2. The Effect Of The Soul Upon Physical Man

And then you will also realise that in times when men still had a feeling for what lies beyond the Threshold, for what lives and weaves in the luminous clouds and in the rolling mist, the position of painters, for example, was quite different from what it came to be later on. The spiritual power they recognised carried the colours to the right place on the canvas. The poet, conscious that divinity, that spirituality, was speaking in him, could say: ‘Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Peleus’ son, Achilles’; or: ‘Sing to me, O Muse, of the man, the much-travelled one’. These are the opening lines of Homer’s epics. Klopstock, who lived in times when feeling for the Divine-Spiritual was no longer present, substituted: ‘Sing, Immortal Soul, of the redemption of sinful man.’ I have often spoken of this. But the old painters too, even those living in the epoch of Leonardo and Raphael would still have been able to say and would moreover have felt it in their own way: ‘Paint for me, O Muse, paint for me, O Divine Power, direct my hands, carry soul into my hands so that the brush in my hands is guided by you.’ It is very important to understand this close union of man with the spiritual in all situations of life, especially in the most significant.