the power of light, and thus has creative power. And from that moment on he knew: although nature is dead to man, Christ is on earth with his power. He has penetrated it. And in Christ mankind can now find what it used to find in nature. That was Paul's great experience before Damascus. And then he understood: people have lost nature as a consolation, nature has become aesthetic to them. But the Christ enters. The Christ, properly understood, gives that which lived there in the whole complex of the speaking minerals, the plants that make one blush and pale, the animal nature that looks and searches within the human being. A spiritual cosmos has connected with the earth. The power of the sun, which previously appeared to man in minerals, plants and animals, is now there in a moral way. It is there for inner experience. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

What are people talking about when they discuss the interpretation of what the Christ proclaimed: the end of the earth is here, a new kingdom is arising. Yes, those who have understood that the ears of grain will henceforth be five times as rich in the fields, that the grapes will be five times as large on the vines – we know that this is how it was understood – do not understand what was meant; that in fact a saturation of purely natural existence had come with what lies in the descent of the Christ to earth. This was revealed to Paul with the event of Damascus. And so we must see this second world, a second, completely new world has come with the Christ. It is not just this abstract concept, as it is often viewed, but it is a completely new world, a world that, when properly understood, gives what nature used to give. Intellectualism laughs when one speaks of gnomes in minerals, but this is supposed to express nothing other than what I said earlier: the minerals spoke to you – or that there are undines in plants. People who can no longer turn pale or blush at the sight of plants cannot, of course, know about the Undines either, for the concepts of reason, the definitions, say nothing about the Undines. But the blush and the pallor, that which lies in the blood, speaks of it, spoke of it once. Today it speaks of it only unconsciously. But all this can be revived when the Christ enters humanity as a real experience. And in the Christ, old age will be able to communicate with youth again. For the Christ cannot be grasped by the intellect. You see, today we judge the world intellectually, we speak of right and wrong, of true and false. But this is only significant for the physical world in which we live between birth and death. People to whom one must speak about the higher worlds do not want to enter into what is essential. Certainly, one must carry the concepts of true and false, of logically right and wrong, up into the higher worlds as well. But that is not the essential. The essential is that something living must be added, that the concepts of 'healthy' and 'ill', for example, must be introduced. Here in the physical world, something is either right or wrong; for the higher worlds, what is right is also healthy. We experience it as vividly as we experience health in the physical world as something that encompasses the whole person. And what is wrong, what is incorrect, is what is sick there. We would actually be better off speaking of health and sickness in the ordinary world if we want to describe things accurately than if we speak of right and wrong. We also need to develop some sense of how to look at what is healthy and what is sick. Here we judge logically according to right or wrong; in the higher worlds we sense: something is growing there, it is developing. We do not speak of mere rightness, we sense that as healthy. And when we grasp a concept about it, we also feel this concept as something healthy, not just as something right. And in the same way, we sense what is wrong in the spiritual world as being sick. Now, in the physical world we are content with right or wrong — we are predisposed that way. This is not the case for history. For history, we cannot make do with the concepts that newer historians have developed based on the model of pure physics. We have to speak of a health at the starting point of humanity. In the Greco-Latin period, we have to speak of a disease of culture. And we have to speak of the therapy of history by developing the effectiveness of the mystery of Golgotha. We must therefore speak as we speak of the healthy and the sick person, we must present history according to the model of an illness and a cure.

Rankesche history, for example, is infinitely abstract compared to reality. And this kind of history, as it is written today, is more or less like a doctor approaching a sickbed or a healthy person and simply wanting to reason with them. We must approach history with an eye for health, illness and healing. And that happens when we look at history in such a way that we start from health in primeval times, gradually see a real cultural illness, and feel the great therapist who, through the mystery of Golgotha, has really brought healing from outside the earth. In this way, the study of history is brought to life. But in this way, too, the Christ is placed in the historical evolution. Only the historical evolution has a possibility of approaching the Christ, which proceeds as physiology and pathology must proceed in relation to the material. It must be possible to bring into spiritual life those concepts that today can only be used in the physical life, and even there only poorly, because, for example, one examines the person after he has died and deduces the most important laws for his life from the corpse. So one handles it poorly, but at least one handles it. But when considering history, this has been completely forgotten. At most when people see very special states of emergency, such as, let us say, when a sect appears that whips itself, then one speaks of something pathological, or when things come to it, as it has already happened during the last years, for example, that someone once started shooting at Venus with machine guns because he believed that it was an enemy balloon approaching. This is called a war psychosis. So in special cases one speaks of the healthy or the sick taking effect. But one does not consider the healthy and the sick in the great process. Therefore one cannot come to a real understanding of the principle of healing, of the great historical therapy that appeared with the Mystery of Golgotha. Of course, one can say that people today are still actually quite ill. Well, but that does not apply, because one should have an idea of what it would be like if the Mystery of Golgotha had not occurred. And if people believe that it only depends on faith, then they are also mistaken, because it depends on the objective that has occurred in the evolution of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. Of course, faith also helps the sick person, but the doctor's skill is also essential. Therefore, it was a mistake to look for the actual phenomenon of Christian piety merely in faith. That would be like saying: the medicine can stay where it wants, you just need to teach the patient to believe that he can get well through this medicine.

We have come to abstractions everywhere, to an inability to see how what a person experiences within is connected to what is happening objectively outside. And so it will be necessary for our ideas to become more and more alive. For with the dead ideas with which we have gradually become accustomed to looking at the outer world, the Mystery of Golgotha will not arise. In the face of these, Christianity would fade more and more. The Christ would become more and more the mere man Jesus, as He has already become for many theologians. Christianity would disappear. A real revival of Christianity presupposes that the whole development of humanity and of human views will be permeated with more living concepts than is possible through intellectualism. We had to have intellectualism for the sake of human freedom. But we must bring intellectualism out again for the sake of the human being, so that this human being can come to life again. For freedom, a dying was necessary, because freedom can only come from the activity of the will in the dead, that is, from the highest application of the will. When the life in us overpowers us, consciousness fades, in which only freedom can flourish. But once intellectualism is there, life must come to intellectualism, that is, the concrete concepts of healthy and sick must come to the abstract concepts of true and false.

And we need the application of these concrete concepts to history first of all. Then we will be able to find the Mystery of Golgotha as the most important component of the historical development of the earth.