Transcription
[Music] [Music] [Music] As previous lectures have shown, I will try to use the time we have for these reflections to shed light from spiritual science on aspects of human life. This is because we are living, of course, in a time when it is particularly necessary to hone our understanding of what is at work in human life and history.
Now, I have sought to suggest that in occult Brotherhoods, fraternities that look back to all kinds of occult insights, the way in which the human soul is engaged and worked upon is different from what is usual and also basically desirable in our era. Last time I spoke of the case of Thomas More, his title Utopia, trying to show that what we call history is a fable, convulsed, full of all kinds of legends, all sorts of views tailored and curtailed, but that we can inform it with truth if we take account of influences playing into human life from supersensible worlds.
Now today, let us first ask ourselves how teachings of resurrection, as I spoke of in relation to rediscovery of the lost word, can act upon the human soul in certain rights and services common in occult Brotherhoods. How is it that these work on the soul in a particular distinctive way? This is very closely connected with how the human soul is generally influenced in our time and increasingly will be the longer we pass in the fifth post-Atlantean Age in which we now live. We are still in the first third of this era at present. The way in which influences act upon the human soul in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch should therefore first be considered.
During this epoch, all human endeavors are focused on excluding certain things that were once innate and natural to people. If we look at a work of Natural Science from a period not so far back, a work, say, of Albertus Magnus from the 13th and 14th centuries, you can see that this way of looking at the natural world is now very alien to modern people. Why is this? It is because in those times a person still held the view that certain elemental powers were at work in the world of nature around them; powers, if no longer beings, of a spiritual, if ethereal kind. The chief trait of modern thinking is the rejection of everything the senses cannot see; nothing of a spiritual, if ethereal, nature is acknowledged. We can only understand works such as those of Albertus Magnus in the 13th century if we realize that he still saw spiritual powers everywhere at work in his physical surroundings.
In our modern scientific age, the fact that we only absorb into our thoughts what we perceive in the outer world through our senses—what is available to sensory perception—exerts an important influence not only on scientific views but also on all human thinking and conception. This outlook filters down into the mind of minds of ordinary folk. It is, of course, quite wrong to use the term spiritual science as it is used in ordinary discourse today in reference to aesthetics, art history, and even sociology. Spiritual science inevitably involves the spirit, or in other words, everything that does not unfold in the sensory realm. But what history recounts does occur in this realm, even though it originates in feelings and so forth. Such disciplines should not rightly be called spiritual sciences, but sensory sciences.
Thusly, characteristic of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch initially is that human thinking only absorbs and acknowledges what originates in outward sensory nature. It would be wrong to think that one should attack the nature of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, denigrating its course materialistic ideas. This says really very little unless we can also, at the same time, counter such ideas with something equally real. You see, we can say that this fifth post-Atlantean era exists specifically to develop materialism, to discard from human thinking anything that does not enter us from the sense world. Only by giving ourselves up, once in more than two millennia—which is how long this era lasts—to a worldly life that excludes elemental powers can we possibly attain our full freedom, fully unfolding from within us our true spiritual activity and efficacy. The excesses of materialism in this first third of two millennia have occurred only because we are still at the beginning of this era. The flood of sensory perceptions has inundated us, and we have not yet succeeded in allowing the spirit to emerge by eliciting it within us through true spiritual science. This spirituality must still emerge.
The previous epoch, the Greco-Roman, had a different mission. At that time, people were still tuned to perception of the elemental, if ethereal, spiritual powers in their surroundings, and having perceived them, could allow these to work upon them in the way people related to each other—it was assumed that we are enveloped in an elemental spiritual atmosphere. During these two thousand one hundred and sixty years that preceded our fifth post-Atlantean era, the human body was prepared as an instrument for our present thought-oriented and purely sensory grasp of outer reality. The work accomplished upon the human being during the Greco-Roman epoch was one that concentrated more upon the body itself. This shaped our body so that now, in our current period, we can think about the sensory phenomena we perceive.
For example, when people taught others back then, either in the mysteries themselves or in institutions dependent on them—as all teaching centers and sites of worship were in the Greco-Roman epoch—it was not a matter of telling people things that would then inform their outlook and convictions, as is inevitably so today, but rather to give them something directly that worked upon their bodies. If someone today undertook such a thing, trying to convey through his teaching something that works directly upon the human body, this would be impermissible and at odds with our modern Zeitgeist. The human being today wishes to preserve his body from direct influence, and rightly so, for it is inherent in the nature of our time. Only a person's soul should be affected and influenced; anything else is basically impermissible magical influence. Although this was certainly still allowable in the Greco-Roman era, at that time the human being's corporeal instrument was still softer, more flexible, pliant, and work still needed to be done upon it. Now it has grown harder, and teaching or instruction instead addresses the soul. But to work in a formative way upon a human body that is still pliant, we cannot resort to things gained solely from the outer world of the senses. The Greco-Roman epoch could not have fulfilled its mission with the contents of our modern science. If Copernican astronomy had been taught back then, or Darwinism, rather than preparing the human body for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, it would have become desiccated; it would have been shaped wrongly. This was a quite different science, therefore, which, instead of conveying a kind of photography of natural existence as our modern science does, presented symbols instead of the kinds of experiments that today empirical science uses. It offered rituals and a kind of sacramentalism. You see, with sacramentalism, rites of worship, symbolic, mythic accounts, one reaches into regions of human experience that are quite different from what we possess today in our natural laws, in the Copernican worldview, in Darwinism.
Now, as I suggested, these Brotherhoods retained the ancient symbols, symbolism, sacramentalism, ritual acts and services, and these are perpetuated in our day and can influence people in the way I intimated. One aspect of human nature especially falls under this sway, though it should not be exposed to much influence if we remain in the realm of what is permissible. Remaining in the realm of the allowable, one should clothe one's words of teaching or kindred education in such a way that they pass only into the other's ear, leaving a person free to form his own view and conviction in response. Everything should basically be done in this way. Thus our teaching or communication works solely into the physical body, and if all runs normally, this body will not be reconfigured in consequence, not altered from the shape and imprint it was taught in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Roman. But by using symbols, sacramentalism, rites, and rituals, one works deeper, right into the etheric body; in other words, one directly influences the whole nature and direction of a person's thinking. In a sense, one resorts to one's teaching or communication as one elaborates something in one's surroundings to an element that works into the other's etheric body and thus directs his thinking in a certain direction.
Now this is what happens primarily in the occult Brotherhoods I have been speaking of, but another quite different kind of fraternity exists, one that should also be called occult but pursues the same thing in a quite different field, in the way these work. They too knowingly reach deeper into human nature. Occult fraternities of this kind include the Jesuit Order, for example. This order is certainly founded on occult insights, as I explained in the cycle of lectures I gave in Karlsruhe. On that occasion, I specifically described the exercises a Jesuit pupil is obliged to undertake in order to become a Jesuit. These exercises involve the person who is speaking or enacting rites of worship intervening not in the human etheric body but the astral body. All Jesuit schooling focuses on giving the Jesuit the strength to shape his words, the way in which he speaks, so that what he presents or what he does steals its way into another person's astral impulses.
Now Jesuit influence is not limited to the presence of Jesuits in one place or another. There are channels in human life through which one can exert an influence even in places where one is prohibited from staying. And if people sense certain dangers in Jesuitism, they should not think that this will be avoided by forbidding Jesuits from dwelling in a particular location. This demonstrates a lack of awareness of what is at work, and awareness only dawns through the kind of knowledge that only spiritual science can offer. But it is not so easy to show how Jesuitism exerts its influence, since this involves all kinds of unknown channels which people are reluctant to credit. I would therefore first like to give one example of what Jesuitism does whenever it can pursue its impulses in a robust and unimpeded way, doing everything its methods allow to work its way into the human astral body. A very good example of this is something that occurred at the transition from the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean epoch: the founding of the Jesuit state of Paraguay in 1610. How did this come about?
Now, my dear friends, you know that after the discovery of America and the rush to exploit its resources and treasures, including gold, a period followed during which the Europeans who made their way there felt very happy in the new world, but the Native American Indians much less so. Many accounts have been written of how this poor indigenous population were treated by civilized Europeans. And in one region of South America, Paraguay, where European culture penetrated in a way that rode roughshod over the Native Americans, larger numbers of Jesuits appeared one day with the intention of treating the Guaraní, a native tribe in Paraguay, in ways that were, in their view, a good deal better than the treatment they received from other Europeans. Now the Jesuits did not know the language of the Guaraní, nor did the latter speak any of the languages spoken by the Jesuits, and not Latin either. And therefore, this did not work in the ordinary way in which people seek to influence things. What did the Padres do, therefore, when they appeared in Paraguay in larger numbers? They navigated the rivers on barges and ships, reaching wild regions inhabited only by the native peoples. It was hoped that they would fall under the sway of spreading European capitalism there. And so the Jesuits sailed down rivers into the wilderness and tried above all to have beautiful music playing around them—music, song—and to mingle into this musical element, into their singing, all kinds of things with which they were very conversant through their own practices. Along the waves of music and song, they spread something else: a ritual, sacramental element. And this resulted in the Indians approaching them voluntarily, gathering in large numbers, and before long the Padres were accompanied by huge crowds of Indians in many different regions of the land and were able to found villages, forming them into a kind of state and establishing their own forms of organization. From 1610 onward, this renowned Jesuit state developed in Paraguay, the majority of whose inhabitants were the native, along with the Jesuits who governed and led them. Churches were built, one for instance at a location founded under the name of Saint Severus—readers aside that might be Xavie—rus. I'm going to say Severus. And the readers aside that could hold four or five thousand people. In this Jesuit State, everything was strictly governed and regulated, but everywhere under the sway of ritual and worship. Everywhere, in the smallest settlement, care was taken that music embedded in ritual should exert its effect in the form of services and worship, and that the day was carefully apportioned and human actions regulated by the ringing of the church bell. The time for this or for that was marked by the ringing bell. To mention just one example, rather than merely getting up in the morning, washing, and then going to work in the fields, the church bell rang, and this indicated the start of the day. One got up, gathered in the village square, and was received with music. In the middle of the square stood either an image of the Holy Virgin or some other Saint, understanding of whom had previously been inculcated in the Indians through sermons delivered by the Jesuit priests. Here, first of all, a kind of service of worship was held in prayer; the people gazed up to heaven. Then the whole train began to move forward with the statue of the saint or the Virgin Mary carried in front. Thus they walked to the fields and then worked. After sufficient work had been done, they carried the image of the saint or virgin back to the marketplace again, and as the bells rang, the people were dismissed. Everything was imbued with ritual, symbolic actions. Even the work in the fields itself was accompanied by ritual actions in which certain Jesuit priests had been instructed. Everything was imbued and infused with ritual. The whole interaction between the Padres and the Indians was directed toward an influence on their astral bodies. All their astral bodies were correspondingly prepared, and the whole Jesuit state in Paraguay was basically imbued with an astral aura in consequence of the symbolism, the sacramentalism, the ritual actions of the Jesuits. Governed, of course, in a way that the Jesuits wished, and in some ways very striking things were achieved by this means. Remember the indigenous people had previously been wild tribes preoccupied with hunting and suchlike, and within a short time they were made, in quotes, intelligent, in the sense the Jesuits understood it. These people soon became able to make everything needed by their Jesuit leaders, the Padres. In fact, soon attracted the rancor of other European rulers there and needed an army; in a relatively short time they organized an army, some of whose officers were Indians, not all Europeans. They organized an army that successfully broke a blockade which England tried to enforce against Paraguay. Circumstances were simpler than today, but all this occurred. The Guaraní quickly learned to make everything that Jesuits needed, such as muskets and cannons. They also learned to make European musical instruments, including organs. They learned painting and stone carving to a level that would have graced any church in Spain.
But now consider the astral aura in which all this was plunged. Those who interacted directly with the Indians and went about among them were only intermediaries of the Jesuits. The Padres themselves lived strictly apart, held all the reins in their hands, governed and regulated everything, but were only glimpsed in their richly adorned and golden costumes at Mass and ceremonial gatherings. The Indians, we can say, saw them only as theatrical apparitions in a cloud of incense. No wonder, then, that the Indians looked up to them as if to higher beings, and all this was part of the desired effect of working directly into their astral bodies. The moral condition of this Jesuit state truly does not seem to have been particularly bad. It is said, at least, that in the most numerous instances, the Indians, who had no need to fear that anyone would have reported them if they did something wrong, were so plagued by their conscience that they reported themselves for any misdeeds, and care was taken that any punishment meted out was one which the person punished could agree with and accept. I do not know whether application of this principle in our society would lead to happiness, but people fail to understand to what extent ways of thinking have changed over the centuries. Remember that roughly at this time the Italian Campanella described a state similar to that imagined by Thomas More. Campanella certainly thought his idea was feasible, describing the state he conceived as something that could well be realized at that epoch, but his basic premise and condition for his state is that no one should be hanged if he has not agreed to be so. This is not a joke and is seen as such only in our own time. Another thing the Jesuits achieved in their state was to reflect on the problem of how much all should work to serve the needs of an enclosed human society. Everyone worked in the way I described except for the Jesuits themselves, who concerned themselves with government, and they found that a person need only work two days a week for a relatively normal time on each of those days, and this would produce everything needed by the community. Thus the Jesuits only let the people work two days a week for themselves, and everything produced during the other working days was surrendered to the state. This was used also as Jesuit propaganda throughout the rest of the world. Well, we can thank the Jesuits for the weekend—for more than a century, therefore, the Jesuits found it possible to work everywhere in the world by using this principle of the Jesuit state that people need work only five days a week, or at least four days. On Sundays they let people rest, except that they had to attend church and watch and listen to all the ceremonies. What the Jesuits garnered in this working week supported their economic activities everywhere else in the world. But in the end, the Europeans who dominated America and were not Jesuits but were part of the growing capitalist surge considered this Jesuit economy too backward. On 22 July 1768, mounted squadrons appeared on the scene in numbers sufficient to imprison the Jesuits. This marked the end of the Jesuit state. Thus it lasted from 1610 to 1768 and developed its activities as I have described.
I wished to describe this to you only to show what can be achieved by developing methods that influence the human astral body. Naturally, these methods were easier to apply to the Indians than to other communities or societies which would not have succumbed so easily to them. What would people around here do, do you think, if unknown people came sailing up the Elbe and tried to use music to control them? Back then it was easier to use such approaches since the people involved were relatively primitive, and the further back we go in humanity's evolution, the more susceptible the human astral and the etheric bodies are to such influence and control. These wild tribes retain something of a former pliancy, primarily in relation to their physical bodies. If one wishes to exert such an influence, one has to work upon the astral body, but the resonances of this astral body act in turn upon the physical body, and that is where the influence actually lies. When you speak to a European, you send words into his ear, but his brain resonates with them as determined by the person's whole education and the life circumstances in which he is rooted. This was not so in the case of the Indians. The Jesuits worked upon or into their astral body, and the brain resonated along with this. You can say that through these musical elements and other ritual acts the Indians were harnessed into all the resonances emanating from these rites, so that in a sense they became living parts of a common astral aura.
We Europeans are better off, are we not? You see, our heads have grown more dense and are not so easily influenced. That is clear. But everything, my dear friends, is different in degree in every individual, and while one cannot work in the same way upon a highly civilized population in Europe in the same way as has been described, to a lesser degree it is still possible to work into a human being's etheric or astral body so that this effect vibrates on into the body. But an influence of this kind ought not to emanate from an individual, for even if he were to veil himself in a cloud of incense, in either a physical or spiritual sense, the effect upon European people would no longer be very great. What the Jesuits did, simply by leading their workers physically into the fields, is not something that always has to be done physically. Where, as I said, the body has grown more dense than in the Indians, this cannot be achieved with people physically, since people will not allow themselves to succumb to this. They project such faith in authority and will not tolerate it. For this type of authority practiced by the Jesuits, invested in a physical human being, has been fading during the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Yet as it fades, faith in authority increases correspondingly when the beings exerting an influence are less physical or not physical at all but merely work through a physical person. As we know, there are ahrimanic beings whom the general population think of as the devil. And whereas the authority of a bodily person is avoided like the plague across the so-called civilized world, the authority of ahrimanic beings working through human actions is far from negligible. To modify a phrase from Goethe's Faust only very slightly, we can say, quote, "the scholar never notices the devil even when he has him by the collar," close quote. And these ahrimanic beings acting amongst us inevitably have their own methods and means that are different from those, say, of the Jesuits in Paraguay in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Jesuits could work upon the Indians as I described; their physical body was soft and pliant. Now one has to work differently; in particular, one has to take account of the fact that human thinking as such is influenced, but one enters the thought orientation of people and exerts a power that they do not notice. I don't mean that people are doing this; people are usually the vehicle for it, used by ahrimanic beings to enter the thought orientation of human beings. Their ways of thinking then—when people adopt a view, they think this is through their own conviction. Superficially, this is true, but if you look deeper you find it is not. When a particular view or judgment is buzzing around in public life, so that, if you will forgive the expression, it lubricates its way into people's feelings and sentiments, people believe that they have grasped it rationally. In truth, they have only adopted it into their habits of thought; it has insinuated itself. And then people think, of course, that the idea or thought is their own and not based on any faith in authority, but they completely fail to notice how it has insinuated itself into their soul.
How does such a thing occur? Well, it may happen, for instance, in the following way. As time goes by, there are all sorts of habits of thought, or if you trace the historical development of such things, you will find that they really do not emerge from rational insights. A view forms about what science is about, what a strict scientific method should be. In the same way, this view about the nature of scientific rigor merges with a requirement that the scientific rigor must proceed from an arcane or esoteric location, from a university or similar. Whatever does not emanate from such a place does not insinuate itself so fully into hearts and minds, into these habits of thought. All kinds of names and nomenclatures insinuate themselves naturally. There is no faith in authority, but nor do people believe in anything else either, except perhaps what a renowned person may have said about it. A current of views and judgments composes itself, compounded of all such elements, and this forms a real riverbed, a channel for ahriman. A river for ahriman to sail up. Ahriman can now let his powers flow up it, for he cannot sail up into really conscious life and conscious thinking if one stands guard at the gate of one's consciousness. Ahriman cannot enter if we do not stand guard, but in the way I have indicated, allow ourselves to be carried along on a current of thought habits, ahriman can gain free entry everywhere and do as he pleases with us. One has very little protection indeed against this if one has thrown one's own self into this current; for instance, if from the earliest childhood one has been inculcated with "rigorously scientific" disciplines. Let us assume, therefore, that someone has been trained from early infancy, brought up in accordance with a strict psychological method. Psychology has become very popular in our time. Edward von Hartmann wrote a history of modern psychology in 1901, at the very beginning.
Of this work, he speaks of something that modern psychology no longer mentions, since it is seen as outmoded, unscientific. He says, for instance, “Only in the first half of this period—the second half of the 19th century—do some theistic philosophers still adhere not only to the immortality of a self-aware substance of soul, but also to…of non-determinate freedom, though mostly they make do with positing this heartfelt desire of theirs only as an academic possibility.” Such a view has ceased entirely in recent times. It is self-evident that in modern psychology no attention is given either to the question of immortality nor to that of whether human freedom even exists. These are no longer even regarded as scientific questions.
I don’t know whether you have seen the newspapers in recent days. The particular political slant of your paper is unimportant here. You can read many column inches in every newspaper of any persuasion about electron psychology that was given at a very scholarly psychology society in Berlin. A Dr. Levin Stein, a very scholarly psychologist of our time, was speaking there about the psychology of a personal column. One must, of course, be fully conversant with scholarly methods to be able to apply them to any and every field in a rigorously scientific manner. Just think what a rich field of scientific exploration is offered if one knows that a notice is being published in a paper in which someone says he is looking to marry, that he seeks a girl with quite specific qualities. Then one sits back and waits for the letters to pour in which give expression to the psyche, the soul of a certain number of girls or women. What deep insights one can gain in this way into the life of the soul! Surely it is far more dignified to speak of such insights than to discuss the immortality of the soul in the old way, or human freedom. The latter subjects are discussed only by those who fail to understand the demands of strict science. One needs a certain flair for experimentation if one is to handle such matters in an entirely scientific manner. Of course, you see the strict scientific method says that chance or random observations do not lead to—well, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the expression—“strong inference.” A strong inference is always the basis for empirical discovery. This means that cases should not be handled in a way that provides us with chance observations whose conclusions could be misleading. One must be an experimenter in the same way that a chemist tries to discover nature’s secrets of his experiments. One has to try to deduce the secrets of life, of the psyche, which can be revealed when marriage invitations are published in the papers and girls write back.
But how does one become an experimenter? That is also something the papers explored in their many column inches on the subject. Someone is a scholar, a psychologist—not, of course, of the old school in which the soul’s immortality is still discussed. He discusses the psychology of the personal column and experiments by posting his own marriage advertisement, as the paper relates. This is first done by announcing that one seeks a younger girl with idealistic traits, who is not so very concerned about outward appearances and lifestyle. Then one gets the notice published and waits for all the replies, of which there are many. This scholarly gentleman received over 200 replies to his announcement, and this, of course, gives us helpful glimpses into the respondents’ psyches. It allows us to judge the effect of such an announcement on the soul. That is the first step. But to have a really strong inference, and in other words, to see the problem from the other perspective, one inserts a second announcement in which one no longer seeks an idealistic wife but a smart, good-looking one who cares a good deal about appearances. Again, one receives over 200 replies. The scholarly chap then set to work in a thorough manner, tracing the history and development of marriage advertisements. It emerges that the first such advertisement appeared over a hundred years ago in the Hamburg newspaper. Just think what a contribution to scholarship this is! We even discover how long the advert was—much longer than nowadays, the length of a whole feature. Gradually, there were more and more of them, offering a fund of source material for modern psychological research. The researcher, it is said, counted how many marriage advertisements appeared in two newspapers on two successive days in order to obtain a strong inference. He did not only do this once but repeatedly. This is all done statistically by counting up the findings from many sources and finding the arithmetic mean; thus, by dividing. We must, of course, always resort to scientific measurements. As far as I remember, there were 700 such marriage announcements on two successive days in two newspapers. Here we find, therefore, a very fertile field for scientific rigor.
Actually, I do not know if the scholar really stated what the newspapers reported him as saying, but according to them he said that this matter had a deeper significance in his view. As reported, psychology had reached a certain level of scientific rigor and should now fulfill its mission in the world in practical ways, at a time such as the present when humanity faces such challenges. Apparently, the scholar said that those who develop this field of psychology in relation to marriage advertisements will be furthering practical psychology and can, for instance, serve the pragmatic needs of soldiers returning from the front in their search for a life. Thus, psychology, with its new academic and scientific standing, should become practically useful and draw on its experimental findings to discover the right way of formulating marriage advertisements and advise returning soldiers on how best to do so. This is no fairy tale but has come to light in recent days, my dear friends, and shows us that people do not have a clue what is happening in their astral body, since they do not even know they have one. The whole thing is only possible because of the presence of these currents, sustained by our emmonak forces and mingling with human habits of thinking, creating in people a view of scientific exploration that is applied to absolutely everything. One can forgive this if it retains a little humor. The scholar of philosophy who has just published the… treatise, in the title…procession…excuse me…Croatia…yar Boca… does at least bring some humor to bear on his subject, which is to see whether Greek literature provides any evidence that people back then suffered from lice infestation as we do nowadays. He searched for lice through the whole of Greek literature, from Homer to Aristophanes, but at least he did—he did so with humor, although the treatise is presented in a strictly academic and scholarly way. These things do illumine what is happening below the surface of contemporary life and are more important than one might initially think.
It is important to know that in our time we need a spiritual scientific stream which people do, in fact, fear to begin with, if they cling to the habits of thought I had indicated. They fear it because it offers knowledge of the human being which awakens unconscious fears in people, since such knowledge can only be sustained if we do not allow our…humanity to suffer or lapse. Thus, in a society such as ours, we endeavor not only to disseminate spiritual science but to nurture feelings of fraternity and sorority. This must be cultivated too, since otherwise human passions would be unleashed in too drastic a fashion. But, on the other hand, to judge the nature of the times, we do need to cast our eye a little upon the nature of many human beings. In this realm, we will always need to abide by a certain rule which I would compare with the confidentiality of a letter. If you find a letter addressed to someone else, you do not read it, do you? Likewise, we do not gaze into the soul life and whole human life of another person without good reason. But a good reason can exist. If we see that a certain individual has a particular importance in contemporary life, then in order to educate and inform our contemporaries, we will need to shine a light into the soul life of this individual, using the means afforded by spiritual science. You see, someone like Levin Stein, with his psychology of marriage advertisements, is able to spread the strangest views of science amongst those who certainly do not put their faith in authority, of course, but—how shall I put it—do not have any other faith either. But when someone appears dressed in the mantle of science, they immediately succumb to this. We need to know that the human soul is a very, very complex thing; that the whole human being is very complex; and that we cannot acquaint ourselves with human nature if we do not fully engage with this complexity. Just think, we possess four aspects initially, if we overlook the higher levels, and these four are in interplay within us. The physical body can still retain some of the pliability and…flexibility of the 4th post-Atlantean epoch, but at the same time have a certain receptivity toward everything modern thought life engenders. Unless a person can appear who, let us say, possesses this quality—an organism that, on the one hand, still possesses residual qualities of the Greco-Roman era, but at the same time has a head that can elaborate the thoughts of modern times with some acuity and reproduce them—this can certainly coexist in someone. Such a person will be considered very sharp, very clever, but through the distinctive quality of his body I have suggested, he may at the same time also be weak-minded. If we know that the human being is complex, it will not be contradictory to say that he is both weak-minded and bright or sharp at the same time. Spiritual science, you see, is something that gives us a light we can shed to find our way through the complex conditions and circumstances of modern times.
Truly, my dear friends, do not think that I have anything against people speaking very cautiously at present about circumstances in America. I have no objection whatsoever to maintaining political tact or caution and to corresponding conduct in order to allow certain things to happen that need to. But this does not mean we must obscure our view of the truth. And this is why, despite the current circumstances, and in fact because of them, I recently drew attention in a public lecture to the leading statesmen in America, Wilson, and the kind of thought forms he is developing. I read out a passage written by him about his views on freedom. This was in a public lecture to show how far removed this—well, let us not say American, but mechanistic—thinking he is from what we have achieved in European culture. In the living nature of the latter, people such as Fichte or others who have affinity with him had laid down the first elements of a true philosophy of freedom, and now we can ask…this to the current political conditions…mean that someone must come along and—“by accident,” let us say—quote the very same sentence as I quoted from this book on freedom, and then use them to describe Mr. Wilson as someone who has here written something of greater significance than anything else written in the past two years, and to suggest that we in Europe would be very lucky to have such a figure amongst us, who is the “feature of America.” This is what has been said: Mr. Wilson is America’s fiefdom. This comment has been published recently in the German-speaking world. My dear friends, such phenomena are only possible because people are complex beings, and amongst ourselves we can certainly highlight special circumstances of this kind. But we need to have people in our circles who become fully conversant with life through what spiritual science offers us. As I said, when they have a body that is as pliant and easily influenced as a Greco-Roman body, and which therefore has not attained the more advanced stage of modern corporeality, and then one may be sharp and clever, absorbing all the sorts of views that are expressed in modern society. Thus, one is a very clever person, but at the same time weak-minded—both at once, in fact. One may find particular resonance and response amongst our contemporaries who are—well, not submissive to authority, but unsubmitted to it. If furnished with a soft and pliant body, one acts as a kind of human phonograph that can amplify, distort, and caricature all kinds of contemporary thoughts, to write the kinds of tasteless and stupid things I have just described. One does, of course, have to be fully immersed in modern culture, but to appear to be a clever person and to exert an influence, one does not need to stand fully in this culture but only has to be quick-witted enough to absorb its forms of thoughts, and then have a body as I described. And then you see someone like this can be a modern journalist—someone like Maximilian Harden, who has exerted great influence for decades now. One has to know what forces are working in modern culture and our modern opinions are formed, and also how these can be traced back to human nature, but without absorbing spiritual scientific insights into the human being, when as no means to do this. Only by such insight and knowledge are we prevented from being carried away on the stream I described, which engenders the habits of thought that make people believe they have long since overcome any faith in authority because they are now so wonderfully advanced. They place no faith in authority, apparently, and yet they believe every word that is printed in the title to… compt periodical.
My dear friends, by judging things in the light of spiritual science, though without allowing this to affect our practical conduct, and of course not our emotions, but only allowing these insights to inform our views and judgments, we must become aware of the values that hold sway in our culture today. Everything is an unformed, chaotic mass nowadays. Of course, we do not live in regions in which, like the Indians of Paraguay, we gaze upon gold-garbed priests surrounded in clouds of incense. No, we don’t do that, but we have other altars—the newspapers and suchlike—and the clouds of smoke are less material, of course, since incense is more substantial than the aura around modern authorities, though this enveloping cloud is more spiritual. My dear friends, its scent is not as beautiful as the more material scent of incense. That is the whole chaotic mass of what exerts great authority on people who think they have grown beyond it and freed themselves from it. But it is difficult to gain full appreciation for what can lead the human being away from what he otherwise so easily succumbs to. For this, one must gradually engage with all kinds of things. Yes, my dear friends, the difficulties are by no means small which spiritual science encounters as it seeks to penetrate life as it must. It must encompass diverse realms of life and can only advance through one after another, slowly and gradually working upon people. For instance, as you all know, and as karma elicits from us, we have tried to develop a kind of expressive art which we call Eurythmy. People can think what they like about this, but our prime challenge is to present it to people in a worthy manner. A few days ago we read that one of our members—our member—appeared on stage, a tall, slim gentleman who first recited poems in his own fashion, then, after disappearing, reappeared in white trousers and vestments, and, as the newspaper naturally mockingly relates, accompanied his further recitation with all kinds of contorted movements, holding a veil in his hands which he fluttered about. Then he vanished again to reappear once more in a blue dress edged with yellow and managed to continue to recite despite a torrent of mocking applause. He announced his hope…woman’s…as I said, he is a member of our society, as “Eurythmy recitation art.” Thus, a member has himself rendered this Eurythmy, which is so dear to our hearts, a public laughingstock. “Eurythmy and other plagues of the war” was one of the headlines in the Munich press about this performance. So you can see how difficult it is to bring spiritual science into everyday life if those who wish to help do so lack the right outlook. My dear friends, we need to reflect in far, far more serious ways than has so far happened on the impulses that must work within our spiritual scientific movement.