Spiritual Science Beyond Surface Phenomena and Facts

GA 287 — 18 October 1914, Dornach

First Lecture

In the lectures I had to give, I often drew attention to an example that could arise from observation in real life and that can illustrate so clearly how necessary it is to look deeper into the phenomena of life everywhere, not to stop at what is, so to speak, the first impression of perception. The example I referred to is something like this: A man is walking along the bank of a stream, and from a distance we see him fall into the water. We come closer, but can only pull him out of the water dead; we find a stone where he fell, and after this first glance, we find it quite natural to conclude that the man stumbled over the stone, fell into the water, and drowned. It could very easily happen that this judgment would be accepted, that it would be found quite understandable, and that this judgment would be passed on to posterity. But it need not have been so at all. If one were to investigate more closely, it might turn out that the man had suffered a heart attack at the moment he approached the stone, fell into the water as a result, and was pulled out dead. If the first judgment had remained and no investigation had been made into what had happened, a false judgment would have been perpetuated in history, the substance of which would have been as natural as possible: the judgment that the man had died as a result of falling into the water. But the opposite may be true: he did not die because he fell into the water, but because he suffered a heart attack and then fell into the water. Thus, a complete reversal of the truth can arise in the most natural way in the world. Such judgments, however, which more or less contain a reversal of the truth, are commonplace in the world of human judgment, and also commonplace in science, as I have often mentioned.

Now, for those who truly devote themselves with all their heart and soul to our spiritual scientific movement, it is necessary not only to learn from life, but also to constantly strive to learn the truth from life and to seek out the opportunities in which, in the most natural way, not only from human mouths, but also from the facts themselves, not only the truth, but also the untruth, deception can be conveyed to us in the most natural way, not only from human mouths, but also from the facts themselves. Learning from life is what must become the guiding principle of all our endeavors. Otherwise, it will be difficult for us to truly achieve what we want to achieve with many other things, including our building: to participate actively with our soul in the becoming of a world epoch that can be compared to the becoming of that world epoch that emerged from an older life of humanity, let us say, at the time to which Homer's poems refer. In fact, something similar is to be striven for with the whole formative, artistic, and spiritual essence of our building, just as it had to be striven for back then, when the transition from an older time to a newer time took place, when what Homer recounts in his poems happened. We want to learn from life, try to learn the truth from life.

We have so many opportunities to learn from life, if only we want to. Haven't we had them in the last few days? Can't we start from something symptomatic, especially something that has shaken us so deeply? Consider that a large number of us were down at the crossroads on Wednesday evening, or were nearby, saw the car overturned, saw the car lying there, came here to the lecture and knew of nothing else, quite naturally, quite naturally, except that a car had overturned down there. For hours that was the only impression, for hours... But what was the truth? The truth was that a clearly speaking karma was playing out in a human life; the truth was that a human life that had developed so beautifully before us was karmically completed at that moment, when this human life was reclaimed by the spiritual powers, back into the spiritual worlds, because these spiritual powers need human lives at certain times for the sake of evolution, lives that have not been lived out, but have powers left over that could have been used on the physical plane, but which should be saved for the spiritual worlds. One might say: for those who have immersed themselves in spiritual science, the fact is now so spiritually obvious that one can look upon this human life as one that the gods demanded for themselves; and that, in order to bring about the realization of this karma, the carriage was led to that spot and overturned in order to complete the karma of that human life. At first, this appeared heartbreaking to us. The heart-rending nature of it is justified. But we must also be able to immerse ourselves in the ruling, active wisdom that permeates the world, even when it seems incomprehensible to us. We should learn from such a fact to look deeper into the essence of things. And how could we rise more worthily to the human life in question, and how – in this solemn hour – could we more solemnly commemorate his earthly passing in our souls than by immediately beginning to learn from this serious karmic lesson that has come to us in these days?

But we are only too easily inclined to disregard, even forget, the lessons that are given to us so clearly by life at every opportunity. That is why we must resort to meditation, to concentrated thinking, and try to come to terms with world phenomena in general, as is the spirit of spiritual science. We must strive for this incessantly.

I would like to weave what I have to say today into the reflections that have been made in connection with our building here, because it will serve as something of an illustration for some of the things that will be said in relation to art. Let us strive for nothing less than to recognize in what is to be achieved through our building a historical necessity. Down to the individual forms, something that is historically necessary should truly be established in humanity with this building!

If we want to understand something like this with the utmost seriousness, then we must be concerned with gaining the possibility, through spiritual science, of reforming our concepts and ideas, so to speak, of gaining better, higher, more serious, more penetrating, more profound concepts and ideas about life than we can have without spiritual science.

From this point of view, let us first ask ourselves the question: What is history, and what is it that people so often understand by history? Is what people so often understand by history not basically like the story of the man who walks along the edge of the stream, dies of a heart attack, falls into the water, and is reported to have drowned in the water? Isn't history often something that is taken from reports that can be characterized in this way? Many historical reports are not better founded than this. Let us imagine that someone was passing by the crossroads between eight and nine o'clock on Wednesday and had no opportunity to hear anything about the shocking event that took place there; so he knew nothing more than that a cart had overturned there, and he would report that. But that is how many historical reports are. What is most important, so to speak, lies buried under the rubble of news reports and remains completely hidden, completely eluding what we usually call history. Often one can even go further and say that the external news, the documents, prevent us from recognizing the true course of historical development. This is the case when these documents—and this is the case for almost every historical epoch—present the matter from one side, and there are no documents from the other side, or when these have been lost. You may think that this is a hypothesis. It is not a hypothesis, but rather, much of what is taught as history today is based on such documents, which conceal the truth rather than reveal it.

The question may now arise: How can we approach historical development at all? Well, spiritual science has shown us the way in many ways, not by looking at external documents, but by drawing out impulses from the spiritual world. Of course, it cannot then present the external course of events as it is presented in external history. But it will recognize the inner impulses everywhere. And the spiritual researcher must have the courage, once he has recognized the inner impulses, to bring them to the surface and hold on to them, even if the externally transmitted facts seem to contradict them. We must have the courage to believe in the truth of what we have recognized spiritually if we really consider ourselves to be standing on the ground of spiritual science.

The transition can be made by trying to approach the mysteries of historical development in a different way than is usually done. Take all the documents that exist from the 13th and 14th centuries in Italy, take all the documents that remain, all the documents from which people so readily compile history; and if you compile history from such documents, you will obtain a tableau, a painting, that corresponds much less to the truth than if you study Dante and Giotto and immerse yourself in what Dante and Giotto created from their souls. And if you add to this scholasticism, what remains of the thoughts of the scholastics, and try to think about and recreate what Dante, Giotto, and the scholastics created, then you will have a truer picture of that era than if you gather together the external documents. Or if someone wanted to study the rebellion of the Nordic or Central European Protestant spirit against the Catholicism of the southerners, what could be found out from the documents? But it is not important to learn individual facts; what is important is to unite one's soul with the creative, ruling, weaving impulses; then one learns about this rebellion of the Protestant spirit against the Catholic spirit when one studies Rembrandt and gets to know him in his peculiar painting. And so much could be cited.

And related to this is the fact that we are often more disturbed by historical documents, when they are available, than we are encouraged by them. Perhaps such a historian's heart, which attaches great importance to documents, would be delighted if there were a great many documents about Homer's life. And how such a historian's heart would be delighted if there were a great many documents about Shakespeare's life! But there is a point of view from which one can say: Thank God we don't have such documents! - But of course, one must not press this point, not exaggerate it. It is certainly true that we must, I would say, be grateful to history for not leaving us any documents about Homer or Shakespeare. I know that, in speaking about these two poets in this way, someone might come along and say something quite correct, albeit one-sided—for a one-sided truth is also a truth—someone might say: Yes, we must long for the time when we no longer have external documents about Goethe! That may be completely justified from one point of view, but not from all points of view.

Isn't it true that with Goethe it often seems not only disturbing but downright intrusive that we know not only what he did as a person from day to day, but sometimes from hour to hour? Once you start to imagine what a human soul went through when, at a certain age, it uttered the fateful words: " I have now, alas! studied philosophy, law, and medicine, and unfortunately also theology, with ardent effort... Here I stand, poor fool! and am as wise as before," then one might long for the time when Lewes and all the others no longer tell us what Goethe did all day long, and when and where he wrote this or that verse. And one could say: What prevents us from following Goethe's flight of fancy back to the time when he wrote the words “The sun resounds in brotherly spheres with its ancient song,” when we take Goethe's diary pages and collections of letters, which truly fill many volumes, and read about what Goethe was doing at the time when he wrote these sublime verses? how it prevents us!

However, it is only justified to say this from one side. As true as it is completely justified in relation to Homer and Shakespeare, it is just as one-sided in relation to Goethe. For Goethe's own works include the book “Poetry and Truth,” in which he himself tells us about his own life. It is part of the fabric of this personality to know something about his own life, for Goethe himself felt compelled to make this confession in “Poetry and Truth.” Therefore, no one can say that the author of Faust will stand before humanity in the same way as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. From this you can see that we cannot extend a truth that we have grasped from one side to all cases. It must not be used for anything other than to address the individual case, the entirely individual.

But one must grasp the matter much more deeply. Spiritual science attempts to do this. I have repeatedly tried to explain, including in my last lecture, that modern culture is striving toward spiritual science by pointing to individual symptomatic facts. I have attempted to explain how this is particularly the case in philosophy in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy.” In the second volume, which has just been published and continues up to the present, you will see how philosophical development is also pushing toward what I have presented in the last chapter as a “Sketchy Outlook on Anthroposophy,” toward which everything is tending. Of course, this could not happen before some support was given to our Anthroposophical Society, because the outside world will probably still understand very little of the whole structure of this book.

As an aside, I can only say that this is something that can happen to a writer in our current “tasteless” times. But when this tastelessness is directed against a book that is, so to speak, helpless, it truly becomes a sin against the law that should prevail in spiritual life. The second volume of the book “The Riddles of Philosophy” has 254 fully printed pages and ten lines on page 255. When I got my hands on the second volume, which had just been published, this morning, I discovered that the publisher had had the audacity to place an advertisement on the last page, directly below my text. The book concludes with the words: "Therefore, at the beginning of this final chapter, it was not shown how the soul speaks about the supersensible when it places itself on its ground without further preconditions, but rather an attempt was made to philosophically pursue the directions that arise from the newer worldviews. And it was indicated how the pursuit of these directions by the soul living within them leads to the recognition of the supernatural essence of the soul.“ - And immediately below, the publisher prints: ”J. Zangwill's Ghetto Writings just published in their entirety. Authorized German editions by Dr. Hanns Heinz Ewers."

Today's writers have to put up with such publishing insolence, for our time has come to no longer recognize anything that truly good taste and spiritual life require.

I note that in the preface, at a certain point, I had written a few words justifying why a sketchy overview of anthroposophy concludes this book. There is the sentence: "Now the view expressed in the book attempts to prove that some solutions in contemporary philosophy work toward finding something in the inner experience of the human soul that reveals itself in such a way that its place in the modern world view cannot be disputed by knowledge of nature. If it is the philosophical view of the author of this book that what is presented in the final chapter speaks of soul experiences, . . ." and so on. I would like to expressly note that the phrases I use have been carefully crafted. I have often spent hours pondering a single line. It was not unintentional that I wrote “If it is the philosophical view of the author of this book . . .”. When I received the proofs, I was told that this phrase was not grammatically correct and that the publisher would have to change it. At the time, I had to make all kinds of phone calls to the publisher, drive to his office, and so on. It is now written as it should be, but I had to do all that to get my text accepted.

From this you can see how necessary it is to take spiritual science so seriously that what it aims to do is actually introduced into everyday life. Not for any selfish reasons, but because it was necessary, we needed the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House; because it is necessary to really introduce spiritual science into life.

This is, albeit a small one, a chapter that characterizes our time, that characterizes the necessary demands of our time. If we succeed in speaking to the people of the present through our building in such a way that the aesthetic conscience of people is also awakened from these forms, then much will have been achieved. That was just said in parentheses.

I said that something different applies to Goethe than to Homer. But I would like to add that this difference applies for the same reason. Do we get to know Homer better through anything other than his poetry, even though he is not centuries but millennia behind us? Do we not get to know him much better through this than would be possible through any documents? Yes, Homer's age was capable of producing works through which the true Homer can be clearly seen in the soul. Countless examples could be cited, but let me mention just one which is also connected with the deepest impulses of that turning point in the world's development in Homeric times, as we ourselves hope for now when we long for the transition from materialistic culture to anthroposophical culture. We know that the first canto of the Iliad speaks of the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles. The moods of Agamemnon and Achilles before Troy are aptly described. We also know that the second canto begins with the Greeks feeling that they have been lying before Troy for too long and longing to return home. We also know that Homer presents the matter as if the gods, as the guiding divine-spiritual powers, were constantly intervening. How Zeus intervenes is described at the beginning of the second canto of the Iliad. It describes how the gods on Mount Olympus and also the Greeks below slumber so comfortably that Herman Grimm, the witty man, suggests that one can clearly hear Hera snoring. Now, at the beginning of the second canto, it continues:

"All now, the gods and men in armor,
Slept through the night; only Zeus did not enjoy the slumber:
Instead, he pondered restlessly in his mind how he might honor Achilles
And destroy many of the Danaans on the ships.
This thought finally seemed the best to the doubting god:
To send a deceitful dream to the son of Atreus..."

So Zeus decides to send Agamemnon a deceitful dream during the night.

“And he began to him, and spoke the winged words:”

So Zeus spoke the following words to the dream:

"Hurry to me, deceitful dream, to the sturdy ships of Achaea;
Go there to the tent of Atreus' son Agamemnon,
To tell him exactly what I command.
Urge him to prepare for battle the head-locked Achaeans
All in the army; for now the Trojan
far-traveled city. Let the Olympian gods no longer be of two minds;
they have already been moved by Heracles' pleas,
and down upon Ilios shall ruin descend. He spoke thus,"

— thus Zeus to the dream —

"And the dream, as soon as he heard the words,
Hurried away, and came to the sturdy ships of Achaea.
There he hurried, and found Agamemnon, son of Atreus,
Sleeping in his tent; ambrosial slumber surrounded him.
He approached his head, resembling in form the son of Neleus
Nestor, whom Agamemnon honors above the elders."

Zeus sends the dream down from Olympus to Agamemnon. He gives the dream the task we have just heard. The dream approaches Agamemnon in the form of Nestor, one of the heroes who had gone to Troy.

"Like Nestor, whom Agamemnon honors above the elders!
Imitating his form, the divine dream began thus:
Are you slumbering, son of Atreus, the fiery horse tamer?
No judge deserves to sleep through the whole night,
He who is entrusted with the protection of the peoples and has so many responsibilities.
Arise, now hear my words: I come, a messenger of Kronion,
who favors you greatly, even from afar, and has mercy on you.
He commands you to prepare for battle, you Achaeans with your curly hair,
all of you in the army; for now the Trojan city,
far-traveled, can easily be conquered by you.
The Olympian gods are no longer of two minds;
they have all been moved
by your pleas; and down upon Ilios may ruin descend
from Zeus. Keep this in mind, that nothing may escape your memory
when you now awaken from your sweet sleep."

So this is what happens: Zeus, the director of events, sends a dream to Agamemnon so that he may rouse himself to a new deed. The dream appears in the form of Nestor, a man who, alongside Agamemnon, is among the heroes who have gone to war. Agamemnon stands before the figure of Nestor, and Nestor, whom he knows well by his physical appearance, tells him in a dream what he should do. And further, we are told that Agamemnon gathers the princes before he gathers the peoples. And he tells the princes about the dream, but correctly, just as he heard it:

“Friends, listen: a divine dream appeared to me in my slumber
Through the ambrosial night; and he was wonderfully similar
In stature and size and form to the sublime Nestor.
He came to me and spoke, beginning thus:
”Are you slumbering, son of Atreus..."

and so on. So Agamemnon tells the princes what the dream said to him. None of the princes stand up, only Nestor, the real Nestor, stands up and says the words:

"Friends, exalted princes and guardians of the people of Argos,
Had another man told us of such a dream,
We would have called him a liar and turned away in contempt.
But he saw it, he who boasts before all the people.
So let us see if the Achaeans can perhaps succeed in preparing themselves!"

Are we not looking infinitely deep into Homer's soul when we can know, with the means of spiritual science, that he can tell us such things? Did we not speak a few days ago about how what we experience in the spiritual world is clothed in images, and that we must first interpret the images, that we should not be misled by them? Homer, who spoke at a time when the old atavistic clairvoyance was just being lost, wanted to portray in Agamemnon a man who could still experience the old atavistic clairvoyance in, I would say, “episodes of life,” who could still be guided in his decisions as a commander by the old clairvoyance, by dreams. When we look at Homer and what he describes, we remember that the human soul stands at the turning point of an era. But we recognize even more. Homer not only depicts in Agamemnon a human soul in which atavistic clairvoyance still plays a role – and we recognize not only the very appropriate depiction of this clairvoyance – but also, wonderfully, as if magically illuminated, one might say, the whole situation: Homer has Agamemnon explicitly describe that Nestor appeared to him, Nestor, who is sitting there and speaking himself. This is how clearly the true poet describes. But now let us continue. Agamemnon has gathered the princes and told them his dream; Nestor has spoken that one should do what the dream commands. The peoples come together, but Agamemnon speaks to them in a way that is completely different from the meaning of the dream. He says that it is miserable to lie before Troy for so long: we long for home, we want to go to the ships—and so on, he tells them. He speaks in such a way that everyone is seized by an extreme desire to run to the ships and sail home. And it takes Odysseus' powers of persuasion to get the peoples to return and actually begin the battle against Troy.

Here we see into Homer's soul. We see that in Agamemnon he depicts the first man who makes the transition from a man who is still guided by ancient clairvoyance to a man who acts on his own decisions. And so, with overwhelming humor, he first presents us with Agamemnon as he speaks to the princes under the influence of the dream, and then with Agamemnon who overcomes this, who has taken leave of the dream, and who, when speaking to the people, is influenced only by external circumstances. We see how Agamemnon grows out of the old era and enters the new era, where he is now placed at the peak of his own ego. How wonderfully Homer describes this! He wants to tell us: this is how such a soul must find the transition, led away from the old clairvoyance and acting on decisions that arise from human intelligence, that is, from what we call the intellectual or emotional soul, which we must attribute above all to the ancient Greeks. Because Agamemnon, who is described as a figure of transition, already moving from the time of ancient clairvoyance into the new era, does something quite contradictory — speaking once from a clairvoyant dream, another time from his ego — Homer must, in the further course of events, call on Odysseus for help, who makes decisions based solely on intelligence, that is, through the influence of the intellectual soul. Two epochs collide here, and we can only admire how appropriately Homer describes this.

And now I ask you: Do we know Homer from a certain side when we know such a trait? Certainly, we know him through it as we must know him if we want to understand world history correctly, and as we could never get to know him if we had still so many external documents. But that is only one trait. Many could be cited, and the figure of Homer would stand before us correctly; we would be able to deal with him in a way that we could never do if we were dealing with a personality who had become known to us only through external documents. Just try to think about what you know of Greek history. But if you approach Homer in this way, then you know Homer down to the tip of his nose, I would say. Basically, there were people who knew Homer in this way before the discourtesy of philology dawned and clouded the picture. We know Socrates from the descriptions of Plato and Xenophon; we know Plato himself and Aristotle; we even know Phidias. And when we have these figures before us, an image of Greek culture emerges on the physical plane, which we can expand into a spiritual unity. However, we must resort to spiritual science. Just as the sun brings light to the landscape, so spiritual science illuminates the plastic figures of Homer, and even those of Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Phidias, and so on.

Now let us try to look at Lycurgus, Solon, and Alcibiades. How do they appear when we look at Greek history? Like real ghosts. Anyone who understands human individuality must say that they stand like ghosts in history. For the traits that describe them are so abstract, so one-sided, that they appear completely ghostly. No less ghostly are the figures of later times, who have come into historical existence only through external documents.

I say all this so that a number of souls may gradually come to recognize, understand, and penetrate the necessity of a new impact, a new impulse in our human development, even in those areas that many people consider so fixed that to shake them would seem like folly. But to do this, we need many, many things. We need what can be called the will to penetrate the truths of the world, and we need the power of judgment to realize that these truths do not lie readily on the surface of things. It is infinitely important that we learn from life in this regard. For much, much more than one might believe, error enters into world development, into human development, through superficial adherence to external factual connections which, as they appear to us in the way I described at the beginning, can only conceal the truth.

In the field of philosophy in particular, I hope that the manner of presentation in the second volume of “The Riddles of Philosophy” will enable many to truly understand the connection that exists between the philosophical foundation of the worldview as presented in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” and the spiritual-scientific worldview as presented in my “Outline of Esoteric Science.” If, on the one hand, we seek a presentation of the spiritual worlds as they appear to clairvoyant knowledge, then, on the other hand, the realization must be added to the reception of these presentations that human beings do not encounter truth directly in the world, but must first attain it. Truth reveals itself only to those who strive, who work, who penetrate into the depths of things through their own efforts, not to those who want to accept things as they initially present themselves as half-truths. Such a thing is easy to say in this abstract form, but again and again our soul is inclined to stray from the deeper understanding of what is actually meant.

I believe that this may already be understandable to some who have tried to penetrate spiritual science with all the means it has offered, as for example in our building, where an attempt is made to convey something to the soul through the harmony of the columns and their motifs and everything else that is given in the forms, to convey something to the soul that enables it to go beyond what is immediately present. When the soul begins to experience what lives in the forms of the building, then the immediate forms will disappear for the soul, and through what lives in the forms, through the language of the forms, the soul will find its way out into the wide spheres of the spiritual. Then our building will have achieved its purpose. But in order to find that, there is still much to be learned from life.

My dear friends! Is it not, in essence, a strange karma for all of us who are gathered here for the purpose of our building to experience the connection between karma and apparent external coincidence in the shocking event of Theo Faiß's death? If we draw on everything we have learned so far in our anthroposophical endeavors, then we can already understand that human lives that are taken away early, that have not gone through the worries and various sorrows of life, and who passed away untouched by life, that such human lives are forces within the spiritual world that are related to the whole of human life, that are there to influence the whole of human life. I have often said that the earth is not merely a vale of tears to which human beings are sent from the higher worlds as a kind of punishment, but rather that the earth is a place of learning for human souls. But when a human life ends early, when a human soul has had only a short period of learning, then forces remain that would otherwise have been used on the physical body, and these forces flow down from the spiritual world and continue to have an effect. Not only does spiritual science convince us of the eternity of the soul and its journey through the spiritual world, but we also learn about the lasting effect of such spiritual power when a person is torn from the physical body, like the good boy who has now been torn from us on the physical plane. And we honor and commemorate his physical passing in a dignified manner when we learn, in the manner indicated and in many respects from what we have experienced in recent days, learn a great deal. Anthroposophy is learned through feeling and sensing. Then, when we are confronted with such a case, we look up in the right way to those spheres into which the soul of the child whose body we have today handed over to Mother Earth has been transferred.

What is now being sent out by many anthroposophical souls to people who sacrifice their personalities can also be spoken, with a slight change, to those who are dead according to the earthly plan. For the request we are making also reaches them. This request applies to the living, and it also applies to the dead. And when we are convinced that the soul has already left the body, we recite the mantra, which most of our friends here are familiar with, with a slight change, the slight change with which I will now send it to dear, good Theo, to his soul, as it lives on in the spheres as a sphere being:

Spirit of his soul, active guardian
May your wings bring
Our souls' pleading love
Your protection to the trusted sphere being;
That, united with your power,
Our plea may shine helpfully
Upon the soul that lovingly seeks it.