A New Experience of Christ
GA 69c — 19 May 1913, Stuttgart
XIII. Raphael's Mission in the Light of Spiritual Science
Dear attendees! The subject of today's reflection will somewhat cross the boundaries that have usually been drawn here in such spiritual scientific reflections. Nevertheless, it seems useful to me to consider human spiritual life in a broader sense in relation to what the human soul can feel about the results of this spiritual science. Moreover, if we consider contemporary history, this evening's reflection, perhaps, as a kind of spiritual-scientific challenge, places itself directly into this spiritual life of the present, for the consideration of Raphael, if we consider it in the way it is usually done, presents people with many puzzles, really great spiritual-cultural-scientific puzzles.
And perhaps we may be confronted with the necessity of extending our spiritual-scientific considerations to such areas in particular, especially if we allow the fate of a significant contemporary art researcher in relation to Raphael to have some effect on our souls – an art historian who, I believe, is so not only in the scholarly, in the usual scientific sense, but who is so above all because the nineteenth century beat in his heart as directly as in few personalities: Herman Grimm. He is one of those art historians who were always not only with reason and intellect, not only with the usual scientific sense, but with the whole soul in their subject. And anyone who is familiar with Herman Grimm's art and cultural writings knows how much of what is directly moving the present intellectually pulsates within him, how his riddles about many subjects of intellectual life are the riddles of our era. And if spiritual science is to prove more and more fruitful, then it will have to seek contact with the way in which the entire spiritual cultural life seeks to approach such riddle-questions.
Herman Grimm – he was the son of Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jakob Grimm, the great linguist – was truly a nineteenth-century spirit. This great expert on Goethe and this significant spirit, who wrote the wonderful book about Michelangelo, died at the turn of the twentieth century.
Whoever delves into Herman Grimm's work on Michelangelo will feel how, in his contemplation, the entire time from which Michelangelo was born comes to life, how Michelangelo's soul comes to life before us, how he stands out from his era, how this becomes art, artistic creation in his soul - a rounded image in a rare sense! And we can take other works by Herman Grimm, for example his important work on Goethe, and find that he has a direct, personal relationship to everything concerning Goethe, which reveals more of Goethe's character, of Goethe's inner being, than many scholarly considerations can give. And so it is with many.
Now it is, in a sense, characteristic that Herman Grimm also wrote a “Life of Raphael”. However, he felt differently about this “Life of Raphael” than he did about the Life of Michelangelo or even the Life of Goethe. Herman Grimm himself confessed that he had repeatedly tried to solve the riddle of Raphael and that at certain times he had indeed sought a kind of conclusion with his Life of Raphael; but every time he approached the riddle of Raphael again, he knew how imperfectly he had dealt with Raphael in his own soul. Again and again he made a new approach; and so we have a wonderful essay that he wrote shortly before his death, which is only the introduction to a book that should have been more extensive, in which he once again attempts, shortly before his death, to place the image of Raphael before his own soul, to solve the riddle of Raphael for himself in a certain way, insofar as such riddles can be solved by human souls at all.
Thus we see on the one hand a struggling spirit who, in accordance with his entire disposition, is immersed in artistic life and in the contemplation of artistic life, who creates a wonderfully rounded image of Michelangelo, we see how he is aware that he has really to have brought this image to a kind of conclusion; we see how this struggling soul fights throughout his entire life to present the enigma of Raphael, and does not finish it, so that he makes a new attempt immediately before his death, which again is not finished. Why is that? Yes, a mere scholar would have been finished in some sense, but not a mind like that, which immersed itself in its task with all its soul and wanted to resurrect the image of Raphael. The closer Herman Grimm approached Raphael, the more he wanted to resurrect the image of Raphael in his soul, the more it revealed itself to him as emerging in an enigmatic way from the entire human development; it presented itself to him in such a way that, the more closely one looks at it, one is led to delve into the deepest mysteries of the human soul itself and to gain an understanding of what such a human soul is, which grows out of the entire picture of human development as a great mystery. And when one follows the other side of Herman Grimm's work, one has the feeling that a mind such as his, which has grown so intimately together with the spiritual culture of the nineteenth century, is making attempts everywhere to find the way – yes, which way? The path that the spiritual researcher knows as his own. I can only gently hint here at the wonderfully intimate way in which Herman Grimm presents a death, a dying, at the end of his significant book 'Unüberwindliche Mächte' (Insurmountable Powers), and in this dying the detachment of what has been presented here more often than the detachment of the etheric body from the physical body. We see Herman Grimm's soul wrestling tenderly and intimately, but no less urgently, to find the paths that spiritual science in particular wants to unlock.
Thus, when one contemplates this remarkable art historian, one can really get the idea: something lives in him that is a question of our age in particular. And because the pulse of our time lived in him, this question lived with particular vibrancy in his soul - the spiritual-scientific question that we wanted to approach in all the considerations that have been employed here. But it is precisely in such a struggle as Herman Grimm's with Raphael's image that one sees that if one gets stuck in the nineteenth-century way of looking at things, one will not be able to cope with the greatest riddles, if one sincerely and without hypocrisy tries to solve such riddles with the awareness of having to delve into ever deeper depths. From the contemplation of spiritual science, the answer will emerge more and more, which I can only hint at, why Herman Grimm could not finish his contemplation of Raphael. However grotesque it may sound to some, the reason for this is that he was able to approach the gate of spiritual science everywhere, but could not unlock this gate anywhere according to the spirit of his century, according to the conditions of the whole becoming of the nineteenth century. So let the attempt be made to approach Raphael, not from some spiritual-scientific dogma or law, but with that which, as the whole mood of the soul, is able to penetrate into our minds when we face Raphael's painting. In spiritual scientific research it is much more important – and this is ultimately what impresses itself on our souls – that we look at the things of the world in a certain mood, than to apply all possible laws that may arise from spiritual research in a stereotypically abstract way. That is certainly not what the human soul should do in spiritual science.
How did Raphael appear to Herman Grimm, this nineteenth-century spirit? This man speaks strange words. I will quote them to you verbatim so that we can, so to speak, fully immerse ourselves in the way this man seeks to gain a personal relationship to his subject through his research. Thus Raphael appears to him as a spirit, to understand which he needs to draw on the most intimate depths of human development. Not on the basis of an epoch, but as if born out of the whole development of humanity – great and powerful on the background of human development, that is how he appears to him; and for those who can feel, words such as those written by Herman Grimm in the last fragmentary pages about Raphael, which he wrote as if born out of a final attempt to understand Raphael, have a profound effect. There Herman Grimm says:
Raphael is a citizen of world history. He is like one of the four rivers that, according to the beliefs of the ancient world, came from paradise.
No matter what scholars may think about it, someone who can open his soul to something very special will experience something special in his soul when he looks at a person like Herman Grimm, who has immersed himself in an object throughout his life and in whose feeling something lives that makes him speak about Raphael in such a way that he elevates him to a citizen of world history, to a being that stands out from the entire development of humanity. And Herman Grimm, too, may appear differently to others, if one wishes to do him justice from a certain emotional point of view. Herman Grimm said:
If Michelangelo were called away from the dead by a miracle to live among us again, and if I met him, I would respectfully step aside so that he could pass by; but if Raphael came my way, I would walk behind him to see if I could catch a few words on his lips. With Leonardo and Michelangelo, one can limit oneself to recounting what they once were in their day. With Raphael, one must start from what he is today. A soft haze has settled over the others, but not over Raphael. He is one of those whose growth is far from over. Generations of people living in the future can always conceive of new enigmas that Raphael will pose for them [...].
And so the question is raised: What riddles can Raphael's appearance pose to someone who has penetrated his soul through what comes from the spiritual-scientific contemplation of the world? Well, spiritual science speaks of development in time in a dual sense; this dual sense has been touched on here several times. First of all, spiritual science speaks of how humanity progresses from epoch to epoch in its earthly development, so that one recognizes that spirit and meaning are in this development, that spiritual laws can therefore be found. In terms of these spiritual laws, we can see how humanity in prehistoric times was led in a different way in its development across the earth than it was later; we can see how other, [new] impulses and impacts worked in accordance with these spiritual laws into our time. In the spiritual-scientific sense we distinguish precisely between the individual epochs, and therefore one cannot be satisfied with the trivial statement that natural development never makes a leap. This statement can certainly be quite correct if it is interpreted in a certain way; but just try to observe nature: you will see how such a saying, which is so easily spoken in a trivial way, has only a very limited meaning. Nature makes leaps: plants make a giant leap in their development between the root and the green leaf, then another giant leap between the green leaf and the blossom, and yet another between the blossom and the fruit. Nature leaps everywhere, and it is no different in the history of mankind. The individual epochs do not, as a comfortable worldview would have it, simply and successively merge into one another, but rather they are sharply distinguished from one another in character. And anyone who takes a close look at these human epochs will find that the human soul is capable of recognizing something special in each epoch, of experiencing something special. Even if one finds the word pedantic that Lessing used: that world history is an education of the entire human race - in a certain sense this word is justified. Just as the individual, starting from a primitive stage of his spiritual life, rises to ever new impulses, which he then experiences in the outer world and in his own inner being, so it is also the case for all of humanity throughout the earth. This is one way in which spiritual science views the development of humanity across the earth.
The other way of looking at it relates to the human soul's participation in this ongoing education. And here spiritual science - as has been explained so often and also the day before yesterday here - states as a result: the human being goes through this earth development in repeated earth lives, so that the human soul participates in the successive epochs that we, looking back, can ask ourselves how our own souls in earlier epochs of the development of the earth, in earlier lives on earth, participated in what the development of the earth could give the human soul each time. Again and again our souls were embodied on earth in bodies to absorb that which then became impulses for later epochs. Thus, in its successive lives, the human soul participates in everything that can flow into it from the impulses of the entire human development on earth.
There are, let us say, compassionate minds who forgive Lessing for speaking from such a point of view at the height of his life in his significant work “The Education of the Human Race” about repeated lives on earth, because only through this - [through this idea of repeated lives on earth] - did it become clear to him which forces actually carry the whole evolution of humanity through history: only through the fact that the human souls themselves carry over what they absorb in one epoch into other epochs, and the human soul does not belong to only one epoch in isolation, but recurring again and again to the successive epochs, so that it is a citizen of all of history. If we can start from this point of view, that in a very peculiar way, what each human soul has absorbed as impulses in earlier epochs, then it comes to us before the soul, as in particular an outstanding mind [like Raphael] can be found in the outcome of all that his soul has gone through in earlier lives on earth in any epoch.
We will not search pedantically and abstractly for cause and effect, but we will acquire a feeling for how a soul can become immersed in an epoch, and we feel in this soul, basically, in a very special way, the entire previous life on earth that such a soul - and every human soul - has lived through in its own unique way. If we now look at a relatively short period of time in terms of the development of the earth, but one that is close at hand for the present study of humanity, namely the historical millennia, and compare it with the millennia that preceded the historical ones , then something arises for spiritual scientific research that has been mentioned here often: the human soul itself has undergone transformations so that it was very different in ancient times than in later times or than in the present. It must be pointed out that our ordinary present intellectual thinking, which has achieved its triumph in science, is a product of development that has only gradually emerged. Spiritual science must take the word 'development' very seriously and see this development not only in the succession of external forms, but above all in the work of the human soul. Only in spiritual science does this development of the human soul present itself differently than in external science.
Spiritual science turns its gaze back to ancient times, to times even earlier than the historical ones, and finds that the human soul was endowed with a kind of primitive clairvoyance. Today I can only hint at these things; they are explained in more detail in other lectures. What our intellectual thinking is today, through which we come to self-awareness and recognize ourselves inwardly as human beings, had to develop first. In ancient times, the whole imaginative life of man was such that he had certain intermediate states between waking and sleeping, like dream images. These were not mere dream images, but they were symbolic expressions of the reality that surrounded him. He perceived in a kind of ancient clairvoyance. Then humanity developed further, and our present understanding, our imagination and other things, as they are peculiar to present humanity, were incorporated as an element of a new impulse.
Now we find a significant break in the great period of human development that precedes us, which presents itself to us through a very wonderful epoch of this human development. That is the time of Greek culture. For those who look at human development with the trained eye of a spiritual researcher, Greek culture appears as a kind of middle ground between two separate lines of development in human history. If we look at Greek culture, then, because our present consideration is to culminate in the view of an artist, the artistic aspect is the most important for us. This artistic aspect was, however, in full harmony with the whole Greek spirit, and this Greek spirit only appears to him who, shortsightedly, regards the development of humanity — as today's spirit does — in such a way that human souls were actually about the same as they are today. For those who look closely at the characteristic features of human development, the picture is quite different.
I would like to start with a specific example: when an artist approaches his art today, let us say sculpture, it is quite natural and self-evident for our present time, because it lies in the character of our time, now, let us say it dryly, that he works from a model, that he has the model of nature before him, that he imitates nature. This corresponds to our current view, our current environment, which artistically suggests the soul's contemplation that confronts nature and seeks the truth by conjuring up images of things in the soul. This is what modern science does, and in a certain way this is also what modern art does. [But this is only right and proper for our time, for this is what the intellectual contemplation of the world wants; it wants man to gain the true or the false image of nature through contemplation and to create images of nature in his imagination, which he then confronts as a self-aware human being. This was not yet the case in Greek times, and those who believe that the Greek artist did it the same way as the modern artist are wrong. The modern artist has to do it this way because the human soul has become more and more internalized; because in our time the human soul is no longer able to form that intimate bond with nature by immersing itself in the objects themselves. It presents itself as distinct from the things, it imitates them. This is how today's man acquires his power of judgment, but it is also how he acquires his full self-confidence in the world.
It was different in the Greek world. In the Greek world, the soul was still intimately connected with all that is physical, corporeal; and because it was more intimately connected with all this, it was also intimately connected with what the physical, corporeal is connected with, with the surrounding nature. What lives and moves in nature, experienced this in the human soul as it really is in nature. The human soul did not stand opposed to nature, it was in nature, living with the foundations of nature. If a Greek artist wanted to create any old statue in sculpture, spiritual research shows us that it would have been quite unnatural for him to imitate something externally. If he wanted to depict a statue, say of Mars or Zeus — figures that he all humanized —, it was his primary concern to feel what the soul of Mars or Zeus experienced. And because the soul impulses and feelings poured directly and objectively into the soul, the artist felt in every gesture, in every movement, in every posture, in every look, what the soul experienced. He was actually inwardly Mars, Zeus, and therefore knew what a hand, what a muscle looked like. He created his immediate inner experience. He did not create according to nature because the soul did not merely experience the soul, but also experienced what was bodily in the environment. This separation [of the soul's co-experience from nature] – that has only come about.
In ancient Greece, the soul was still part of natural existence. But if we go back even further than ancient Greece, we come closer and closer to the times when there was still a kind of clairvoyance, when man went beyond the physical and felt the spiritual that lay behind it – and was connected to the spirit that hovers behind the sensual world. From the innermost depths of the world, from the laws that do not resemble the external, the soul created those forms that now correspond all the more to the laws of the external world. Even in philosophers such as Plato, Pythagoras and Socrates, we find human souls that still reach down below the surface. In Greek thought, the soul is not yet internalized in the human personality; it is still rooted in the world of the senses. Modern man has freed himself; he can only confront nature and imitate it. But in this way the soul, having become stronger, attains inner stability and a firm footing within itself. Thus the human soul of primeval times was unfree and dependent on the all-pervading spirit; thus the Greek soul was directly within nature, not yet separating spirit and nature; and thus the modern soul is set apart from its surroundings, grasping itself in its inwardness.
Now there is no period of time for art that shows us as clearly as in a leap in the characterized sense how this art, on the one hand, still demands the greatness and significance of experiencing nature and, on the other hand, has to reckon with the deepened inwardness of the human soul - [it is the time in which great artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael created their works]. It is characteristic that the event falls into the time of Greek culture, which gave the human soul internalization above all else and which, through its impulses, contributes to the education of the human soul: the emergence and establishment of Christianity. And it seems mighty and wondrous to us when we look at the development of humanity from the most comprehensive interdenominational point of view, regardless of any narrow-denominational point of view, and see how, from the time of the emergence of Christianity, what we can call the internalization of the human soul arises in a lawful manner, and which I am now trying to characterize.
You can particularly see this when you try to look at a mind from the first Christian centuries, a mind like Augustine's. Just delve into something like the “Confessions” of Augustine – worth reading for anyone who wants to delve into the spirit of the times, in the best sense of the word. And one thus gains a sense of the infinite inwardness of human soul experience, which breaks into human development and shows itself in a soul like that of Augustine. And compare the whole life, the whole inward nature of Augustine's soul life with what [all of] Greek art, even the harrowing tragedies of an Aeschylus, of a Sophocles, could give. In the great Aeschylus and the great Sophocles we find the connection between man and his environment everywhere. However ingenious the characterizations may appear to us, the people everywhere do not stand out in such a way that we can speak of an internalization of the soul life to the same degree as in the powerful and forceful way in which this inwardness of the human spirit appears to us in Augustine.
We will only be able to see the whole spiritual course of human development when we recognize this impulse of internalization as an historical law, even if we do not want to tie in with the Christ impulse in any conventional way. For these things are present, as surely as the sun is present in space. They can be grasped spiritually as the effects of the sun on the planets in space. [This development has particularly led to a certain inartistic way of looking at things in the so-called Renaissance, the golden age of human-spiritual development.] But art will never be able to disappear from human development; it will only seek for itself that which is possible for it in the lawful general character of an age. And so we see in the epoch at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, in which Raphael's life also falls, how there is a struggle, firstly, to make art possible and, secondly, to take into account in art what has also occurred in the development of art in a lawful manner with the internalization of the human soul.
In this mighty transitional epoch, Raphael's spirit matured. And how does he appear to us? In a wonderful way he appears to us! Raphael was born in Urbino in 1483, the son of a goldsmith who was also a painter and from whom he received his first painting lessons. Orphaned at an early age, Raphael was apprenticed to the most important painter in Italy at the time, Pietro Perugino in Perugia. From Perugino, we see Raphael receiving, so to speak, the first stimulus for what would then rise to such tremendous greatness. But when you consider Raphael's environment, first in Urbino, then in Perugia, and then again Raphael's soul itself, this consideration becomes a mystery wherever you look; for this Raphael soul stands within its environment like something that does not grow out of this environment itself, but that places itself within this environment as if coming from completely different home climes. And only those who are short-sighted with regard to these things can still strive to explain Raphael in terms of what surrounded him.
Raphael grew up in Perugia, where he learned from the most important painter in Italy at the time. If we first look at the master himself, we see a thoroughly Christian man, counting on the Christian moment of the soul's interiorization. If we let the overall impression of his pictures sink in, we find this justified everywhere. Yes, out of the traditions of his time, this master of Raphael painted the Christian figures, the inner soul of man seeking the paths of eternity. He painted the figures of the holy legend in such a way that the struggling, searching human soul, in need of eternity, finds satisfaction in these figures. But in every stroke of these paintings by Perugino, we also see that he was not present with the innermost fibers of his soul in what he painted from tradition. You can see this clearly when you look at the still existing pictures, at the mild, but still quite understandable face of Perugino from his time: This soul, living in these features, has sought to internalize the art from what he has conjured up on the canvas, from tradition; but the soul was not completely there. This not fully internalized tradition, that was the essential thing that Raphael had of his master.
If we consider the surroundings of Perugia, we see wonderful nature that awakens in every sentient human soul a feeling for the riddles of natural existence, for the eternal values that lie in earthly existence. But what took place in this environment? Struggle after struggle within a passionate people. And it must be assumed that the place where Raphael grew up learning was characterized by struggles, by terrible struggles, which the individual families and clans fought among themselves in the struggle for supremacy in the city. Entire families moved out and then besieged those left behind in the city. Raphael was surrounded by all this. Try to imagine someone who grew up in Perugia and compare him to Raphael. You would see how the former would have lived with all of this and absorbed the life around him – you can almost touch it.
There is a promising tale told by a chronicler, a historian who was just such a person, who was there; he tells how, among these warring factions, one of the heroes of such a faction rode into the city like a sort of St. George or Mars, riding into the city on horseback, powerfully fighting for his followers, and how he rode down everything that opposed him with his horse - a picture from Perugia at that time! We see this scene, as described by the chronicler, depicted in a painting by Raphael - elevated to the spiritual and soul realm, in which everything that has a direct effect on the observer of this scene is swept away. We see how a life confronts us here that only a soul can experience, which hovers above the whole and only captures what is inwardly, spiritually presented in such a scene, and then later conjures it onto the canvas. This is how Raphael appears to us: at home in worlds that do not belong to this sensual world, at home in spiritual realms with which his soul is completely interwoven in its inwardness. And the immediate environment in which he is placed gave him nothing else than that he was allowed to look at it. A spirit, as if from completely different homelands, who can never be explained by his environment for clear thinking and clear observation, who brings something with him, adds something that is not in the environment.
And what did Raphael learn from his master? It is precisely that which makes Raphael the wonderful phenomenon of artistic and human development that he did not learn from his master. For we feel with Raphael that the main feature of the newer period, the internalization of the human soul - the self-evident internalization that is connected with everything he creates - is precisely what is missing in Perugino, but that it is present in every fiber of Raphael and pours directly into what he lives out in his forms, in his art. We feel how a piece of Raphael's deepest inwardness lives on the canvas everywhere when we immerse ourselves in his paintings. This was something that Raphael took from the heights of heaven and not from Perugino, something that he brought in like a messenger from completely different worlds. Whoever tries to grasp this internalization not only in dogmas and doctrines, in external laws that can be grasped in concepts, but with the whole soul, will feel it flowing out of every creation of Raphael, so that in Raphael's greatest creations we have precisely that which we can say: It is now something quite different from what lies in Greek art. There lived that which man has directly experienced in soul and body and at the same time shaped in forms. In Raphael, we see the inner soul of man as poured out and confronting us in forms, the soul that has separated itself from natural existence, pouring out and confronting us as a new world, as a creation of the most inwardly human soul - not in a certain way in nature, but like a new creation - the interior of the human soul striving outwards again and artistically embodying itself there.
Those who call only those a Christian who believe in Christian dogmas, we want to leave to themselves for today's reflection. Those who recognize the Christian trait in the inwardness of the human soul, who see this Christian impulse at work, who see how the human soul breaks away from the outer world and turns inwards to reflect, how it seeks the Christ impulse within - because the human being, having separated from nature, needs such a point of support - will understand why this impulse was given precisely at this time. Those who are able to recognize and feel this more than dogma-less Christianity, this Christianity that is no longer regarded as Christian by some, will understand when the spiritual scientist researcher feels how in Raphael's soul, even before his birth, the basic trait of Christianity was alive, how in all that Raphael felt and experienced, a Christian soul was born, a soul that entered the whole environment as a Christianized soul, a soul with which the Christian way of life was born at the same time, a soul that was Christian through everything that lived in it. And this Christianity in Raphael's soul cannot be explained by anything in the environment. When it is put this way, it looks like an assertion, and it cannot be proven with mathematical certainty; such things arise through intimate immersion in the essence of such a soul. You can see in Raphael, when you let his soul pass before you, how it stands out and differs from another soul that only during its life entered into the internalization of Christianity. By contrasting Raphael with another figure, we can see the difference between a soul that is born a Christian and therefore incorporates the Christian message into every line of its creations, and a soul that only gradually embraces Christian impulses.
Let us continue to observe Raphael in relation to his immediate surroundings. When he was transferred to Florence in 1504, he came into an environment where the after-effects of Savonarola were still vividly felt and where the atmosphere was still strongly influenced by what Savonarola had brought to Florence. The spirit of Savonarola himself was still perceptible in the followers and opponents of Savonarola in Florence, for example in Fra Bartolommeo, who was one of Raphael's friends. When you place a soul like Savonarola's side by side with Raphael's, so to speak, as a contemporary soul, you notice a difference. How naturally the Christianized, the way of the whole Christianized soul, comes to us in Raphael; this soul of Raphael does not first have to become Christian, it does not fanatically represent Christianity; it never does that. Raphael's soul does not need to indulge in Christian dogmas either; this soul draws such lines, applies such colors, as correspond to Christian interiorization; it lives Christian from birth. How different is the soul of Savonarola! He assimilates Christianity in such a way that he fights for the heroic, the great, the significant, and the moral of Christianity bit by bit. He is kindled bit by bit during his development by what one can feel as an impression of Christianity. She is a soul who is only becoming familiar with Christianity, who is fanatical about Christianity, and we can see how she is gradually drawn to Christianity and lives so close to Christianity that the internalized Christian soul must pour out again - powerfully, and therefore one-sidedly and fanatically. There is an enormous difference.
If you do not dogmatize, but consider how, in the moment when one ascends to spiritual-scientific contemplation, everything becomes infinitely versatile, where the evidence does not arise as in the field of mathematics, where everything has sharp contours, then it becomes clear to him who is not merely acquainted with scientific dogmas and laws but has imbued himself with the impulses of spiritual science that this, which has just been attempted to be developed, is illuminated with infinite clarity by the two souls. When spiritual science shows us how Raphael's soul - I only want to hint at these things gently, not roughly, as it must be done in spiritual science when one comes across individual concrete facts - when spiritual science illuminates for us how a soul like Raphael's was already in an earlier life , how it absorbed the power of Christianity and passed through life between death and a new birth with this power of Christianity, then one can also understand the transformation by which he can now live out in a serene form in soul-spiritual powers that which he once experienced with strength. The only way to make sense of the riddle is to say to oneself: Yes, that which has direct Christian impact, right down to the dogmatic, has not been experienced by a soul like Savonarola in the past, but was only in that life at the time of Raphael that it was able to gradually live its way into Christianity from other forms of life, into a stage that the Raphael soul had already passed through in an earlier life.
Of course, I too find it natural that a large part of humanity today still finds what has just been said absurd and ridiculous. I will never be surprised - together with all those who know the fundamentals of spiritual science - when something like this is found to be absurd and ridiculous. But the time will come when people will realize how deeply rooted is what can be said about human souls through the spirit, which has just been used to explain the very different nature of the soul of Savonarola compared to that of Raphael. The doctrine of repeated earthly lives will prove fruitful.
And yet another trait comes to light when we study Raphael's soul. If we probe his soul in this way, we find that it is so thoroughly Christian that Raphael was not at all disturbed by the unchristian environment of the popes when he came to Rome. Indeed, a soul in which Christianity lived so naturally could more easily cope with the environment, not taking offense at Julius II, the pope of whom Machiavelli, who was certainly not particularly moral himself, said that he was a devilish soul, a man who would have liked to bare his teeth at anyone who crossed him. And of the following popes, with whom Raphael lived, there is not much of a Christian tale to tell either. A soul like Savonarola's clashes with such popes. He confronts them as the Baptist once confronted people in his apt words, but not the soul of Raphael, who has already gone through this in some previous life, which we will not talk about here. Raphael's soul remains untouched in its Christian self-evidence.
But artistically, his soul must be active. Artistry must be a continuation of what appeared as art in the Greek world. He must seek what he does not have within himself, and he must seek it in his surroundings. We see him, for example, walking around among the excavated ruins and ancient tombs in Rome, taking in everything, really absorbing from the outside that which is peculiar to Greek art, which he must marry with that which is self-evident to him, with Christian inwardness. It is as if Raphael's soul in a previous life had had the opportunity to be so close to Christianity that Christianity was born as a matter of course with this soul in the existence of Raphael, but that in a previous life it had been far removed from Greek culture and now had to absorb this Greek culture from the outside in order to marry it with the Christianity that he brings with him as a matter of course from a previous life. It is as if what appears out of the spiritual as a necessary result of a previous existence on earth grows together with what this soul must now take in from the outside - in contrast to the Savonarola soul. Thus the two kinds of forces that confront us in this Raphael soul grow together. And it will no longer be absurd and ridiculous to look for Raphael in an earlier life somewhere in a Christian environment that was far removed from Greek culture, which at that time poured powerful impulses into this soul, which remained dormant until this soul life had been transformed - until the next birth, of course, now without any fanaticism and without many other things that are only remotely similar to fanaticism. When this soul was reborn, it sought, because it had been far removed from Greek culture, to find it where it could, in order to absorb this Greek culture into itself.
If we can recognize the spiritual currents that came together in Raphael from a spiritual scientific perspective, can we grasp them, then we learn to understand how both had such a significant effect on this soul: [on the one hand] the natural Christian internalization through his individuality and [on the other hand] the Greek element, through the environment into which the soul was drawn because it lacked that which was an important, a great point of passage through all epochs of human development. We see how Raphael, through the merging of these two things, one individual and one rooted in the general development of humanity and not received from Raphael's earlier incarnation, rises on the great tableau of general human development as if to a [special] summit. Then we understand that what arises in his soul, so infinitely internalized, is what now confronts us from his creations. If Raphael is a typically Christian soul and in it the Christian principle and the general human element of Greek culture are combined in a lawful manner, if Raphael thus absorbs the great currents of the present cycle of human development, then we may assume that something lives in his soul itself that is like an image of the lawfulness of human progress.
And so that my explanations do not seem too “mystical” to you and the “fantasy” does not seem too grotesque to you, I would now like to show you how a soul takes in something like an image of the great currents of world development , how it presents, as it were, small epochs within itself like images of great human epochs – for it is in such epochs that the development of humanity takes place – I would like to show, not with my words, but again with the struggling Herman Grimm, who says something very remarkable. In his last work, Herman Grimm wants to depict the most important highlights of Raphael's work, but how strangely he speaks of this creative, creating soul of Raphael, how curiously. For Herman Grimm, the development of Raphael's creations becomes a law of the whole world – he regards seven works as the greatest in Raphael's development. And of these seven works he says:
At twenty-one years of age he painted the Marriage of the Virgin, four years later the Entombment; four years after that the Camera della Segnatura was completed, four years after that the cartoons for the tapestries were painted and soon after that the two Madonnas. The “Transfiguration” stood at the foot of the deathbed.
A spirit that appears to the unprejudiced observer as if it were to incorporate the epochs of human development, such a spirit appears to the art observer, who looks for the characteristic, in his development in such a way that he ascends from year to year to higher and ever higher peaks; and because the last four years are not complete, the last work is also not finished.
It is often said that man is a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm; an epochal spirit like Raphael appears to us here as a microcosm of human and spiritual development itself. And how does he embody this? We need only turn our gaze to the two large and powerful, if now, one might say, poorly overpainted and poorly preserved, two rooms in the Vatican in the Camera della Segnatura, one of which - whether rightly or wrongly, it remains to be seen - is called “The School of Athens” and the other “The Disputa”. The whole of human development is depicted in these two pictures, which are placed opposite each other and touch the human soul so deeply. In one of the pictures, Greek culture is represented by the ennobled figures on the left and right, as it were expressing itself in the question: [Where has humanity come to, to what point has it progressed in the entire age of Greek culture,] where man still lived with the immediate surroundings of the outside world? Everything, down to the architecture, reflects the spirit of this development in this single image.
It is wrong to comment on it or interpret it in a pedantic, philistine way; it is right to try to summarize in a feeling what humanity has received on its way to Greek culture, where life in the external world has been replaced by the internalization of the human soul of the human soul, if one summarizes the entire life of humanity in an elapsed time with everything for which the human soul has longed, what it has striven for, has achieved, in one feeling: It flows towards us, it lives in this image that which this feeling fulfills with content. It is not necessary to paint the individual figures. I consider it a bad thing when travelers stand in front of a painting with a “Baedeker” in their hands and read: This is such and such - Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Pythagoras. What do we care about all the names, what do all the comments and explanations give us? The artistic breath that comes down from this picture is also what streams out of the Greek work of art – the breath that is there from the development of humanity itself, when we look at it with a sensitive, artistic heart. Then the epoch of interiorization on the opposite wall: above, the symbols of the supernatural; below, representing people, how the supersensible flows into their souls in order to interiorize them. The whole mighty contrast of an ancient time and the time of internalization, and again the breath of the new internalization itself, they flow towards us from what is called - again rightly or wrongly - “Disputa”.
From what Raphael's soul had grown, he conjured it into these scenes. And one feels it so clearly, if one can feel truthfully what lies in the souls in these two different cycles of human development, the pre-Christian and the post-Christian times. If one abstains from all intellectual judgment, all inartistic commenting – that nonsense of subjective interpretation that has become so widespread, especially in theosophical circles – and abandons oneself to direct sensation, if one artistically immerses oneself in the things one feels drawn to Raphael, to a human soul that has married interiorization in artistic creation with kinship with all spiritual things in nature, as it was present in earlier epochs.
Again – when you cross over from Florence to Bologna and have the picture in front of you: in the middle the female figure, looking upwards in a visionary manner – I don't need to mention the name, you may assume, for my sake, that this is the “Saint Cecilia” - so expressed that in every gesture, in every line, in every color scheme, the soul's detachment from the physical is shown. She looks up, so that both from the central figure, as from the four surrounding ones, it is clear: The earthly instruments fall to the ground directly from the feeling; but the soul, which is directed upwards – we feel that its tones have fallen silent – listens to what is born as if from the supersensible, what sounds through the world, warming it like the music of the spheres, in the presence of which earthly music fades away. Only a soul that feels so inwardly as the Raphael soul could conjure this on the canvas, on the wall. And only a soul that was like the Raphael soul could create the highest that the human soul can feel, straight from the depths of the human soul. If spiritual science in its universality wants to elevate the human soul to the origin of human existence, then it comes to what has been explained here many times: that we may be surrounded by many things on earth, that we may look at many things, but that precisely that which presents itself to us in strict spiritual scientific contemplation as the innermost part of our nature, that is of extra-terrestrial origin – it lives, as I said the day before yesterday, in the spiritual and soul that surrounds us, just as the Earth's atmosphere physically surrounds us; and we feel that this, which is the most human of all, is born out of the spirit.
If we want to have a representation of that, of the most human of the human, if we want to feel and experience in our soul what spiritual science is able to stimulate in the soul, then we feel the earth with everything that belongs to the earth, we disappear and the most human of the human floats by, our soul is absorbed in the extra-terrestrial worlds. It turns its gaze outwards to seek in these extra-terrestrial worlds that which is the origin of man; and it transports itself outwards, seeking to sensualize the supersensible in the cloud-forming regions. From the cloud-forming regions, we find the image of the most human of humanity pressing towards the earth, as Raphael lets this mysterious union of mother and son float in, born out of the stylized clouds. Our soul rises from the feeling that flashes in us in the figure of the so-called “Saint Cecilia” to the delicately tangible supersensible feeling of the mystery of man originating from extraterrestrial worlds.
And when we allow this feeling, which awakens an infinite warmth in our soul, to be just feeling – it is the one feeling into which the currents of spiritual scientific contemplation ultimately converge – when we allow this feeling to prevail within us and seek a satisfactory representation – seek something that meets the feeling from the outside – then we imagine the “Sistine Madonna” from Dresden. The spiritual feeling grows together with what Raphael has depicted in this picture. Line and color, hand movement and gesture present to us what is meant: the encounter of spiritual ideals with the highest artistic ideals, with the religious feelings in us, the encounter of that feeling which, in all that is pictorial, is able to flame, the encounter of this feeling with what flows towards us from Raphael's creation, the encounter of the feeling with the creature of the imagination, which itself has grown out of such a feeling.
One may gladly fall silent when one has reached the description of the feelings that ultimately lead to the grasp of the supersensible. Raphael, however, appears to us as a riddle that is the task of spiritual science. And deep down we can understand why someone like Herman Grimm, who everywhere penetrates to spiritual science and longs to find in Raphael's figures something that corresponds to spiritual science, but because he cannot find it, leaves his observation unfinished. Such an example shows quite clearly what has had to be said so often: the legacy of the nineteenth century consists in the fact that the external science of that century, the external observation and the external recreation of nature, was destined to reach a peak that cannot be admired enough. But it has left behind riddles, so that in our age this external science must lead to spiritual science.
One is enriched and stimulated to occupy oneself with Raphael spiritually when one considers the peculiar struggle of Herman Grimm. And then one can feel how peculiar it must have been in the soul of Herman Grimm, and one comes to say the same thing that has been attempted here with all too inadequate means. It is strange that in the introduction to his consideration of Raphael we find a peculiar thought sprouting up in Herman Grimm's soul – just as thoughts sometimes arise from the deep, subconscious regions of the soul – a peculiar thought that makes one wonder: why precisely this thought when considering Raphael's soul?
I see developments of humanity that I will be denied the opportunity to participate in...
- he doubts that the soul will truly live again in later incarnations.
... but which seem to me so gloriously beautiful that for their sake it would be well worth while to begin human existence all over again.
It is strange, one might say, grotesquely dryly: precisely where Herman Grimm cannot approach Raphael's life because he cannot view it from the point of view of repeated earthly lives, the idea of repeated earthly lives occurs to him. When one looks at Raphael, he says, one is drawn to the thought of starting life all over again.
We need not comment further on such a thought, but merely let it hint, as it does from the subconscious in Herman Grimm, who will one day be the solution to the Raphael riddle. And if we must see the solution to many of the riddles that live in every human soul - the smallest as well as the greatest - in the fact of repeated lives on earth, then the great riddles of human development will also become particularly understandable to us at their peak if we are able to draw on the doctrine of repeated lives on earth. Then an infinitely deep meaning flows into the developmental history of humanity.
And when we are imbued with the feeling that souls like Raphael's themselves put the forces of humanity into them, in order to apply them in a new life in new forms, then we feel vividly towards Raphael what Herman Grimm once concluded and at the same time began his reflection on Raphael with, and with what we also want to conclude what should be explained by today's reflections on Raphael. Particularly when one sees, in the sense of spiritual-scientific observation, how deeply Raphael's soul is rooted in the whole sense of human development, then one really feels what Herman Grimm suggests at the beginning of his consideration of Raphael. And here too spiritual science shows us, not in abstract forms, what the inner life of the soul is, but it kindles devotion to everything that is full of spirit, full of strength and fruitful in human development. What Herman Grimm was able to say from the depths of his soul can only emerge from such a contemplation as we have given today. Yes, with such a feeling we may look up to Raphael, and so we can say:
Everyone wants to know about the life's work of such a person. Raphael has become one of the elements on which the higher education of the human spirit is based. We want to approach him because we need him for our well-being.
Yes, and the development of humanity is intertwined with such a power, which flows into its sphere because it will, must live in ever new aspects in this soul, and this power will in turn flow out into other souls. So spiritual research can also express the same words that Herman Grimm said:
People will always want to know about Raphael. About the young, beautiful painter who surpassed all the others. Who had to die young. Whose death was mourned by all of Rome. Even if Raphael's works are lost, his name will remain ingrained in people's minds.
And spiritual science can add: The power that was in his soul will live on and on, in ever new and new forms, in ever more creative development of humanity!