Today I would like to
mention certain things which will afterwards make it possible
for us to understand more closely the karmic connections of the
anthroposophical movement itself. What I wish to say today will
take its start from the fact that there are two groups of human
beings in the anthroposophical movement. In general terms I have
already described how the anthroposophical movement is composed
of the individuals within it. What I shall say today must of
course be taken in broad outline and as a whole; but there are
the two groups of human beings in the anthroposophical movement.
The things which I shall characterize do not lie so obviously
spread out ‘on the palm of the hand,’ as we say.
They are by no means such that crude and simple observation
would enable us to say: in the case of this or that member, it
is so or so. Much of what I shall characterize today lies not in
the full everyday consciousness of the personality, but, like
most karmic things, in the instincts — in the
sub-conscious. Nevertheless, it does thoroughly impress itself
on the character and temperament, the mode of action and indeed
the real action of the human being.
We have to distinguish the
one group, who are related to Christianity in such a way that
those who belong to it feel their attachment to Christianity
nearest and dearest to their hearts. There lives in these souls
the longing, as anthroposophists, to be able to call themselves
Christians in the true sense of the word, as they conceive it.
This group derives great
comfort from the fact that it can be said in the widest and
fullest sense: The anthroposophical movement is one that
recognises and bears the Christ Impulse within it. Indeed, for
this group, pangs of conscience would arise if it were not so.
Now as to the other group:
— In the manifestations of their life, those who belong to
it are indeed no less sincerely Christian. And yet, they come to
Christianity from rather a different angle. To begin with they
find great satisfaction in anthroposophical cosmology —
the evolution of the earth from the other planetary forms, and
so forth. They find satisfaction in all that Anthroposophy has
to say about humanity in general. From this point they are then
led naturally to Christianity. But they do not feel in the same
measure an inward need of the heart to place Christ in the
center at all costs.
As I said, these things
work themselves out to a large extent in the subconscious. But
whoever is able to practice true observation of souls will be
able to judge the different individuals in the right way in
every single case.
Now the
origins of this grouping go back into very ancient times. You
know, my dear friends, from my Occult
Science that at a certain
period of earthly evolution the souls took their departure from
the continued evolution of the Earth and came to dwell on other
planets of our system. Then, during a certain time —
during the Lemurian and Atlantean times — they came down
again to Earth. Thus the souls came down again from the various
planets — not only from Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, etc., but
also from the Sun — to take on an earthly form. And we
know how there arose, under the influence of these facts, what I
described in Occult
Science as the Oracles.
Now there were many among
these souls who tended through a very ancient karma to come into
that stream which afterwards became the Christian stream. We
must remember, after all, that less than a third of the
population of the earth are professing Christians to this day.
Thus only a certain number of the individual souls who came down
to earth developed the impulse to evolve towards the Christian
stream.
The human souls came down
at different times. There were those who came down comparatively
soon, in the first periods of Atlantean civilisation. But there
were also those who came down relatively late — whose
sojourn, so to speak, in the pre-earthly planetary life was
long. When we look back into the life of such a soul —
beginning with the present incarnation — we come perhaps
to a former Christian incarnation and maybe to yet another
Christian incarnation. Then we come to the pre-Christian
incarnations. But we reach comparatively soon the earliest
incarnation of such a soul, whereat we must say: Tracing the
life still farther back from this point, it goes up into the
planetary realms. Before this point, these souls were not yet
present in earthly incarnations.
In the case of other souls,
who have also found their way into Christianity, it is
different. We can go very far back; we find many incarnations.
It was after many incarnations, pre-Christian and Atlantean,
that these other souls entered into the Christian stream.
For intellectual thinking
such a thing as I have just mentioned is exceedingly misleading.
For one might easily be led to suppose that those who by the
judgment of present-day civilisation would be considered as
particularly able minds, are the very ones who have had many
incarnations. But this need not by any means be the case. On the
contrary, people who have excellent faculties in the present-day
sense of the word — people who are well able to enter into
modern life may often be the very ones for whom we find
comparatively few past incarnations on the earth.
Perhaps I may here remind
you of what I said at the time when the anthroposophical stream
which we now have in the anthroposophical movement was
inaugurated. I may remind you of what I said at the Christmas
Foundation Meeting, when I spoke of those individualities with
whom the Epic of Gilgamesh is connected. [See World History
in the Light of Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977.]
I explained certain things about such individualities. We find,
as we look backward, that they had had comparatively few
incarnations.
Now, my dear friends, for
those human souls who come to Anthroposophy today — no
matter whether there are still other, intermediate incarnations
or not — that incarnation is important which falls roughly
into the 3rd or 4th or 5th century after Christ. (We find it
nearly always, spread out over a fairly long period, — two
to three centuries. Sometimes it is later — even as late
as the 7th or 8th century). Above all, we must look into the
experiences of these souls in that early Christian time. We then
find a subsequent incarnation when all these experiences were
secured or confirmed.
Now in the case of all
these souls, the important thing is: According to all their past
conditions, their former lives on earth, how were they to relate
themselves to Christianity? You see, my dear friends, this is a
very important karmic question. Later on we shall have to
consider other, more subsidiary karmic questions; but this
question is a cardinal question of karma, because, passing over
many other subsidiary things, it is through their deepest,
innermost experiences in former incarnations — through
what they underwent with respect to world-conceptions, religious
beliefs and the like — that human beings come into the
Anthroposophical Society. With respect to the karma of the
Anthroposophical Society, this must therefore be placed into the
foreground. What have the souls in this Society experienced, in
matters of knowledge, world-conception and Rreligion?
In those early centuries of
Christian evolution, one could still take one's start from
traditions of knowledge — which had existed ever since the
founding of Christianity — about the Being of Christ
Himself. In those traditions, He who lived as Christ in the
personality of Jesus was regarded as a Being of the Sun, before
He entered into this earthly life. We must not imagine that the
attitude of the Christian world to these truths was always as
negative as it is today. In the first centuries of Christianity
they still understood the Gospels, certain passages of which
speak so distinctly of this Mystery. They understood that the
Being who is called Christ had come down into a human body from
the Sun. How they conceived it in detail is less important for
the moment; the point is that they still had this idea.
At the same time, in the
epoch of which I am now speaking, the possibility of really
understanding such a conception had dwindled very much. It was
hard to understand that a Being coming from the Sun descends to
the Earth. Above all, many of the souls who had come into
Christianity having a large number of earthly incarnations
behind them — far back into Atlantean times — could
no longer fully understand how Christ can be called a Being of
the Sun. The very souls who in their old beliefs had felt
themselves attached to the Sun-Oracles, and who thus revered the
Christ even in Atlantean times inasmuch as they looked upward to
the Sun — the souls therefore who according to the saying
of St. Augustine were ‘Christians before Christianity was
founded upon Earth,’ * Christians of the Sun —
these very souls, by the whole character of their spiritual
life, could find no real understanding of the saying that Christ
was a Sun-Hero. Therefore they preferred to hold fast to that
belief which — without such interpretation, without this
cosmic Christology — simply regarded Christ as a God, a
God from unknown realms, who had united Himself with the body of
Jesus. Under these conditions, they accepted what is related in
the Gospels. They could no longer turn their gaze upward to the
cosmic worlds in order to understand the Being of the Christ.
They had learned to know Him only in the worlds beyond the
Earth. For even the Mysteries on Earth — the Sun-Oracles —
had always spoken to them of Christ as a Sun-Being. Thus they
could not find their way into the idea that Christ — this
Christ beyond the Earth — had really become an earthly
Being.
[*
St. Augustine: Retractationes.
I.xiii.3. “When I said [in his book De
Vera Religione]
‘That is in our times the Christian religion, to know
which, is the most secure and certain salvation,’ it was
said in relation to the name, not in relation to the thing
itself, of which it is the name. For the thing itself, which is
now called the Christian religion, was there among the people of
antiquity, and was not wanting from the beginning of the human
race, down to the time when Christ came in the flesh; whereafter
the true religion, which was always there, began to be called
Christian. For when the Apostles began to preach Him after the
resurrection and ascension into heaven, and very many believed,
first of all at Antioch, as it is written, they were called
Christian disciples (Acts X1, 26). Therefore I said: ‘This
is in our times the Christian religion,’ not because it
was not there in earlier times, but because in later times it
received this name.” (Tr. from the Latin text).]
These Christian souls, when
they afterwards passed through the gate of death, came into a
strange position, which I may describe — somewhat tritely
perhaps — as follows. These Christians, in their life
after death, came into the position of a man who knows the name
of another man and has heard many things about him; but he has
never made his acquaintance in person. To such a man it may
happen, at a moment when all the support which served him as
long as he merely knew of the name are taken away, that
he is suddenly expected to know the real person, and his inner
life completely fails him in face of this new situation. So it
was with the souls of whom I am now speaking: those who in
ancient times had felt themselves belonging especially to the
Sun-Oracles. In their life after death, they came into a
situation in which they had to say, ‘Where, then, is
the Christ? We are now among the Beings of the Sun, where we had
always found Him, but now we find Him not.’ That He was on
Earth, this they had not really received into the thoughts and
feelings which remained to them when they passed through the
gate of death. So after death they found themselves in a state
of great uncertainty about the Christ and they lived on in this
uncertainty about Him. They remained in many respects in this
uncertainty. Thus, if in the intervening time another
incarnation followed, they tended easily to join those groups of
people who are described to us in the religious history of
Europe as the various heretical societies.
Then, no matter whether
they had passed through such another incarnation or not, they
found themselves together again in that great gathering above
the earth, which I described here the other morning, placing it
at the time of the first half of the 19th century. Then it was
that these souls among others found themselves face to face with
a great super-sensible ritual consisting in mighty imaginations.
And in the sublime imaginations of that super-sensible ritual
there was enacted before their spiritual vision the great
Sun-Mystery of Christ. These souls, as I explained, had come to
a blind alley with their Christianity. And the object was,
before they should descend to earthly life again, to bring them,
in picture-form, at least, face to face with Christ, whom they
had lost — though not entirely — yet to such extent
that in their souls He had become involved in currents of
uncertainty and doubt.
Now these souls responded
in a peculiar way. Not that they found themselves in a still
greater uncertainty through the fact that all this was enacted
before them. On the contrary it gave them a certain satisfaction
in their life between death and a new birth — a feeling of
salvation from many doubts. But it also gave them a kind of
memory of what they had received about the Christ — albeit
in a form that had not yet been permeated in the true cosmic
sense by the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus there remained in their
inmost being an immense warmth and devotion of feeling towards
Christianity, and at the same time a subconscious dawning of
those sublime imaginations.
All this was concentrated
into a great longing, that they might now at last be able to be
Christians in the true way. Then when they descended —
when they became young again, returning to the earth at the end
of the 19th or at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries —
having received the Christ by way of inner feeling though
without cosmic understanding in their early Christian
incarnation, they could do no other than feel themselves
impelled towards Him. But the impressions they had received in
the imaginations to which they had been drawn in their
pre-earthly life, remained in them only as an undefined longing.
Thus it was difficult for them to find their way into the
anthroposophical world-conception, inasmuch as the latter
studies the cosmos to begin with and leaves the consideration of
Christ until a later point.
Why did they have such
difficulty? For the simple reason, my dear friends, that they
had their own peculiar relationship to the question ‘What
is Anthroposophy?’ Let us ask: What is Anthroposophy in
its reality? My dear friends, if you gaze into all those
wonderful, majestic Imaginations that stood there as a
super-sensible spiritual action in the first half of the 19th
century, and if you translate all these into human concepts,
then you have Anthroposophy. For the next higher level of
experience — for the adjoining spiritual world whence man
descends into this earthly life — Anthroposophy was
already there in the first half of the 19th century. It was not
on the earth, but it was there. And if Anthroposophy is seen
today it is seen indeed in that direction: towards the first
half of the 19th century. Quite as a matter of course one sees
it there. Nay, even at the end of the 18th century one sees it.
For example, one may have
the following experience. There was a certain man who was once
in a peculiar position. Through a friend, the great riddle of
human earthly life was raised before him. But his friend was not
altogether free of the angular thinking of Kant (“das
kantige Kant'sche Denken”), and thus it came to expression
in a rather abstract philosophical way. He himself — the
one of whom I am now speaking — could not find his way
into the ‘angular thinking of Kant.’ Yet everything
in his soul stirred up the same great riddle, the great question
of life. How are the reason and the sensuous nature of man
connected with one another? And lo, there were opened to him —
not merely the doors but the very flood-gates, which for a
moment let radiate into his soul those regions of the World in
which the mighty imaginations were being enacted. And all this —
entering not through windows or doors but through wide-open
flood-gates into his soul — translated as it were into
little miniatures, came forth as the fairy-tale of the Green
Snake and the Beautiful Lily. For the man of whom I speak
was Goethe.
Miniatures — tiny
reflected images, translated even into a fairy-like beauty —
descended thus in Goethe's Tale of the Green Snake and the
Beautiful Lily. We need not therefore wonder that when it
became necessary to give Anthroposophy in artistic scenes or
pictures, (where we too must naturally have recourse to the
great imaginations), my first Mystery Play, The Portal of
Initiation became alike in structure — albeit
different in content — alike in structure to the Fairy
Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.
You see it is possible to
look into the deeper connection even through the actual things
that have taken place among us. Everyone who has had anything to
do with occult matters knows that what happens on earth is the
downward reflection of something that has taken place long, long
before in the spiritual world, though in a somewhat different
way, inasmuch as certain spirits of hindrance are not mingled in
it there.
These souls now, who were
preparing to descend into earthly existence at the end of the
19th or at the beginning of the 20th century, brought with them
— albeit in their subconscious — a longing also to
know something of cosmology, etc., that
is, to look out upon the world in the anthroposophical
way. But above all, their hearts and minds were strongly
inflamed for Christ. They would have felt pangs of conscience if
this whole conception of Anthroposophy — to which they
found themselves attracted as an outcome of their pre-earthly
life — had not been permeated by the Christ Impulse. Such
was the one group, taken of course ‘as a whole.’
The other group lived
differently. If I may put it so, the other group, when they
emerged in their present incarnation, had not yet reached that
weariness in Paganism which the souls whom I described just now
had reached. Compared to those others, they had indeed spent a
relatively short time on earth — they had had fewer
incarnations; and in these incarnations they had filled
themselves with the mighty impulses which a man may have, if
through his lives on earth he has stood in a living connection
with the many Pagan Gods, and if this connection echoes strongly
in his later incarnations. Thus they were not yet weary of the
old Paganism. Even in the first centuries of Christianity the
old Pagan impulses had still been working in them strongly,
although they did incline more or less to Christianity, which,
as we know, only gradually worked its way forth from Paganism.
At that time they received
Christianity chiefly through their intellect. Though indeed it
was intellect permeated with inner feeling, still they received
it with their intellect. They thought a great deal about
Christianity. Nor must you imagine this a very learned kind of
thinking. They may indeed have been relatively simple men and
women, in simple circumstances; but they thought much.
Once again it matters
little whether there was a subsequent incarnation in the
meantime. Such an incarnation will of course have wrought some
changes; but the essential thing is this: When they had passed
through the gate of death, these souls looked back upon the
earth in such a way that Christianity appeared to them as
something into which they had not yet really grown. They were
less weary of the old Paganism; they still bore within their
souls strong impulses from the old Pagan life. Thus they were
still waiting for the time when they should become true
Christians.
The very people of whom I
spoke to you a week ago, describing how they battled against
Paganism on the side of Christianity — they themselves
were among the souls who in reality still bore much Paganism,
many Pagan impulses within them. They were still waiting to
become real Christians. These souls, then, passed through the
gate of death. They arrived in the spiritual world. They passed
through the life between death and a new birth, and in the time
which I have indicated — in the first half of the 19th
century or a little earlier — they came before those
sublime and glorious imaginations; and in these imaginations
they beheld many impulses to ignite their work and their
activity. They received these impulses mostly into their will.
And, if I may say so, when
we now look with occult vision at all that these souls are
carrying today, especially within their will, we find —
above all in their life of will — the frequent impress of
those mighty spiritual Imaginations.
Now the souls who enter
their earthly life in such condition feel the need to experience
again here upon earth — in the way that is possible on
earth — what they experienced in their pre-earthly life as
a determining factor for their karmic work. For the former kind,
for the former group of souls, the life in the first half of the
19th century took its course in such a way that they
felt themselves impelled by a deep longing to partake in that
super-sensible ritual. Yet they came to it — if I may so
describe it — in a vague and mystic mood, so that when
they afterwards descended to the earth only dim recollections
remained to them; albeit Anthroposophy, transformed into its
earthly shape, could make itself intelligible to them through
these recollections. But with the second group it was different.
It was as though they found themselves together again in the
living aftereffect of the resolve that they had made. For they,
even then, had not been quite weary of Paganism. They still
stood in expectation of being able to become Christians in a
true way of evolution. And now it was as though they remembered
a resolve that they had made during that first half of the 19th
century: a resolve to carry down on to the earth all that had
stood before them in such mighty pictures, and to translate it
into an earthly form.
When we look at many an
anthroposophist who bears within him the impulse above all to
work and co-operate with Anthroposophy most actively, we find
among such anthroposophist of the kind I have now described. The
two types can be distinguished very clearly.
Now, my dear friends,
perhaps you will say: All that you have here told us may explain
many things in the karma of the Anthroposophical Society; but
one may well grow anxious: ‘What is coming next?’ —
seeing that so many things are being explained about which one
might well prefer not to be torn away from blissful ignorance.
Are we now to set to work and think whether we belong to the one
type or the other? My dear friends, to this I must give a very
definite answer. If the Anthroposophical Society were merely to
contain a theoretical teaching or a confession of belief in such
and such ideas of cosmology, Christology, etc. — if such
were the character of this Society — it would certainly
not be what it is intended to be by those who stand at its
fountainhead. Anthroposophy shall be something which for a true
anthroposophist has power to change and transform his life, to
carry into the Spiritual what is experienced nowadays only in
unspiritual forms of expression.
I will ask you this: Has it
a very bad effect upon a child when at a certain age certain
things are explained to him or her? Until a certain age is
reached, children do not know whether they are French or
German, Norwegians, Belgian or Italian. At any rate this whole
way of thinking has little meaning for them until a certain age.
One may say they know nothing of it in reality. We need only put
it radically: — You will surely not have met many
Chauvinist babies, or even three-year old Chauvinists! ... It is
only at a certain age that we become aware: I am German, I am a
Frenchman, I am an Englishman, I am a Dutchman and so on. Yet in
accepting these things, do we not grow into them quite
naturally? Do we say it is unbearable to discover at a certain
age of childhood that we are Poles or a Frenchmen, or Germans
or Russians or Dutch? We are used to these things, we take them
as a matter of course. But this, my dear friends, is in the
external realm of the senses. Anthroposophy is to raise the
whole life of man to a higher level. We must learn to bear
different things, things which will only shock us in the life of
the senses if we misunderstand them. And among the things we are
to learn to recognise there is this too: — We must grow
just as naturally and simply into the self-knowledge which is to
realise that we belong to one type or the other.
By this means the
foundation will be created for a right estimation of the other
karmic impulses in our lives. Hence it was necessary, as a kind
of first direction, to show how the individual — according
to the special manner of his pre-destination — stands in
relation to Anthroposophy, to Christology, and in relation to
the greater degree of activity or passivity within the
anthroposophical movement.
Of course there are
transitions too, between the one type and the other. These
however are due to the fact that what comes over from the
previous incarnation into the present is still irradiated by a
yet earlier incarnation. Especially with the souls of the second
group this is often the case. Many things still shine over from
their genuinely heathen incarnations. For this reason they have
a very definite predisposition to take the Christ in the sense
in which He must truly be taken, namely as a Cosmic Being. But
what I am now saying shows itself not so very much in the ideal
considerations; it shows itself far more in the practical things
of life. The two types can be recognised far better by the way
in which they tackle the detailed situations of life than by
their thoughts. Thoughts indeed have no great significance —
I mean, the abstract thoughts have no such great significance
for man. So, for instance (needless to say, the personal element
is always to be excluded here) we shall frequently find the
transition types from the one to the other among those who
somehow cannot help carrying over the habits of
non-anthroposophical life into the anthroposophical movement. I
mean, those who are not even inclined to take the
anthroposophical movement so very seriously, and those above all
who are always grumbling, finding fault with anthroposophists.
Precisely among those who are always finding fault with the
conditions in the anthroposophical movement, especially with the
personalities and all the little petty things, we find the
transition types, flickering from the one into the other. For in
such cases the intensity of neither of the two impulses is very
strong.
Therefore, my dear friends,
at all costs — even though it may sometimes mean a
searching of conscience and character — we must somehow
find it possible, each one of us, to deepen the anthroposophical
movement in this direction, approaching such realities as these
and thinking a learnestly on this: How do we, according to our
own super-sensible nature, belong to the anthroposophical
movement? If we do this, there will arise a purer conception of
the anthroposophical movement; it will become in course of time
an ever more spiritual conception. What we have hitherto
maintained in theory — and it need not go so very deep,
when we merely stand for it as a theory — this we shall
now apply to real life. It is indeed an intense application to
life, when we learn to place ourselves, our own life, into
connection with these things. To talk a lot about karma, saying
that such and such things are punished or rewarded thus and thus
from one life to the next, need not strike so very deep; it need
not hurt us. But when it reaches into our own flesh and blood —
when it is a question of placing our own present incarnation,
with the perfectly definite super-sensible quality that
underlies it — then indeed it goes far nearer to our
selves. And it is this deepening of the human being which we
must bring into all earthly life, into all earthly civilisation
through Anthroposophy.
This, my dear friends, was
a kind of Intermezzo in our studies, and we will continue from
this point next Friday.
Continued in the next issue
of SCR
Thanks to the Rudolf
Steiner Archive
Home