18. The Origin of Evil and the Evil in the Light of Spiritual Science

Take, for example, monistic materialism, which has developed from natural science, particularly in the nineteenth century, and under whose ideas some of our most ideal men live as if under a heavy burden. Because this philosophy has penetrated ever deeper into the human soul, it has made it possible to see through material laws, and everyone living today is unconsciously dominated by the knowledge of these laws of material existence, which have, however, pushed back the free view into the spiritual world. And so it became possible that in the nineteenth century minds such as Schopenhauer, Hartmann and Lotze developed, which pushed towards a conception of existence that should have satisfied man, but they could not gain any ideas about the spiritual that would have been suitable to defeat the ideas of natural science in spiritual superiority. Therefore, all that is painful in the world appears inexplicable to them; they see the withering away, but not the germ of hope that lies in the withering away, which must also be found within the dying flower and germinal cover, like the consequence of pain and evil in life. Everything in the physical realm is also affected by the spiritual world. How this should show itself according to its inner nature was not, or not sufficiently, recognized by the researchers of the nineteenth century. We see how difficult it is for the most capable representatives of their time to relate to the phenomena of the world, and how they cannot find a way out with the scientific views alone in many things; we see how such minds thirst for a satisfactory perspective on existence in their innermost soul life, but that their view is clouded by the pressure of the one-sidedly understood natural sciences. For example, this is how the world appears to him: it is like the corpse of a human being whom we know to have been abandoned by his soul. But what lies before us as a corpse is incapable of developing something soulful and spiritual from itself, as if from something left over from a pre-worldly spiritual existence of a divine spiritual substance that was there at the beginning. But in its present state no germ of a new spiritual can be found. This philosopher, Mainländer, who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century, has been appreciated by Privy Councillor Max Seiling in enthusiastic words, but in the facts he is quite right. When one sees the tragedy of such a mind, one recognizes the task of spiritual science in relieving people of the oppressive burden of nineteenth-century ideas, especially in the case of such significant minds as Mainländer, who takes life so seriously, seeing in human existence only old age and evil, pain and death. In contrast to this, however, spiritual science also sees that in all this there is also something alive, the spiritual, which has sprouted towards the future and could not develop later in its special way if it had not been pushed down at times into physical life as evil and pain. From such a point of view, however, one can no longer speak of the “philosophy of pain and its redemption”; then it would be absurd to speak of this redemption - in view of the analogy already used with the plant germ, the so-called seed, for whose development often the whole mother plant, but at least a part of it, the flower and so on, must die, which one would have to regard as an evil for the latter. In the same way, the new and perfect cannot develop from a spiritual germ without evil and pain being aroused in the physical world. If we look at all this from a higher spiritual point of view, we will realize that in all our efforts to alleviate evil, we cannot be released from it in the usual sense, but must learn to endure it. If the painful and suffering in the present is sometimes quite difficult, the gratifying fruit will lie in the future and then come into effect. From such an understanding arises a tolerable, peaceful and industrious outlook on life; who knows, out of suffering, as out of a germ, in the future, the more perfect develops. He who sees the better future in a perhaps painful present, even if he does not close himself to the imperfect and ugly in active remedy. Even when the leaves and blossoms of existence fall away, the germ grows and endures beneath them, enabling a future, richer development, and we understand: what appears to us as evil and suffering in the physical world is a parallel phenomenon to what, in the spiritual world, enables a future, more perfect existence. With this view, which corresponds to reality, we can get over the bitter, the painful and the sorrowful; for in evil and the evils we see something inexplicable only in physical existence, we can only understand and thus bear it when we penetrate to the source of all these processes, to the spiritual world. There the otherwise terrible sight of the sensual-physical world is transformed.