6. Michelangelo

And yet we have the assurance which anthroposophy gives us: that nothing can really be destroyed which has been so significantly granted to the development of humanity as happened through Michelangelo, but that the fruits of what has been granted will continue active in further lives of so unique an individual as he was, and that the earth can never lose what has once been imprinted upon it. Even if the present age does not understand the doctrine of repeated earth lives any more than his contemporaries understood Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel; even if it thinks the doctrine ridiculous or fantastic, it is just the greatest spirits that teach us most vividly how the meaning of life is to be found when we observe repeated earth lives and transfer into ever new ages what has been experienced in older epochs of mankind. And if Goethe once said that Nature had invented death in order that she might have so much life, spiritual science should add that not only was it to have life but to have it ever more richly and abundantly. This is the only thought we may find worthy to be set side by side with the thoughts which arise naturally in us when we gaze on the works of an artist like Michelangelo.