The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

GA 53 — 4 May 1905, Berlin

Schiller and the Present

I have often emphasized here that the theosophical movement cannot distract us from immediate reality, from the duties and tasks that the day imposes on us in our present time. It now remains to be seen whether this theosophical movement can also find the right words when it comes to bringing us closer to the great intellectual heroes who are, after all, the creators of our culture and education. These days, everything that counts as German education is focusing its thoughts on one of our greatest intellectual heroes, our Friedrich Schiller.

A hundred years separate us from his passing. The last great Schiller festival, which was celebrated not only in Germany but also everywhere where people participate in education, in England, America, Austria, and Russia, was in 1859, the hundredth anniversary of his birth. It was accompanied by lavish celebrations and words of devotion to Schiller's highest idealism. These words were spoken across the entire globe. Once again, lavish celebrations will be held in honor of our great intellectual hero. But as intimate and sincere and honest as the words spoken back in 1859 were, the words spoken about Schiller today will not be as intimate and devoted, spoken so entirely from the soul. Education and the national view of Schiller have changed significantly over the last fifty years. In the first half of the 19th century, Schiller's great ideals, the great descriptions of his dramas, slowly and gradually took root, and it was an echo of what Schiller himself had planted, an echo of what he had sunk into hearts and souls, what flowed in inspiring words from the lips of the best of the German people at that time. The most outstanding figures of the time did their utmost to say what they had to say. The brothers Ernst and Georg Curtius, the aesthetician Vischer, the linguist Jakob Grimm, Karl Gutzkow, and many others joined in. At that time, they joined in the great chorus of Schiller celebrations, and everywhere it sounded as if one were hearing something from Schiller himself, something that Schiller himself had planted.

We must admit that things have changed in recent decades. The immediate connection to Schiller has diminished because Schiller's great ideals no longer speak so intimately and familiarly to our contemporaries, and therefore it may be a substitute to begin a Schiller celebration by clearly and vividly presenting to our souls what Schiller can still be for the present, what Schiller can still become for our future. For the theosophist, it is appropriate above all to take up the great fundamental questions of theosophy and to ask whether Schiller has anything to do with these fundamental questions. I hope that the course of this evening will show that it is not artificial to bring Schiller and the theosophical movement together, that we theosophists ourselves feel called in a certain way to cultivate the memory of Schiller.

What is, in essence, our fundamental question, the object of our longing, what we want to explore and fathom? It is the great question of finding the way to that which surrounds us as the object of our senses, as the world of our senses, and to that which is above the sensual, as the spiritual, the supersensible, which dwells in us and above us. Early on, this was also the question that moved our Schiller. I cannot go into details today. But I would like to show one thing, namely that this fundamental question: How is the physical connected with the spiritual, the supersensible? — runs through Schiller's life and work as the actual task that Schiller wanted to solve from the beginning of his life to the heights of his creative work, indeed, throughout his entire creative work, which is an artistic and philosophical expression of this question. He wrote a treatise at the time when he had completed his medical studies. This treatise, a kind of dissertation, which he wrote upon leaving the Karlsschule, deals with the question: What is the connection between the sensual nature of man and his spiritual nature? In this work, Schiller deals in a powerful and beautiful way with how beauty and spirituality are connected with the physical nature of man. The developments of our time have long since overtaken Schiller's answer to this question, but that is not important when it comes to a genius as great as Schiller. What matters is how deeply he immersed himself in the subject and how he came to terms with such things. Schiller understood that there should be no conflict between the sensual and the spiritual. He thus sought to show in a subtle way how the spirit, how the soul of man, works down into the physical, how the physical is only a means of expression of the spirit dwelling in man. Every gesture, every form, and every linguistic expression is an expression of this. He first examines how the soul lives itself out in the body; then he examines how the physical condition works up into the spiritual. In short, the harmony between body and soul is the meaning of this treatise. The conclusion of the treatise is magnificent. Schiller speaks of death as if it were not the end of life, but only an event like other events in life. Death is not the end. He says beautifully: Life brings death at some point; but that does not mean that life is over; after experiencing the event of death, the soul passes into other spheres to view life from the other side. But has man really already absorbed all the experience of life at that moment? Schiller believes that it may well be that the life of the soul within the body is like reading a book, which we read through, put aside, and after some time take up again in order to understand it better; which we then put away again, take up again after some time, and so on, in order to understand it better and better. He is telling us that the soul does not live in the body only once, but just as a person picks up a book again and again, so the soul returns again and again to a body in order to gain new experiences in this world. It is the great idea of reincarnation, which Lessing had briefly touched upon shortly before in “The Education of the Human Race” and in his literary testament, and which Schiller now also expresses when he writes about the connection between the sensual nature and the spiritual nature of man.

Right from the start, Schiller begins to view life from the highest point of view.

Schiller's early dramas have a powerful and profound effect on those who have a sensitive heart for what is great in them. When we ask ourselves why Schiller's great ideas flow so deeply into our hearts, the answer is that Schiller touches on things in his dramas that belong to the highest concerns of humanity. Human beings do not always need to understand and abstractly comprehend what is going on in the poet's soul when he lonely shapes the figures of his imagination. But what lives in the poet's breast when he shapes his characters, who then move across the stage, we already see as young people in the theater, or when we read the dramas. What lives in the poet's soul flows into us. And what lived in Schiller's soul when he poured his youthful soul into his “The Robbers,” “Fiesco,” and “Intrigue and Love”! We must take him out of the intellectual currents of the 18th century if we want to understand him, if we want to understand him completely.

There were two intellectual currents that dominated the intellectual horizon of Europe at that time. One current is described by the term French materialism. If we want to understand it, we must look more deeply into the development process of the peoples. What fermented in Schiller's soul had its origins in the striving and thinking of centuries. Around the turn of the 15th to the 16th century, a new era began in which people looked up at the stars in a new way. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo—they are the ones who ushered in a new age, an age in which people viewed the world differently than before. Something new crept into people's souls as they relied on their external senses. Anyone who wants to compare the difference between the old worldview of the 12th and 13th centuries with what emerged at the turn of the 16th century with Copernicus and later with Kepler must compare what plays out in Dante's Divine Comedy with the worldview of the 17th and 18th centuries. One may object to the medieval worldview as one wishes. Today, it can no longer be ours. But it had one thing that the 18th century no longer had: it presented the world as a great harmony, and man was placed in this divine world order as its center; he himself belonged to this great harmony. All things were the outflow of the divine, the creative power that was revered in faith, namely Christianity. The higher realm was the object of faith. It had to hold and sustain. And this worked its way down to the plants and minerals. The whole world was enclosed in a great harmony, and man felt himself standing within this harmony. He felt that he could be redeemed from what he longed to be redeemed from through his growth and interweaving with this divine harmony. He rested in what he felt himself to be in the world permeated by God and felt content. This changed and had to change in the time when the new worldview entered people's minds, when the world was permeated by the modern spirit of research. People had gained an overview of the material world. Through philosophical and physiological research, they had gained insight into the sensory world. What people thought about the sensory world could not be reconciled with their faith. Other concepts and other views took hold. However, people could not reconcile their new discoveries with what they thought, felt, and sensed about the spirit. They could not reconcile it with what they had to believe about the sources of life according to ancient traditions. Thus, something emerged during the French Revolution that can be expressed in the sentence: “Man is a machine.” People understood matter, but they had lost the connection to the spirit. They felt the spiritual within themselves. But they did not feel how the world was connected to it; they no longer had that. The materialists created a new worldview in which there was really only matter. Goethe felt repelled by such a view, as in Holbach's “Système de la nature”; he found it empty and barren. But Holbach's worldview was derived from the scientific view of nature. It reflected external truth. How should people who have lost their spirit now relate to this? They have lost the connection, they have lost the harmony that medieval people felt, the harmony between the soul and the material world. It was inevitable that the best minds of that time would strive to rediscover this connection, or that they would be forced to choose between the spiritual and the sensual.

As we have seen, this was the fundamental question, Schiller's youth question: to find this connection between ideal and reality, nature and spirit. But the spirit of the times had opened up a deep chasm between the spiritual and the sensual, weighing heavily on his soul like a nightmare. How can ideal and reality, nature and spirit be reconciled again? — that was the question.

This gulf had been opened up by another intellectual movement, one that was linked to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau had rejected the culture of his time to a certain extent. He had found that this culture alienated man, tore him away from nature. He had not only alienated himself from nature through his worldview; he could no longer find the connection to the source of life. He therefore had to long for nature, and so Rousseau established the principle that, basically, culture had led humans away from the true harmonies of life, that it was a product of decline.

At that time, the question of the spiritual, the ideal, had approached the greatest of their contemporaries in a new form: and how could it not be there when they considered life itself! At a time when the ideal of life was so strongly felt, one had to feel the conflict twice as keenly when one looked at real life as it had developed and then again at what existed in human society. Schiller's youth fell into this period. It all piled up, and that was what Schiller had to perceive as disharmony. His youth dramas arose from this mood. Back to the ideal! What is the right way for humans to live together, as prescribed for us in a divine world order? These are the feelings that lived in Schiller's youth, which he then expressed in his youth dramas, in The Robbers, but also in the court dramas; we feel them when we let the great drama “Don Carlos” sink in. We have seen how the young doctor Schiller raised the fundamental question of the connection between the sensual and the spiritual, and that as a poet he presented it to his contemporaries.

After the harsh trials that his youth dramas brought upon him, he was invited to visit the father of the freedom poet Körner, who did everything necessary to promote intellectual life. Körner's refined philosophical education also led Schiller to philosophy, and now the philosophical question arose anew in Schiller's mind: How can the connection between the sensual and the spiritual be rediscovered? — We find a reflection of what was discussed and exchanged in great thoughts between Schiller and Körner in Dresden at that time in Schiller's philosophical letters. These may be somewhat immature compared to Schiller's later works. But what is immature for Schiller is still very mature for many other people and important for us, because it can show us how Schiller struggled his way up to the highest heights of thought and imagination.

These philosophical letters, “Theosophy of Julius,” represent the correspondence between Julius and Raphael; Schiller as Julius, Körner as Raphael. The world of the 18th century confronts us there. There are beautiful sentences in this philosophy, sentences similar to those which Paracelsus expressed as his worldview. In the spirit of Paracelsus, we are shown in the whole outside world what divine creative power has created in the most diverse realms of nature: minerals, plants, animals with the most varied characteristics are spread throughout nature; and man is like a great summary, like a world that, once again, like an encyclopedia, repeats within itself everything that is otherwise scattered. A microcosm, a small world within a macrocosm, a large world! What is contained in the various realms of nature is like hieroglyphs, says Schiller. Human beings stand at the summit of all nature, uniting within themselves and expressing on a higher level what is poured out throughout nature. Paracelsus expressed the same idea in a grand and beautiful way: All beings in nature are like the letters that make up a word, and when we spell out nature, nature reveals itself in its essence, and there is a word that is represented in man. Schiller expresses this in a lively, emotional way in his philosophical letters. This is so full of life for him that the hieroglyphs in nature speak a vivid language. I see, says Schiller, the pupae in nature outside that transform into butterflies. The pupa does not perish, it shows me a transformation, and that is my guarantee that the human soul also transforms in a similar way. Thus, the butterfly is a guarantee of human immortality for me.

In the most wonderful way, the thoughts of the spirit in nature are thus linked to the thought that Schiller develops as that which lives in the human soul. Then he struggles his way up to the view that the power of love not only lives in human beings, but is expressed in certain stages throughout the world, in minerals, in plants, in animals, in human beings. It expresses itself in the forces of nature and most purely in human beings. Schiller expresses this in a way that is reminiscent of the great mystics of the Middle Ages. He calls what he has expressed in this way the “theosophy of Julius.” From this he developed his later views on life. His entire way of life, his entire striving, is nothing other than a great self-education, and in this sense Schiller is a practical theosophist. Basically, theosophy is nothing other than self-education of the soul, a continuous working on the soul and its further development to the higher stages of existence. The theosophist is convinced that the higher he develops himself, the higher things he can then see. Those who have only become accustomed to sensuality can only see sensual things; those who are trained for the soul and spirit see soul and spirit around them. We must first become spiritual and divine ourselves, then we can recognize the divine. This is what the Pythagoreans said in their secret schools, and this is what Goethe said in agreement with an ancient mystic:

Were not the eye sunlike,
The sun could never see it,
If God's own power did not lie within us,
How could the divine delight us?

But we must first develop the powers and abilities that lie within us; we must first cultivate the capacity for this within ourselves. Thus, Schiller sought to educate himself throughout his entire life.

A new stage in his self-development are his aesthetic letters, the “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” They are a jewel in our German intellectual life. Only those who are familiar with his aesthetic letters can feel and sense what mysteriously flows between and from the words—including Schiller's later dramas; they are like balm for the soul. Anyone who has studied the high intellectual and pedagogical ideals that live on in his aesthetic letters will have to say: We must call these aesthetic letters a folk book. Only when our schools teach not only Plato and Cicero, but also Schiller's aesthetic letters with equal emphasis to young people, will we recognize how something unique and ingenious lives in them. What lives in the aesthetic letters will only bear fruit when the teachers in our secondary schools are imbued with this spiritual lifeblood, when they allow something of what Schiller wanted to cultivate to flow into their pupils by giving us this wonderful work. In today's philosophical works, you will find no reference to these aesthetic letters. But they are more significant than much of what has been achieved by professional philosophers, because they appeal to the innermost being of human beings and seek to raise this innermost being to a higher level.

Once again, it is the big question that confronts Schiller at the beginning of the 1890s. He now poses the question as follows: On the one hand, man is subject to sensual needs, sensual desires, and passions. He is subject to their necessities, he follows them, he is a slave to his instincts, desires, and passions. On the other hand, there is the logical necessity: you must think in a certain way. — On the other hand, there is also the moral necessity: you must submit to certain duties. — Intellectual education is logically necessary. Moral necessity demands something else, something that goes beyond the modern view. Logic gives us no freedom; we must submit to it. Duty also gives us no freedom; we must submit to it. Man is placed between the two, between logical necessity and natural necessity. If he follows one or the other, he is unfree, a slave. But he should become free.

The question of freedom arises in Schiller's soul as profoundly as it has perhaps never been posed and addressed in the entire German intellectual life. Kant had also raised this question shortly before. Schiller was never a Kantian, or at least he soon worked his way beyond Kantianism. While writing these letters, he no longer held Kant's point of view. Kant speaks of duty in such a way that duty becomes a categorical imperative. “Duty! You sublime, great name, which encompasses nothing pleasant, nothing that leads to flattery, but demands submission,” you who “establish a law ... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly oppose it ...” Kant demands submission to the categorical imperative. Schiller, however, broke away from this Kantian conception of duty. He says: “I gladly serve my friends, but unfortunately I do so with inclination” – and not with that which kills inclination, which kills even love. Kant demands that we do what we ought to do out of duty, out of the categorical imperative. Schiller wants harmony between these two, harmony between inclination and passion on the one hand and duty and logic on the other. He finds it first in the contemplation of beauty. For Schiller, working in beauty becomes a great world music, for he has said: “Only through the morning gate of beauty did you enter the land of knowledge.” When we have a work of art, the spiritual shines through it. Thus, the work of art does not appear to us as an ironclad necessity, but as a light that expresses the ideal, the spiritual, the spiritual. Spirit and sensuality are balanced in beauty. For Schiller, spirit and sensuality must also be balanced in human beings. Where human beings are between these two states, where they depend neither on natural necessity nor on logic, but where they live in the state that Schiller calls aesthetic, there passion is overcome. He has brought the spirit down to himself, he has purified sensuality through beauty, and thus man has the drive and desire to voluntarily do what the categorical imperative demands. Then morality in man is something that has become flesh and blood in him, so that the drives and desires themselves embody the spiritual. Spirit and sensuality have thus permeated the aesthetic human being; spirit and sensuality have permeated each other in the human being because he loves what he ought to love. What lies dormant in the human being must be awakened. That is Schiller's ideal. Also with regard to society and the laws, people are forced by necessity or by the state of reason to live together lawfully. In between stands the aesthetic society, where love accomplishes what is desired from person to person and imposed on them by their innermost inclination. In the aesthetic society, people work together freely, so they do not need external laws. They themselves are the expression of the laws according to which people must live together. Schiller describes this society in beautiful and sublime terms, where people live together in love and mutual affection and, out of freedom, do what they should and must do.

I have only been able to express the ideas of Schiller's aesthetic letters in a few strokes. But they only have an effect if they are not merely read and studied, but if they accompany people throughout their lives like a book of meditation, so that they want to become what Schiller wanted to become. At that time, the time had not yet come. It is only today that we can see the great scope of a society that makes the connection between people on the basis of love its first principle. At that time, Schiller sought to penetrate such a recognition and such a coexistence of people through art, through the “morning gate of beauty.” Since the time was not yet ripe for him to create free people in a free society, Schiller wanted at least to educate people in his art so that they would one day be ready for it. It is sad how little Schiller's most intimate thoughts and feelings have found their way into educational life, which should be completely permeated by them, which should be an outline of them.

I have explained how we should understand Schiller in relation to the present day in my lectures on Schiller, which I gave at the “Freie Hochschule” (Free University). There I attempted to present the ideas in a coherent and comprehensive manner. Much of what I can only hint at today can be read in detail there. In all of Schiller's biographies, you can basically find very little of these Schillerian intimacies. But once, a teacher, a subtle, dear teacher, took it upon himself to process the content of Schiller's aesthetic letters into beautiful letters. The man's name was Deinhardt. I don't think you can still get the book in bookstores. All teachers, especially those in our secondary schools, should have bought it. But I believe it has been pulped. The man who wrote it could hardly manage to find a meager position as a private tutor. He had the misfortune of breaking his leg; the doctors who treated him declared that the fracture could be healed, but that the man was too poorly nourished. He died as a result of this accident.

After Schiller had risen to prominence in this way, something very important happened to him: a fact came to light that had a profound impact on his life and also on the life of our entire nation. It is an event that is very significant, significant indeed for the whole of modern intellectual life. That is the friendship between Schiller and Goethe. It was established in a peculiar way. It was at a meeting of the “Natural History Society” in Jena. Schiller and Goethe attended a lecture by an eminent naturalist, Batsch. It so happened that the two left the hall together. Schiller said to Goethe: "That is such a fragmented way of looking at natural beings; the spirit that lives in all of nature is missing everywhere.“ Schiller thus presented his fundamental question to Goethe once again. Goethe replied: ”There could well be another way of looking at nature.“ He had also hinted at this in ”Faust,“ where he says that those who seek to drive out the spirit then have the parts in their hands, ”but unfortunately the spiritual bond is missing." Goethe saw something in all plants that he called the primordial plant, and something in animals that he called the primordial animal. He saw what we call the etheric body, and Goethe then sketched this etheric body for Schiller with a few characteristic strokes. He was clear that something truly alive is expressed in every plant. Schiller replied: “Yes, but that is not experience, that is an idea!” To which Goethe said: “I am very happy to have ideas without knowing it, and even to see them with my eyes.” Goethe was clear that this was nothing other than the essence of the plant itself.

Schiller now had the task of working his way up to Goethe's grand and comprehensive view. The letter I mentioned earlier is beautiful; it contains the deepest psychology there is, and with it Schiller strengthens his bond of friendship with Goethe. "For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have watched the course of your mind and noted the path you have charted for yourself with ever-renewed admiration. You seek the necessity of nature, but you seek it by the most difficult path, which any weaker force would be wary of. You take nature as a whole in order to gain insight into the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the explanatory reason for the individual. From simple organization you ascend step by step to the more complex, in order to finally construct the most complex of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature. By recreating him in nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea, which sufficiently demonstrates how much your mind holds together the rich whole of your mental images in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would suffice for such a goal, but even to embark on such a path is worth more than to end any other — and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad, between Phthia and immortality. Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and had you been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps even rendered superfluous. You would have taken on the form of necessity in your very first view of things, and the grand style would have developed in you with your first experiences. Now that you were born a German, that your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but to either become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withheld from your imagination with the help of your thinking power and thus, as it were, give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way." This is something that had a lasting effect on Schiller, as we shall see in a moment.

Life confronts us in a grand and comprehensive way in “Wallenstein.” You need not believe that you will find the thoughts I am now developing when you read Schiller's dramas. But deep down they lie in his dramas, just as blood pulses in our veins without us seeing this blood in our veins. They pulsate in Schiller's dramas like the lifeblood. An impersonal element plays into the personal. Schiller said to himself: there must be something more comprehensive that goes beyond birth and death. He sought to understand how the great supra-personal destiny plays into the personal. We have often mentioned this law as the law of karma. In “Wallenstein,” he describes the great fate that crushes or elevates man. Wallenstein seeks to fathom it up in the stars. But then he realizes again that he is being pulled by the threads of fate, that our stars of destiny shine again in our own hearts. In “Wallenstein,” Schiller seeks to poetically master the personal, the sensual nature in connection with the divine. It would be inartistic if we wanted to enjoy the drama with these thoughts. But unconsciously, the great impulse that emanates from this connection flows into us. We are lifted and carried away by what pulsates through this drama. In each of his subsequent dramas, Schiller seeks to climb to a higher level, to educate himself and draw others up with him. In “The Maid of Orleans,” forces that are transpersonal and play into the personal are at work. In The Bride of Messina, he seeks to embody something similar; there he seeks to tie in with ancient Greek drama. He seeks to introduce a chorus and a lyrical element. He wanted to portray destinies that transcend the merely personal, not in ordinary colloquial language, but in elevated language.

Why did Schiller draw on Greek drama? We must remember what Greek drama itself was based on. If we look back at Greek drama beyond Sophocles and Aeschylus, we come to Greek mystery drama, the original drama, of which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are only later stages of development. In his book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche attempted to explore the origins of drama. Every year, the Greeks were presented with something in large dramatic paintings that was at once religion, art, and science for the Greeks in ancient Homeric times—truth, piety, and beauty. What did this original drama become? This primal drama was not a drama depicting human destinies. It was intended to depict the god himself as the representative of humanity—Dionysus. The god who descended from higher spheres, incarnated himself in material substances, ascended through the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms to man, in order to celebrate his redemption and resurrection in man. This journey of the divine in the world attained its most beautiful form in what was called the descent of the god and the resurrection and ascension of the divine.

This primordial drama played out in manifold forms before the eyes of Greek audiences. There the Greeks saw what they wanted to know about the world, what they should know as the truth about the world: the overcoming of the natural by the spiritual. For them, science was what was presented in these dramas, and it was presented in such a way that this presentation was linked to piety and could serve as a model for what human beings experienced. Art, religion, and wisdom were what unfolded before the audience. Not in ordinary language, but in elevated language, the individual performers spoke of the descent, the suffering, and the overcoming, of the resurrection and ascension of the spiritual. And what was happening there was reflected by the choir, which reproduced in the simple music of the time what was happening in the midst of it as a divine drama. From this unified source flows what we know as art, as science that became physical, and as religion that emerged from these mysteries. Thus we look back on something that links art with truth and religious piety.

The great thinker on ancient Greek drama, the French writer Edouard Schuré, attempted to reconstruct this drama in modern times. You can read about this truly ingenious reconstruction in “The Sacred Drama of Eleusis.” Through his immersion in this drama, he came to the conclusion that it is the task of our time to renew the theater of the soul and the self. In his “Children of Lucifer,” he attempts to create a modern work that once again combines self-reflection and beauty, dramatic power and truth. If anyone wants to know something about what drama should and wants to become in the future, they can get an idea of it from Schuré's images of “Children of Lucifer.” What is the whole Wagner circle striving for when it seeks to portray something supra-personal in its dramas? In Richard Wagner's dramas, we see a progression from the personal to the supra-personal, to the mythical. That is why Nietzsche, when he sought the birth of tragedy in the primordial drama, found his way to Wagner. What the 19th century aspired to in this way, Schiller had already attempted in his “Bride of Messina,” where the spiritual is presented in elevated language, where the chorus presents the echo of divine actions before us. From what depths he wanted to give birth to a Greece at that time, he says in his extraordinarily witty preface to the essay “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy,” which is another gem of German literature and German aesthetics.

And Schiller attempted to do the same thing that the 19th century wanted to do—to enter the land through the morning gate of beauty in knowledge and to be a missionary of truth. In the drama “Demetrius,” which he was unable to complete because death took him away, he sought to understand the problems of the human self with a clarity so great and powerful that none of those who have attempted to finish “Demetrius” have been able to do so, because Schiller's great wealth of ideas is not to be found in them. How deeply he grasps the human self that lives within man! Demetrius finds certain signs within himself that he is the true Russian heir to the throne. He does everything to obtain what is rightfully his. At the moment when he is close to achieving his goal, everything that has filled his self collapses. He must now be what he has made of himself solely through the power of his inner being. The self that has been bestowed upon him is no longer there; a self that is to be his own creation must arise. Demetrius must act from this. It is the problem of human personality grasped with a grandeur unlike that of any other playwright in the world. Schiller had something this great in mind when death took him away. There is something in this drama that will now find more resonance for those who could not put it into clear words. And that which was built into the hearts and depths of people's souls flowed forth again in 1859.

The year 1859 brought about a revolution in modern education. Four works appeared around this time by chance. They set the tone for our education. One was Darwin's “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” which brought about a materialistic movement. The second work was equally characteristic, particularly in relation to Schiller, if we recall the words Schiller addressed to astronomers: “Don't talk to me so much about nebulae and suns! Is nature only great because it gives you something to count? Your subject is certainly the most sublime in space; but, my friends, the sublime does not dwell in space.” But it was precisely this sublime in space that became possible to comprehend thanks to a work published at that time by Kirchhoff and Bunsen on spectral analysis. And the third work was again in a certain contrast to Schiller. In an idealistic spirit, Gustav Theodor Fechner wrote: “The Preschool of Aesthetics.” An aesthetic “from below” was to be created. Schiller had begun it in a powerful way from above. Fechner started from simple sensory perception. The fourth work brought materialism into social coexistence. What Schiller wanted to establish as society was placed under the perspective of the crassest materialism in Karl Marx's work “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” All of this crept in there. These are things that must be far removed from the immediate intimacy that Schiller poured into people's hearts, honestly and sincerely. And now those who are influenced by modern literature will no longer be able to look up to Schiller in such an ideal way. Recently, in the last decade of the 19th century, a man who was thoroughly steeped in aesthetic culture wrote a biography of Schiller. The first words in it were: “In my youth, I hated Schiller!” And it was only through scholarly study of him that he was able to work his way up to an appreciation of Schiller's greatness.

Anyone who can listen even a little to what is flooding our time will see that a certain inner compulsion prevails. Times have changed. That is why many great, enthusiastic words and many beautiful celebrations will perhaps still be associated with Schiller. But those who are able to listen more closely will not be able to hear something that still moved the minds and spirits half a century ago, when we revered Schiller. We must understand that this is not the slightest criticism of those who are somewhat distant from Schiller today. But given the tremendous greatness of what Schiller created, we must admit: He must once again become part of our intellectual education. The immediate present will have to lean on Schiller again. And how could a society that strives for spiritual deepening, such as the Theosophical Society, not connect with Schiller? He is, after all, the first preparatory school for self-education if we want to reach the heights of the spirit. We will come to a different understanding if we go through him. We will come to the spiritual if we go through his “Aesthetic Letters.” We will understand the Theosophical Society as an association of people, regardless of nation, gender, tribe, and so on, as an association based solely on pure human love. Throughout his life, Schiller strove to reach the heights of spiritual being, and his dramas are basically nothing other than an artistic attempt to penetrate the highest realms of this spiritual being. What he strove for in the human soul was nothing other than to bring forth something in the human soul that is eternal and imperishable. If we recall Goethe once again very briefly: he used the word “entelechy” to describe that which lives in the soul as the imperishable, that which man develops within himself, works out for himself through experience in the real world, and which he sends up as his eternal self. Schiller calls this the form that shapes. For Schiller, this is the eternal, which lives in the soul, which the soul continually develops within itself, enlarges within itself, and carries over into the realms that are imperishable. It is a victory that the form achieves over physicality, which is transitory and in which the form merely lives out its life. Schiller calls it the eternal in the life of the soul, and we may, like Goethe, after Schiller had passed away, coin the words “He was ours”; we may, when we grasp Schiller again in living spirit, permeate ourselves again with what lived in him and with what he lives in the other world, which kindly and lovingly received his best; as theosophists, we may also celebrate that mysterious connection with him, which we can celebrate as the Schiller Festival. Just as the mystic unites with the spiritual of the world, so man unites with the great spiritual heroes of humanity. Everyone who strives for a spiritual worldview should celebrate such a festival, a “unio mystica,” in addition to the grand and resplendent Schiller festivals. Nothing should be said against these grand festivals. However, only those who celebrate this intimate festival in their hearts, which connects them intimately with our Schiller, will find Schiller's work. Striving for the spirit, we will best find the way if we do as Schiller did, who educated himself throughout his life. He expressed it, and it sounds like a motto of the theosophical worldview:

Only the body possesses those powers
That weave dark fate;
But free from every temporal power,
The playmate of blissful natures,
Walks above in the corridors of light,
Divine among gods — the form.