The Inadequacy of a Spirit-Seeker

The aim of the remarks I have made in a series of essays following on from the works of Herman Grimm and others was to show how the search for a spiritual content of world view, taken up by many in the last third of the nineteenth century and continued to the present day, has led to a dead end.

More than others, this search is characterized by Wilhelm Jordan, the poet of “Demiurgos” and the “Nibelungen.” The whole tenor of his poetry is determined by the fact that his spiritual development took place at a time when science was preparing to become the decisive authority for the formation of a world view.

With hearty intellectual vigor, Wilhelm Jordan grasped what astronomy had to say about the origin of the solar system, what geology had to say about the development of the earth, and what chemistry had to say about the nature of the material world. In the 1950s and 1960s, he gave the world his large-scale poems. In them, the scientific thinking of his time was the soul-bearing stream that flowed through them. Wilhelm Jordan wanted to develop poetic power as a flower in the soul, which had a commitment to science at its core.

But he wanted more. He wanted to develop religious devotion as a fruit of this flower. He had penetrated so deeply into the spirit of science that he knew that science cannot lead to religion on its own. Man must find the religious in spite of the fully recognized natural science. There must be more life in the human soul than the power to develop a natural science. This forms the leaves of the plant. The flower and fruit are not yet visible in the leaves. But the power for their development is already in the leaves.

It was with this in mind that Wilhelm Jordan wrote his Andachten. These are the devotions of a seeker of God who stands on the foundation of natural science; but of one who, instead of seeking to distil the spiritual essence of the world from his knowledge of nature, sought it through a special power of soul independent of natural knowledge. But he sought it in such a way that he could still remain a believer in natural science in the possession of knowledge.

No wonder that Wilhelm Jordan did not please either the stormers of the type of the Straussians, who wanted to make a religion out of natural science itself; nor the believers in the old traditions, who did not want to admit that natural science demanded a new path to the spiritual.

Thus the “devotions” were met with objections from both left and right.

Wilhelm Jordan now opposed them with his book “The Fulfilment of Christianity”. It appeared in 1879, at the time when the waves of that faith began to rise particularly high, which assumed that a valid world view could only be gained from science.

In the “prelude” to this writing, Wilhelm Jordan speaks almost like someone intoxicated by the revelations of natural knowledge:

Your Isis veil has fallen,
Nature! We see you forming stars
From milky pale world haze.
We still ask: how does life germinate?
But your weaving has been overheard,
The riddle of your master art. Now grins the proud world-ruler
At a tree-animal as an elder-brother,
As its ancestor, a poor worm,
As a primeval ancestor, a cell,
Germinated, when under a warm wave
The chaos-glow hid itself. The priest's spell has become true:
“He will murder his happiness in life
Who removes this goddess's image?"
Is the impetuous truth-seeker,
Paralyzed and despairing,
Plunged after the veil has been drawn away?

Wilhelm Jordan answers with a firm: No. But he also does not want to join in the thinking of those who, using the old philosophical means of understanding nature, interpret world-weariness into it. He opposes Schopenhauer, who, during the time when Jordan was working, had just found the ear of the people, and his “follower” Eduard v. Hartmann. They had, or so Jordan felt, turned “Nature”, which had been thought of as having fallen away from the spirit for so long, into a being in which, after the “veil of Isis had fallen”, one could only see an Isis tormenting man.

The world, blinded by its own sense,
The world that scorns all wisdom and
Mocks all reason, now has found
Its favorite food: youth drinks from Schopenhauer
Grief for the brain, joy for the heart. The schoolboy reaches for the powder death,
The today's popular cure method
To quickly consumed spinal cord.
In bitter seriousness, Mr. von Hartmann seems to mean
The negation
Of life and the world's quark.

How does Wilhelm Jordan want to come to a spiritual world view? He turns to the self-creative power of the human soul. As a poet, he lived in this self-creative power. And in his poetic power he sensed something of the creative power that in ancient times created the myths about the evolution of the world and the spiritual guidance of humanity. This power must not interfere with the knowledge of nature. But it may express in images the spiritual essence at work in human evolution, beyond the realm of nature. She may become the continuator of what was created in this direction in the pre-scientific period. Jordan says about this (in 'The Fulfilment of Christianity', page 213): 'Thus I have been able to compare the poetic, mythical, religious, theological world view with the present sum of scientific knowledge of the world in its entire historical development. The result was that the two are by no means as hostile and irreconcilable as zealots on both sides claim and as the greater their ignorance regarding the other realm and the more limited their own limited perspective in their own realm, the more intolerantly they defend it. Rather, they relate to each other as seeking relates to finding, as surmising and divining to recognizing and knowing, as wishing and hoping to attaining, possessing and being able, and are and remain indispensable to each other forevermore.

Wilhelm Jordan does not see that the power of the human soul to create myths, in the days when the content of myths was still convincing, also formed images of natural phenomena that were akin to the myths in their spiritual nature. But now that the natural sciences have taken on their modern form, they require not only a continuation of the ancient soul power to supplement them, but one that brings the spirit in the human soul just as close to the spirit in the world as the scientific method of measuring, weighing and counting brings us to natural things and natural processes.

Jordan writes (Fulfillment of Christianity, page 168): “Our cosmology, both the heavenly, that is, astronomical, and the earthly, that is, geological, as long as it is strictly limited to its own field and to its own means of knowledge, as long as it does not anticipate knowledge from other realm of knowledge, which only begins with the history of man, and only adds this knowledge as if by sleight of hand, in order to then act as if it could be found there – our cosmology must honestly admit that it knows nothing about God on its own, nor, in all likelihood, that it will ever be able to know anything about Him.

The scientist knows that in the physical realm he is approaching reality. The human being who goes with the scientist in this respect can do nothing other than strive for the breakthrough to the spiritual world from the soul. Wilhelm Jordan wants to develop the self-creative powers of the soul, but not to the point of penetrating with them to the real objective spirit. Thus he falls prey to the same fate as the personalities characterized in these essays: Carriere, Herman Grimm. He allows the spiritual power of the soul to prevail in him, so that it produces ideas beyond sense perception; but he cannot bring the objective spirit into these ideas, just as one does not make the objective physical content of the ideas in sense perception.

Thus even a mind as impetuous as Wilhelm Jordan's does not, in the realm of spiritual knowledge, come to create the real spiritual. So he too has reached the deadlock that so many before him had encountered in their quest for the spiritual beyond the material, but who in the end had nothing but the ideas they had produced in their own minds, and who were powerless to perceive the spiritual objectively.

Wilhelm Jordan's striving for the spiritual was also too weak not to be overwhelmed by natural science. The present and the near future need a spiritual science that takes the step beyond the old knowledge in the same way that natural science has done.