44. Let the Divine Live in Your Own Soul

[Beginning missing] Among the greatest of these upheavals is that of the outgoing Middle Ages. One after another, those ideas that had been taken for so long as an external expression of divine creative wisdom faded away. At the same time that the profound Meister Eckhart and the strong-minded Johannes Tauler were preaching to bear witness to the Christian God, who had risen in their hearts in new glory, the ingenious Roger Baco was pondering the workings of natural forces in a different way than the Middle Ages were accustomed to. The latter believed that they were giving this idea of God a new firmness when they showed how every human being spiritually relives his suffering, his death and his resurrection; the former pursued his deeds in the outer world with the acumen of the intellect and the tools of the physicist. And behold: these deeds looked different in this light than they had been believed for centuries. A rebirth of the “Word” was experienced in the meaningful writings of Jacob Böhme; but Copernicus and Kepler transformed the world view in which the creative power of this Word had been so long admired. Those who had first proclaimed the Word had different thoughts about the earth and the stars than those that were now imposed on the searching humanity. Was it not natural that with the doubt about their conception of the world, the associated conception of God and the soul also became shaky? Could one still have confidence in a writing about the nature of the spirit if this writing presented the deeds of the spirit in a way that one could no longer profess? And did not those who saw in this writing the guarantee of the salvation of their souls have to condemn the men who shook what they believed was intimately connected with this writing? Could what Roger Baco achieved in the mastery of the forces of nature come from the spirit of good, if he thereby intervened in the preaching of centuries? Nature seduced these minds to relate to the world differently than this proclamation had commanded them. The view had to arise that research in nature was “sin” and that the spirit that arises from such research is “devil”, as Goethe put it in precise words. The “spirit of nature” had been recognized in its contradiction to the higher spirit that makes its voice heard in the human heart. Faust, the ally of this spirit of nature, who put the Bible under the bench, had to fall prey to evil forces. Lucifer, this spirit of nature, which, like the “morning star”, should point to the sun in eternal harmony, seemed to fight the luminosity of this star. Human wisdom, from which the wisdom of God once originated, seemed to be its worst enemy. And so it has remained throughout the centuries. More and more, human wisdom shone into the eternal workings of the forces of nature. Just as God's creative power seemed to recede from the heavens when Galileo's telescope illuminated the infinite spaces, so in the nineteenth century this creative power seemed to recede from the wonderful structure of living beings when the microscope allowed a view into the forces by which they are built and when the striving gaze revealed the laws according to which the forms of the living are shaped. On the basis of his scientific discoveries, Newton had established a cold, sobering attraction where seraphim had once been. Attraction and natural law were to be viewed with understanding where it had been believed that the love of the seraphim for God moved the heavenly bodies around the Earth, proclaiming the glory of the Creator. Natural selection has displaced the great Darwin from where, according to earlier opinion, God's power of thought had placed species next to species in manifold perfection. Even Carl von Linné, the greatest naturalist of the eighteenth century, was still allowed to say: there are as many species of plants and animals as God originally created. In obedience to eternal, immutable laws, the new spirit of man allows the incomplete to develop out of the complete without the intervention of wisdom. What an evil companion this spirit has become for man in modern times! Lucifer, the morning star, Lucifer, the light-bearer, has changed from a guide to the Divine into a seducer to un-divine things. A barren and terrible faith it is that this Lucifer seems to have given to man. He points his telescope and shows him worlds that, according to their necessary laws, revolve around each other, and in their space the inquiring eye finds no space for the old God. He shows him the forces of life in the cell and in the human body, and promises to reveal to him one day how these laws shape the thoughts of the soul in the parts of the brain. And then this inquiring mind will no longer be able to find the old God in man's inner space either.

We must not blind our spiritual eyes to this process of development! We must not hide from ourselves the fact that the old way of belief and the new way of knowledge have brought about a world war in the hearts of men, which opens up a terrible perspective for the future. People who cover their eyes and form their judgments only according to what they want to see may be of the opinion that this old way of believing will again conquer the circles of the apostates. Those who look at the world with a free and open eye cannot form such a judgment. It fills them with fear and apprehension when they follow the battle between “belief” and “knowledge”. For he knows, he sees it daily, that in the course of the day the power of knowledge is the greater. He sees how, despite all the efforts of the “strong in faith,” a sober, soulless world view is being built up, conquering the masses, freezing the heart, and condemning man to despair of his “eternal destiny”.

These clear-sighted people also know that in the long run this world view will not prevail, that a higher view of God will shine over the earth again. But they also feel that man is not here to stand idly by and watch what happens without him; rather, he is called upon to shape the perfect out of the imperfect, the higher out of the lower. When the weak-willed and strong-in-faith tell us that God will lead people back to the light, then the strong-willed may reply: God's highest earthly tool is man, and he demands that this tool not fail. God's wisdom wants to work through human will. We are called to promote what God's counsel is in the world. We should not be lulled into a sense of complacency by the thought that what is to be will come to pass, but should cling to the search for what needs to be done in order to regain the lost spirit.

From the imperfect contemplation of nature, the great sages have taken the ideas with which they showed how the God who reveals Himself to them in their souls realizes His glory in the external world. These ideas have changed. Is it not perhaps only because of our weakness that we cannot find in our ideas what our ancestors found in theirs? In the book that Faust placed under the bench, these ancestors have told how they saw the ways of eternal wisdom. They too have read in the “book of nature”, and according to what was revealed to them there, they have clothed the inner word of God externally.

Our way of reading has certainly changed. But should the reading destroy the content? Could it not be that the new reading only bothers us for a while? Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to be numbed by the fact that the microscope has enlarged the space in which what previously escaped us is taking place, and the telescope has led us into spaces that previously only the imagination was allowed to inhabit. Could not an intensified power of the soul also find the spirit in the enlarged space, and also in the spaces that have been illuminated!?

You represent a materialistic world view and rely on Copernicus and Darwin. Your ancestors represented a spiritual world view and relied on Plato, Moses and Aristotle. You fight Plato, Moses and Aristotle and say that you rely on your reason, while your ancestors relied on the written word. But be honest and true to yourselves. Is your “reason” anything other than the “faith” of your ancestors? What they proclaimed about the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, they felt, and you call it “faith”; what Darwin and Haeckel say, you feel, and call it “reason.” And ask yourselves, how many of you have examined the paths by which your naturalists have arrived at their assertions? Just as few have followed the paths by which lonely soul researchers have come to the Trinity. You “believe” as they “believed”. And what you think you can deduce from your “reason” you have read in Haeckel's “natural history of creation” just as your ancestors read their ideas into the Bible.

One of those who, under the impression of the new natural science, fought the “old faith” (D. Fr. Strauß) said: “That from the belief in things, some of which are certain not to have happened, some of which are uncertain doubt as to whether they have happened, and only to the slightest extent beyond doubt that they have happened, that belief in such things should depend on man's salvation, is so absurd that it no longer needs refutation today."—No objection is to be raised here against this sentence. At most, that it is self-evident and banal. But the following sentence seems to be just as self-evident: That our entire happiness should depend on things observed through a telescope in outer space, where it is uncertain whether the ideas we associate with them are assumptions or not; and on other things that a naturalist has “overheard” through the microscope about the and of which we certainly do not know how they came to their existence, should depend on the entire happiness of man is so absurd that it should no longer require refutation in the shortest time.

Everything that is aimed at here was already said by the great Master Eckhart in the thirteenth century: What use is it to me that my brother is a rich man and I am a poor man; what use is it to me that so and so many years ago Christ suffered and rose again, if the true man does not rise in myself. Let the divine live in your own soul; do not let yourself be blinded by the telescope and microscope; find the highest in yourself, who is closer to you than the nebulae of outer space and clearer to you than the combinations of substances that the chemist calculates for you. But one thing is necessary for such a discovery. You must listen to the words of those who speak to you of the paths that lead to the matter, just as you listen to the astronomers who teach you about the Milky Way, and just as you pay attention to the zoologists who speak to you about the development of human germinal systems.

When Darwin and Haeckel speak, you listen with faith and form your world view according to their research. Far be it from us to take this belief away from you. Because we ourselves have this belief. We admire the eternal forces of nature in the sense of the “natural history of creation”. But why do you not listen just as attentively when the psychologist speaks to you of the laws of spiritual life? Why do you call him a fantasist when he tells you of the things that have been revealed to him, when he speaks of the destinies of the soul on the basis of his sure research methods, while you treat natural scientists differently? You cannot perceive within yourself what the psychologist tells you. But how many know from their own observation the germinal life of organisms? In order to really judge for themselves, they would first have to become acquainted with the extensive methods by which the natural scientist arrives at his results. Without doubt, they will admit this after some reflection. But few are willing to admit it today for the laws of intellectual life. But just as you cannot fully understand Haeckel without walking in his footsteps, you cannot understand the soul researcher without walking the paths he has walked. No amount of “reason” could give you the right to contradict Haeckel before you have learned how he arrived at his results; but do the same with the soul researchers. Then, and not before, may you speak of a rejection of what they say. But then you will no longer behave so contradictorily.

The paths of those who investigate spiritual life in their own way are much more difficult than those that lead to the external life of nature. But those who speak out against the results of spiritual researchers look no less strange than those who speak out against the results of germinal life without ever having observed an animal germ in its development.

This journal will deal with the facts of spiritual life. It demands nothing, absolutely nothing, of people, except that they approach it with the same attitude that countless people today approach natural scientists. Based on their own, deepest experience, perhaps only a few will be able to immediately verify some of what is said here. But is it any different with the facts of nature? However, no one can be excluded from the possibility of testing it.

And closer to us than any object in nature is what is being discussed here: the human spirit. What everyone here talks about is, after all, none other than the human spirit itself. It is the human spirit to which it is seemingly so close, and yet which it usually knows so little about. There are many who have little inclination to care for this human spirit. What the great Fichte says about them applies to them: the spirit, about which they care so little, will give them sunshine and rain, clothe and nourish them at the right time – for that is what their body demands; their spirit has not yet awakened, they do not care about it.

But for all those who are looking for the sun of the spirit, we want to speak up. We want to seek this sun behind the clouds, which only part when the much-misunderstood signs of the book are read correctly, which Faust once wanted to exchange with the Bible. We do not want to let the microscope or the telescope, the laws by which the planets revolve, or the material processes that we suspect under the skullcap, cloud our free spiritual view into the fate of souls. We want to be allies of science; but not slaves to its misunderstood conclusions, but companions who walk in spirit the paths that it follows in matter.