The Inner Nature and Essence of the Human Soul

GA 80b — 5 March 1922, Berlin

6. The Harmonization of Art, Science and Religion through Anthroposophy

Dear attendees! Today's lecture makes no other claim than to be merely an introduction to the considerations that I will be discussing in the next few days, considerations about the relationship between anthroposophy and the various fields of science and life.

One of the most significant facts of recent intellectual life is undoubtedly the coexistence, collaboration and thinking together of Goethe and Schiller, especially in the very early days of their friendship in the last decade of the eighteenth century. And it is extraordinarily significant that during this time, when two of the greatest geniuses of humanity found each other intimately, a burning intellectual question between these personalities was, so to speak, discussed and considered on all sides. Both Goethe and Schiller were artists at heart. But during the period in question, they were deeply concerned with the relationship between art and knowledge, as revealed in scientific observation, on the one hand, and, although somewhat less clearly, the relationship between art and religious feeling and perception in humans, on the other. And if one lets the keynote sink in, which resounds through all Goethe's and Schiller's discussions of the mutual relationship between knowledge, art and religion, then one comes to say: Above all, for these two minds, this question was one of the following: How do the powers of knowledge, art and religion work together in the human being to lead the human being to live out and express his full, harmonious human nature for himself and for the world?

Anyone who enters into this lively treatment of the question will no doubt be most deeply impressed by what has come to light in Schiller's examination of this question in his, unfortunately far too little appreciated, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” and by what Goethe added to Schiller's reflection in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, which forms the conclusion of the “Conversations of the German People”.

on the Aesthetic Education of Man” and what Goethe added to Schiller's reflections in his ‘Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’, which forms the conclusion of the ‘Conversations of the German Emigrants’. And I do not believe that one can get more thoroughly into the question, which I would like to discuss a little today, than by first focusing one's attention on the position of two such outstanding minds. For everything is, so to speak, characteristic about the fact that I have mentioned; the point in time when Goethe and Schiller feel the deepest need to enlighten themselves about this question is characteristic; it is characteristic that they use what their friendship and their life together to clarify this question, which seemed so extraordinarily important to them at the time; and in many other respects, one can still emphasize the significance of gaining an understanding of the question of today's topic from an examination of the interaction between Goethe and Schiller.

On the one hand, Schiller saw the scientific consideration, to which he was led in a certain sense by what his external position had to become at the time, by his professorship in Jena, and also by the fact that he wanted to enlighten himself about the philosophical foundations of art from Kantian philosophy. But every such question took on a character that led to the general human, to the more comprehensive question: What is the actual essence of man, what contributes most to this essence of man within the development of culture and the mind? And so the question became: How does man attain the possibility of coming onto the path of his destiny, out of knowledge, out of science, out of artistic striving? This question became a burning one for Schiller. He posed this question in the essay he wrote on the aesthetic education of the human race. At this time, Schiller often said to himself that there was something unsatisfactory about scientific observation when one wants to strive for the highest, purest development of the human being. Schiller made some remarkable statements in this regard. For example, when he received a piece of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister” and read it with the utmost interest, he wrote to Goethe about his feelings about the artistic treatment on Goethe's part in this work, beginning with the sentence: “The artist is, after all, the only true human being, and the best philosopher is, after all, only a caricature next to him.”

What did Schiller mean by such a radical statement? He meant that by engaging in artistic creation or immersing himself in works of art in an appreciative, artistic way, man feels his full humanity to be inwardly active and inwardly alive, and that what he experiences in true works of art is something quite unsatisfactory compared to what he can experience in scientific knowledge. It was out of such feelings that Schiller arrived at the peculiar solution which he gives to this question in his Letters on Aesthetics. He said to himself something like the following: When we, as human beings, are most closely in touch with the highest things here on earth, when we are devoted to the contemplation of the world of ideas, which after all is the goal of all scientific endeavor, then we feel the necessity to be logical; we dare not deviate from the laws of reason, which, as it were, takes possession of our spirit and our soul and prescribes the paths for us. We are not truly free inwardly when we engage in this kind of cognitive activity, and in our inner freedom we can only truly live out our humanity.

In this cognitive activity, Schiller sees, as it were, the one pole of human activity; he sees the other pole in man's surrender to the natural necessity of his own being, to his instincts, his drives, to his capacity for desire, which in ordinary life emerges from his lower organism and his drives. It is out of these impulses that man acts, it is on these that he initially bases his life. But one is surrendered to the natural necessity of one's own being when one is surrendered to one's drives and instincts; one follows, so to speak, one's drives and instincts as much as outer nature follows its natural conditions; one is not free. Between these two states, surrender to the necessity of reason and surrender to the necessity of nature, Schiller seeks that “middle state” in which the human being can find himself, and which he calls the aesthetic state, that state in which man is as an artist or as an artistic enjoyer. How does Schiller now describe this middle state from his experience of art?

He says: When we enjoy a work of art as human beings, we do not feel the rigid, strict rational necessity that must guide us in our understanding, but nor do we feel the mere desire that lives in our urges and instincts; for when we work our way up to the free enjoyment of the beautiful, we must not get stuck in what only our sensual urges give us. The spiritless sensual impulses can never rise to the real understanding of the work of art. But in giving ourselves to the artistic, we do not live in an abstract, spiritually withdrawn, unsensual way, as is the case with scientific knowledge when it advances to the level of ideas; we live, because what appears sensually is also is the artistic, in that middle state of devotion to a sensual thing, but we live in devotion to a sensual thing in such a way that at the same time our own sensual nature is laid aside, that we are not devoted to its necessity, that we have spiritualized it, ensouled it. We have descended from the rigid necessity of reason into sensuality, which is appropriate and congenial to us in the artistic; we have torn ourselves away from the rigid necessity of reason; but on the other hand we have also torn ourselves away from the oppressive necessity of nature. In this intermediate state, we are truly free human beings. When we create art, for example, we do not follow methodical rules like those we have to observe in science; we surrender to the free play of what rules in our own soul. The inner free lawfulness, which at the same time appeals to our sympathy and antipathy, guides us as we create art. We are in a free state of mind.

It is from this background that Schiller dares to speak out so radically in these aesthetic letters. In this activity, which is governed by the senses and yet is spiritual, as spiritual as the necessity of reason without surrendering to this necessity of reason, and as sensual as only life in sensuality can be without losing itself to the necessity of nature, Schiller's gaze is drawn to the free play of the child, who does not yet know a necessity of knowledge, but who has also not yet immersed himself so deeply in his sensuality, as he indulges in his free play, unfolding from his sympathy and antipathy. It was in this mood that Schiller coined the radical sentence: Man is only fully human when he plays, and he only plays in the true sense of the word when he is fully human.

What Schiller expressed here belongs to a higher level of spiritual development. Here the German spirit was trying, so to speak, to enlighten itself about humanity from an extraordinarily high point of view. The German spirit was trying to grasp the whole inner essence of the artistic by asking: What can art be in order to bring man as high as possible in his development through the artistic essence?

Schiller was faced with this question. It was no less pressing for Goethe. Goethe followed with interest all the thoughts and ideas that Schiller developed, as it were, through the question: How is man made free through the content of his spiritual life? But Goethe, by nature, could not get used to the more abstract trains of thought in Schiller's aesthetic letters. For Goethe, who was an artist in a completely different, in a broader sense, than Schiller, the question was not as simple as it was for Schiller. Goethe said to himself: Schiller sees three forces at work in man: the necessity of reason, the necessity of nature, and in between the aesthetic state; from their mutual relationship, he wants to recognize the free human soul in a spiritual way. But it's not that simple, Goethe said to himself. Because this human soul is something endlessly complicated; you can't see through it by just piling up three such abstract forces, no matter how ingeniously you philosophize about it. Goethe couldn't just follow Schiller's philosophy. For him, the answer to the same question took the form of an image, that powerful image with the most diverse sub-images that we encounter in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. I will now pass over all the other figures contained in this fairy tale and describe the actual situation, how the soul wants to reach its goals, its freedom, its experience of its true nature, by different paths.

The paths that the individual characters – there are about twenty of them – take in Goethe's fairy tale are all paths of the soul, not intended allegorically or symbolically, but in the way that Goethe had to speak of these paths of the soul. Anyone who sees allegories or symbols in something like this “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” has not yet penetrated into the real, genuine spiritual life, as it prevails in Goethe, for example. If someone says: In these figures I see only allegorical or symbolic representations of states of mind or the like, then he has no idea how rich Goethe's experiences were on the individual soul paths, and how Goethe could not express what he wanted to reveal about the paths of the soul in any other way than in images that are ambiguous but also promising. But I would just like to point out the target figures: all the different personalities in this fairy tale ultimately move towards the temple of the four kings, towards the temple of the golden king, the silver king, the bronze king and the king who is composed of these three substances in an irregular manner. And we see how Goethe wants to lead the entire plot towards the goal of a certain relationship emerging with the golden king, the silver king and the bronze king, who, in a sense, by acting on another person in the fairy tale – on the beautiful lily – the essence of the world onto the deepest human; and as these three mighty personalities radiate the innermost essence of the world onto humanity, we see how the fourth king, who is chaotically mixed from the substances of the other three, collapses into himself.

If one tries to express in somewhat abstract words what Goethe felt at this encounter between the fair lily and the four kings, one must say: He wanted to show how the human soul, if it wants to come to true humanity, must ultimately arrive at a certain relationship to what the golden king represents: the cognitive, that which leads man to wisdom; how he must arrive at the silver king, who gives man that which is beauty, that which is artistic; and how he must arrive at that which is represented in the brazen king, at the good, at real pious deeds. Thus, for Goethe, man ultimately arrives at knowledge as it lives in science, at the beautiful as it lives in art, and at the good as it exists in the religious. But in that Goethe portrays how, separately, each of the three kings radiates this threefold world-being of wisdom, beauty, and goodness upon man, while at the same time man comes to comes to his true humanity, as that which previously influenced him – the mixed king, who is chaotically mixed together from the three substances – collapses and no longer has any existence. Goethe wants to show how true humanity can only be achieved through a very specific relationship between wisdom, beauty and goodness, or – as one could also say – between science, art and religion, in that these three revelations of the world have an effect on man.

What Goethe means by this should not really be expressed in abstract sentences, because it represents, one might say, the whole sum of Goethean experience in relation to wisdom or science, to art or beauty, to religion as it manifests itself in the kindness of human beings. Goethe had to attempt to depict in individual images what Schiller presented more in abstract, philosophical ideas. That alone is significant. It is significant for the reason that, out of his entire epoch with its characteristic intellectual life, Goethe – like Schiller – came to the question: How must science, art and religion fit into human life? And he found no way to express this other than in a fairy-tale-like way at first. Nevertheless, one can see that for him it was a burning question, just as it was for Schiller. Schiller saw in the merely cognizant a caricature of the true human being. But ever since he had come to a real, awakened consciousness of humanity, Goethe actually always strove to seek the foundations of the artistic essence and artistic creation and the significance of this artistic essence and creation for humanity in the nature of the world itself. And one arrives, I would say, at extraordinarily intense ideas and feelings in the indicated area when one follows how Goethe intensively studies Spinoza's philosophy with Herder, how he reads Spinoza's “Ethics” with Herder, how he wants to gain ideas from this ethics about how divine necessity, in its conformity to law, rules and weaves through the world. In a sense, God in the workings of the world – that is what Goethe wants to bring to life in himself by studying Spinoza. But basically he remains unsatisfied. And how he remains unsatisfied can be seen from the extraordinarily characteristic statements to his friends in the letters he wrote to his Weimar friends from his Italian journey. There, in Italy, he felt that he was in an element that suddenly began to satisfy him when confronted with works of art that gave him an idea of the artistic nature of the Greeks. We read in the letters that he wrote back to Weimar the words: Now, in the face of these Italian works of art, I am getting a feeling for Greek art; I have the suspicion that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of. Goethe believed he recognized: the eternal, iron laws of nature that he wanted to feel from Spinoza's philosophy, but could not find there, but which he felt from his own studies of nature and which he was then able to trace into his art in order to feel science and art in a unity. He could only feel this unity where he believed he was looking at the essence of Greek art. He believed that the Greeks had come to understand the essence of natural necessity, and that they had elevated this understanding and essence in their works of art, but in such a way that the same thing lives in these works of art – but in a transformed form – that otherwise only lives within nature. By feeling this, by feeling the necessity of artistic creation in what he now imagined to be Greek art, Goethe came to the shattering utterance, which he now wrote to his Weimar friends, standing before the works of art that he was able to see at the time: “There is necessity, there is God!”

We can see the path that Goethe took: he sought out necessity, divine conformity to law in the nature of the world, from the philosophy of Spinoza in order to gain knowledge; he stood in front of the works of art that he regarded as the most perfect, and he sensed from them what he strove for with all the fibres of his soul. It was in the presence of these works of art that he experienced what he felt to be a sense of the divine. But we also see from this that Goethe could not simply understand art as a mere optional addition to life, but that he strove to recognize how art is deeply rooted in the roots of the world in its forms. And perhaps a particularly characteristic saying of Goethe's, which, I would like to say, leads very deeply into what Goethe experienced and felt in this area. He once objected to speaking of the “idea of truth”, the “idea of good”, the “idea of beauty”. You can read about this in his “Sayings in Prose”. He said: There is only one idea, and it lives in nothing other than in the perceived all-embracing spirituality, as the form in which it can appear to man. He says of this idea that it can express itself as truth, as beauty, as goodness. In a sense, Goethe wanted to have established in the roots of the world, in the nature of the world, that which he shaped artistically; he wanted what the artist created to have its source not only in free human arbitrariness, but at the same time, as a free artist, the human being should stand within the nature of the world. And so it was that not only the question of true humanity developed for him through the question of art, but also the other question: How does the essence of the world prevail in man when he is truly an artist? How do the laws of the world continue to work in the creative, free artistic human being?

I have only mentioned this because it shows how, in the case of Goethe and Schiller, the full depth of the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion in the nature of man himself emerges in the spiritual life of modern times. I believe that anyone who approaches the minds of Goethe and Schiller with both an open mind and heartfelt devotion must feel this question, the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion. For these two outstanding geniuses of humanity considered it one of the most important questions in their lives to fathom how the world essence is a unified one, what relationship man gains to this world essence when he is cognitively active, when he is artistically active and when he is religiously active. Now, I would like to say that the deepest inspiration for a correct, intensely deep approach to this question can be drawn from Goethe and Schiller. But it cannot be denied that we, in an epoch that is so long after Goethe and Schiller, must also freely confront what they raised as a significant human question. And so it was precisely from a deeper, from a truly — I may say it without being immodest — devoted study of Goethe and Schiller that the human question appeared to me as the question of freedom at the time when I set about writing my 'Philosophy of Freedom'. It could not make sense to me that man is a truly free being only by living in the artistic. What Schiller asserted is certainly the case: that in the cognitive observation of the world of rational necessity, one must, so to speak, follow a spiritual compulsion. But something else is at hand: when one follows this rational necessity, when one devotes oneself to scientific observation in this sense, then one lives in what one experiences of nature, of the world in general, and even if it is the ideas of the laws of nature, in ideas.

One lives with it in images, and one feels that one cannot really fathom anything in nature unless one allows free inner human activity to prevail, and that even if the necessity of nature forces us, it cannot force us to act, but that we must freely take up the activity. One feels the pictorial nature of what nature and the world always are, and then, in knowing, one feels one's own free human nature in a very special way. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. When one advances to the real impulses of moral action, and when these impulses of moral action become pure thinking, then man lives again, prompted to action by images. We feel the pictorial nature in our cognition, and when we bring our morality to the same pictorial nature, then we feel ourselves in freedom. This is also what actually made man free in the age in which science emerged in the modern sense.

Only life in that which does not actually immerse itself in nature, and therefore also has its limits in relation to nature, only life in the realm of thought, in the realm of images, frees the human being from the necessities into which he is placed as a natural being, and only then could scientific activity have the possibility of full inner freedom when it really brought people to inner pictorial experience. One cannot be unfree in the face of images. One can be pushed or shoved into action by some other force, physically, emotionally or intellectually. Imagine whether you can be prompted to do anything by a mere image — compare mental images with linguistic images — they are powerless and impotent. And so our images are powerless and impotent in a moral sense. But if we start from mere images, then we are free human beings in moral action. It must therefore be said that man is a truly free being not only in the aesthetic state, but also when he elevates his morality to such heights that he can rule, when he devotes himself to a truly free cognitive activity.

Thus it becomes necessary to seek the inner harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a new way in the post-Goethean age. And anthroposophy, which does not want to be just any old theoretical, abstracted world view, but which wants to be a spiritual content that has an effect on the whole, on the full human being, because it and flows from the whole, complete human being, anthroposophy must, above all, seek to relate what it can give to knowledge, to artistic creation, and to religious experience. I would like to say that this does not lead to some kind of artificiality of the anthroposophical path, but rather that this anthroposophical path naturally leads to it, and by standing on anthroposophical ground, one can be fully in harmony with the particular way of posing questions in this field, as it arose with Schiller and oethe.

Dear attendees, I have to draw on something that is indeed one of the elements of anthroposophical research, but which I would like to sketch at least in a few lines to show how anthroposophy comes to a harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a very natural way, and not through some contrived invention.

If one wants to characterize how anthroposophy proceeds, it is of course always necessary to point out how the forces of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul, and are not active in the ordinary life of man and in ordinary science, must be developed through certain intimate soul exercises. And the importance of such soul exercises for human life must also be spoken of in the most varied ways. At this point I would merely like to suggest that these soul exercises consist of meditation and concentration, but in a completely different way than they were once practiced in the Orient. In such meditations and concentrations, where the cultivation of thoughts is undertaken in a very special way, thoughts become more alive and more intense. Through through special exercises, one comes to live, not in mere shadowy thoughts, as in ordinary science, but in such strengthened thoughts, to live as one otherwise only lives in outer sense experience, where one is given over to sense experiences with one's eyes and ears. The essence of meditation is that one is given over to the life of ideas in an intense way, as one never otherwise lives in mere thinking. In this way thoughts come to life. One feels how one gradually frees oneself from the physical conditions of thinking and, as it were, learns to think free of the body. Thinking becomes, without becoming pathological, inwardly fuller, more intense. One arrives at images. What I have called in my writings imaginative cognition occurs. Through this one arrives at the first significant results of the anthroposophical world view.

When one has strengthened one's thinking in this way for a while, so that it has become more intense and alive and no longer needs the body for support, then one no longer experiences one's thoughts as a mere tableau of memories, but rather as an overview of the workings of forces within us that are in us because we are human beings on earth. In our contemplation, we have a tableau before us in which we see how our thought life has become intense and has become related to what works in us as growth forces, what itself works in us as forces of metabolism. We learn to recognize that, in addition to our physical body, which is already in space, there is a time body, a body of formative forces within us, which permeates our physical body and is in perpetual motion. We see through this body of formative forces in a single tableau. And by so elevating ourselves to get to know the first supersensible aspect of the human being in this body of formative forces, we get to know a thinking that is much more alive than ordinary, abstract thinking, so that we also come to experience all those realities where the thoughts of time overflow into organic growth. One sees into the workings of a spiritual body that has permeated us since our birth. By rising up to it, one comes to look very particularly clearly at that epoch in our human development which otherwise always lies outside our consciousness. In ordinary life we remember our earlier childhood back to a certain point. Before this point, up to birth, there is a time that is about as dark to us as the experiences of the soul in the state of sleep.

A kind of sleep state manifests itself to us, looking backwards from the point from which we remember, to birth, in this period of our life. This epoch of our earthly life begins to shine forth in its essence before imaginative knowledge, before this looking into the spiritual world. I would like to say that, alongside what is experienced as knowledge, a spiritual body, a body of formative forces, rules in us. Alongside this, one gets the great, powerful, moving impression of what has ruled in us since we entered the physical world at birth. At that time, the forces that shape our brain so plastically out of the wisdom of the world, so that it can become a tool of wisdom, were most intensely at work; the brain's formative forces shaped the rest of the organism. By elevating ourselves to an understanding of the body of formative forces, we experience what has ruled and woven in the very earliest years of childhood, and how everything that once works in human life, even if it weakens for other epochs, will appear again later. Thus, what is effective in the first years of childhood is most particularly, most intensely effective in shaping the human being during these years; it is also effective later, but then only quietly, while in the first years of childhood it is powerfully, mightily effective. And we learn to look at the forces that prevail in the first years of childhood, when the human being has just overcome infancy and still particularly needs the care of the outer world; we learn to look at how he, emerging from the first earthly dreaming, forming the physical human organism; we learn to look at something that now makes the impression on us that it is artistically greater, more sublime than anything we can develop in the world in terms of art. And by looking at it, we learn to recognize what the essence of artistic imagination and artistic enjoyment actually consists of. Only now do we begin to understand the real connection between later human life and earlier life, to recognize it in artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

When we look directly at a work by a creative genius, we see that this genius has absorbed more from this first childhood period into later life than any non-artistic person. Likewise, a person who is particularly good at artistic enjoyment has more of these powers radiating into his life than an abstract person, a dullard. Without wishing to be in any way sophisticated, we learn to apply a biblical saying in the following way: Unless you learn to recognize the importance of the first childlike state, you cannot enter the realm of artistic experience. — It simply pours itself into artistic life with its special organic powers. That is why art is felt to be such an invigorating element in the whole human being, because art brings to life in us what was the strongest life at the starting point of our earthly existence.

So I would like to say: the primal forces of artistic activity in man arise quite naturally when we in anthroposophy — purely cognitively — ascend to the first supersensible, to the formative forces body of the human being, to imaginative knowledge. And if we then want to ascend to the next level of knowledge, we must indeed develop it in the following way. We develop the first, imaginative stage by repeatedly placing certain ideas at the center of our thinking in a meditative state of concentration, thereby awakening our powers of thought. However, we must also develop the opposite activity. We must learn to withdraw from our consciousness those images to which we have first directed all our attention, so that they become fixed in our consciousness to a certain extent, and then to create a completely empty consciousness. This creation of an empty consciousness is the second important step on the way to supersensible knowledge.

When we have developed this empty consciousness to such an extent that we know while awake: we have nothing in our consciousness now, neither of external impressions nor of internal memories, we have made the consciousness completely empty, then a spiritual world, hitherto unknown to us, penetrates into this consciousness; we thus make acquaintance with a spiritual world, as we make acquaintance with the ordinary world through our outer senses and through ordinary consciousness. Inspired knowledge then enters and with it the second result of anthroposophical research. We can now also suppress the whole formative forces body, everything that particularly organizes that from which we can ultimately gain an artistic sense, we can suppress it and create an empty consciousness in relation to the formative forces body. But then we have the essence of our spiritual soul before our soul eye, as it was before we descended from a spiritual-soul world into the earthly world through birth or, let us say, through conception with this spiritual soul from a spiritual-soul world, before we took on flesh and blood through our parents. We are now learning to recognize the eternity of the human soul – on the one hand, on the side of the unborn.

But we also learn, when we turn our feelings and perceptions to what arises for us as an insight into the spiritual and eternal being, to recognize now how this human soul lived in a purely spiritual and divine environment before its earthly existence, how, as it were, divine powers radiated through it in its existence, like natural forces in earthly existence. Just as the substances and forces that we absorb in our earthly existence give rise to those forces that in turn live in our organism, so the divine-spiritual rays of light live in our spiritual-soul existence before we penetrate into earthly life. There we are permeated by divine forces, just as we are permeated by natural forces here in physical earthly life.

We can certainly stop at mere anthroposophical spiritual science; then we come to the body of formative forces. But we can also turn our feelings, our heart life, to what the knowledge of this body of formative forces gives us; then we encounter the liveliness of the full human scope of what permeates us in the first years of our existence like a dream-like, like a sleeping life, but what works in the formation of our physical body. Likewise, we can remain purely cognitively and scientifically in the contemplation of the spiritual soul within us, as it was permeated by divine spiritual forces before our earthly existence. But we can turn to this being itself and turn our feelings to it; then we learn to recognize what this soul experienced inwardly at that time. It experienced the urge to embrace earthly existence with the divine spiritual forces that surrounded it.

The reason why the soul has immersed itself in the earthly body is to connect with the physical through the divine spiritual. This reason is none other than that which lives in the shadowy afterimage of earthly existence in religious feeling and religious piety. If we have religious piety, we may not concern ourselves with what this soul-like nature is before it has descended into earthly life. These are the powers of feeling and perception towards which the soul soul strove to live the soul-life into earthly existence, that is, when it strove for physical embodiment; but when we think of these powers in the lingering image of the earth, they live themselves out in religious life. Just as art is a radiance of the forces of the first child life into later life, so religious life is an echo of what the soul went through before descending into physical life.

And so we find that if we stop at the level of knowledge and rise to the idea there, as long as we dwell in mere earthly life, where we have to use our organism for knowledge, we find only knowledge, alongside which stands art, which can at most be considered aesthetically, and alongside which stands religion, which can be considered theologically. But with physical science we do not arrive at a living transition into artistic feeling or religious experience. When we rise to anthroposophical knowledge, we have thoroughly true scientific knowledge, but this rises to imagination. Imagination can remain thoroughly scientific. By remaining so, it does not become artistic. Therefore, no one needs to fear that by creating art they will fall back into allegory and symbolism if they are imbued with anthroposophy; they would do so if they merely stopped at ideas.

But anthroposophy is not like other sciences in that it stops at mere ideas; it continues to penetrate, feeling its way from the contemplation of the body of formative forces to the experience of the laws of that which first shaped us in our earliest childhood and continues to influence our lives, and through which we feel so stimulated in our imagination. This is not to say anything against the elementary nature of imaginative creation; but imagination can be stimulated by advancing in the manner described to epochs of life that would otherwise elude external observation. And by advancing further to the experience of the soul before its descent into earthly existence, one comes to sense what lives here on earth in the afterimage of religious life and experience, when we live in such a way that our life through what God is in us is at the same time something willed by God, so that the mood of doing what is willed by God is the echo of what was an important deed willed by God when God Himself still worked in the soul as a spiritual deed before the soul descended into earthly life.

If we consider the whole of human life with the eternal nature of the human soul, we find that there is a natural transition from science to art, to religion. For that which appears in knowledge appears in art and in religion if we follow it only to the corresponding human spheres. I would like to say that Anthroposophy cannot help but stimulate the human being artistically when it takes hold of him in his capacity for feeling and emotion. And Anthroposophy cannot help but, when it takes hold of the human being in his or her life of will, allow that person to feel an echo of how, in some way, they have committed themselves to the divine world-shaper in their earthly existence, and to do what is willed by God. Then the will is stimulated to religious experience.

Dear attendees! In the ancient mysteries, what later divided into three for the sake of humanity's enrichment, emanated from a unity. In the ancient mysteries, in the wisdom schools of gray antiquity, which are hardly known to external history but which anthroposophy is getting to know, science was so imbued with spirit that, in relation to the human soul, this spirit-imbued striving was also beauty. What a person recognized, he incorporated into matter; he made his wisdom creative and artistic. And by feeling what he learned in his liveliness as the world-ruling divine-wise, the mystery school student offered his act of worship to the divine, so to speak, having re-created sacred art into a cult. Science, art and religion were one. Man could not remain in this unity. For the sake of human wealth, the threefold division into art, science and religion had to arise: into scientific certainty, artistic taste and religious belief.

Today, however, we have once again reached a point where the inner harmonization of science, art and religion has become a question for the most outstanding minds. We have seen this in Goethe and Schiller. Today we must again strive to bring together that which has come to us in outward differentiation. Anthroposophy does not want to contribute to the chaotic mixing of religion, science and art, after they have historically differentiated – and this has its justification; it would thereby fall prey to the fourth king in Goethe's fairy tale. It seeks to develop wisdom, the gift of the golden king, beauty, the gift of the silver king, virtue and religion, the gift of the brazen king, in an ideal separation; then they can radiate together into the human being. When the human being directs his attention to the whole human being, then what lives in him as the whole of life, and which is particularly expressed in the first years of childhood, becomes the source of nourishment and also of the fertilization of art. But what the soul has experienced before descending to earth becomes the source of fertilization of religious life.

Without any chaotic mixing of these three areas, anthroposophy in particular can lead people in a completely natural way to science, art and religion, to truth, beauty and goodness, by allowing each to exist in its own nature, but still allowing it to have an effect on people in such a way that in human experience, what is found as truth may encounter the beautiful, the artistic – and respond to it as directly related, as another expression of the nature of the world – and in turn encounter the good, the religious, and also respond to it as another expression of the nature of the world. Goethe, although not yet standing on the standpoint of Anthroposophy, felt this very strongly. “He who possesses science and art also has religion; he who possesses neither, let him have religion!” — thus spoke Goethe; and thus, in essence, must Anthroposophical spiritual science speak again today, in the world being, forming three interlocking organized links: religion, art and science. And man finds his true humanity only by allowing the essence of each of these world revelations to permeate his soul, while maintaining his full individuality. But in him they find each other in full inner harmonization when he becomes a whole human being through it. And in this harmonization of science, art and religion, man can find his full humanity, his development worthy of a human being through all levels of existence of his being.