11. The Spiritual and Moral Strength of Contemporary Peoples in the Light of Spiritual Science (Anthroposophy)

The Mediterranean man puts man before himself. He received the image of man by looking into the world. But at the same time, I would like to say, the moral idea became abstract. It had to assert itself as an inheritance. But man still felt the warming of this moral idea. And in essence, much of the religious life of the time in which the Mediterranean peoples set the tone was this warm feeling for the moral order of the world. It is only when he has the morality-free image of nature around him that man feels abandoned and lonely in the face of his moral feelings. Man looks out into the world in which he stands as a natural being to which he belongs as a natural being. It gives him nothing moral. If he wants morality, he must bring it forth from the source of his innermost being. He stands there before the world, which gives him no directive. He must seek the directive. Freedom has no meaning in the oriental spiritual culture. Freedom acquires its meaning out of naturalism. This materialism, which arises out of the nerve-sense human being of Western peoples, has a moral significance. This culture demands of man that he become conscious of his freedom and give birth to his morality out of himself. If one were to remain with mere naturalism — which was the result of yesterday's reflections here — then one would, like the personalities whose statements I quoted yesterday, trample morality into the ground. But if we had not gone through this dangerous stage of human development, where morality is called into question, where morality is given in the freedom of human decision, humanity could not develop to freedom! This is the meaning of human development, from an original spiritual culture to the material culture of the West, which is particularly geared to economic life, which has basically brought an ethics of utility to the surface, but which must give people the consciousness of freedom with regard to the actual moral impulse.