In wishing to
describe the development of groupings which have a certain
connection with the Anthroposophical Society, I yesterday had to
make reference to the impact of H.P. Blavatsky, because
Blavatsky's works at the end of the nineteenth century prompted
the coming together of those whom I described as homeless souls.
Blavatsky's works have very little to do with anthroposophy. I do
not, however, want simply to describe the history of the
anthroposophical movement, but also to characterize those of its
aspects which relate to the Society. And that requires the kind
of background which I have given you.
Now it is of course quite easy — if we want to be critical
— to dismiss everything that can be said about Blavatsky by
pointing to the questionable nature of some of the episodes in
her life.
I could give you any number of examples. I could tell you how,
within the Society which took its cue from Blavatsky and her
spiritual life, the view gained ground that certain insights
about the spiritual world became known because physical letters
came from a source which did not lie within the physical world.
Such documents were called the Mahatma Letters. [ Note
1 ] It then became
a rather sensational affair, when evidence of all kinds of
sleight of hand with sliding doors was produced. And there are
other such examples.
But let us for the moment take another view, namely to ignore at
first everything which took place outwardly, and simply examine
her writings. Then you will come to the conclusion that
Blavatsky's works consist to a large degree of dilettantish,
muddled stuff, but that despite this they contain material which,
if it is examined in the right way, can be understood as
reproducing far-reaching insights into the spiritual world or
from the spiritual world — however they were acquired. That
simply cannot be denied, in spite of all the objections which are
raised.
This, I believe, leads to an issue of extraordinary importance
and significance in the spiritual history of civilization. Why is
it that at the end of the nineteenth century revelations from a
spiritual world became accessible which merit detailed attention,
even from the objective standpoint of spiritual science, if only
as the basis for further investigation; revelations which say
more about the fundamental forces of the world than anything
which has been discovered about its secrets through modern
philosophy or other currents of thought? That does seem a
significant question.
It contrasts with another cultural-historical phenomenon which
must not be forgotten, namely that people's ability to
discriminate, their surety of judgement, has suffered greatly and
regressed in our time.
It is easy to be deceived about this by the enormous progress
which has been made. But it is precisely because individual human
beings participate in the spiritual life as discerning
individuals that we get some idea of the capacity which our age
possesses to deal with phenomena which require the application of
judgement.
Many examples could be quoted. Let me ask those, for example, who
concern themselves with, say, electrical engineering, about the
significance of Ohm's Law. The answer will be, of course, that
Ohm's Law constitutes one of the basic rules for the development
of the whole field of electrical engineering. When Ohm [ Note
2 ] completed the
initial work which was to prove fundamental for the later
formulation of Ohm's Law his work was rejected as useless by an
important university's philosophical faculty. If this faculty had
had its way, there would be no electrical engineering today.
Take another example: the important role which the telephone
plays in modern civilization. When Reis, [ Note
3 ] who was not
part of the official scientific establishment, initially wrote
down the idea of the telephone and submitted his manuscript to
one of the most famous journals of the time, the Poggendorffschen
Annalen, his work was rejected as unusable. That is the power
of judgement in our time! One simply has to face up to these
things in a fully objective manner.
Or there are occasional fine examples which characterize the
judicial competence of the trendsetters among those who are
responsible for administering, say, our cultural life. And the
general public moving along the broad highway is completely
spellbound by what is deemed acceptable by these standards today.
No country is better or worse than any other.
Take the case of Adalbert Stifter, [ Note
4 ] a significant
writer. He wanted to become a grammar school teacher.
Unfortunately he was thought to be totally unsuitable, not
talented enough for such a post. Coincidentally a certain
Baroness Mink, who had nothing to do with judging the ability of
grammar school teachers, heard about Adalbert Stifter as a
writer, acquainted herself with the material he had produced so
far — which he himself did not think was particularly good
— and prevailed upon him to have it published. That caused
a great stir. The authorities suddenly took the view that there
was no one better equipped to become the schools inspector for
the whole country. And thus a person who a short while before had
been thought too incompetent to become a teacher was suddenly
appointed to supervise the work of every other teacher!
It would be an exceedingly interesting exercise to examine these
things in all areas of our intellectual life, finishing with
someone like, for instance, Julius Robert Mayer. [ Note
5 ] As you know, I
have called into question the application under certain
circumstances of the law of conservation of energy, which
attaches to his name. But contemporary physics defends this law
unconditionally as one of its pillars. When he went to Tübingen
University, he was advised one fine day to leave, because of his
performance. The university can certainly take no credit for the
discoveries he made, because it wanted to send him down before he
sat the exams which enabled him to become a doctor.
If all this material were seen in context, it would reveal an
exceedingly important element in contemporary cultural history;
an element through which it would be possible to demonstrate the
weakness of this age of materialistic progress in recognizing the
significance of spiritual events.
Such things have to be taken into account when taking full stock
of the hostile forces opposing the intervention of spiritual
movements. It is necessary to be aware of the general level of
judgement which is applied in our time, an age which is
excessively arrogant, precisely about its non-existent capacity
to reach the right conclusions.
It was, after all, a very characteristic event that many of the
things traditionally preserved by secret societies, which were at
pains to prevent them reaching the public, should suddenly be
published by a woman, Blavatsky, in a book called Isis
Unveiled. Of course people were shocked when they realized
that this book contained a great deal of the material which they
had always kept under lock and key. And these societies, I might
add, were considerably more concerned about their locks and keys
than is our present Anthroposophical Society.
It was certainly not the intention of the Anthroposophical
Society to secrete away everything contained in the lecture
cycles. At a certain point I was requested to make the material,
which I otherwise discuss verbally, accessible to a larger
circle. And since there was no time to revise the lectures they
were printed as manuscripts in a form in which they would
otherwise not have been published — not because I did not
want to publish the material, but because I did not want to
publish it in this form and, furthermore, because there was
concern that it should only be read by people who have the
necessary preparation in order to prevent misunderstanding. Even
so, it is now possible to acquire every lecture cycle, even for
the purpose of attacking us.
The societies which kept specific knowledge under lock and key
and made people swear oaths that they would not reveal any of it,
made a better job of protecting these things. They knew that
something special must have occurred when a book suddenly
appeared which revealed something of significance in the sense
that we have discussed. As for the insignificant material —
well, you need only go to one of the side-streets in Paris and
you can buy the writings of the secret societies by the lorry
load. As a rule these publications are worthless.
But Isis Unveiled was not worthless. Its content was
substantive enough to identify the knowledge which it presented
as something original, through which was revealed the ancient
wisdom which had been carefully guarded until that moment.
As I said, those who reacted with shock imagined that someone
must have betrayed them. I have discussed this repeatedly from a
variety of angles in previous lectures. [ Note
6 ] But I now want
rather to characterize the judgement of the world, because that
is particularly relevant to the history of the movement. After
all, it was not difficult to understand that someone who had come
into the possession of traditional knowledge might have suggested
it to Blavatsky for whatever reason, and it need not have been a
particularly laudable one. It would not be far from the truth to
state that the betrayal occurred in one or a number of secret
societies and that Blavatsky was chosen to publish the material.
There was a good reason to make use of her, however. And here we
come to a chapter in tracing our cultural history which is really
rather peculiar. At the time there was very little talk of a
subject which today is on everyone's lips: psychoanalysis. But
Blavatsky enabled the people of sound judgement who came into
contact with this peculiar development to experience something in
a living way which made what has been written so far by the
various leading authorities in the psychoanalytic field appear
amateurish in the extreme. For what is it that psychoanalysis
wishes to demonstrate?
Where psychoanalysis is correct in a certain sense is in its
demonstration that there is something in the depths of human
nature which, in whatever form it exists there, can be raised
into consciousness; that there is something present in the body
which, when it is raised to consciousness, appears as something
spiritual. It is, of course, an extremely primitive action for a
psychoanalyst to raise what remains of past experience from the
depths of the human psyche in this way; past experience which has
not been assimilated intensively enough to satisfy the emotional
needs of a person, so that it sinks to the bottom, as it were,
and settles there as sediment, creating an unstable rather than a
stable equilibrium. But once brought into consciousness it is
possible to come to terms with such experiences, thus liberating
the human being from their unhealthy presence.
Karl Jung[ Note
7 ] is particularly interesting. It occurred
to him that somewhere in the depths — of course there is
some difficulty in defining where — there are all the
experiences with which the human being has failed to come to
terms since birth; that embedded in the individual psyche there
are all kinds of ancestral and cultural experiences stretching
far back. And today some poor soul goes to his therapist who
psychoanalyses him and discovers something so deep-seated in the
psyche that it did not originate in his present life, but came
through his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and so on,
until we arrive at the ancient Greeks who experienced the Oedipus
problem. It passed down through the blood and today, when these
Oedipal feelings make their presence felt in the human psyche,
they can be psychoanalysed away. Furthermore, people believe that
they have discovered some very interesting connections through
their ability to psychoanalyse away what lies in the far distant
past of one's culture.
The only problem is that these are thoroughly unscientific
research methods. You need only have a basic knowledge of
anthroposophy to know that all kinds of things can be extracted
from the depths of the human psyche. First there is our life
before birth, the things which the human being has experienced
before he descended into the physical world, and then there are
those things which he has experienced in earlier lives on earth.
That takes you from a dilettantish approach to reality! But one
also learns to recognize how the human psyche contains in
condensed form, as it were, the secrets of the cosmos. Indeed,
that was the view of past ages. That is why the human being was
described as a microcosm.
What we encounter as psychoanalysis today really is dilettantish
in the extreme. On the one hand it is psychologically amateurish
because it does not recognize that at certain levels physical and
spiritual life become one. It considers the superficial life of
the soul in abstract terms, and does not advance to the level
where this soul life weaves creatively in the blood and in the
breathing — in other words, where it is united with our
so-called material functions. But the physical life is also
amateurishly conceived, because it is observed purely in its
outer physical aspects and there is no understanding that the
spiritual is present everywhere in physical life, and above all
in the human organism. When these two amateurish views are
brought together in such a way that the one is supposed to
illuminate the other, as in psychoanalysis, then we are simply
left with dilettantism.
Well, the manifestation of this kind of amateurism may be seen
with Blavatsky from a psychological perspective. A stimulus may
have come from somewhere, through some betrayal. This stimulus
had the same effect as if a wise and invisible psychiatrist had
triggered within her a great amount of knowledge which originated
in her own personality rather than from ancient writings.
Up to the fifteenth century or thereabouts it was not an
infrequent occurrence for visions of cosmic secrets to be
triggered within human beings by some particularly characteristic
physical happening. Later this became seen as an extremely
mystical event. The tale told about Jakob Boehme, [ Note
8 ] who had a
magnificent vision as he looked at a pewter bowl, is admired
because people do not know that up to the fifteenth century it
was very common for an apparently minor stimulus to provoke in
human beings tremendous visions of cosmic secrets.
But it became increasingly rare, due to the increasing dominance
of the intellect. Intellectualism is connected with a specific
development of the brain. The brain calcifies, as it were, and
becomes hardened. This cannot, of course, be demonstrated
anatomically and physiologically, but it can be shown
spiritually. This hardened brain simply does not permit the inner
vision of human beings to rise to the surface of consciousness.
And now I have to say something extremely paradoxical, which is
nevertheless true. A greater hardening of the brain took place in
men, ignoring exceptions which, of course, exist both in men and
women — which is not to say that this is a particular
reason for female brains to celebrate, for at the end of the
nineteenth century they became hard enough too. But it was
nevertheless men who were ahead in terms of a more pronounced
intellectualism and hardening of the brain. And that is connected
with their inability to form judgements.
This was exactly the same time at which the secrecy surrounding
the knowledge of ancient times was still very pronounced. It
became obvious that this knowledge had little effect on men. They
learnt it by rote as they rose through the degrees. They were not
really affected by it and kept it under lock and key. But if
someone wished to make this ancient wisdom flower once more,
there was a special experiment he could try, and that was to make
a small dose of this knowledge, which he need not even
necessarily have understood himself, available to a woman whose
brain might have been prepared in a special way — for
Blavatsky's brain was something quite different from the brains
of other nineteenth-century women. Thus, material which was
otherwise dried-up old knowledge was able to ignite, in a manner
of speaking, in these female brains through the contrast with
what was otherwise available as culture; was able to stimulate
Blavatsky in the same way that the psychiatrist stimulates the
human psyche. By this means she was able to find within herself
what had been forgotten altogether by that section of humanity
which did not belong to the secret societies, and had been kept
carefully under lock and key and not understood by those who did
belong. In this way what I might describe as a cultural escape
valve was created which allowed this knowledge to emerge.
But at the same time there was no basis on which it could have
been dealt with in a sensible manner. For Madame Blavatsky was
certainly no logician. While she was able to use her personality
to reveal cosmic secrets, she was not capable of presenting these
things in a form which could be justified before the modern
scientific conscience.
Now just ask yourselves how, given the paucity of judgement with
which spiritual phenomena were received, was there any chance of
correctly assessing their re-emergence only twenty years later in
a very basic and dilettantish form in psychoanalysis? How was
proper account to be taken of something which had the potential
to become an overwhelming experience, but to which psychoanalysis
can only aspire once it has been cleansed and clarified and
stands on a firm basis; when it is no longer founded on the blood
which has flowed down the generations, but encompasses a true
understanding of cosmic relationships? How was such experience,
which presents a magnificent uncaricatured counter-image to
today's impaired psychoanalytical research, to be assimilated
adequately within a wider context in an age in which the ability
to form true judgements was such as I have described? In this
respect there were some interesting experiences to be had.
Let me illustrate this with an example of how difficult it is in
our modern age to make oneself understood if one wants to appeal
to wider, more generous powers of judgement; you will see from
the remainder of the lectures how necessary it is that I deal
with these apparently purely personal matters.
There was a period at the turn of the century in Berlin during
which a number of Giordano Bruno societies were being
established, including a Giordano Bruno League. Its membership
included some really excellent people who had a thorough interest
in everything contemporary which merited the concentration of
ones ideas, feelings and will. And in the abstract way in which
these things happen in our age, the Giordano Bruno League also
referred to the spirit. A well-known figure [ Note
9 ] who belonged
to this League titled his inaugural lecture “No Matter
without Spirit”. But all this lacked real perspective,
because the spirit and the ideas which were being pursued there
were fundamentally so abstract that they could not approach the
reality of the world. What annoyed me particularly was that these
people introduced the concept of monism at every available
opportunity. This was always followed with the remark that the
modern age had escaped from the dualism of the Middle Ages. I was
annoyed by the waffle about monism and the amateurish rejection
of dualism. I was annoyed by the vague, pantheistic reference to
the spirit: spirit which is present, well, simply everywhere. The
word became devoid of content. I found all that pretty hard to
take. Actually I came into conflict with the speaker immediately
after that first lecture on “No Matter without Spirit”,
which did not go down well at all. But then all that monistic
carrying-on became more and more upsetting, so I decided to
tackle these people in the hope that I could at least inject some
life into their powers of discernment. And since a whole series
of lectures had already been devoted to tirades against the
obscurantism of the Middle Ages, to the terrible dualism of
scholasticism, I decided to do something to shake up their powers
of judgement. I am currently accused of having been a rabid
disciple of Haeckel at that time.
I gave a lecture on Thomas Aquinas [ Note
10 ] and said, in
brief, that there was no justification to refer to the Middle
Ages as obscurantist, specifically in respect of the dualism of
Thomism and scholasticism. As monism was being used as a
catchword, I intended to show that Thomas Aquinas had been a
thorough monist. It was wrong to interpret monism solely in its
present materialistic sense; everyone had to be considered a
monist who saw the underlying principle of the world as a whole,
as the monon. So I said that Thomas Aquinas had certainly done
that, because he had naturally seen the monon in the divine unity
underlying creation. One had to be clear that Thomas Aquinas had
intended on the one hand to investigate the world through
physical research and intellectual knowledge but, on the other
hand, that he had wanted to supplement this intellectual
knowledge with the truths of revelation. But he had done that
precisely to gain access to the unifying principle of the world.
He had simply used two approaches. The worst thing for the
present age would be if it could not develop sufficiently broad
concepts to embrace some sort of historical perspective.
In short, I wanted to inject some fluidity into their dried-out
brains. But it was in vain and had a quite extraordinary effect.
To begin with, it had not the slightest meaning to the members of
the Giordano Bruno League. They were all Lutheran protestants. It
is appalling, they said; we make every attempt to deal
Catholicism a mortal blow, and now a member of this self-same
Giordano Bruno League comes along to defend it! They had not the
slightest idea what to make of it. And yet they were among the
most enlightened people of their time. But it is through this
kind of thing that one learns about powers of discrimination;
specifically, the willingness to take a broadly based view of
something which, above all, did not rely on theoretical
formulations, but aimed to make real progress on the path to the
spirit, to gain real access to the spiritual world.
Because whether or not we gain access to the spiritual world does
not depend on whether we have this or that theory about the
spirit or matter, but whether we are in a position to achieve a
real experience of the spiritual world. Spiritualists believe
very firmly that all their actions are grounded in the spirit,
but their theories are completely devoid of it. They most
certainly do not lead human beings to the spirit. One can be a
materialist, no less, and possess a great deal of spirit. It,
too, is real spirit, even if it has lost its way. Of course this
lost spirit need not be presented as something very valuable. But
having got lost, deluding itself that it considers matter to be
the only reality, it is still filled with more spirit than the
kind of unimaginative absence of anything spiritual at all which
seeks the spirit by material means because it cannot find any
trace of spirit within itself.
When you look back, therefore, at the beginnings you have to
understand the great difficulty with which the revelations of the
spiritual world entered the physical world in the last third of
the nineteenth century. Those beginnings have to be properly
understood if the whole meaning and the circumstances governing
the existence of the movement are to make sense. You need to
understand, above all, how serious was the intention in certain
circles not to allow anything which would truly lead to the
spirit to enter the public domain. There can be no doubt that the
appearance of Blavatsky was likely to jolt very many people who
were not to be taken lightly. And that is indeed what happened.
Those people who still preserved some powers of discrimination
reached the conclusion that here there was something which had
its source within itself. One need only apply some healthy common
sense and it spoke for itself. But there were nevertheless many
people whose interests would not be served by allowing this kind
of stimulus to flow into the world.
But it had arrived in the form of Blavatsky who, in a sense,
handled her own inner revelation in a naive and helpless manner.
That is already evident in the style of her writings and was
influenced by much that was happening around her. Indeed, do not
believe that there was any difficulty — particularly with
H.P. Blavatsky — for those who wanted to ensure that the
world should not accept anything of a spiritual nature, to attach
themselves to her entourage. In a sense she was gullible because
of her naive and helpless attitude to her own inner revelations.
Take the affair with the sliding doors through which the Mahatma
Letters were apparently inserted, when in fact they had been
written and pushed in by someone outside. The person who pushed
them in deceived Blavatsky and the world. Then, of course, it was
very easy to tell the world that she was a fraud. But do you not
understand that Blavatsky herself could have been deceived? For
she was prone to an extraordinary gullibility precisely because
of the special lack of hardness, as I would describe it, of her
brain.
The problem is an exceedingly complicated one and demands, like
everything of a true spiritual nature which enters the world in
our time, a quality of discernment, a healthy common sense. It is
not exactly evidence of healthy common sense to judge Adalbert
Stifter incapable of becoming a teacher and subsequently, when
the nod came — in this case it was again due to a woman,
and probably one with a less sclerotic brain than all those
officials — to find him suitable to inspect all those he
had not been allowed to join.
A healthy common sense is required to understand what is right.
But there are some peculiar views about this healthy common
sense. Last year I said that what anthroposophy had to say from
the spiritual world could be tested by healthy common sense. One
of my critics came to the conclusion that it was a wild-goose
chase to talk about healthy common sense, because everyone with a
scientific education knew that reason which was healthy
understood next to nothing, and anybody who claimed to understand
anything was not healthy. That is the stage we have reached in
our receptivity to things spiritual.
These examples show you how contemporary attitudes have affected
the whole movement. For it is almost inevitable —
particularly given someone as difficult to understand as
Blavatsky — that such an atmosphere should lead to a
variation of the one message: any clever person today, anyone
with healthy common sense, will say ignorabimus; [ Note
11 ] anyone who
does not say ignorabimus must be either mad or a swindler.
If we really want to understand our times in order to gain some
insight into the conditions governing the existence of the
anthroposophical movement, then this must not be seen purely as
the malicious intent of a few individuals. It has to be seen as
something which in all countries, in contemporary mankind,
belongs to the flavour of our times. Then, however, we will be
able to imbue the strong and courageous stand we should adopt
with something which, if one looks at our age from an
anthroposophical point of view, should not be omitted —
despite the decisive, spiritually decisive, rejection of our
opponents' position — compassion. It is necessary to have
compassion in spite of everything, because the clarity of
judgement in our times has been obscured.
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