Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science

GA 69d — 29 March 1914, Munich

18. The Origin of Evil and the Evil in the Light of Spiritual Science

Among the world mysteries that not only impose themselves on man from a purely scientific point of view, but are repeatedly posed by life, is that of the source of evil and evil in the world. Allow me to speak this evening from the point of view of spiritual science about this particular puzzle of human life, and specifically of that spiritual science, the foundations of which I have been expounding to this audience for many years.

Before actually addressing the questions in question, I would like to briefly point out how the question of evil and the evils in the world have occupied the mind of the inquisitive throughout the centuries, and this incessant preoccupation should already show how deeply evil and the evils are felt by the human soul. It will be sufficient to mention briefly that the philosophers, from the most diverse points of view, according to which they saw evil and evils penetrating into life, tried to solve its riddle, but nevertheless did not fully come to terms with it. Let us go back to the philosophy of the third century B.C., known as Stoicism, which attempted to derive the principles of the universe and of human behavior from Greek thought. The Stoics were confronted with another question: How can one come to terms with human life when one feels the sting of evil within oneself in life and sees the otherwise wise governance of the world riddled with the evils of existence? If one wants to try to characterize how Stoicism coped with evil in human nature, one has to look at the states of consciousness arising from the foundations of the world. When the Stoic unfolded the powers of his consciousness, which he assumed to be in harmony with the world, he thought that only good could develop; but evil also occurred; then he said: It is when evil enters into the nature of the human soul that there is a state of twilight in the soul, a kind of spiritual powerlessness. And the Stoic then asked himself: how can the normal consciousness of our soul be dimmed, or even rendered unconscious? Because man is a complicated being and, even if he lives in one of these normal spheres with his consciousness, he sometimes descends into lower spheres, similar to when he falls asleep, and is imbued with what is not and should not normally be in him. The Stoic thus thinks of man as belonging to several worlds; if he follows the good, he is in his own sphere; if he falls to evil, he is among the same. In the visible world, there is something lower than man, in the animals, plants and minerals, a hierarchy of the natural kingdoms. That, then, into which man submerges in evil, must be there as a disharmony of nature. But here it can be said that this attempt at a solution shows the inadequacy of any such way of looking at these riddles, because the question remains unanswered as to why, when a person, in a state of diminished consciousness, descends below his normal sphere and evil comes to the fore, what significance does it have in human life, and what does he bring back from there at all? Philosophical thinking proved - and still proves - to be powerless to approach the problem of evil from this side.

Several centuries later, the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus attempted to approach the problem of evil from the standpoint of mystical philosophy. He reasoned that the human soul, through further development in the sense of spiritualization, can delve deeper into the spiritual and gradually break free from the laws of material existence. In this, Plotinus, and with him many philosophers, saw that which is the enemy of good; he thought that to the extent that the material world had an effect on the soul, evil intruded to the same extent, and so he saw evil in the material world, which was hostile to the spiritual. But even with this, mystical thinking did not come close to the problem of evil: it has not been explained why material forces oppose good and what the human soul should get from the fact that these forces can play into it.

Then came the attempt at an Augustinian solution, which is not really one. But in this attempt, something typical occurs that will reappear again and again from then on; namely, Augustine does not allow evil to exist in its reality. He thinks that only good exists, and just as light can be found everywhere, but not in its full strength, but in the most diverse gradations, so evil is only a weak good with evils. Such solutions have been taken up again and again; they are an example of simply denying the world's riddles that could not be explained by their representatives. If, for example, Campbell called evil only the shadow of good, we doubt with good reason that evil can be understood by this; for us it is not much more than if one wanted to say: Cold is just another, a subspecies of heat, it is not something positive, but something negative, so we don't need to put on a fur coat to protect ourselves from it. Such a triviality had to be cited as an objection to characterize the value of the latter attempts at a solution.

The theosophist and mystic Jakob Böhme delved deeper into the world and its causes, where evil also appears as a positive force when examined with the spiritual eye. He did not stop at concepts and ideas because he increased his entire soul powers to a high level of experience and then felt and experienced what is spiritual and divine. He recognized that evil is deeply rooted in the roots of existence; before him, the entire existence spoke as a “yes” that can only be fulfilled by a “no”.

How do we as human beings attain consciousness? When a person sleeps, under ordinary circumstances he has no consciousness; only when he wakes up and, in the familiar way, collides with the world everywhere, does normal consciousness arise, his self-consciousness, in what opposes the soul. Jakob Böhme sees this way of encountering its objects already in the world's divine primal existence, by having it emerge from the dark existence of the Ungrund (the groundlessness). At that time, the divine consciousness could, in Böhme's view, only ignite itself in its opposite, as in the material in the human being. According to Böhme, the divine source arose out of the ungrounded, and thus, with the former, also the good and the evil. Jakob Böhme goes further with this view than with a mere philosophical explanation. Darkness is present without needing an explanation; it is light that needs explanation. Thus Böhme, like Schelling, allows the effects to arise from the dark ungroundedness of the world, which they see as being permeated by the divine-spiritual existence, and which are thrown into the primal ground by the action of the divine. It is remarkable that Jakob Böhme positively recognizes evil and sees it not in the external sense world, but rooted in the foundations of existence, because every divine must raise itself and the world out of the ungrounded.

It is interesting that a contemporary of Jakob Böhme in Japan, Toju, the sage of Omi, who lived there around the middle of the seventeenth century, established a philosophy in the Far East that strives for a similar solution. His view is almost the same as that of Böhme, the divine “Yes” of the Ungrund rises and plays into the “No”, the “Ri” of the Ungrund into the “Ki” of the Urgrund.

Thus we see how each of them, in his own way, seeks to approach the riddle of evil and the evil one through philosophy and mysticism of varying depth. A certain powerlessness to approach the solution of this problem also appears in Lotze, in that brilliant philosopher who also tries to stand firmly on the ground of natural science with regard to evil. He says: One can assume that evil must be present in the world so that good can be drawn from it by overcoming it. But what about the animal kingdom, where evil cannot be overcome by education? Lotze therefore comes to no other conclusion than to say: evil is there, and we must believe that it seemed necessary for reasons that are not accessible to man, to the wise world government. Human knowledge is denied recognition in this regard.

Everything else that could be said on a large scale would demonstrate anew that conceptual, idealistic philosophy fails when it comes to explaining evil and that this philosophy itself comes to the conclusion that it is currently impossible to come close to solving the problem of evil and evils. And such problems become, for a philosophy tied to the brain as its tool, issues at the limits of its cognitive field; from its standpoint, it must indeed come to the conclusion that human knowledge has fundamental limits. In contrast to this, however, it must be pointed out that the human power of cognition undergoes a development that can be accelerated and deepened by one's own effort. When this happens and the problem of evil is approached with the means of spiritual science, a most remarkable solution arises, which may initially appear paradoxical.

We know that spiritual research is not based solely on the ordinary power of perception, but above all on that which initially lies dormant in man, but can be brought up from the unconscious through the means of meditation and concentration, through an unlimited effort of mental and soul activity, which are otherwise only used in their elementary state. Then, after such strengthening, the human being can experience himself outside of his body, like a table, for example, which stands in front of him in ordinary daily consciousness. Just as it is easily possible for the chemist to separate water into its two elementary components, hydrogen and oxygen, so, as in a kind of spiritual chemistry, the soul can be lifted out of the body and brought to independent activity, leaving the body in the physical world while it works in the spiritual world. In this state, the spiritual researcher experiences the existence of spiritual entities and the processes in the spiritual world as a higher reality.

What then is the nature of evil when man, as a spiritual researcher, develops spiritual eyes and ears? What kind of forces are these that have been dormant in the depths of the soul and are now awakened? The soul then feels in possession of powers that it cannot develop within the physical body, with its tendency towards the wrong, the ugly and the erroneous. However, when growing into the spiritual worlds, it sees that this no longer hinders it , if a person has a clear awareness of these shortcomings before his separation and, when the soul emerges from its corporeality, gains an insight into the fact that these weaknesses and shortcomings become sources of action in the spiritual world as soon as he can look courageously and boldly at his faults. Indeed, the spiritual researcher must train his senses to such an extent that he can look at all ugly passions; for if he does not allow them all to enter into his fully clear consciousness, they will have all the stronger an effect on the spiritual field of perception, penetrating his views and turning them into errors, hallucinations and fantasies. Thus a connection is established between the evil, the work of the spiritual researcher and his ascent into the spiritual world. What is available to the spiritual researcher and provides him with clarity rests in the depths of the soul of the undeveloped human being. When the spiritual researcher visualizes evil in his mind's eye and compares it to the forces that could lift him up into the spiritual world, it turns out that the forces through which the human being commits evil deeds in the world of the senses are transformed in the spiritual world, so that through them one can see with spiritual senses in the spiritual world. Seen there, they are the germs for the blossoming of clairvoyant powers. But this should not be misunderstood as if these elevated powers, which are transformed into their opposite in the physical world and develop into a source of evil and badness, would now readily develop clairvoyant powers in the human soul if they were preserved from taking possession of the physical body. It is precisely this that shines a deep light into human life and explains why it is an obstacle for the spiritual researcher if he does not recognize evil and it then flows into his soul life, where it then presents itself as illusion and error. Evil is like gravity, for example, at a lower level of nature, when it manifests itself in avalanches, volcanic eruptions, which can lead to great misfortune, while gravity, when it is properly and moderately directed, as in the case of a waterworks, will become a blessing for the population.

Just to clarify, it should be emphasized that the facts of spiritual science show that human life cannot be imagined as something simple, but must be understood as an interplay of different spheres of the world, whose forces can be beneficial in one world and harmful in another. The human organism as a whole must develop different forces in one particular sphere of life than in another. Thus, a locomotive can easily run over a person who, in despair, throws himself in front of its wheels and thus comes into conflict with the forces that could have been beneficial to him if he had used the train as a passenger. We thus become aware of how, on the one hand, forces must be developed that become evil on the other, and it is precisely these that can lead human beings up into the spiritual worlds; for in these forces, which have an evil effect in the physical world, higher forces prevail in a good, beneficial sense in the sphere that suits them. Thus, evil becomes transparent in its meaning as a product of the transformation of forces in human life, so that we finally arrive at the fact that this evil is the reversal of a higher good in a sphere of activity that is not appropriate for it.

Thus, when we approach the mystery of the life of evil people, we see that we must apply spiritual scientific forces that show how evil must be regarded in its true nature as justified, even though it can also be experienced as good in its equally true meaning in another world. The events of the sensory world and the history of human thought teach us that those who remain in the sensory world cannot explain how pain and evil can penetrate it. Schopenhauer and Hartmann, in their pessimistic worldview, explain well how evil predominates in the world, but they do not quite manage to say how, in their opinion, the divine-spiritual source can be freed from the evils of existence and how the human soul can be freed from evil. Wherever evil, pain, suffering, and so on appear in the physical world, the spiritual researcher finds that all this suffering appears as a seed for a development that is only to take place later in the spiritual world. We can illustrate this again with an analogy – [not to rely on it, because spiritual science does not rely on analogies, but on facts]: When a desperate person throws himself in front of a speeding locomotive, two spheres of the sensory world collide [which are incompatible with each other]: What is necessary for the unfortunate person to continue living is crushed, and the forces of the locomotive, which are otherwise beneficial, push themselves onto others with whom they are incompatible. But if the person rises in time, they could also be saved, and the forces of the locomotive could remain effective in a good sense; the soul of this person would be able to draw new strength from its sudden change of heart to make a new start in a further stage of life and recover completely.

What is put into life is intertwined in such a way that different spheres collide. The spiritual submerges into the physical-sensual and experiences itself there quite differently than it could experience itself in the spiritual alone. As a result, the spiritual grows stronger in a way that would not have been possible without this submersion. Indeed, one could say that certain developments could not have occurred in the spiritual world if evil had not existed in the world, just as no germ of a new plant can arise without the withering away of the flower and part of the mother plant. In every painful experience there is a necessary descent, so that the germ of something new, higher and more luminous, can develop in the bosom of a sphere that is initially foreign to it, from which something must be sacrificed for this purpose, that is, for this development; and in this dying away is the necessity for all evil. In the evil and pain of this world lie the seeds for a future development.

Take, for example, monistic materialism, which has developed from natural science, particularly in the nineteenth century, and under whose ideas some of our most ideal men live as if under a heavy burden. Because this philosophy has penetrated ever deeper into the human soul, it has made it possible to see through material laws, and everyone living today is unconsciously dominated by the knowledge of these laws of material existence, which have, however, pushed back the free view into the spiritual world. And so it became possible that in the nineteenth century minds such as Schopenhauer, Hartmann and Lotze developed, which pushed towards a conception of existence that should have satisfied man, but they could not gain any ideas about the spiritual that would have been suitable to defeat the ideas of natural science in spiritual superiority. Therefore, all that is painful in the world appears inexplicable to them; they see the withering away, but not the germ of hope that lies in the withering away, which must also be found within the dying flower and germinal cover, like the consequence of pain and evil in life. Everything in the physical realm is also affected by the spiritual world. How this should show itself according to its inner nature was not, or not sufficiently, recognized by the researchers of the nineteenth century. We see how difficult it is for the most capable representatives of their time to relate to the phenomena of the world, and how they cannot find a way out with the scientific views alone in many things; we see how such minds thirst for a satisfactory perspective on existence in their innermost soul life, but that their view is clouded by the pressure of the one-sidedly understood natural sciences. For example, this is how the world appears to him: it is like the corpse of a human being whom we know to have been abandoned by his soul. But what lies before us as a corpse is incapable of developing something soulful and spiritual from itself, as if from something left over from a pre-worldly spiritual existence of a divine spiritual substance that was there at the beginning. But in its present state no germ of a new spiritual can be found. This philosopher, Mainländer, who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century, has been appreciated by Privy Councillor Max Seiling in enthusiastic words, but in the facts he is quite right. When one sees the tragedy of such a mind, one recognizes the task of spiritual science in relieving people of the oppressive burden of nineteenth-century ideas, especially in the case of such significant minds as Mainländer, who takes life so seriously, seeing in human existence only old age and evil, pain and death. In contrast to this, however, spiritual science also sees that in all this there is also something alive, the spiritual, which has sprouted towards the future and could not develop later in its special way if it had not been pushed down at times into physical life as evil and pain. From such a point of view, however, one can no longer speak of the “philosophy of pain and its redemption”; then it would be absurd to speak of this redemption - in view of the analogy already used with the plant germ, the so-called seed, for whose development often the whole mother plant, but at least a part of it, the flower and so on, must die, which one would have to regard as an evil for the latter. In the same way, the new and perfect cannot develop from a spiritual germ without evil and pain being aroused in the physical world. If we look at all this from a higher spiritual point of view, we will realize that in all our efforts to alleviate evil, we cannot be released from it in the usual sense, but must learn to endure it. If the painful and suffering in the present is sometimes quite difficult, the gratifying fruit will lie in the future and then come into effect. From such an understanding arises a tolerable, peaceful and industrious outlook on life; who knows, out of suffering, as out of a germ, in the future, the more perfect develops. He who sees the better future in a perhaps painful present, even if he does not close himself to the imperfect and ugly in active remedy. Even when the leaves and blossoms of existence fall away, the germ grows and endures beneath them, enabling a future, richer development, and we understand: what appears to us as evil and suffering in the physical world is a parallel phenomenon to what, in the spiritual world, enables a future, more perfect existence. With this view, which corresponds to reality, we can get over the bitter, the painful and the sorrowful; for in evil and the evils we see something inexplicable only in physical existence, we can only understand and thus bear it when we penetrate to the source of all these processes, to the spiritual world. There the otherwise terrible sight of the sensual-physical world is transformed.

A real and impulsive ethic is also based on all these things. Not a sermonizing of morals emerges from this, which in itself would be easy, but through this, man gets to know the source of evil and evil in the spiritual world, and this and a further urge for knowledge will lead him ever deeper and more thoroughly out of the sensual world and into the supersensible world, as its cause. Spiritual science is able to point out that all evil, all pain and suffering, will remain a mystery to human knowledge as long as their sources are seen only in the world of the senses. Only spiritual science can throw a true light on human life and on all human activity, since it calls back to the origin, which is not really present in the sense world, but teaches the correct form of evil only by showing it in its good origin, which it has in the spiritual world. To summarize, we can present what has been said today in human perception as follows: Much in the world will remain hidden to the seeking soul that does not want to go beyond the physical world in its research; it can easily fall into despair if it does not have the courage to penetrate to the very foundations where life's greatest mysteries lie hidden, to their source in the spiritual world. Spiritual science will lead people more and more to the solution of what oppresses them in their souls. They will be able to come to terms with their existence in the most diverse life situations if they know that evil and ills have their origin not only in the sense world but above all in the supersensible world, recognizing them as the germ of a better future, influenced from the spiritual world, which is also the home of their soul.

Answering questions

Question: So can life only be understood when suffering is evenly distributed?

Rudolf Steiner: When talking about oxygen, we should not expect to solve all of chemistry's questions at once. This is a different question here: the distribution of evil and evil. There is not only one life. Let us assume we have a picture: a variety of things are depicted on it, we cover everything except for one ugly thing: only when the cover is removed does it become apparent that there is something ugly in that very place. [It is the same with knowledge: if it is not merely theoretical, it is not acquired out of joy and pleasure, but out of suffering. Joy is something that is gratefully accepted in life. It is not a matter of asceticism, but anyone who has come to a realization that has permeated his entire soul and is asked, “Would you give up your joy or your pain?” would answer, “I would leave joy and pleasure if only I could keep the pain I have endured, because I owe the realization to it.” And so, when viewed from a higher standpoint, a great deal leads to a justification of suffering and pain.

Question: [Regarding] Hatred, Cruelty, Cannibalism: How can they be the sources of a good strength in the other world?

Rudolf Steiner: I did not say that, it did not even occur to me! There is no cannibalism in the spiritual world, so nothing can be developed from cannibalism in the spiritual world. One can say, for example, that a philanthropic soul would carry out all kinds of good deeds with lion power: that would be something completely different; but one must not say that the lion's power of devouring becomes philanthropy.

Rudolf Steiner: This question is asking me to answer with a simple “yes” or “no”: No.

Question: What is good and what is evil?

Rudolf Steiner: To ask this question after today's lecture seems a bit strange. It is an educational habit of the last few centuries that one asks: What is this? What is that? — What is actually contained in this “what”? One does not notice how shortsighted such questions are. But the question can be deepened. As the question is asked, one cannot answer with an absolute definition. From the whole of life, one should explain every phenomenon of life. So, if good is to be explained, yes, many definitions can really be found. For example: Good is that which is so placed in life that the life of this person is most promoted; or what best satisfies one's own conscience, and so on and so on. Someone may come along and say that evil is something fluid, or time, or a tribe. But that is not what it is about, whether in a partial or general sense; one must try to explain it as has been done today. Question: Good and evil: [Is there no difference]?

Rudolf Steiner: There is nothing to be done with this question either. Gravity, which is extraordinarily beneficial when it drives the earth around the sun, can cause evil as an avalanche rolling down from the mountain. The lecture was not intended to teach reevaluation in a different sphere, but change into a different sphere [hinein]. Even if people do not know what evil they do, that is not the point: it is completely irrelevant whether something happens consciously or unconsciously in the sphere of decay. The lecture was not an apology for evil, as if to say: Those who are truly evil are the best, because they have the gift of clear-sighted good. It was not stated that the best person is the great criminal, but rather that there is no “beyond good and evil” in the sensual world, only in the supersensible world.