If
we look at a phenomenon such as H.P. Blavatsky from the
perspective which will have become clear to you, we need to be
concerned first with her personality as such. The other aspect is
the impact she had on a large number of people. Now it is true,
of course, that this impact was in part quite negative. Those who
had a philosophical, psychological, literary, scientific —
let us say a well-educated — bent were glad to be rid of
this phenomenon in one way or another. They could achieve this
simply by saying that she had engaged in dishonest practices and
that there was no need to spend time on something where there was
evidence of that sort of thing.
Then there were those who were in
possession of ancient, traditional wisdom, members of one or
another secret society. One must never forget that numerous
events in the world are linked to actions from such secret
societies. They were concerned above all to find a way to prevent
such a depiction of the spiritual world having a wider impact.
Because, as we saw, these things could be read and promulgated,
and in this way the secret societies had been deprived of a good
deal of the power which they wanted to preserve for themselves.
That is why it is members of such societies who are behind the
accusations that Blavatsky engaged in dishonest practices.
More important for our present
purpose, however, is that Blavatsky's writings and everything
else connected with her personality made a certain impression on
a large number of people. That led to the establishment of
movements which describe themselves in one way or another as
theosophical.
I would like you to remember that in
these discussions I always try to present my material in such a
way that it should correspond to the facts. This becomes
impossible nowadays in many circles, simply because of the
terminology one has to use. What happens today is that when a
person encounters a word it is very tempting for him to seek a
dictionary definition in order to avoid having to look at the
issue itself. When such literary people hear of theosophy they
open a dictionary — which may well be a dictionary in their
minds — and look up the word. Or they might go as far as to
study all kinds of literature in which a word like theosophy
occurs, and then use that as the basis for their judgement. You
have to be aware how much actually depends on this kind of
procedure.
This must always be juxtaposed with
the question: How did the societies which base themselves on
Blavatsky come to use the name Theosophical Society? One thing
which did not happen, when it was founded at the end of the
nineteenth century, was to found a Theosophical Society with the
aim of propagating theosophy as defined in the dictionary. But a
body of knowledge about the spiritual world existed through
Blavatsky, which initially was simply there. Then it was found
necessary to cultivate this knowledge through a society and a
society requires a name. It is pure coincidence that the
societies which are based on that called themselves the
Theosophical Society. No one could think of a better name —
it's as simple as that. This has to be clearly remembered. People
who have learnt about the historical development of their given
area of study are likely to have come across the term theosophy.
But the term they have come across has nothing to do with what
called itself the Theosophical Society.
Within the Anthroposophical Society,
at any rate, such things ought to be taken very seriously. There
should be a certain drive for accuracy, so that a proper feeling
can develop for the unobjective scribblings to which these things
have gradually given rise.
But there is one question which
should particularly concern us: Why is it that a large number of
our contemporaries have felt the urge to follow up these
revelations? Because that will provide us with the bridge to
something of a quite different nature: to the Anthroposophical
Society.
In considering Blavatsky, it is
important that her attitude was what might well be called an
anti-christian one. In her Secret Doctrine she revealed in
one large sweep the differing impulses and development of the
many ancient religions. But everything which might have been
expected as an objective depiction is clouded by her subjective
judgement, the judgement of her feelings. It becomes abundantly
clear that she had a deep sympathy for all religions in the world
other than Judaism and Christianity, and that she had a deep
antipathy towards Judaism and Christianity. Blavatsky depicts
everything which comes from the latter as inferior to the great
revelations of the various pagan religions: in other words, an
expressly anti-christian perspective, but an expressly spiritual
one.
She was able to speak of spiritual
beings and spiritual processes in the same way that one normally
speaks of the beings and processes of the physical world; she was
able to discuss aspects of this spiritual world because she had
the capacity to move among spiritual forces in the same way that
contemporary people normally move among physical-sensory forces.
On that basis she was able to bring
to the surface and clarify characteristic impulses of the various
pantheistic religions.
Now we might be surprised by two
things. First, that it is possible at all today for someone to
appear who perceives the salvation of mankind in this
anti-christian perspective. And second, we might be surprised
about the decisive and profound influence exerted by such an
anti-christian perspective specifically on people with a
Christian outlook — less so perhaps on those with a Jewish
background. These are two questions we must ponder when we speak
about conditions governing the existence of the contemporary life
of the spirit among the broader masses in general.
In respect of Blavatsky's
anti-christian perspective, I want only to recall that someone
who became much better known than she in Central Europe, among
certain circles at least, had as much of an anti-christian
perspective. That was Nietzsche. [ Note
1 ] It is
difficult to be more anti-christian than the author of The
Anti-Christ. It would be
adopting a very superficial attitude not to enquire into the
reason for the anti-christian outlook of these two personalities.
But to find an answer one needs to dig a little bit deeper.
For we need to have a clear
understanding that increasing numbers of people today are
becoming divided in their spiritual life, something which they do
not always acknowledge and which they try to paper over with a
certain intellectual cowardice, but which is all the more active
in the unconscious depths of their mind.
One needs to have a clear
understanding of the way in which the European peoples and their
American cousins have been influenced by the educational
endeavours of the last three, four, five hundred years. One need
only consider how great the difference really is between the
content of today's secular education and the religious impulses
of humanity. From the time people enter elementary school all
thinking, their whole inner orientation, is directed toward this
modern education. Then they are also provided with what is meant
to satisfy their religious needs. A dreadful gap opens up between
the two. People never really have the opportunity to deal
inwardly with this chasm, preferring instead to submit to the
most dreadful illusions in this respect.
This raises questions about the
historical process which led to the creation of this yawning
chasm. For this we have to look back to those centuries in which
learning was the province of those few who were thoroughly
prepared for it. You can be quite certain that a twelve-year-old
schoolgirl today has a greater fund of worldly knowledge than any
educated person of the eleventh, twelfth or thirteenth centuries.
These things must not be overlooked. Education has come to rely
on an extraordinarily intense feeling of authority, an almost
invincible sense of authority. In the course of the centuries
modern education has increasingly comprised only the knowledge of
what can be demonstrated to the outer senses, or by calculation.
By excluding everything else it became possible — because
two times two equals four, and the five senses are so persuasive
— for modern education to acquire its sense of authority.
But that also increasingly gave rise to the feeling that
everything which human beings believe, which they consider to be
right, must be justified by the the knowledge of which modern
learning is so certain. It was impossible to present in a
corresponding fashion any truth from the realms where mathematics
and the senses no longer apply.
How were these truths presented to
humanity prior to the existence of modern learning? They were
presented in ritual images. The essential element in the spread
of religion over the centuries lay not in the sermons, for
instance, but in ceremonial, in the rituals. Try to imagine for a
moment what it was like in Christian countries in the fourteenth
or fifteenth centuries. The important thing was for people to
enter a world presented to them in mighty and grandiose images.
All around, frescoes on the walls reminded them of the spiritual
life. It was as if their earthly life could reach as high as the
tallest mountain, but at that point, if one could climb just a
little bit higher, the spiritual life began. The language of the
spiritual world was depicted in images which stimulated the
imagination, in the audible harmonies of music, or in the words
of set forms such as mantras and prayers. These ages understood
clearly that images, not concepts, were required for the
spiritual world. People needed something vividly pictorial not
something which could be debated. Something was required which
would allow the spirit to speak through what was accessible to
the senses. Christianity and its secrets, the Mystery of Golgotha
and everything connected with it, were essentially spoken about
in the form of images, even when words were used in story form.
The dogmas were also still understood as something pictorial. And
this Christian teaching remained unchallenged from any quarter
prior to the existence of intellectual learning, and for as long
as these things did not have to be justified by reason.
Now just look at historical processes
in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
the urgency with which human beings begin to experience the drive
to understand everything intellectually. This introduced a
critical attitude of world-historical significance.
Thus, the majority [in the west –
Ed.] of human beings today are introduced to religious life
through Christianity but alongside that to modern learning also.
As a consequence, the two — Christianity and modern
learning — co-exist in each soul. And even if people do not
admit it, it transpires that the results of intellectual
education cannot be used to prove Christian truths. So from
childhood people are now taught the fact that two times two
equals four and that the five senses must only be used in such a
context, and they also begin to understand that such absolutes
are incompatible with Christianity.
Modern theologians who have tried to
marry the two have lost Christ, are no longer able to speak to
the broad spectrum of people about Christ; at most they speak
about the personality of Jesus. Thus Christianity itself has been
able to be preserved only in its old forms. But modern people are
simply no longer willing to accept this in their souls, and they
lose some of their inner security. Why?
Well, just look at the way
Christianity has developed historically. It is extremely
dishonest to use rationalism to put meaning into Christianity,
the Mystery of Golgotha and everything connected with it. One has
to talk about a spiritual world if one wants to speak about
Christ. Modern human beings did not have the means in their
innermost being to understand Christ on the basis of what they
had been taught at school, for rationalism and intellectualism
have robbed them of the spiritual world. Christ is still present
in name and tradition, but the feeling for what that means is
gone; the understanding of Christ as a spiritual being among
spiritual beings in a spiritual world has disappeared. The world
created by modern astronomy, biology and science is a world
devoid of spirit.
Thus numerous souls grew up who, for
these reasons, had quite specific needs. Time really does
progress, and the people of today are not the same as people in
earlier ages. You must have said to yourselves: Here I meet with
a certain number of others in a society to cultivate spiritual
truths. Why do you, each single one of you, do that? What drives
you? Well, the thing which drives people to do this is usually so
deeply embedded in the unconscious depths of their soul life that
there is little clarity about it. But here, where we want to
reflect on our position as anthroposophists, the question has to
be asked.
If you look back to earlier times, it
was self-evident that material things and processes were not the
totality, but that spirits were everywhere. People perceived a
spiritual world which surrounded them in their environment. And
because they found a spiritual world they were able to understand
Christ.
Modern intellectualism makes it
impossible to discover a spiritual world, if one is honest, and
as a consequence it is impossible to understand Christ properly.
The people who try so hard to rediscover a spiritual life are
very specific souls driven by two things. First, most souls who
come together in the kind of societies we have been talking about
start to experience a vague feeling within themselves which they
cannot describe. And if this feeling is investigated with the
means available in the spiritual world it turns out to be a
feeling which stems from earlier lives on earth in which a
spiritual environment still existed. Today, people are appearing
in whose souls something from their previous lives on earth
remains active. There would be neither theosophists nor
anthroposophists if such people did not exist. They are to be
found in all sections of society. They do not know that their
feeling is the result of earlier lives on earth, but it is. And
it makes them search for a very specific path, for very specific
knowledge. Indeed, what continues to have an effect is the
spiritual content of earlier lives on earth.
Human beings today are affected in
two ways. They can have the feeling that there is something
within them which affects them, which is simply there. But even
though they might know a great deal about the physical world they
cannot describe this feeling because nothing which was not of a
spiritual nature has been carried over. If, however, in the
present I am deprived of everything spiritual, then what has come
over from a previous life remains dissatisfied. That is the one
aspect.
The other effect which lives in human
beings is a vague feeling that their dreams should really reveal
more than the physical world. It is of course an error, an
illusion. But what is the origin of this illusion, which has
arisen in parallel with the development of modern learning? When
people who have had the benefit of a modern education gather
together in learned circles they have to show their cultural
breeding. If someone starts to talk about spiritual effects in
the world people adopt an air of ridicule, because that is what
being cultured demands. It is not acceptable within our school
education to talk about spiritual effects in the world. To do so
implies superstition, lack of education.
Two groups will then often form in
such circles. Frequently someone plucks up a little courage to
talk about spiritual things. People then adopt an air of
ridicule. The majority leave to play cards or indulge in some
other worthy pursuit. But a few are intrigued. They go into a
side-room and begin to talk about these things, they listen with
open mouths and cannot get enough of it; but it has to be in a
side-room because anything else shows a lack of education. The
things which a modern person can learn there are mostly as
incoherent and chaotic as dreaming, but people love it all the
same. Those who have gone to play cards would also love it,
except that their passion for cards is even stronger. At least
that is what they tell themselves.
Why do human beings in our modern age
feel the urge to investigate their dreams? Because they feel
quite instinctively, without any clear understanding, that the
content of their thoughts and what they see depicted in the
physical world is all very nice, but it does not give them
anything for their soul life. A secret thinking, feeling and
willing lives in me when I am awake, they feel, which is as free
as my dream life is free when I am sleeping. There is something
in the depths of the soul which is dreamt even when I am awake.
Modern people feel that, precisely because the spiritual element
is missing from the physical world. They can only catch a glimpse
of it when they are dreaming. In earlier lives on earth they saw
it in everything around them.
And now those souls are being born
who can feel working within themselves not only impulses from
their previous lives on earth, but what took place in the
spiritual world in their pre-earthly existence. This is related
to their internal dreaming. It is an echo of life before birth.
But not only do the historical
processes deny them the spirit; an educational system has been
constructed which is hostile to the spirit, which proves the
spirit out of existence.
If we ask how people found a common
interest in such societies as we are describing here, it is
through these two features of the soul; namely, that something is
active both from their previous earth lives and from their
pre-earthly existence. This is the case for most of you. You
would not be sitting here if these two things were not active in
you.
In very ancient times social
institutions were determined by the Mysteries, and were in
harmony with the content of their spiritual teaching. Take an
Athenian for example. He revered the goddess Athene. He was part
of a social community which he knew to be constituted according
to Athene's intentions. The olive trees around Athens were
planted by her. The laws of the state had been dictated by her.
Human beings were part of a social community which was in total
accord with their inner beliefs. Nothing the gods had given them
had, as it were, been taken away.
Compare that with modern human
beings. They are placed in a social context in which there is a
huge gap between their inner experiences and the way they are
integrated into society. It feels to them as if their souls are
divorced from their bodies by social circumstances, only they are
not aware of it; it is embedded in the subconscious. Through
these impulses from earlier lives on earth and pre-earthly
existence, people feel connected with a spiritual world. Their
bodies have to behave in a way that will satisfy social
institutions. It provokes a persistent subconscious fear that
their physical bodies no longer really belong to them. Well,
there are modern states in which one feels that your clothes no
longer belong to you because the tax man is after them! But in a
larger context ones physical body is no longer ones property
either. It is claimed by society.
This is the fear which lives in
modern human beings, the fear that every day they have to give up
their bodies to something which is not connected with their
souls. And thus they become seekers after something which does
not belong to the earth, which belongs to the spiritual world of
their pre-earthly existence.
All this takes its effect
unconsciously, instinctively. And it has to be said that the
Anthroposophical Society as it has developed had its origins in
small beginnings. To begin with, it had to work in the most basic
way with very small groups, and there is much to be said about
the ways and means in which work took place in such small groups.
For example, in the first years in
Berlin I had to lecture in a room in which beer glasses were
clinking in the background. And once we were shown into something
not unlike a stable. I lectured in a hall, parts of which had no
floor, where one had to be careful not to tumble into a hole and
break a leg. But that is where people gathered who felt these
impulses. Indeed, this movement aimed to make itself accessible
to everyone right from the beginning. Thus the satisfaction was
just as great when the simplest mind turned up in such a
location. At the same time it was no great worry when people came
together in order to launch the anthroposophical movement in more
aristocratic fashion, as happened in Munich, because that, too,
was part of humanity. No aspect of humanity was excluded.
But the important point was that the
souls who met in this way always had the qualities I have
described. If such people had not existed, then someone like
Blavatsky would not have engendered any interest, because it was
among such people that she made her mark. What was most important
to them and what corresponded to their feelings?
Well, the concept of reincarnation
corresponded to the one thing which was active in their souls.
Now they could see themselves straddling the ages as human
beings, making them stronger than the forces which daily tried to
rob them of their bodies. This deep-seated, almost will-like,
inner feeling of human beings had to be met by the teaching of
reincarnation.
And the dreamlike, out-of-body
experience of the soul, which even the simplest country person
can experience, could never be satisfied with knowledge which was
based only on matter and its processes. That could only be met by
making it clear to them that the most profound aspect of human
nature exists as if it is woven out of dreams, if I may put it in
this radical way. This element has a stronger reality, a stronger
existence than dreams. We are like fish out of water if we are
forced to live our soul life in the world which has been conjured
up for people by modern education. In the same way that fish
cannot exist in air and begin to gasp, so our souls live in the
contemporary environment, gasping for what they need. They fail
to find it, because it is spiritual in nature; because it is the
echo of their experiences in life before birth in the spiritual
world. They want to hear about the spirit, that the spirit
exists, that the spirit is actually present among us.
You have to understand that the two
most important concerns for a certain section of mankind were to
learn that human beings live more than a single life on earth,
and that among the natural things and processes there are beings
in the world like themselves, spiritual beings. It was Blavatsky
who initially presented this to the world. It was necessary to
possess that knowledge before it was possible to understand
Christ once again.
As far as Blavatsky was concerned,
however — and in saying this we should emphasize her
compassion for mankind — she realized that these people
were gasping for knowledge of the spiritual world, and she
thought that she would meet their spiritual needs by revealing
the ancient pagan religions to them. That was her initial aim. It
is quite clear that this had to result in a tremendously partisan
anti-christian standpoint, just as it is clear that Nietzsche's
observation of Christianity in its present form, which he had
outgrown, led him to adopt such a strong anti-christian attitude.
This anti-christian outlook, and how
it might be healed, is the topic I want to address in the next
lectures. It remains only to emphasize that what appeared with
Blavatsky as an anti-christian standpoint was absent right from
the beginning in the anthroposophical movement, because the first
lecture cycle which I gave was “From Buddha to Christ”.
Thus the anthroposophical movement takes an independent position
within all these spiritual movements in that, from the start, it
pursued a path from the heathen religions to Christianity. But it
is equally necessary to understand why others did not follow this
path.
Continued in the next issue of SCR
Thanks to The Rudolf Steiner Archive
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