The Intellectual Fall from Grace and Spiritual Ascent of Sins

GA 220 — 12 January 1923, Dornach

Fourth Lecture

In the course of world history, there are symptoms that show internal developmental forces as if they were external phenomena. Sometimes such symptoms appear to be connected with internal developments in an external way. But the connections in the world, in the world of spirit, soul and matter, are so profound that often what appears externally can, on closer inspection, be taken as a real indication of the internal. And in this sense, the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno in the year 1600 may be mentioned as an outward sign of a momentous inner development. The flames of that funeral pyre shine, I might say, to the historical observer as a symbol pointing to the significant transformations that have taken place in the entire developmental history of mankind.

We must not forget that three human personalities appear to us as particularly characteristic of that period of transition from the 16th to the 17th century: a Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno; a shoemaker, Jakob Böhme; and a Lord Chancellor, Bacon, Baco of Verulam - three personalities who seem to be quite unlike each other, but precisely in their dissimilarity are extremely characteristic of what took place in the development of humanity during the emergence of the newer world view, during the twilight of the old world views.

Jakob Böhme had grown up in the simplest of folk conditions, and even as a boy he had listened with a fine spiritual ear to the many wisdoms that still lived in the people of Central Europe at that time, wisdoms that related as much to what people felt within themselves as to the secrets behind natural processes and natural things. All this folk wisdom was already in a state at the time when Jakob Böhme's fine spiritual ear could listen to it, that it was actually impossible to put the deep wisdom, the remnants of which Jakob Böhme still heard, into clear words, so that one was already compelled to express deep wisdom in stammering, often inadequately words. In the case of Jakob Böhme, one must bear in mind that he chewed on words in order to squeeze out of them something that he had actually only absorbed emotionally — I would say from the weight of them — and that this is the wisdom contained in popular tradition.

We see as a second personality Giordano Bruno - grown into the teachings that were particularly in the Dominican Order, those teachings which, now also based on ancient wisdom, brought insights into the relationship of man to the world in finely chiseled terms, which in themselves had a certain strength and intensity of knowledge, but were dulled by ecclesiastical tradition. And we see how, in the personality of Giordano Bruno, the whole urge and passion for knowledge of the age, the transition from the 16th to the 17th century, so to speak, works its way out of the soul with Faustian violence, how Giordano Bruno is so completely a child of his age , how, alongside the fact that the Dominican lives in him, he is, in the most eminent sense, a man of the world of that time, but precisely a man of the world in all the refinement in which one can be when one brings sharply defined, vividly developed ideas into the world. Perhaps no other personality of that time spoke as a result of the general character of the age as did Giordano Bruno. One need only look at how he is compelled, because he must speak from the fullness of world consciousness, but only has the narrowness of the human soul of his time available, to wrap the fine ideas that he absorbed during his studies in a poetic garment; how he becomes a poet of knowledge, a poetizing scientist, because at the moment when he wants to say something, such a rich spiritual content lives in him that this rich spiritual content goes beyond all concepts and he is compelled to surrender to the momentum of the poetic, the poetical, in order to express this abundance of light.

And on the other hand, in Baco of Verulam, we see a man who has actually lost the ground under his feet, a man who is completely absorbed in the external life of his time. He is a statesman, a Lord Privy Seal; he is a man of great intelligence, but one that is not rooted in any tradition, which for the first time brings forth in a large-scale way that which a person like Fichte would later so despise – from his point of view, justly so: the banality of reason, the banality of rationalism.

Baco of Verulam actually introduced banality into philosophy in a clever way. As I said, he had completely lost the spiritual ground under his feet, had no tradition, he only took that as real which appeared to the senses, but was not yet able to extract anything spiritual from sensory experience. One might say that he was the reverse of Jakob Böhme. While Jakob Böhme, from the old spirituality, which was no longer understood, nevertheless wanted to strike sparks of the soul and also sparks of the material everywhere, wanted to find the secrets of the soul and the secrets of the material from old traditions, which he then uttered in a stammering manner, Baco of Verulam had nothing of the kind in him. He stood, as it were, with his soul like a tabula rasa, with a blank slate, facing the external, sensual world, applying the banality of ordinary human understanding, not of healthy, but of ordinary human understanding, to this external sense world, and nothing else came of it but the beginning of sensory knowledge, which is devoid of all spirituality.

Thus these three personalities stand as contemporaries. Jakob Böhme was born in 1575, Giordano Bruno, older than he, in 1548, and Lord Bacon in 1561. They represent modern civilization in its rising, each in his own special way.

Now, at the present time, when the descending forces are at their strongest, it is extremely difficult to point out the inner workings and life of such souls as these three. For much of what these souls lived in as still quite real spiritual views has now faded away. In the future, when history is looked back upon, it will certainly be characterized as follows: our age, because it is the culmination of materialism, also bears within itself the moral antithesis of this materialism. And this moral antithesis is certainly, on the one hand, the rampant immorality, but on the other hand, above all, the indifference towards everything spiritual. I draw special attention to this indifference because I intend to let these three lectures, which I am now going to give, culminate on Sunday in one that deals with the particular kind of opposition to the anthroposophical world view, and because I would like to create a basis for this today and tomorrow by means of a kind of historical approach.

This indifference to everything spiritual sometimes makes one wonder why people of our time still see anything special in Goethe's “Faust”, for example. It would actually be easier to understand if people of our time would simply say, in line with their views: Goethe's “Faust” belongs to a bygone age. Almost every page of Goethe's “Faust” contains a revelation of ancient superstition. There is a lot about magic and an alliance with the devil.

Now, our time has the excuse that it says: All this is poetic disguise. But on the other hand, our age does admit that Göethe wanted to depict something like a kind of representative of humanity in his Faust. So you have to say that you better understand the great scholar Du Bois-Reymond, who actually considered the whole of Faust to be some kind of nonsense and said: Faust should have become a decent person, married Gretchen honestly and invented the electrostatic generator and the air pump. — That is actually a more honest statement from the point of view of our age than what is very often said about Faust by people who share the views of this age. For they do it only because the opinion has been formed that Goethe's “Faust” is a great work that must not be thrown on the scrapheap. It is, as I said, the complacency that sometimes feels embarrassed, things that it should actually reject, really to reject.

Just imagine how our time would treat these things if such things did not have the traditional judgment attached to them! If Shakespeare had not written “Hamlet” and such a Hamlet drama by an obscure poet from some unknown depths were to appear today, then one would see what people would say about such a Hamlet drama.

Sometimes you really have to think seriously about such things in order to understand the time in the right way. This indifference, because it is embarrassed to do anything else, swings itself to a consideration of Mephistopheles in Goethe's “Faust” or occasionally lends itself to saying all sorts of inappropriate things about the magic in “Faust”. But to look into that which actually existed as a spiritual-soul atmosphere at a time when such decisive things for the spiritual life of modern civilization happened as in the time in which Giordano Bruno, Jakob Böhme and Baco von Verulam lived, that is actually impossible for the present time.

Now, if we want to look at something like this quite impartially, we have to realize the gigantic ideas that earlier ages had in relation to the present ones! Ideas that, precisely because of their gigantism, are no longer even worthy of indifference today, except perhaps when viewed from a literary-historical perspective.

Look back to the Middle Ages, look at a figure like Merlin! Immermann tried to revive this figure in his time, but the former gigantic stature is so reduced in Immermann that it seems as if everything was written in a dressing gown, with a nightcap on one's head.

Take just the simple straight line of the Merlin saga. What is Merlin to become? Merlin is to become an anti-Christ. He is to become one according to the legends of the Middle Ages: the antithesis of Christ. Christ, according to the Gospels, was born without physical fertilization. Merlin is to do the same. But Christ was born through the overshadowing of Mary by the Holy Ghost; Merlin is to be born through the overshadowing of a pious nun by the devil in her sleep. The devil wants to create an antipode of Christ on earth in the person of Merlin; therefore he attacks a pious nun in her sleep. And Merlin does not become the Antichrist only because the nun is too pious. And it is precisely through her true and right morality that the devil's intention is prevented in Merlin.

Just try to realize what such lines mean within the medieval saga. They signify an inner boldness of world-view, an inner energy of thought-formation. Compare all that is said in our time, except in circles such as the anthroposophical ones, about the origin of evil in the world, about the origin of corruption in humanity, and you will have to admit: nothing is more justified than to say that the newer development is that of the philistines. For ultimately, apart from all philosophical inner rigor, with which the origin of evil is sometimes spoken of today, things are bourgeois in relation to an idea that is gigantically developed with regard to evil, like that of the creation of a Merlin, who is only, so to speak, a wayward son of the devil and therefore does not become evil enough.

Consider this: Merlin is one of the leaders of the Arthurian circle. The saga takes him as an aid to illuminate the character of an age. But the saga cannot find a way on earth to characterize this age accurately. Therefore it goes beyond the earthly, goes into the supersensible-evil, needs a wayward son of the devil to explain the earthly.

I am not saying that we do not need similar elements of saga for our age. I am not saying that in order to characterize many things accurately, it would not be necessary to speak of similar creations. Even the Philistinism of modern times, in its origin and sources, does not need to be explained merely in earthly terms. For the peculiar thing about Philistinism is that its harmfulness is no more grasped by itself than its usefulness.

In the middle ages, the Eucharist controversy arose everywhere. I have already explained that people only began to discuss the Eucharist when they no longer knew what it contained. How one begins to discuss when one knows nothing about a matter. As long as one knows something about a matter, one does not discuss it. For someone who has a glimpse of the secrets of the world, discussions are always a sign of ignorance. So when people get together and discuss things, it is a sign to someone with insight that they all know nothing. As long as reality is there – and you can only know something about realities – you don't discuss. At least I have never heard that when the rabbit is on the table, people discuss whether it is a real rabbit or a not-real rabbit, or where the rabbit originated, or whether the rabbit is eternal, or arose in time, or the like, but they eat it; at most they quarrel over ownership, but not over any kind of knowledge. But behind this dispute about the Lord's Supper lies something quite different, and this very different aspect makes the ideas that one had for the interaction of people in turn seem gigantic compared to the philistine ideas of today, which are sometimes no less devilish, but are just philistine ideas.

People like Trithem of Sponheim, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Georgius Sabellicus, Paracelsus, they were not just slandered in an ordinary philistine way, but it was at least said of them that they were in league with the devil and that they could therefore practice magical arts that were feared. And so, behind the dispute about the Lord's Supper, we see fear of magic. This fear of magic, in turn, is connected with the advent of a new era, whose signature lies precisely with such spirits as Baco van Verulam, Giordano Bruno and Jakob Böhme.

What did they understand by a magician? A magician was understood to be a person who drew knowledge from within himself, through which he could control nature and possibly also people. But the spirit of modern civilization was directed towards making these inner cognitions, which were certainly there and which in those days still figured as remnants of ancient, instinctive clairvoyant insights, disappear, and to allow to arise that which can only be gained from external nature, not from human insight. There was tremendous fear of a person whom one could not observe as he handled all kinds of things, so he put together machines and the like. Because where one was able to see everything, one could also, so to speak, see how the insights entered his mind. Today, of course, this is common practice, because, isn't it, today one is no longer afraid of magic, because it is actually no longer there, because the inner sources of knowledge have already gone down completely. Today it is clear that it makes no difference whether you listen to a person who is imparting knowledge, i.e. listening to his humanity, or whether you watch him tinkering with the machines in the laboratory , because there you can see how the insights first enter his head; and that something else may still be in his head than what you can see is entering, that is not accepted. You always have to be able to see exactly what a person has in his head. Today this is a matter of course.

In Baco von Verulam's time, there were still people who had a certain inner wealth. Therefore, it was still worthwhile for Baco von Verulam to stir up the great campaign against such inner soul wealth and to point out what can come into a person from the outside. One is tempted to say that one is referred back to ancient times, when human minds were still considered to be full, and people wanted to know what was inside because they were convinced that what was inside could not be found outside in nature. And then along came Bacon and declared: That's nonsense, the human head is hollow throughout, everything that goes into it must go into it from the outside, from nature.

Now that was theory. In the early Middle Ages, however, there was a tremendous fear that something in man could grow independently within, that spirit could grow in man. No wonder that understanding of the mystery of the Lord's Supper was also completely lost, because something had to be done by man if a transformation from matter into something completely different was to take place.

And so we see how, especially in the controversy over the Lord's Supper, something very strange arises. In the early days of Christianity, the transformation of the bread and wine was accepted as something possible, as something real, by virtue of certain ideas that were there. These ideas were no longer there. Therefore, people began to ask: What could this be? And from then on it was to be carried out purely externally. The external now became the essential, which was already expressed by the fact that the reformers even quarreled among themselves about the form in which the Lord's Supper should be taken. The spirit was driven out of the ceremonies.

That was the first phase of materialism at all. What first came to light in materialistic terms in modern civilization was sacramentalism. That was where materialism actually first arose. And during this age, in which Bruno, Böhme and Bacon lived, was only to lay the foundation for a new spirituality, as an age that tends to show man spiritless matter in the laws of nature, so that man has to seek the spirit out of his own power, the first phase of this was that in all areas of life, one first extinguished the spirit, as it were, extinguished it above all in worship. And then this extinguishing continued into the profane areas of life.

But Goethe was still sensitive to all this, and in his “Faust” he created an echo of what was felt, in energetic terms, especially in this age, in the transition from the 16th to the 17th century. What did Goethe want to present in his “Faust”? The form is poetic, but what he wanted is more generally human than merely poetic. And it is not difficult for an unbiased mind to say what Goethe wanted in his “Faust”: he wanted to present the whole, the full human being to humanity itself. And so he summoned up this figure from the 16th century, the Faust figure, whom he actually only knew poorly from insufficient records when the impulse arose in him to write a “Faust”. He took this Faust figure from the 16th century because, emotionally, he was able to relate to the tremendous struggle that took place in the 16th century to somehow recover something that had been lost: namely, the human being.

And that was what each of these three was actually seeking. The Dominican friar, who had outgrown scholasticism, in which concepts had flourished to the point of the utmost abstraction, sought—by poeticizing them, elevating them to art, permeating them with feeling, but also with profound insight—to make these concepts come alive by actually wrestling with them: What is the world in man? What is man in the world? – That was the way it was with Giordano Bruno.

And that was basically the way it was with the shoemaker Jakob Böhme. He, too, sought the human being, but in the way he grew up, in those simple circumstances, which had much more of the human element than the circumstances of the “upper ten thousand”. He did not find it, this human being. And he immersed himself in popular wisdom, and what he was looking for was basically nothing more than the world in man, man in the world.

Only Bacon was not actually aware of this search for the human being, but he also sought him in a certain way. He even sought him in the way in which he is still sought by the leading natural philosophers of today. Bacon sought man by wanting to construct him as a kind of mechanism. Condillac, de Lamettrie, the natural philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, they build man atomistically out of individual natural processes, like a mechanism. According to the belief of these natural philosophers, something comes into being that, to the discerning mind, is nothing more than a kind of spectre in the evil sense, something that cannot live, that is actually a bag of concepts stuffed with abstractions.

Really, when you hear Bacon talk about man, it is as if he were just a bag of concepts stuffed with abstractions. But that is something, after all. It is also a search for the human being, even if it is a completely unconscious search. Even with Bacon, we find that he has relegated everything with which one used to try to understand the human being to the idols, that he is also searching for the human being. He does not know it clearly, but basically he is also searching for the world in the human being, for the human being in the world.

And what is it actually like, that each person searches in their own way for the human being in the world, for the world in the human being? — If we try to gain insight from Jakob Böhme, this search for the human being appears to us in the following way. We see how Jakob Böhme comes upon a person who is actually nowhere to be found. Through his stammering concepts, we come upon an image of a person who is nowhere to be found. And yet, this non-existent, seemingly non-existent person has an inner power of existence, a real inner power of existence. We believe in the man Jakob Böhme, even though we say to ourselves: the way Jakob Böhme speaks, for my sake, of the three elements of life, of salt, sulfur and mercury in man, is not the way a person in modern times is. But there is a being that Jakob Böhme fleshed out – one cannot say that he compiled it, but rather that he fleshed it out. And precisely in spiritual science one comes to ask: What is the reason for this being, of which Jakob Böhme speaks in a stammering manner? And then one comes to this: This is the human being of the pre-earthly existence. If one goes back to the spiritual science of the nature of man in the pre-earthly existence, then strange similarities emerge with what Jakob Böhme describes as the human being stammering. This human being, whom Jakob Böhme describes, cannot walk around on earth. But in the pre-earthly existence, he actually has a possible existence. It is just that, so to speak, in Jakob Böhme's description, not everything that makes up this pre-earthly human being is really there.

And so one would like to say: If one really gets into Jakob Böhme's description of man, how this human being appears in the pre-earthly existence, then one has the impression, especially with correct spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical knowledge: Jakob Böhme describes the pre-earthly human being. It is correct, but he describes him in such a way that he remains a theory, not an extensive theory, but an internal theory. It is the pre-earthly human being who cannot become an earthly human being, who actually dies spiritually before he can be born on earth. He cannot cross over to earth.

So one could also say: What Jakob Böhme describes of the pre-earthly human being is like wanting to have a memory of something one has experienced, and one cannot get to the bottom of it, no matter how hard one tries to bring up the memory again. So for Jakob Böhme the power was lost to conjure up the pre-earthly human being again. In earlier ages one could do it. Jakob Böhme had absorbed the folk tradition of such wisdom. But he could not achieve anything other than a pre-earthly human being who was stillborn in soul. The human ability to describe this human being as truly alive in his pre-earthly existence was no longer sufficient.

And Giordano Bruno, well, Giordano Bruno is actually not only a child of his time, but a human being in whom everything is completely present. One has the feeling with Giordano Bruno that everything in him is present, magnificent presence, present that encompasses the universe in space – but nothing past, nothing future. He experiences the world entirely in the present. He presents the universe as a present reality and would actually now also like to describe the man of the present from his stammering, poetizing words of knowledge. He is just as little able to do this as Jakob Böhme is able to describe the pre-earthly human being. But the seeds are there in Giordano Bruno to place the human being of the present, namely the earthly human being between birth and death, in the universe in such a way that he can be understood.

But here again we see the inability of human powers to grasp the whole man whose knowledge is the goal of their striving. But this man had to be grasped, for out of the comprehension of the terrestrial man must again spring the pre-existent man and the post-existent man. Of the post-existent man they had very little. This part was left closed to Bacon, to Baco of Verulam.

Just as the sleeping human being, when he is outside of the physical and etheric body in his ego and in his astral body, lives in the same world that we perceive with our eyes, with our entire sensory apparatus, how this sleeping human being, that is, his spiritual-soul, absorbs sleeping germs into himself for the life that he will unfold when he has passed through the portal of death, but as what is actually taken in from the immediate present for the future is closed to man for ordinary consciousness, so for the first approach of modern science, as it appears in Baco von Verulam, all that is closed is what is future, but what nevertheless lives unconsciously, even if denied, in sensory knowledge. And from sense knowledge must be drawn the knowledge of post-existence, of existence after death. Bacon is not yet able to do this, he has no spiritual power at all. Therefore, as I said, his man becomes a bag of concepts, stuffed with abstractions. It is the most imperfect of what must one day be achieved at the end of this age — which must strive towards spirituality, but now out of knowledge of nature: this, what emerges in Baco von Verulam.

Thus we see how, in the case of Jakob Böhme, the pre-earthly man is approached in an imperfect way, and in the case of Giordano Bruno, the present-day earth man, the man between birth and death, is approached in a grandiose but equally imperfect way, and how, in the case of Bacon, there is still unconsciousness of what is to come to life one day, but which still appears to him as a completely dead product. For you see, what Bacon describes as man, that does not live on earth, that is a ghost on earth. But when it will be described in its perfection, then it will be the human being in the after-earth existence.

If we take these three spirits, who truly represent a wonderful triumvirate at the turn of the 16th to the 17th century, especially if we take their origin — the man of the people Jakob Böhme, the Dominican Giordano Bruno, who emerged from the spiritual training of the time , and Baco of Verulam, who stood on the heights of outward social life but had lost the ground under his feet. If we also understand from these social conditions how they were able to arrive at their views in different ways, then we find a remarkable destiny fulfilled in them.

We see the man of the people, Jakob Böhme, fighting throughout his life for that which still lives in the people, but lives in a stammering way and is treated with hostility. Yet the struggle continues latently: fundamentally, Jakob Böhme does not step out of the circles of folklore.

Baco von Verulam, an intellectually magnificent man, the representative of the modern world view, loses himself morally, goes astray morally, and is an honest representation of man in so far as this kind of scientific approach was bound to go astray morally. Only the others are not as honest as he is in the demon; for I do not want to claim that he was honest.

And in between, Giordano Bruno, who pointed not to the past nor to the future, but to the present, where he sought to grasp the germ from which the future view of the world must develop. With him it appears still in its embryonic state. But the forces clinging to the old were to crush this germ in its birth. And so we see how the burning Giordano Bruno is a historic monument of magnificent kind, as the burning Giordano Bruno indicates: something must come of it. And that which was to come, which impelled him to utter these words: You may kill me, but my ideas will not be killed in centuries to come — that must also live on. And in this way, external symptoms, which appear to be only externalities in historical development, are nevertheless deeply rooted in the development of humanity. It is expressed in these Giordano Bruno flames how a new impulse must be received by the old, if one really understands the whole configuration of the old.

I wanted to describe to you what actually happened inwardly, what people actually wanted to burn. Well, our time has indeed erected an external Giordano Bruno monument on the site of the former Giordano Bruno flames. But the point is that we should now really understand what was killed back then, but should and must live - live, however, in further development, not in the same form in which it existed back then.