Notes from Mathilde Scholl 1904–1906
GA 91 — 10 September 1906
16. The Power of God in the World and in Man
All of nature's kingdoms are an expression of divine creative power. The calmness of the mineral kingdom embodies the divine thought, the movement and life of the plant kingdom embodies divine love, and the power of the animal kingdom embodies divine will.
In the human being, divine will has individualized into many individual wills. The animal, the plant, and the mineral do not yet have their own will. There are higher beings behind them, and these realms are subject to their will. The individual human will could not have been worked out if it had not first shown itself to be one that separates and detaches itself from the whole. The mineral has no life of its own; it lives in a whole, the whole mineral world. The plant has no sensation of its own; it only senses in the totality of all plant life; the animal has no will of its own; it has its will in a higher, more comprehensive totality. Only man possesses his own will.
The first main task of man was to develop his own will. He has his own life, his own feelings and his own will. Through his own will, he should be able to develop further. While the divine creative power in the mineral only expresses its thoughts in the visible form, in the plant it expresses life in its visible growth and reproduction, and in the animal it expresses will in locomotion and passion. It has not only made man the center of all its expressions and revelations, but has also given him self-awareness by completely immersing himself in man. She gave him the ability to recognize her within himself. Man is the being that becomes aware of divine power and that should learn to consciously use this creative power. At first, he learned only to use the divine creative power for his own purposes, because he should first fully develop himself, as a divine germ, as a becoming god. He first used the divine will to reproduce. His intuitive perception was expressed in pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion, love and hate, and the divine thought was expressed in his intellect, his ability to think.
We observe here the descent of the divine creative power in nature from thinking through feeling to willing, and the ascent of the divine creative powers in man from willing through feeling to thinking. Just as the human being stands before us as a willing, feeling, thinking being with self-awareness, so he is still the unpurified human being, who only contains the higher forces in himself in the bud. He must gradually make these forces more and more like the primal force, through clarification, through purification, through consolidation. While he first received the will, then the feeling, then the thinking from the Godhead, his ascent now continues in such a way that he first purifies his thinking and makes it completely his own, then, through the purified thinking, he also purifies his feelings and learns to control them completely, and further through thinking and feeling he must purify the will and make it completely his own. Only then will he become a free man.
His thinking must become clear and calm like the mineral kingdom, his feeling must become pure and chaste like the feeling of the plant kingdom - his will must become strong like the power of the animal kingdom - but combined with the calmness of the mineral kingdom and the chastity of the plant kingdom - only then will he become a complete human being. Then he can participate in the development of all cosmic powers. Every human being is a blossom on the tree of the Godhead. But only after he has absorbed all the powers of the Godhead and brought them into harmony through an inner process of transformation within himself, only then can he become productive in the higher sense, only then can the blossom become fruit, from which new life will later sprout. In the beginning of his life, the human being will be a reflection of life, of the etheric body. He will then be alive, plant-like. It is precisely this craving that kills. Devotion brings life. It builds the immortal body, which only generates itself. The whole development is a development towards life. Development means life.
All the forces that have been stored up in the animal kingdom show us the stage that was necessary to lead the human being into physical existence. The animal kingdom is the stored-up desire of the human being. To the extent that he overcomes his desires, to that extent he has a liberating effect on the animal kingdom. The power pent up in the animal kingdom, the passion that increased in man to self-conscious passion, must gradually be absorbed again through the purification of human nature and used there as power and transformed into life. Then, through inner alchemy, he shapes the harmonious life of the plant kingdom from the passion of the animal kingdom and the calmness of the mineral kingdom. From the inactive and the chaotic, he then crystallizes out the living, harmonious, and beautiful in living forms.
In the mineral kingdom is embodied wisdom, the wise thought; in the animal kingdom is embodied power; in the plant kingdom, power and wisdom are to flourish unitedly into beauty.
Therefore, man himself had to first separate all these realms, so that he could then shape a beautiful cosmos out of these realms, which are at the same time a means of ascent, a model and a field of activity for him, as an individuality, as a free, cosmic force. Then the wisdom of the mineral kingdom and the power of the animal kingdom will be fully incorporated into plant life. Man is then the master builder who uses these forces and transforms them into a beautiful, spiritualized world temple full of life and harmony.