Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge II

GA 90b — 15 January 1905, Berlin

III. The Deification of Man – The Task of the Arts

The medieval mystics speak of a so-called deification of man. It is an extraordinarily apt expression for an inner process, for certain spiritual experiences. It is based on the fact that man can develop more and more through his inner core, can let the spiritual man shine through the outer shell more and more.

That is the essence of divinization. Those who speak of it have in mind that the human being also originated from the spiritual. As it were, descending from the spiritual to the physical existence, in order to move up again to its starting point. Why did it have to take the path away from divinity, if the path back must be taken again? A prominent mystic of the present day has said that those who have gained even a little experience no longer ask this question so easily, and basically Greek mysticism has given the answer by calling the soul a bee. Just as the bee leaves the beehive, flies out into the fields and collects honey, the extract, the noblest, from the plant and brings it back – the soul does the same in the world, sets out into the fields, collects wisdom treasures for examination, which can only be experienced here for the souls, in order to enrich the dwelling place of God again. We could learn more from such simple images than the sober mind is able to grasp.

Yesterday I was able to speak about the three arts and their development by presenting them as a reflection of those worlds that preceded our present one. The three elemental realms are reflected in architecture, sculpture and painting. Everything in the three elemental realms is, in some respect, the still uncompacted starting point of our world, slumbering as if buried, and which man brings out again. That is why they have been compared to a slumbering place of God, where they rest in order to be resurrected again through man. We can no longer see the realm of fluctuating images with our outer eyes. Man seeks to revive it within himself through the three arts, to resurrect it.

The great task of art is that through its creation, our being is a release of the God that sleeps in nature, that in our soul, God awakens again and flows into our creations, so that in the designs of human works, divinity can live.

And by doing this, man deifies himself and thereby becomes the being who has to bring the honey of the world back to the altar of God.

Let us let our eyes wander over the works of the great painters. What Raphael and Michelangelo conjure up on the canvas, what elevates thousands of souls, is a creation of the spirit, great and powerful, but it will pass away, the works of the great geniuses will scatter into tiny atoms. But connected with this human creation is something that is imperishable, that which the human soul has worked for. They have acquired something that is everlasting; they will carry into eternity what they have brought into their spirit, what they have worked into it. When the globe is blown apart, the beings will take with them what the souls have learned and experienced here. They bring this back to the altar of God as the bees of life. This is what mysticism called deification. Time and again, humanity redeems the hidden God. Then it becomes clear what so few understand today: that what man ultimately creates as the divine world was already there in the beginning. So that the highest that man ultimately comes to is the lowest. So that in knowledge we ultimately have what God has put into the world. Hellscherische insight is communion with the divine world.

We have spoken of a special training of the dream-filled sleep consciousness, which leads to the knowledge of the three elemental realms, to the world of floating images, the formations of formless forces, and that of the world-forming clay. Now there are other experiences. It is the dream that has surrounded us with symbolic representations that can rise to a perception of the formative forces. Now there is the awakened consciousness during dreamless sleep.

When the continuity of consciousness occurs, the human being perceives the sounding world: the spiritual world begins to resound. What Pythagoras described as the music of the spheres is real truth. The inner essence of the world is expressed in sound: “The sun resounds in the ancient way.” This would be a complete phrase, for the sun does not resound in physical life, but it does when we recognize it as the body of a spiritual being. Out of the chaos of the world, we hear it ordering itself, chaos as sound, as spiritual harmony: “Sounds arise for new ears... Unheard-of things do not resound.”

But the spiritual hears. Spirits who have theosophical wisdom have therefore spoken of sound as the form of the world. In Schopenhauer's spirit lived the presentiment of an enormously significant fact. For the clairvoyant, the essential being of the world is a world of sounds. If we penetrate into the inner being of things, it is through the musical essence, through the world of sounds, and that is true.

Formations push outwards, and even the formative forces penetrate into space, and their mirror images are external announcements of inner beings. What we perceive in the three arts is the most spiritualized form. With music, we do not penetrate through the surface, but directly into the essence of things. When the bell rings, its innermost being floods into the world. The sound is the outward-reaching beauty of the innermost being. That is why it is also an external reflection of that in which the Hellseher immerses himself in his innermost being.

We also speak of three realms in the inner realm. When we speak of the innermost being of the world spirit, we will have to perceive it as a feeling of the trinity. Just as the human being has emerged from the mineral that pulsates in the physical body, so life pulsates in the physical in the highest being. Will, wisdom, activity. In this, the will emerges again, of which Schopenhauer speaks as the essence that rises from the abyss. It lives in us, constitutes our being.

The idea becomes an image, and then the connection with the outside world takes place; most of all where there is action and activity. In them we embody ourselves and are present as the Godhead is in its kingdom. Thus we have abysmal will in wisdom, which establishes connection with the world, and we have activity, in which it is hidden. If will is the deepest thing in us, then it is also in nature. When will awakens in the soul of man, God celebrates his resurrection – likewise in wisdom and in the actions of man. As music leads us into the essence of things, so it is the deepest essence of things themselves that lives in the tones of music. Tone is the spiritual body of will. The most original essence of the spirit is in the will of the musical. A beautiful thought of Schopenhauer's philosophy is that the riddle of the world is solved in music.

Nietzsche, who wanted to search for such connections of thoughts with an unparalleled yearning spirit, came to a confused inkling of the most beautiful kind: in the “Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music”. What did he want to achieve in this book? Nietzsche tried to describe the path of the spirit to its inner life. He sought to penetrate to the point where man feels the world will pulsating within him. In music, man transforms will into a spiritual body. Man is most intensely united with his God when music resounds from his soul. Thus, for Nietzsche, too, music is placed in the universe.

From a higher perspective, Goethe allows Faust to advance to “In the beginning was the deed.” 'Deed' is the outflow of will, and if man wants to create an image of the deed in a work of art, he must give birth to it out of the musical. And then we shall find the cosmic position of the speaking arts in the spirit of the world.

Wisdom is the power of the spirit, half of which penetrates outwards and allows the other half to be provided by the world: the penetration of the spirit with the essence from outside. The harmony of inside and outside - that is wisdom. It is true wisdom when man finds the harmonization of his inner being with the outside. And true wisdom includes the good. It is a wisdom of feeling.

Just as the will finds expression in sound, so too does the soul find its way to the word through meaning. Like wisdom, the word has a part that comes from outside and a part that comes from within. In its meaning, it announces something external to us. Just as the original will is expressed in the art of pure sound, so too is the wisdom of the soul expressed to the soul in the rhythm of the word.

Lyric poetry – sound steeped in meaning.

Song – wisdom poured out and embodied.

The third is where the spirit withdraws and embodies itself in action. Man's action is his creation; the third realm of the spiritual draws the dramatic arts. The drama is the image of the third realm, of activity.

Thus man leaves behind the phases of his being in what he creates as an image. Music, lyric poetry, drama.

As long as the beings around us announce themselves through sound, we remain outside of them to a certain extent. They express their meaning through the inner word, when they not only sound but also speak. This is something that is envisioned as an ideal in the very distant future, but it is also something that stands at the starting point of the world. And the artist presents it as prophecy.

The musician, the lyricist and the playwright are the prophets of what is to come. The other three arts represent the past; these three represent the future. In this way, the artist creates a paradise for us, whereby past, present and future are connected. This is what Goethe is talking about:

But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the living, rich beauties!
That which is becoming, that which is eternally working and living,
Embrace with the sweet barriers of love,
And what floats in a wavering appearance,
Strengthen with lasting thoughts! [Faust I, verses 344-349]

[Thus speaks the Lord to the three archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael in the prologue to Heaven in Goethe's “Faust” I.] What lives in fluctuating appearance, thought affixes.

There is no more beautiful way to describe the cosmic mission of art. The eternal itself is in this world. And if we are able to look at beauty with devotion, to embrace it with our love, to feel the eternal in the image, then we are strengthening beauty with lasting thoughts. When the entire globe has disintegrated into millions of atoms, the eternal will be carried over into new worlds. Art certainly has a part in this. In a work of art, man can create a limited reflection of the beauty of the world, a limited reflection of divine perfection is art.

In the arts, we also get a taste of that blissful freedom that flows from knowledge. Art appears to be the surest guarantee of our ability to achieve freedom. Thus, the beautiful appearance becomes the great educator to the highest, to freedom. The German who does not know Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education does not know an important piece of German spirit. They are full of theosophical sentiment; the experience of the divine essence is what theosophy wants; that is why enjoying art elevates one to a state of selflessness, because it creates disinterested pleasure in the highest spirituality. One must penetrate through matter to the spiritual, then the highest is achieved through the spiritualization of the material; then beauty becomes education to the spiritual, and through the aesthetic perception of beauty, man penetrates to wisdom.