Spiritual Science as a Life's Work

GA 63 — 26 February 1914, Berlin

9.Voltaire from the Perspective of Spiritual Science

Shortly after Voltaire's death in 1778, Lessing's work “The Education of the Human Race” was published, and one might say that this work provides, in a certain sense, the starting point for a spiritual scientific approach to history. Lessing's work, “The Education of the Human Race,” was mentioned repeatedly in these lectures. It seeks to find rational reasons, based on eighteenth-century consciousness, for what spiritual science must again advocate today from its own standpoint: the repeated earthly lives of human beings.

Anyone who tries to think through Lessing's arguments in this most mature work of his life, in what is, so to speak, the testament of his intellectual work, will find that the ideas in this work bring coherence to the whole structure of human historical development. In this historical development of the human being, we see successive epochs that differ from one another. When we look back at ancient epochs, we find that the human soul experienced different things, that it sought its ideals in different ways than in later epochs. We can say, in a sense, that the different epochs of historical development are sharply distinguished from one another by the character of what they are able to give to human souls. And meaning and context come into this whole historical development when we consider that the human soul, which, according to the belief that human life is only once, could, so to speak, only participate in the cultural blessings and impressions of one cultural epoch, that this human soul, in the sense of Lessing and modern spiritual science, appears again and again in repeated earthly lives; that it takes from each epoch what it can give to the human soul, that it then goes through a life between death and the next birth in a purely spiritual world and then reappears in the next epoch, of course with some deviations in the individual life, in order to carry over the fruits, the results, and the impressions of the earlier epoch into the next. Therefore, we can say that what the human soul is to us lives through the whole of historical development and participates in all epochs. And thus, if we take up Lessing's idea once again, we can truly speak of a kind of education of the human soul through the spirit of the successive epochs of historical earthly life. If, in the spirit of the newer spiritual science, we go into more detail about what, one might say, already lies in elementary beginnings in Lessing's ideas about the education of the human race, then we will be as far advanced in the field of historical observation, the field in which our soul develops above all, as we believe ourselves to be today in the purely scientific field. Only then will we have a history in the true sense of the word. Only then will we be able to bring meaning and coherence into the organism of historical development; we will recognize how one epoch builds on another, what the souls of the different epochs have, why they are placed in the different epochs — in other words, one will recognize the lawful working and ruling of the historical epochs just as one today learns to know the working and ruling of the forces of nature that can be recognized by natural science. Then what spiritual science has to say will no longer appear as something so fantastic as it might still appear to so many people today. Then people will begin to smile less at the fact that spiritual science must recognize not only a physical body for the human being, which is woven around the human being at birth and consists of various limbs, but also an inner spiritual-soul being of the human being, which, however, must be regarded as having developed its various formations and structures in the course of human epochs. structures in the course of human epochs.

In the sense of spiritual science, we actually distinguish three structures in the human soul as it has developed up to the present epoch. One might say: the most primitive part of this structure, in which blind passions still have a greater influence and instincts and emotions pulsate, but in which what the perceptions of the physical outer world convey to us also has an effect, is what we call, in the sense of spiritual science, the sentient soul. In contrast to this sentient soul, we then speak of another part of the soul that shows us the human being with greater inner life, showing him to us as he can be grasped once he turns his gaze away from his entire physical surroundings and rises above what reigns within him as more unconscious drives, emotions, and passions. We call this higher part of the human soul the intellectual or mind soul, in which the spiritual life of the human being is already more internalized. And as the highest member of the human soul, as the member in which, above all, self-reflective thinking, the full self-consciousness of the human being, the purest sense of self and self-awareness find expression, we call, in the sense of spiritual science, the consciousness soul. But we do not speak of these three members as abstractions or arbitrarily constructed concepts and ideas: the sentient soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the conscious soul; rather, we speak of them in such a way that we see at the same time how, in the course of the historical development of humanity, these three soul members gradually unfold.

If we were to go far back in historical development, beyond the times when Homer and Hesiod sang, when the Greek tragedians lived and Greek philosophy arose, we would find what we still recognize today in the echoes of ancient Egyptian and Chaldean culture. Much of this has already been brought to light by external research. Spiritual science, however, shows that in the epoch behind the eighth to tenth centuries BC, back to the second to third millennium, human souls, that is, our souls as they were embodied at that time, went through something that cannot be compared with today's life, with the whole configuration and way in which we live today. What we call today's thinking, what we take for granted in our scientific view of the world, would have been impossible back then. It would also have been impossible for the human soul to feel so strictly separated from the rest of nature, so isolated within itself, at the most important moments of its life. All of this was still impossible at that time. People felt that their souls were part of the whole cosmos, of the rest of nature, and felt themselves to be a part of the rest of nature, just as the hand, if it could have consciousness, would have to feel itself to be a part of the organism. Today, we can only imagine the completely different spiritual life that lasted until about the eighth to tenth century BC with the help of spiritual science. When people at that time said, “My instincts drive me to put one foot forward,” or when they said, I breathe — or when they felt hunger or satiety, they felt something in this transition from inner experience to bodily movement that they related to in the same way as they related to other experiences when they said to themselves: there is lightning, there is thunder, or the wind is rushing through the trees. Man had not separated what he experienced spiritually from what was happening outside; he was inside the rest of nature with his whole inner life. But because he could not yet separate himself from the rest of nature, because he still felt himself to be a member of the great organism as a whole, he also had a primitive clairvoyance, an insight into the spiritual world. He did not see nature as we see it today, but as imbued with spiritual beings, to which we are now working our way back through the methods of spiritual science. In those days, it was natural to see nature as both soul-filled and spirit-filled; but it was not possible to experience natural processes in the way we think about them today. Instead, they were seen in images, and these images were what we now call the laws of nature. Something of these images has been preserved to this day in the legends and mythologies of different peoples, and even in genuine fairy tales. In ancient times, people had pictorial imaginations. Today, we can achieve these things not only with the help of spiritual science, but I hope that in the new edition of my “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century” — now expanded to include a prehistory of the entire Western spiritual life — I will succeed in showing what I have attempted to demonstrate: that one can view spiritual life purely philosophically, and that one can then discover how pictorial imagination, which only gradually transitioned into Greek-Latin imagination, existed in primeval times, and how the human soul, through this ancient imagination, which was still pictorial, felt itself transported into the overall organism of the world, which it could imagine as imbued with soul. This took place primarily in the sentient soul.

Greco-Roman thinking, which persisted until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of our Christian era, primarily engaged the intellectual or emotional soul. I have already attempted to describe the very different sensibilities and thinking of those times in my lectures on Raphael and Michelangelo. I have explained how, because the intellectual or emotional soul was predominantly developed in the Greek world, the Greeks, and later also the members of Latin culture, still felt completely at one with their “soul body,” just as they felt their soul in every single limb of their body. If an earlier age, which lived particularly in the feeling soul, had an awareness that man is a member of the whole of nature, then the Greeks had an awareness that what lived in their whole body and what this body could give them was at the same time the immediate, true view of nature for them.

This changed in more recent times; even today, because people are not yet willing to delve into spiritual science, they do not look into these things with complete thoroughness. It changed particularly since the blossoming of natural science in the dawn of modern thinking, since the times of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno. For it was then that what we call the consciousness soul began to develop. And it began to develop in such a way that human beings now really became a mystery to themselves, as they now began to feel themselves separated from the rest of nature by their independent soul, while at the same time experiencing their soul as something special alongside the physical. As strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless true that when the more materialistic trend emerged in the natural sciences, it can be said of this period that the human soul felt more separated from nature.

What kind of era dawned for Western culture since the fifteenth century? It is the time that spreads a net of lawfulness over nature, extending into unlimited spatial expanses. It seems great and powerful to us when Giordano Bruno stands at the dawn of modern times and thinks the power of the laws of nature extending into infinite expanses of the heavens. But in these spatial expanses, we cannot find what human beings experience in their souls. When members of ancient Egyptian or Chaldean cultures looked up at the starry world, they felt that a force emanated from the constellations that was connected in such and such a way to their own moral experience. When the ancient astrologer looked up at the starry world and could sense human destiny in it, this image of nature still allowed the soul to be thought of as part of the workings of nature. But now a time has come in which it has become increasingly impossible for human beings to think of the soul as part of nature. For it was precisely with the rise of modern science in recent times that humans began to struggle with the question: How do I relate to the workings of nature, which no longer radiates anything spiritual to me? The human soul had to come to question its own position in relation to science. We see this struggle in Giordano Bruno. He thinks of his own soul as a monad. Although he thinks of the world in terms of modern science, he still thinks of it as animated by monads.

Leibniz, who still had such a great influence on the spirits in the eighteenth century, also thinks of the soul as a monad, and he thinks of it in such a way that it can relate to the rest of the world in a way that is possible for its own nature. Leibniz asks himself: what must the human soul be like in order to have a place in what I must conceive as a picture of nature? And he can only answer this question by simultaneously shaping this picture of nature himself in a very specific way. Once again, for Leibniz, everything becomes a combination of monads. When we look into anything in nature, we find monads animated at its core. For Leibniz, what we see is like looking at a swarm of mosquitoes that appears as a cloud formation; when we come closer, this cloud formation dissolves into individual mosquitoes, and the swarm of mosquitoes only appears to us at first because we do not look at it closely. I must, Leibniz tells himself, think of the image of nature in such a way that the human soul can exist in it. He could only do this if he thought of it as a monad among monads. Therefore, he distinguishes between monads that live dully, then sleeping monads, then dreaming monads, then monads such as the human soul. But everything else that arises arises only because everything we see arising appears to us only as a swarm of mosquitoes appears to us as a cloud. And we could list the most outstanding minds up to the present day, and we would find that the struggle for knowledge of the human soul in relation to the newer image of nature presents itself in such a way that the human soul feels: I must be able to form an idea of what can arise as an image of nature and what no longer offers me anything of the soulfulness of nature. In contrast to this struggle, what appears as more or less materialistically colored monism, and what even the human soul would like to think of as a natural form building itself up—what is going on in the human soul, what philosophers have been striving for since nature can no longer be thought of as animated—in contrast to this, all monism is only an episode that will pass: But the human soul, detached and aware of what it must imagine as the image of nature, will strive more and more to find content within itself, that is, to arrive at what it formerly drew from nature itself in ancient times.

Therefore, we can say: since the age of modern science, everything has been designed to deepen the human soul within itself, and everything points to the point of modern spiritual science that we are seeking and that is represented here: that through experiencing itself in a spiritual world, the human soul may come to know itself in the whole cosmos, to know itself as carried by spiritual-divine powers, whose outer expression and outer image is outer nature. Just as true as it was when humans, still living in their sentient soul, knew themselves as a part of the whole of nature, just as the Greco-Latin age, which still experienced itself in the intellectual or emotional soul, did not yet experience itself as separated from the physical being, so the modern age experiences itself in the consciousness soul, but knows itself to be separated from nature, since it must form an image of nature that no longer contains anything spiritual. The human soul had to grow stronger and more powerful in order to conjure up from within itself the wealth of spiritual experiences that could restore the security it had when it still felt itself to be a member of the soul-filled cosmos.

This is how the modern human soul has experienced itself since the fourteenth century in the development of the consciousness soul. The development of the intellectual or emotional soul lasted from the eighth and tenth centuries BC to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD. What we are experiencing, what we have been experiencing for about four centuries, and what we must recognize, is that we understand: the spiritual life that the human soul conjures up from within itself will become richer and richer, so that it can live in a spiritual land again. What we experience as the inner grasping of the consciousness soul originated in the period from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century of our era. We have therefore been living in this period for about four centuries.

In the middle of this period, which we have now tried to recognize in its inner struggle, in its striving and striving for self-experience in the consciousness soul, one might say: Voltaire lived in the middle between us and the dawning of the striving for consciousness soul development. And one understands this spirit when one can place it historically in this age of experiencing the consciousness soul. For Voltaire, with all his brilliant intellectual qualities, with all his sovereign intellectual activity, with all that was good in him, is a symptomatic expression of the striving for consciousness soul development, just as he is with all his, one might say, bad, evil, questionable qualities.

There were two things that initially confronted him in the age that can be called the age of the development of the consciousness soul. One was that an ever more glorious image of nature, which we cannot admire enough, developed in recent centuries, reaching its outstanding splendor in modern natural science, a wonderful image of nature in which, however, there is, as it were, no place for the human soul itself. And alongside this, among the most enlightened minds, of whom we could name many, there is the striving to solve the riddle: how does the human soul arrive at a conception through which it can maintain itself in the face of this newer image of nature? The image of nature becomes ever more glorious; the striving in the human soul to maintain itself, to gain inner security, appears more and more as if we were watching it in a rising and falling wave. For we see the human soul as if it were constantly trying to find itself in relation to the image of nature, but always retreating because it is powerless to find within itself what must be conjured up from the consciousness soul at this time. And so we still stand in the midst of the struggle that is the most important reason why spiritual science must enter the present: the struggle for the inner cosmos that has been spoken of here in these lectures and that must be sought by human beings. We see minds such as Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Locke all striving to answer this riddle, so to speak: what am I to do with my soul in relation to the natural world outside? We could take up the thread with any of the minds that confront us here. Let us take up the thread with Locke, for example.

Locke, who, one might say, is a symptomatic expression of what was sought in the realm of English intellectual life at the beginning of the Voltaire era in order to understand the soul, appears to us in the following way. Locke feels, so to speak, completely overcome by the power of the image of nature, feels so overcome that he must say: Basically, we can find nothing in our soul except what this soul has first absorbed from external nature through the senses. The image of nature has such a powerful, impressive effect that Locke wants to limit all human soul life, insofar as it develops knowledge, to what we can stir up on the basis of the senses and what the intellect can combine as a world view; and so he stands before the world and says to himself: We find nothing in this human soul that does not make it lonely, that does not represent it as a “tabula rasa,” as an empty slate, before the sensory impressions come from external nature, which the soul then processes. Thus, we see how the power of the image of nature initially seems so great and powerful that he loses faith in finding anything at all in the human soul itself. Above all, we must consider the moral and spiritual side of Locke's position. Man was given a connection to the spiritual world in what the ancient traditions, religions, and customs offered. Until the advent of modern science, people believed that they were connected to the spiritual world, including through spiritual links. Now there was a picture of nature that seemed so overwhelming that the human soul did not dare to think anything about itself. Now the soul stood there — and the view with which it stood there originated primarily from minds such as Locke's. The souls said to themselves: as human souls, we cannot know or recognize anything that is not conveyed to us through the senses and through the intellect, which is limited to the senses. And now it was important to develop, as it were, from the old traditions and feelings that still flowed up from earlier times, so much spiritual temperament, so much spiritual power, that in addition to what could only be recognized as an image of external nature, one recognized some spiritual-divine world, but one had to admit: Even if one believes in it, one cannot reach it through knowledge. The image of nature initially took on a form that rejected any cognitive connection between the human soul and the divine-spiritual foundation of the world.

This gave rise to the worldview, attitude toward life, and experience of the world in which Voltaire, who was born in 1694 and thus spent his youth at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was initially immersed. He was initially so influenced by the spirit of his time that it made an enormous impression on him when, having been persecuted in France at an early age, he fled to England and became acquainted with the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which limited all human knowledge to the observation of nature and, so to speak, clung to a divine-spiritual world only on the basis of the temperament of the soul. Thus Voltaire was, so to speak, taken up with his innermost being by this experience of the world, by this feeling of the soul, and in his restless yet intelligent soul the immediate conviction arose: one stands on safe ground when one stands on the ground of the overwhelming law of nature. But strong and powerful in him was what I have just called the religious temperament. His soul would not let go of a conscious belief in a connection with a spiritual-divine world. And so we see how, on the one hand, Voltaire developed an infinitely far-reaching admiration for what modern science and the image of nature that stood before him had brought about, and an admiration for philosophical debates such as those brought about by Locke, for example; and on the other hand, he feels the need to bring to bear everything that the human mind can muster as reasons for such a view of nature — and yet to hold fast to the old idea of the immortality of the human soul, of a connection between human beings and the whole of existence, of a freedom of the human soul that is kept within certain limits. And now we encounter a peculiar trait in this man Voltaire, a trait that shows us how he is a completely symptomatic expression of what was alive throughout that entire period.

What strikes us about Voltaire is perhaps most clearly illustrated by another work that appeared at almost the same time as Lessing's “Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes” (The Education of the Human Race), namely Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason,” if one cites Kantianism at all. From his youth onwards, Kant lived in very similar circumstances to Voltaire with regard to the image of nature. Kant was devoted to the “spirit of the Enlightenment” in the fullest sense of the word. It was he who coined the phrase: Enlightenment means having the courage to use one's own reason, contained in the beautiful essay “What is Enlightenment?”. In Kant, Voltaire sees something like the fullest consequence of the impulses of the Enlightenment. Kant, like Locke and later Hume, faces the power of the image of nature, which showed how the world and the human soul came into being. For what has emerged as the image of nature cannot be rejected. That was impressive! And this image of nature had such an impressive effect on Locke that he rejected any knowledge that could not come from sensory impressions and the intellect. Kant proceeds “principled.” He is the thorough, principled man who must drive everything to its principles, and so he writes his “Critique of Pure Reason.” In it, he shows how humans can only have knowledge of what external nature is, and how the human soul can become a practical but undeniable belief from a completely different side than that from which external knowledge originates. In the second edition of his “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant revealed in the preface how he viewed things: “I therefore had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Kant demands a realm for faith where conscience intervenes, where the categorical imperative speaks, which is not knowledge but nevertheless provides an impulse that humans must adhere to, and which nevertheless leads to the idea of God and the idea of freedom. Kant therefore had to tackle the matter in principle by posing the question: If the human soul cannot gain knowledge about itself under the influence of the newer view of nature, how can we then give it a well-founded faith? And he gave the human soul a well-founded faith by expelling knowledge altogether from the realm where anything can be said about the human soul, thus limiting knowledge to the external world.

What Kant had to reduce to a principle without which he could not have lived, a principle on which the entire subsequent period drew, Voltaire did not yet have. He had only the logical side, which said: all knowledge is limited to knowledge of nature. He needed to draw out of the power of his personality what Kant drew out of a principle, out of something completely impersonal. And so we see Voltaire throughout his life, which is identical to one side of the entire intellectual life of the eighteenth century, conjuring up from his “temperament,” from his agile mind, what Kant tried to derive from the principle, namely the categorical imperative. Again and again we see him striving throughout his long life to muster all his wit and intelligence to say to himself: We can know nothing about the image of nature; but step into the breach, human soul; with wit and intelligence, seek now to bring forth all reasons, whatever they may be, good or bad, to uphold what must be upheld in the face of the image of nature!

One might say that Voltaire's temperament and agile mind embodied what Kant reduced to a principle that can be considered impersonal. And anyone who wants to judge human souls must seek to gain a little insight into the structure of a soul with all its struggles, which, in a sense, must hold on to something throughout a whole long life that can continually slip away from it due to the power and significance of the image of nature. If we look at Voltaire in this way, and then turn our gaze from this basic observation to what he created in detail, we will find that he becomes understandable. For as he stood there with his soul, as I tried to depict it with a few strokes as in a charcoal drawing, he basically had a world against him. What Voltaire sought was a spiritual worldview in which God, freedom, and immortality had a place, but which could also measure up to the image of nature. For Voltaire became an increasingly ardent and prejudiced advocate of the newer scientific way of thinking, and this aspiration lived in him and developed—since it was, in a sense, the foundation of his being—with all the forms that sometimes took on a rather unpleasant character in the course of his life.

Precisely at the time when we see Voltaire, so to speak, as the most spirited expression of the human soul's struggle to find itself as a conscious soul, precisely at this time it was least possible to be clear about how this struggle of the human soul presents itself in relation to an older struggle of the human soul in earlier epochs. Voltaire, for example, was unable to arrive at a pure, noble image of Greek culture. To him, what his age wanted, what his age wanted to bring out above all in contrast to the Greek age as a scientific way of thinking, seemed much more significant and greater than what the Greeks had wanted with their image of nature, which at the same time contained the image of spiritual life and activity. Because Voltaire embodied the spirit of the entire struggle of the conscious soul, he was, in a sense, compelled to misjudge a time in which every form of culture still represented a connection between the human soul and the rest of the world. We still encounter such a connection in the characters created by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, those great Greek tragedians. For Voltaire, these Greek ‘tragedians’ were in no way comparable to what humanity had achieved in his time. To him, the Greeks, in their entire worldview, seemed above all to be people who had produced fables about nature; whereas the age of the great scientific discoverers appeared to him to be the one that had brought humanity further in a short time than all previous ages combined. Yes, truly: in the age in which the human soul had to strive to maintain itself in the face of the image of nature, in this age it had to become unjust towards earlier ages, in which ‘the human soul could, so to speak, without any effort on its part, still draw its strength from the surrounding nature’.

Thus we see Voltaire's relationship to earlier times taking on a tragic character, as it were; and we see him placed in his environment as if in complete opposition to the world from which he actually emerged.

Looking back on the period of French intellectual life from which Voltaire emerged, we can say that this world still cared little about the great mysteries that now confronted the scientific way of thinking and the rising consciousness of the soul. This world still lived in the traditions that had been given to it, as it were, so that it could develop in peace toward the age of enlightenment about itself, toward the age of self-awareness. Voltaire saw himself surrounded by a world — — and his French world was still thoroughly imbued with the most rigid and intolerant Catholic principles — that wanted to extract everything spiritual and intellectual from tradition and rejected what was dear and valuable to him: this focus on the self as opposed to the image of nature. And so Voltaire developed a tremendous aversion to the entire intellectual world surrounding him, an aversion that he expressed so early on in the accusations of his life that one might say he had had an eventful life enough. He was in the Bastille twice, in 1717 and 1726; then he had to flee to England in 1726, where he remained until 1729. He then returned to France and, from 1734 onwards, lived in seclusion for a long time at the castle of the Marquise du Châtelet in Cirey in Lorraine, where he immersed himself in scientific studies that were intended to show him how the world view could be understood in terms of modern natural science. What emerged from this was an insight into the necessary basic conditions, the spiritual basic conditions of modern times. One may say as much as one likes against him, that he flattered, that he lied, that he betrayed his friends, that he often sought to achieve something by the lowest means, all of which was not nice; but alongside this there was a holy enthusiasm in him, which expressed itself through the often cynical and frivolous form: The impulses of the human soul demand that the soul find a worldview from within itself, that it renew itself in a worldview that it can set before itself. At first, nothing else could be given to him but the image of nature. Therefore, his wit gave rise to a burning hatred in him toward Catholicism. Above all, he wanted to use his worldview to penetrate what opposed him. Any means was acceptable to him. While he opposed Catholicism in this way, he found himself cut off from everything that could connect him to it, for he hated all the institutions and customs of Catholicism, its rituals and forms of worship; he saw no connection with what resulted from his worldview, which he wanted to base on the natural sciences. On the other hand, it was only through his temperament, through his agile, intelligent soul, that he clung to God, freedom, and immortality; but what enabled him to cling to these things were abstract thoughts, intangible ideas.

When the Greeks looked up to those regions where, according to their knowledge, human beings received their impulses, they saw a divine spirit at work there. Let us look at the works of the Greek tragedians. We see in them the human world depicted, bordering on a divine-spiritual world; we see the world of the gods influencing the human world and the fates of human beings interwoven with the fates of spiritual beings; and we see how, especially in the ideas of ancient times, the contents of consciousness lived on in these spiritual beings, something that could come alive in poetry. Just as human beings could come to life in tragedy and epic poetry, so these contents of consciousness could come to life in poetry. And how they came to life in the poems of Homer! And now, how we see in the age when the human soul separated itself from other beings that its connection with such beings has been lost! We can trace how the supersensible figures still alive in Greek poetry gradually become more and more abstract, more and more conceptual, from Virgil onwards into more recent times — with the one exception of Dante, who formed his Divine Comedy on the basis of clairvoyant inspiration, and in whom these figures stand alive before him again, albeit in the form in which he could see them. Elsewhere, however, we see everywhere how, towards the age of the conscious soul in which Voltaire lived, these figures fade more and more, and how people are left more and more to their own devices. We see how poets are increasingly compelled, when they want to depict human life, to disregard a supernatural world that no longer stands before them.

Voltaire, one might say, was too great to be able to disregard spiritual world beings in his overview of life. His temperament was too great, too comprehensive for that. And that was in his nature. Hence the strange, the miraculous, which we encounter, as it were, already in his youthful epic, the Henriade, in which he describes the fate of King Henry IV. Here we see how he cannot—and does not want to—limit himself to what is going on in the outer world, to which the scientific worldview wants to confine itself. On the other hand, however, we see how he feels limited in his approach everywhere, so that he is only connected with abstractions in the words from which he draws ideas of freedom, immortality, and God. His soul is too highly developed for him, amid all the struggles that were being fought out at that time between the most diverse religious and political parties, to want to portray life in his “Henriade” only as someone who looks at it solely as a human being with a scientific worldview and who grasps other human life only as abstract ideas of God, freedom, and immortality. His soul is too great for that. Therefore, we see how Voltaire's longing to connect the human soul with a supernatural world protrudes; but we also see how it is impossible for him to envision a supernatural world that is humanly possible from within Catholicism, which he hates. For him, the history of the saints was merely a representation of legends, and Christ was more or less a pious, good-natured dreamer. But Voltaire could not bring himself to accept that human life should unfold in its most important events only as it did around Henry IV of France, as it appears when explored with the outer senses and combined with the intellect. Thus, strange characters appear in the Henriade: for example, “Discorde,” or discord. Strange, in the representative of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, in Voltaire, this character of discord! She looks down on the events in France, which are not unfolding as she wants them to. She wants more and more discord among people so that she can achieve her goals. She looks down with displeasure on what is happening against Rome and therefore sets out to come to an agreement with Rome. Thus, we see a mythological figure, Discord, shaped by Voltaire, looking with displeasure at what is happening in France, and we then see her embark on her journey to Rome. — Now one could say: all this is allegory! But it is precisely out of poetic impulses that one must say what I am about to say: this Discord takes on entirely realistic forms, so that one can no longer consider her a mere allegory, for example when it is described how she comes to the Pope, how she is alone with him, and how she wins him over. There she behaves like a coquettish personality from the age of Voltaire; there she exercises all kinds of seductive arts. Precisely out of poetic impulse, I would like to say: I do not credit allegories with what she accomplishes in order to persuade the Pope to support the political party in France! And with what the Pope can give her, she returns to France, acts like an agitator, appears now in the guise of St. Francis, now as Augustine to the monks, goes from city to city, from village to village, and when she then has an interest in preventing Henry III from winning, she manages to seduce the Dominican monk Jacques Clement. Voltaire put everything he had against Catholicism in the spirit of his religious free-thinking into this description. It is interesting to see how far Voltaire goes in his portrayal of this Dominican monk, who is now to be won over by Discord so that he brings about the downfall of Henry III. The Henriade includes a prayer that Clement, the monk, sends up to heaven. I would like to read this prayer to you in Krafft's translation so that you can renew the feeling you must have when you immerse yourself in Voltaire's soul, which was opposed to Catholicism, and which he expects one of his pious followers to send the following prayer up to heaven:

"O God, enemy of tyrants, who guides the Church, will we henceforth see how you oppress your own? How you, fond of murder, bless perjured villains, and treat a king who reviles you with grace? O great God! Your judgment tests us too much;

Show your angry face to the enemy soon;
Let death and destruction be far from us,
And let a king, whom your wrath gave us, die.
Come! Shake the fiery depths of heaven,
And send forth before you the sharp and sudden destroyer,
Down! Arm yourself and strike the enemy armies
With your thunderbolt, which will crush and consume them.
Like leaves that the wind bends and scatters at will,
Let fall man and head, both kings;
Then on their corpses, from all the allies,
Whom you have saved, a song of jubilation resound!" Discordia, peering carefully, splits the air, and
Hears this dreadful prayer and carries it to the mouth of hell.
Immediately she brings from there, where night and terror are joined,
the cruelest despot of the king of shadows.
He comes, and “Fanaticism” is the sound of his name,
a degenerate child of holy religion:
armed for her protection, he seeks to destroy her;
begotten in her womb, he entangles her to death.

The Dominican monk prays for the death of Henry III and Henry IV, prays to heaven for God to send death. And Discord, the strife, is attracted by the monk's prayer, enters the monk's cell and calls “Fanaticism” from the realms of hell as an ally. Another figure that Voltaire presents to us in a very real way! And how does he speak of fanaticism, which he believes has found its strongest support in recent times in the principles of popular sentiment? This is how he speaks of it:

It is he who once led the people of Ammon, the son of misfortune,
to Rabba, in the valley of the Arnon,
Once led the people of the ill-fated Ammon,
When women filled with grief placed the bodies of their children
In the fiery arms of their god Moloch.
He made Jephthah take an ominous oath,
And drove his steel into the heart of the lovely maiden.
Spurred on by him, Calchas once spoke sacrilegious words,
And thereby incited the murder of Iphigenia,
In your forests, O France, he stayed for a long time;
To the grim Teutates he swung the censer high.
You have not forgotten the sacred strangulations,
Druidic work, practiced to please the idols.
From the high Capitol his words resounded with horror:
“Seize the Christian people, tear them apart, exterminate them!”
But since the eternal city recognized the Son of God,
He turned from the ruins of the Capitol to the church.
Now he poured out his wrath on Christian hearts:
Those who once shed their blood became persecutors.
At the Tower, he created the impetuous sect
That stained its insolent hand with regicide.
In Lisbon and Madrid, he kindled that flame
Consecrated pieces of wood, to which Judah's tribe
Was sent in solemn pomp by priests,
Because he did not turn away from the faith of his fathers. And he always went along, in his deceit,
In the holy robes of the church and clergy; ...

Discord brings this fellow up from the depths of hell. And from this fellow, Clément receives the dagger with which he wounds Henry III, causing him to die from his wounds.

Thus we see how spiritual powers play into Voltaire's poetry. We see further how Saint Louis, the progenitor of the royal family, is sent down by God to speak to Henry IV, to instill wisdom in him, so to speak, and Voltaire does not shy away from putting into Saint Louis' mouth everything that is to happen in the history of France. We see further how he links the world he describes, the time of Henry IV, in an even more sinister sense, in that he after Henry first advanced victoriously and then faltered, he attributes this to the fact that discord led him to the “Temple of Love,” where he faltered and grew weary in an ill-fated love until he was called to a new battle. Read this story, this description of the Temple of Love, as he portrays it as a kind of magical service to which Henry IV's opponents are devoted, as a kind of devil worship with all the altars and rituals that he claims play a role in certain parties — and you will say to yourself: how Voltaire, not through his mind, not through his intellect, not through what he becomes in his struggle to attain the conscious soul — but through what he is, through his whole lively temperament, through the sum of his emotional feelings, tends to connect the whole of human life with a spiritual world — which Herman Grimm rightly finds straw-like, abstract. But therein, in that struggle of the human soul, as it takes place in the forecourt of spiritual life, before one could think of a spiritual science, therein lay the tragedy of Voltaire's soul, that where it really wants to represent true, genuine experiences, great, powerful experiences of human life, it must seek the connection between outer life and a spiritual world — and yet can only find this connection in an inadequate way. That is why the Henriade appears today as an “unreadable” poem, because everything Voltaire could muster in terms of the connection between the human world and the spiritual world is based, after all, on traditions that he does not want, that he hates, because he feels incapable of describing in any way the secret forces that run through human development. It must be said that it took all the agility of Voltaire's soul, that agility which, admittedly, led to the shortcomings of the soul that have already been mentioned, to maintain itself in the face of the fact that this soul felt within itself how the possibility of inner spiritual stability was increasingly disappearing due to the external image of nature. And already in the Henriade, in those characters who are mythological figures and do not appear as mere allegories, one notices how this Voltaire soul struggles and searches for something to which it can cling in human life, and how it still finds nothing. One must take this aspect of Voltaire into account and then one will appreciate in the right sense all that he did to understand human development. That is why, despite all its shortcomings, his wonderful characterization of Charles XII or Louis XIV is so exemplary, because for him it contained the greatest mystery: How is historical development experienced? What forces are at work in it, and what forces are at work in the environment of human development?

Given the power with which the image of nature affected him, he could not help but express himself with all his strength and cynicism, going overboard in every respect, so to speak, for example when he attributes to the Virgin of Orleans everything he has against the superstition of all times. But it is precisely Voltaire's soul that allows us to recognize how souls feel when they face the pulse of time in such a way that they do not hear it beating in the fullest sense of the word, but still feel it in the pulsing of their own blood: an age is coming to an end — but, feeling the emptiness within themselves, they say to themselves: The new age is not yet here! - One senses the tragedy of Voltaire's soul when one presents it in such a way that one sees it as questioning: How does the human soul find its footing in the face of the new image of nature? Today we would say: How does the conscious soul struggle to emerge in human beings? And we find the answer to this when we look at Voltaire, how he turns his gaze to everything that France has been able to produce in terms of external culture, how abstract the old traditional powers handed down from ancient times have become to him, for we see how he describes heaven and hell, in a certain sense even magnificently heaven, into which Henry IV is led by Saint Louis, when he describes how spiritual forces split apart the forces of nature, how worlds are thrown into confusion, and how all this nevertheless chokes the deepest subconscious depths of the soul, which seek a foothold where the soul can be anchored with its essence, with its deepest divine essence. But Voltaire cannot find this anchor!

As the decade approached in which Voltaire died, there was a seed in one soul to seek in man himself the original source of a knowledge that not only penetrates nature, but is also capable of delving into the spiritual universe. When Voltaire died, Goethe carried within him the idea of his “Faust,” that Faust in whom we see how he actually draws from what Voltaire would have called the most superstitious conceptions of the soul a figure like that of Faust, who shows us how the deepest longing, the deepest will, and the highest knowledge are to be sought in connection with this human soul. And under the influence of this insight into the deepest depths of the human soul, which Voltaire could not see because the power of the image of nature had too strong an effect on him, and because God, freedom, and immortality, the entire spiritual world remained essentially abstract ideas for him—under the influence of this insight into the human soul, Goethe finally created a character who is quite similar to Voltaire: Mephistopheles, except that Faust, who seeks the birth of the conscious soul in a different way, says to Mephistopheles: “In your nothingness, I hope to find the universe!” And basically, this is the word that echoes Voltaire from Goethe, who, in a different way than Voltaire, sought the modern era's striving for an inner finding of the conscious soul and an anchoring of it in the spiritual worlds. Voltaire presents himself as the star of a dying world, a world in which all striving is directed toward the attainment of the consciousness soul, and illuminates what exerts the strongest compulsion toward the consciousness soul: the scientific worldview. Voltaire is nevertheless the greatest star of this declining world, even though he cannot find what expands the human soul back toward a spiritual world. Nothing is more characteristic of Voltaire than a statement he made about Corneille in his history of Louis XIV. He says that Corneille also had a French translation of Thomas à Kempis's little book “The Imitation of Christ” published, and that he had heard that this little book had gone through thirty-two editions in French translation. He cannot believe this and says: “for it seems so incredible to me that a healthy soul could read this book through to the end even once.” Here we see clearly expressed how Voltaire's soul could not find the possibility of opening up a source to the spiritual world within himself.

Today we are talking about how spiritual science is a genuine continuation of what the scientific world view forces upon human beings, but we are also talking about how this spiritual science is a genuine continuation of Goethe's world view. We speak of a second human being dwelling within the human being, who can experience himself spiritually; we speak of what the human being truly is, which is expressed in Goethe's words: “Two souls dwell, alas, in my breast.” But we speak of this in such a way that the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being can seek and find its spiritual-soul home. In spiritual science, we speak again of a spiritual world to which human beings belong with their spiritual essence, just as they belong to the physical world with their physical bodies. Voltaire, however, is so overwhelmed by the power of the image of nature that he has no feeling for the “second human being” within the human being. While Goethe, shortly after him, lets his Faust strive with all his might for that second human being who strives out of the physical human being toward the spiritual worlds, we see in Voltaire how he cannot comprehend such a second human being. A statement he makes in reference to this second man is very characteristic: “As much as I try to find that we are two, I have finally found that I am only one.” He cannot admit that there is a second person within him. He has tried, but that is his tragedy: in the end, he can only find that he is one person, bound to his brain. That was his deep tragedy, which Voltaire helped himself over by means of his cynicism, even his frivolity. Subconscious depths of the soul, a second person within a person in connection with a spiritual world — the superconsciousness could not admit this to itself. The superconsciousness needed numbness. He could find this in external experience, because external experience devoted itself to the magnificent, intelligent worldview that he was able to create within the most contradictory experiences of the soul. So we can understand that Voltaire had a hard time coming to terms with himself and that he needed various forms of numbness. One must look at the greatness of this man to understand something as grandiose and paradoxical as the fact that one day, in Switzerland, where he had done so much good, he pretended to be terminally ill so that the priest would come and give him the last rites; and after receiving the sacrament, he jumped up and declared that it was all just a joke, and mocked the priest. But one must live in a world that is so “derivative,” one that lacks the real connection between the human soul and the spiritual worlds, as Voltaire lived in such a world, in order not to arrive at the connection to which he wanted to arrive.

Let us look again at Goethe: he takes a “vagrant” — Faust — to show how the deepest impulses spring from the human soul. And if we follow Goethe's entire life, we see how he seeks to find human character in all its richness in the simplest souls. Voltaire lives entirely in a derivative layer, in his sphere of education, where everything is uprooted; there he cannot find what binds the human soul to a spiritual world, and so he can only speak to that derivative layer. Today, we can hardly comprehend that a mind like Voltaire's would say: “I will not allow myself to write for cobblers and tailors; apostles are suited to giving them something to believe in, not I.” And he does not want what he considers his most sacred conviction to be treated as we would like it to be today: that it should penetrate every human soul; instead, he makes the characteristic statement that he writes only for the educated class because he has grown out of it: "Only an upper class can understand the heaven and earth that surrender to my enlightened spirit; the rabble is such that the stupidest heaven and the stupidest earth are just the best!" In this respect, too, Voltaire lives within a cultural sphere that is dying out. That is his tragedy. But such cultural spheres also have the opportunity to develop maturity in relation to certain trends. And Voltaire developed that maturity. It is expressed in his incisive, intelligent judgment, which is not confused even in his wit, and in his healthy, even in his frivolity still healthy, way of influencing the world and relating to it. This makes it understandable that a mind as great in many respects as Frederick the Great could feel attracted to Voltaire, could reject him, could, in a sense, cast him out again after a while, but always had to return to him and pass judgment on him: This Voltaire actually deserves nothing better than the fate of a learned slave, but I appreciate what he can give me as his French. And he could give him much more than just the linguistic element. That is what I have tried to suggest today.

One can understand that the eighteenth century, which on the one hand had to put everything that inhibited the emergence of the conscious soul into perspective, but which, precisely in the declining spirit of the cultural movement, had to show a certain greatness, one can understand that this had to find expression in such a peculiar way precisely in Voltaire. And one sees Voltaire in the right light when one contrasts him with what we have found to be the positive, the enduring influence in the sense of Lessing or Goethe for the striving of the human soul toward the element of consciousness. Truly, what I have allowed myself to say to you today about Voltaire can certainly only contribute to raising awareness of how difficult it is to gain an objective picture of this peculiar man, this peculiar man of whom we can say: Much of what he fought for, what he strove for, lives on as something self-evident in us today — even in those who do not think of reading Voltaire's writings. Yes, one can say of Voltaire in particular: humanity can outgrow his writings; but it cannot outgrow what he was as a force, for he will always remain a link in the intellectual striving of humanity. For what had to come out as the liberation of the human soul was based on the fact that something first had to be worn away by such a corrosive, such a purely dissolving, one might say, such a purely Mephistophelean spirit as Voltaire was. And it is not surprising that Voltaire's spiritual view of history has suffered a similar fate to that of his remains. They were first buried in the Pantheon in Paris, a place of honor; when another political movement came to power, they were taken out again and scattered; then, when a third political movement replaced the previous one, they were gathered up again and reburied. And now some claim that these recovered remains are not the real ones. Until then, Voltaire's historical image will remain accurate, which, on the one hand, is soon portrayed as that of a savior from bondage, an apostle of tolerance, but on the other hand, is again subjected to all kinds of abuse! And given the complexity of Voltaire's personality, it is very easy, when one tries to be completely objective about Voltaire's historical image, for some to say that it is not the right one — just as some say that the bones buried in the Pantheon are not the real ones.

Nevertheless, I say: if spiritual science can fulfill its task in the present and future, then the image of the great demolisher, the great dissolver, the one who cleared away so much, may perhaps emerge before spiritual science in its full objectivity. For it must be said: Voltaire is a human being — he himself said so to Frederick the Great — with all the faults of a human being and, one might even say, a human being with all the “wonders” of a human being, so that the poet's saying is fulfilled in him:

Confused by the favor and hatred of the parties,
His character fluctuates in history.

His personality was such that his image can only “waver.” But even though everything about him wavers, both those who like him and those who dislike him must always admit that, however one may perceive him, with love or with hate, he was a great man who filled a place in what can also be called spiritual science: the ongoing education of the human race to the heights of spiritual and mental human experience, conscious in the world!