Cultural Phenomena — Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy
GA 225 — 8 July 1923, Dornach
VI. European Culture and Its Connection with the Latin Language — The Essence of Greek and Roman Mysteries
From the two lectures I gave yesterday and the day before yesterday, you will have seen how important it is from an anthroposophical point of view to build on what happened in Europe in the course of the 19th century in the right way. And we were indeed able to link the phenomena that we have placed before our minds to many of the things that have emerged as the actual characteristic of the modern era, which we consider to be the actual characteristic of the spiritual and other historical developments in Europe from the mid-15th century onwards.
Today, precisely because I regard yesterday and the day before as a kind of substructure, as a kind of starting point for a perspective, I would like to look a little further ahead, and also a little further back in time.
We must be clear about the fact that in the course of the 19th century, materialism emerged in European development on the one hand. And I count as materialism everything that can only turn to material phenomena if it wants to say something about the world that does not feel the need to turn to a spiritual thing when it is about that which sustains man in the world, which instructs man in the world about his path. On the other hand, added to this materialism was what may be called intellectualism, rationalism, the view of the intellect, which only, I might say, wants to live and weave in logical concepts.
Now do not take this as if I meant that this logical way of thinking should be opposed to another non-logical or even anti-logical one. Of course that does not occur to me at all. But the logical alone is to reality what the skeletal system is to the human being, and in all things the logical actually represents not the living but the dead. And so what man had naively arrived at, this mere intellectual logic that contains dead concepts, promoted materialism, which only tied in with dead substance.
Now, nothing less than a completely disillusioned looking into the true reasons that, on the one hand, brought forth materialism and, on the other, rationalism, can help us today to further develop human civilization. And here we must also reach a little further back in time, so that yesterday's and the day before yesterday's description has an even broader background.
I have often pointed out the deep rift that exists between everything that was once Greek culture – let us say, the culture that developed partly in the Greek language – and what then gradually developed to the west as Roman, as Latin culture. Attention has often been called to the view of Herman Grimm, who says: Today's man can still understand the Romans, because he basically still has the same concepts as the Romans; the Greeks appear to him like the inhabitants of a fairy-tale land. Well, I have indeed spoken about this fact in more detail in the essays that recently appeared in the “Goetheanum”.
But now we must be clear about the fact that the East of Europe, which I tried to describe yesterday, so to speak, only as an appendix and perhaps in a way that is contestable for some of those sitting here, experienced a wave of civilization that was strongly influenced by Greek in later times. In the East of Europe we find the late forms of Greek feeling, of Greek sensibility. In the west and also in central Europe, on the other hand, Latin culture is developing in a very intensive way. And the very differentiation across Europe that I have described to you over the last two days is fundamentally under the influence of what existed in the east as a continuation of Greek culture and in the west as a continuation of Latin Roman culture.
We must not forget the following. We must be clear about the fact that the West was in a very different position to digest the Latin-Roman essence inwardly, spiritually, than Central Europe. The West has absorbed the Latin within itself. Central Europe has become ill from the Latin. And only those who are able to properly consider this phenomenon, which is currently showing itself in its last stages in the most intense way imaginable, actually know how to find their way around within the current concepts of education.
Let us first look at the matter from a Central European point of view. I would like to draw attention once more to what Fritz Mauthner, who died recently, asserted from the point of view of language, from the criticism of language. Fritz Mauthner did not want to write a critique of reason, that is, actually, a critique of concepts, like Kant, but rather a critique of language. He had made the supposed discovery that when people talk about higher things, they are really only talking in words and do not realize that they are only talking in words. But if you look at how people use words, for example, God, spirit, soul, good and so on, you can see that when people use words, they believe that they are dealing with a thing, but they are just using words without pointing to a real thing.
Now, as I have already indicated, I believe that Mauthner's entire view does not apply when it comes to natural things, because then people can distinguish quite well between the word and the thing. At least I have never yet heard of anyone who, for example, had the intention of mounting not a real white horse when he wanted to ride, but merely the word “white horse”! So in relation to things of nature, people can distinguish the word and its content from reality.
But the situation changes – and this gives Fritz Mauthner a certain semblance of justification – the moment we enter the realm of the soul on the one hand and the ethical-moral realm on the other. In relation to the soul, words from ancient times have been preserved that people continue to use, but the views on the matter have not been preserved. So that people use words like soul and spirit, but do not have the view of the matter. And since Mauthner noticed this in the realm of the soul, he thought he could generalize. But in the realm of the soul, and also in the ethical-moral realm, it is the case that, for example, in the ethical-moral realm, moral impulses have gradually lost their factual content for man and actually figure today only as external commandments or even as external laws.
Thus, for a good part of the vocabulary, the view of the matter has been lost. That is why it takes so much effort today to work on the most important abilities of the human soul - thinking, feeling and willing. Because thinking, feeling and willing are things that everyone discusses today, but people do not really have a view of the corresponding things. And it is a matter of coming up with what is actually behind it.
Now we must be clear about the fact that education, which actually led to intellectual life, was carried by the Latin language for many, many centuries in the Middle Ages, and that the Latin language really became a dead language not only in the sense of an external designation, but in a very inner sense. The Latin language, which one had to acquire in the Middle Ages if one wanted to access higher education at all, became more and more a, if I may express it thus, mechanism in itself. And it became precisely the logical mechanism in itself.
This process can be easily followed if you look at history the way we did yesterday and the day before yesterday for the 19th century. If we look at the inner life in the continuation of human existence, we see that in the fourth century AD the Latin language gradually ceased to be experienced inwardly, that it no longer embodied the logos but only the shells of the logos. What then remained of the Latin language as a latecomer, the Italian language, the French language, they have indeed absorbed much of the Latin language. In this way they participated in the dying process of the Latin language. But they also took in what was transmitted by the various peoples who moved from east to west and inhabited the west. So that in Italian and French the completely different element lives on, not only in the words, but above all in the shaping of the language, in the drama of the language. In contrast, the real Latin has died out. And in this deadness, where gradually the views have fallen away, it has become the all-dominant scientific language. And one must inquire precisely about language if one wants to understand: Why did the medieval world view take the form that it did?
Just think that the human being was pushed into this Latin during his boyhood, so that the process was not such that he shaped the language from the living soul, but the language was poured into him as a finished logical instrument, and he learned logic, so to speak, from the way the words were grammatically connected. Logic became something that filled man from the outside.
And so the connection between the human soul and spiritual education became increasingly loose and loose, and one did not grow into education with enthusiasm from what one already had within oneself, one was absorbed by a foreign element of education, by the foreign element of education that had been perverted in Latin. It radiated out, so to speak, into the soul and drove what one originally had out of the person or deeper into the person, into such a region where one made no claim to logic.
Just think how it was for many centuries in the Middle Ages and how it was in our youth, in the youth of those who are now creatures as old as I am. It was the case that if someone had expressed something in their mother tongue and it did not appear clear in the society in which one was, one quickly translated it into Latin, because then it became clear. But it also became cold and sober. It became logical. You immediately understood when something was expressed in a Latin case; you immediately understood exactly and precisely how the matter was meant.
But that was always done through the centuries of the Middle Ages. People allowed themselves all kinds of sloppiness in the spoken language because they attributed exactness and precision to thinking in the Latin language. But that was something foreign to man. And because it was foreign and man can only come to the spirit through his soul, the Latin language became so fossilized that you could no longer use a word in any way if you did not have the thing out there in physical sensuality. With the horse, it would not have worked if you only had the word, because you could not ride on it. But with those things that are supersensible, the content gradually evaporated from the word, and people only had the word. And then later, when their mother tongue emerged, they also only said the word in the mother tongue, the simply lexicographically translated word. In doing so, they did not bring in the idea. By putting anima and soul together and anima having lost its reality as content, the content of the soul was also lost. And so it came about that the Latin language was only applicable to the external sensual.
From the language you have one of the reasons why, in the middle of the Middle Ages, theology said: One can only understand external sensual things through science, and at most their context, and one must leave supersensible things to faith. If these people had developed the full strength to express what is true, then they would have said: Man can only recognize as much of the world as can be expressed in Latin, and the rest he must leave to a not quite expressible, only felt faith.
You see, in a sense that is the truth, and the rest is just an illusion. The truth is that over the centuries the view has taken hold that only what can be expressed in Latin is scientifically true.
And only in the 18th century did the pretension of the vernacular actually come into play. But at that time, when the pretensions of the vernacular were emerging, the various regions of Europe had a very different relationship to the vernacular. Where Latin still had an effect, the vernacular was more easily combined with education. Hence we have these phenomena in Western Europe, which we described the day before yesterday, that actually the connections in social life, the social bonds, as I have called them, develop in a way that is popular, in which everyone participates, because in the West, when folklore emerged, to a certain extent this folklore snapped into a related form in Latin.
In Central Europe this was quite impossible, because there the vernacular had not adopted anything Latin. There the vernacular was something quite different from Latin. And on top of that was the layer of education, which learned Latin if it wanted to be educated. So here the difference was enormous. Yes, it is precisely from this difference that the tragedy for Central Europe, of which I spoke yesterday, stems, the tragedy that existed between the people of the broad masses, who did not learn Latin, who therefore had no science either - because science was what could be said in Latin - and those who acquired science, who simply switched over the moment they acquired it. In their everyday lives, when they ate and drank and when they were otherwise with their fellow countrymen, they were unlearned people, because they spoke the language, which did not have any learning in it at all. And when they were scholars, they were something quite different; then they donned an inner robe. So that basically a person who was educated was actually a divided person.
You see, this had a particularly profound effect on the intellectual life of Central Europe. For in the vernacular, through all kinds of circumstances, which we will also touch on one day, there was actually only what I hinted at yesterday, on the one hand as an astrological element, on the other as an alchemical element. This was already alive in the vernacular, and the vernacular actually had an inner spirituality, an inner spirituality. The vernacular had no materialism in Europe. Materialism was only imposed on the vernacular from the materialism of the Latin language, in that the Latin language, when it was no longer the language of scholars, still left the people with the airs and graces that had developed when it became the language of scholars. And so the Central European language could not find a way to balance or harmonize with what had become established in Latin as education.
This is an extremely serious matter. It can be seen in an intensive way to this day. I will give a concrete example in a moment of how intensely this can be seen. You see, so-called political economy is also taught at various universities today. This political economy has actually grown out of legal ideas, and these are entirely a child of the Latin world. To think legally is to think in Latin, even today. And the ideas of political economy – yes, in an unfortunate way for the Latins, one comes down to things. Just as you can't ride the mere word Schimmel, you can't eat the mere economic terms. You can't do business with the mere economic terms. But since science has only developed from Latin - it's just that people don't realize the context - the economic sciences of the present have no content at all. Political economy, as it is taught today, actually only understands something that no longer has anything to do with reality because it comes from Latin, but it has not found the connection to present reality at all, instead spinning everything out of concepts.
One could say that it is precisely in the field of economics that a contrast becomes apparent. Yesterday I spoke to you about the fact that in Central Europe there were people going around among the people who were called thinkers – they worked from the folk tradition, which is why they had the old astrology, the old alchemy – thinkers, that is, those who reflect. Those who then carried Latin in that sublimated form into political economy are not those who speculate, but those who spin yarns. Yes, really, I am not joking, but am quite serious, because a mere logical web, into which the Latin language has been transformed, is spun out to form what is developed as a single science.
Last fall, I taught a course in economics here. It was based on facts, not on a web of words. And because it was based on facts, because it was based on the realities of economic life, it became more and more apparent that Students of political economy cannot reconcile this with what is mere fiction! The one does not flow into the other. And now someone could suggest that a supplementary course should be held to concretize the conceptual framework of today's political economy with what has been drawn from reality. But that would be like explaining the fertility of an orange to someone looking at discarded orange peel, and that is simply not possible. When it comes to gaining knowledge from reality, you cannot draw parallels to what is mere fiction. You have to start from scratch and work from the original, elementary level if reality is to have an effect.
And because in the education of the people, which was not interspersed with Latin, even if the old celestial and terrestrial knowledge, astrology and alchemy, lived on in a form that was no longer contemporary, the feeling that knowledge is that which one can say in Latin was gradually joined by the other feeling: superstition is everything that cannot be said in Latin but must be said in the vernacular. Only people do not express it that way because they add all kinds of embellishments. But our entire education is permeated on the one hand by the sentence: everything that can be expressed in Latin sentences is scientific; and on the other hand: everything that cannot be expressed in Latin sentences but must be expressed in the vernacular is superstition.
This is something that has been experienced much less in the West, but which has been experienced in a terribly tragic way, especially in Central Europe. In the East, again, to a lesser extent. Firstly, the East had allowed Greek, which was still imbued with the juice of reality, to flow into its civilization in many ways, and secondly, it did not take to heart what became the terrible inner struggle of the soul between the lively, popular and the dead dead Latin, did not take it very much to heart, but sat down and said to himself: “Oh, come now, only people who have fallen out of paradise get into such struggles in life; but we in the East have actually remained in paradise.” It is only an outward appearance that we have fallen out of paradise; we are inward people - inward; inward people!
You see, these things must be thoroughly understood if we are to comprehend the terrible split that exists today between people who live in what has been built in the Latin way and people who, as homeless souls – I used the expression here recently – want to seek the path to the spiritual from the elementary nature of their own being. And then the tremendous authority of something that is a branch of Latin confronts them. The respect for Latin is contained in the belief in authority that is shown towards our present-day science.
Just think what it meant over the centuries when a farmer's boy went to a monastery grammar school and learned Latin there! Then he came home during the holidays and knew Latin! Nobody understood anything of what the farm boy had learned, but all the others knew, well, that one must not and cannot understand anything that leads to science, to knowledge. They knew that now. Because the peasant boy who had come to the monastery school spoke in a language in which one seeks knowledge, and the other peasant boys who were peeling potatoes – well, that was not the case in earlier times – who were, let's say, somehow working in the meadow or in the fields, they had tremendous respect.
For one does not have respect for what one knows, but for what one cannot know. And this settled as a tremendous respect for what one cannot know, where one refrains from it from the outset. Yes, that then continues, and such things take paths that one can only follow if one really has the goodwill to follow the spiritual paths of humanity. The peasant boy in the 13th, 12th century, who only held the plough outside and otherwise helped, perhaps at most helped to crush the bacon into greaves and so on, the peasant boy knew: we cannot know anything, we will never be able to know anything, because only those who learn Latin can know something. The country boy says that, and then it goes the secret ways, and then, in more recent centuries, a naturalist gives a speech before the enlightened naturalists' assembly, and it culminates in the same words that the monastery farmer's boy said in the 12th century: We will not know ignorabimus! If one had the sense today to go back over historical facts, then going back centuries, one would find the origin of the Du Bois-Reymond impulse in the farmer's boy who did not learn Latin, compared to the farmer's boy who did learn Latin.
Now, when a language becomes dead, a language that undergoes the same regression as Latin has, tends to incline towards the dead in its words as well. But the dead in the world is the material. And so the Latin language, even where it was particularly dominant, drove things towards the dead, namely towards the material. Originally, as I have already mentioned, people everywhere knew what the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ meant because they still knew the facts from living experience. The people could have known it too, but popular alchemy was considered superstitious, it was not in Latin. But the Latin language could not capture the spiritual. And so the trivial belief arose that what was imagined under the matter of bread and wine should change, and all the discussions about the doctrine of the Lord's Supper actually arose in such a way that those who discussed it proved nothing other than that they had adopted this doctrine in Latin. But there the words had only a dead character, and one no longer understood the living, just as today's anatomists no longer understand the living person from the dead corpse.
Central Europe has gone through this in a deeply tragic way, in that its language had nothing of what the Latin language brought forth. Central Europe had a language that would have been dependent on growing into the living. But thinking was dead because, after all, this thinking was also a dependency of Latin. And so the concepts did not find the words and the words did not find the concepts.
For example, the word “soul” could have found the living just as the word “psyche” once found the living in Greek. But the previous education was in Latin, and there was no knowledge of this living, and the living that was in the folk words was also killed off. That is why it is so important today to look again at the deep rift that had occurred between Greek and Roman civilization. And this deep rift is particularly evident when we look into the mystery being.
If we go to Greece, I would like to say that the most popular mysteries are the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Mysteries of Eleusis. They were the mysteries that had, so to speak, made the path to the spiritual most popular. And those who were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries were the Telests; they were initiated into Eleusis. Let us first look at what is meant by the term “Eleusis” and then at what is meant by the term “Telests”.
Eleusis is only a linguistic transformation of Elosis and actually means: the place where those who are to come are, those who want to carry the future within themselves. Eleusis means: the future. And the Telests are those who are to come, the Eleusinian initiates are those who are to come. This indicates that people were aware that they are more of an imperfect being as they stand, and that they must become a coming being, one who carries the future within themselves. Telos anticipates the future, that which will only gradually be realized in the future. So that in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the place of the coming, the coming ones, the imperfect human beings were trained to become perfect. They were telestai.
The whole meaning of this initiation was disrupted when it came to Romanism. In Greece, everything in the initiation pointed to the future, to the end of the earth. One should shape oneself with a strong inner impulse so that one would find the way after the end of the earth in the right way. Then one was a telest, one who should develop in the right way after the end of the earth.
When this came to the Romans, the expression of the Telesten gradually became that of the initiates – Initium, beginning. The goal was, so to speak, moved from the end of the earth to the beginning of the earth. The Telesten became initiates. Those who were initiated into the secrets of the future became knower of the past. The Promethean striving became Epimethean, striving for knowledge of the past. But only abstract knowledge of the past can remain; if one wants to penetrate into the future, one needs a living knowledge borne by the will, for there the will must develop itself into. The past is past. One can gain a higher knowledge by going back to the initium, to the past; but it remains knowledge; it becomes more and more abstract.
And with that, the impulse towards abstraction, that is, towards the reification that occurred from the 4th century AD and then more and more, moved into the Latin language. People wanted to return to the past, when ideas were still connected to life, because they knew that now they were no longer connected to life, that now one enters into inanimate speech when one rises to the level of ideas. And to be initiated in Greece meant to receive a higher life in one's soul. To be initiated in Roman times meant to resign oneself to a higher activity for one's life on earth and only to think about it: At the beginning of the world, man once had a higher activity, but from that he has descended; one cannot be a doer, at most a knower in relation to the higher knowledge.
You see, these are the difficulties we face today. When we use the word “initiation”, for example, it is so terribly vivid, because “initiation” is part of the whole concept: to immerse a person under water, to take them away from the sharp contours of physical life, to bring them into the liquid element of the world, so that they can move with their soul in the living, breathing, fleeting, fluid spiritual realm. To initiate is to introduce someone into the mobile, fluctuating, fluid world of life. Now this has to be translated somehow. And it is translated into the opposite. For example, one must say: initiation for the initiation.
It is necessary to know that such contradictions and difficulties are inherent in our present civilization. We must be clear about these skewers, I would say, that hurt us so much in our present civilization. Only then can that which really advances humanity come to life.
It is, of course, very far from my intention to turn these lectures into a diatribe against learning Latin. On the contrary, I would like people to learn even more Latin so that they can also come to feel that only the dead can be designated with Latin, that Latin quite rightly belongs in the dissecting room, but that if one wants to get to know what is not dead but alive, one must resort to the living element of language. Today, we cannot enter the future with some abstract intention, but only with an understanding, free of illusions, of what can again beat the life of the spirit out of the dead. And we are indeed living at a moment when the matter has actually been pushed to a decision in the spiritual life. We are living at an extremely important moment.
I don't know how many of you took seriously what I said in the last few issues of the “Goetheanum”, that only twenty, fifteen, ten years ago one could quote a person like Herman Grimm as a contemporary. Today he is a man of the past and one can only speak of him as of a man of the past. I meant what I said in these four articles in connection with Herman Grimm with immense bitterness. As you know, I myself used to quote Herman Grimm in a completely different sense than I quote him now. I quoted him where he could be used in his expression as a spirit that leads into the future. Today he is a thing of the past, belongs to history, and at most one can quote in such things, where he refers to ancient Greece and Rome, that which was still present only recently; that is already past today.
But I admit that this strange survival of a time that is quickly becoming the past demands something quite different in our time – and much of it is gently overslept! Because gently oversleeping is something that people love so much today.
But anthroposophy is the kind of knowledge that one does not merely collect in ideas, but that one should awaken to. That is why there are so many arguments, and also the one I have just given, is meant to have an awakening effect.