It is my intention today to continue with the subject we began
here last Sunday, and I should like first to go back to the few
words I then said concerning the Anti-Modernist Oath. I described
its nature by saying that since the time of its inauguration
anyone who holds a teaching office in the Roman Catholic Church,
whether as theologian or preacher, has to take this oath which
forbids anyone engaged in Catholic teaching to deviate from what
is recognized as dogmatic truth by the Roman Catholic Church;
which means, in fact, what is recognized as dogma by the Roman
Curia.
Now in face of such a fact the important question to ask oneself
is: “What is there actually new about this Anti-Modernist
Oath?”
There is nothing new in the adherence of a Catholic preacher or
theologian to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church; please
be clear about that. What is new is that the person concerned has
to take an oath to adhere to the doctrine of the Church. I want
you to be clear about this first, and then to see it in relation
to the fact that there has been a prodigious piling up of
historical events in the Roman Catholic Church during the last
half century. It began with the definition of the
Dogma of the Immaculate Conception; then came a further
extraordinary, subtle, and clever step in the Encyclical and
Syllabus of the sixties, in which Pope Pius IX in his eighty
Articles declared all modern thinking to be heretical. Then on
top of that came the definition of the
Dogma of Infallibility, again a very important and
extraordinarily clever and subtle advance. The next extremely
logical step was the Encyclical “Acterni Patris,”
which declared the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas to be the official
doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. The crowning of this whole
structure for the time being is this oath against Modernism,
which in effect is nothing else than the carrying over of
something which was always present intellectually into the sphere
of human emotion, the sphere of will and feeling. That which
always had to be acknowledged has, since the year 1907, had also
to be sworn on oath.
Anyone who
understands this grandiose dramatic development will certainly
not underestimate its importance, for it demonstrates the only
wakeful consciousness within our sleeping civilization. I should
be interested to know how many people felt as if stung by a
viper when they read a certain sentence in the last number of
the “Basler Vorwarts,” [Basel daily] which
illuminates as by a flash of lightning the whole situation at
the present time. I should really like to know how many people,
when reading this, felt as if stung by a viper! The sentence
runs: “Religion, which represents a fantastic reflex in
the minds of human beings concerning their relations one to
another and to nature, is doomed to natural decay through the
victorious growth of the scientific, clear and naturalistic
grasp of reality which is bound to develop parallel with the
establishment of a planned society.” This sentence is to
be found in an article which has not yet appeared in its
entirety, but has yet to be concluded. It is to be found in an
article on the measures taken by Lenin and Trotsky against the
Russian Catholic Church and the Russian religious communities in
general. This article is at the same time an indication of what
is regarded as the programme for the future in these quarters.
One knows for a certainty that the number of Lenin’s
opponents who feel as if stung by a viper on reading such a
sentence is very small. I want to emphasize this as not being
without significance, because it brings out to what an extent
modern humanity passes lightly over things, usually asleep —
how it passes over the weightiest facts, facts which are decisive
for the life of mankind on this earth. It is, of course, not a
question of any one such sentence; the point is that in certain
quarters they will see to it that the content of what is there
expressed will be made known throughout the world, that among the
widest circles of the European population an outlook will come
about which can be thus expressed: “Religion which
represents a fantastic reflex in the minds of human beings
concerning their relations to one another and to nature, is
doomed to natural decay.” The so-called ‘enlightened’
humanity of today is still soundly asleep to the fact that such a
view is coming. But the Roman Catholic Church is awake; she alone
in fact is awake and is working systematically against the
approaching storm. She works against it in her own way. And it is
very important that we should understand that way, for I have had
much to say about the attacks from that quarter that are being
forged against what we have to stand for. Meanwhile the clouds
are gathering. The latest is that the bill posters had to notify
us that the man who this morning was to have posted up in Reinach
the announcement of Saturday’s lecture had the posters
taken from him and burnt. You see, these things are getting
worse, even here they are getting systematically worse.
What was written by a man who frequently hides behind the bushes
and calls himself ‘Spectator’ — a pack of sheer
lies, I told you last time about the most egregious of them —
now goes through the whole Roman Catholic press, and this burning
of our posters really takes one back out of modern times
altogether.
I have already raised the important
question as to why the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church today
must take an oath in support of what they were already pledged to
maintain. No one will deny that the enforcement of such an oath
strengthens the external grasp of the matter. Nor will anyone
deny that if it is felt necessary to make people take this oath,
the assumption is that without such an oath they would no longer
go so firmly forward. But there is, of course,
still a third point, which it would be well for you to ponder.
For verily things enter in here which must not yet be called by
their right names; yet the question may nevertheless be thrown
out as an aside. Must not confidence in a thing be already to a
certain extent shattered if it has to be sworn on oath? Is it a
possibility to administer an oath for the truth? Can there be
such a possibility? Is it not necessary to assume that the truth
of its own inherent force is its own guarantee in the human soul?
Perhaps it is not so important to ask whether an oath is moral or
good or useful; perhaps it is far more important historically to
ask whether it has become necessary, and if so, why?
In view of this oath something else is now necessary. It is
necessary that a certain number of human beings should feel how
without spiritual science there must inevitably come over Europe
the consequence of the frame of mind expressed in the words
“Religion, which represents a fantastic reflex in the minds
of human beings concerning their relations to one another and to
nature, is doomed to natural decay through the victorious growth
of the scientific, clear and naturalistic grasp of reality, which
is bound to develop parallel with the establishment of a planned
society.”
What is it that is to bring about the decay of the old religions
one and all? It is all that has arisen during the last three to
four centuries as modern science, enlightened science — all
that is taught as objective science in the educational
institutions of civilized humanity. Bourgeois teaching and
bourgeois methods of administration have been adopted by the
proletariat. What the teachers of the universities and high
schools right down to the elementary schools have put into the
souls of men, comes out through Lenin and Trotsky. They bring out
nothing but what is already taught in the institutions of
civilized humanity.
Today there exists an antithesis which one should contemplate
without prejudice. It is this. What is to be done to prevent the
influence of Lenin and Trotsky from spreading over the entire
civilized world? The primary necessity is no longer to allow our
children and our youth to be taught what has been taught right up
to the Twentieth Century in our universities and in our secondary
and elementary schools. To grasp this seeming contradiction
demands courage, and because people do not want to have this
courage, they go to sleep. That is why one has to say that
whoever reads a declaration such as the one I have just quoted,
even if it only appears in a few lines of an article, should feel
as if stung by a viper; for it is as if the whole situation of
present-day civilization were illumined by a flash of lightning.
Face to face with this situation, what should spiritual science
do? What spiritual science
should do, I would characterize somewhat as follows. The Roman
Catholic Church, as a mighty corporation, represents the last
withered remains of the civilization of the fourth post-Atlantean
Epoch. It can be well authenticated in all detail that the Roman
Catholic Church represents the last remnant of what was the right
civilization for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, what was
justified right up to the middle of the Fifteenth Century, but
what has now become a shadow. Of course products of a later
evolution often herald their arrival in an earlier period, and
its earlier products linger on into a later epoch; but in
essentials the Roman Catholic Church represents what was
justifiable for Europe and its colonies up to the middle of the
Fifteenth Century.
Spiritual science, however, as we understand it, has to further
the needs of the fifth post-Atlantean civilization. The Roman
Catholic Church represents in a number of dogmas, as a
self-contained structure which is dead but which still exists as
a corpse, something which hangs together inwardly through a
well-constructed logic, a logic of reality. In this structure
there is spirit, the spirit of a past epoch, but it is spirit.
The way in which spirit is contained within it I have, I think,
shown in the lectures I held here on St. Thomas Aquinas. There
was spirit in these teachings, in these dogmas of the Roman
Catholic Church, a spirit which had been perceived by those great
ones whose last stragglers we find in Plotinus and others, and
with which St. Augustine had yet to wrestle.
Since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, what has appeared as
philosophy, science, public opinion, worldview, apart from the
Roman Catholic Church, is, for the most part, void of spirit. For
the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age begins only to emerge
with such principles as those of Lessing and Goethe. And it wants
to enter into what the natural-scientific trend inaugurated by
Copernicus, Galilee and Kepler was able to yield without spirit,
and out of which Darwin, Huxley, and so on have blown the last
remnant of Spirit. It wants to enter into that and fill it with
Spirit. And spiritual science wishes to make manifest the Spirit
which has to be the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age.
An institution permeated by a certain spirit as its own soul, if
it is to maintain itself as an institution, can only fight for
the past. To demand of the Catholic Church that it should fight
for the future would be folly, for an institution which carried
the spirit of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch cannot possibly
carry that of the fifth. What the Catholic Church has become,
what has spread over the civilized world as the configuration of
the Catholic Church, and has its other aspect in Roman law and
the abstractness of the whole Latin culture, all that belongs to
the fourth cultural epoch. And the Catholic Church configuration
has permeated the entire of civilization far more than men think.
The monarchies, even if they were Protestant ones, were in their
structure at bottom Latin Catholic institutions. For the fourth
epoch it was necessary that people should be organized according
to abstract principles, and that certain hierarchical ordinances
should form the basis of organization. But what is to come as the
spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age, which we seek to
cultivate through spiritual science, does not require such a firm
structure, does not need a structure organized according to
abstract principles, but requires such a relation of one human
being to another as is characterized in my Philosophy
of Freedom as ethical individualism. What that book has
to say on the subject of ethics stands in the same contrast to
the social structure fostered by the Roman Catholic Church as spiritual science stands to Roman Catholic
theology.
Spiritual Science was never meant to appear in the role of
belligerent; spiritual science was only meant to state what it
saw to be the truth. Anyone who examines our activities here will
have to admit that never, never have I taken an aggressive
stance. Of course, one has had constantly to defend oneself
against attacks which came from outside, and that is the
essential thing. But it is simply a demand of the age that what
spiritual science has to give should be stated quite concretely.
One has to remember that modern civilization is asleep, and that
Rome is awake. That Rome is awake is revealed by the mighty drama
unrolled in the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception; in the publication of the Encyclical of 1864, with
its Syllabus condemning eighty modern truths; in the declaration
of the Infallibility of the Pope; in the naming of Thomas Aquinas
as the official philosopher of the Catholic priesthood; and
finally in the anti-Modernist Oath for the teaching clergy.
In face of the rising tide of Darwinism, in face of the rising
tide of naturalism in the fifties, something was done which,
although it can only be understood out of the spiritual demands
of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch nevertheless throws down the
gauntlet before all this rising materialism. The rest of the
world lets it come, or at best counters it with foolish arguments
such as those of Eucken. Rome, however, sets up the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception, which states clearly: “Naturally, no
one can accept the Immaculate Conception and at the same time
ascribe to Darwinism; thus we establish the incompatibility of
the two things.” Not more than a decade later, the whole
structure of the modern world conception, void of spirit, is
condemned by the Syllabus. The definition of the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception was already a departure from all the
earlier traditional development of the Catholic Church. In what,
in former times, consisted definition by an Ecumenical Council?
Within the Catholic Church a fundamental condition for the
definition of any dogma — I am simply relating, not
criticizing — was that the Fathers gathered together in the
Council in which the dogma was to be defined should be illumined
by the Holy Spirit; so that in reality the originator of the
dogma is the Holy Spirit. It is really a question of recognizing
whether the Holy Ghost is really inspires the dogma to be
defined. How does one know, how did they know that? Because what
was about to be defined as a dogma by an Ecumenical Council was
already the opinion of the whole Catholic Church. Now that was
not the case with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception;
consequently, one of the fundamental principles of the Catholic
Church was broken, the principle which required that a doctrine
shall only be made into a dogma if the faithful have previously
signified an inclination towards it. Of course, as regards these
modern definitions of dogma, one was already living in the events
of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch; and it was no longer so easy
as in the Middle Ages so to prepare the faithful that a common
opinion prevailed among them which could then be defined. But you
see, the ground had been well prepared — preparations had
really been going on all through the last three or four centuries
for these latest revelations; that is to say, these last
revelations so far. Even then the Roman Catholic Church was
already awake; and if you remember when the Jesuit Order was
founded, you will easily draw the inference that the foundation
of that Order is essentially connected with the fact that some
means had to be found to overcome the difficulties of working on
the faithful in modern times and generally to take these
difficulties into account. One ought to pay attention to the
course things have taken. I am only relating, I am not
criticizing. 1574 was the year in which the citizens of Lucerne
expressed a desire for Jesuitism. Let me repeat that it was
Canisius, the immediate disciple of Ignatius Loyola, who founded
the Jesuit College in Freiburg in 1580 which later established
its colony in Solothurn [Switzerland]. I should like too, to say
that after the suppression of the Jesuit Order by Clement XIV,
the Jesuits had, of course, to disappear from Switzerland, and
they then continued their activities only in the countries of
Frederick II of Prussia and of Catherine of Russia, to whom the
Jesuit Order really owes its continued existence.
But in this extraordinary interregnum between the suppression of
the Jesuit Order in 1773 by Clement XIV and its reinstatement by
Pius VII in 1814, strange things nevertheless happened. For you
see, during this interval, in Sion [Switzerland], for example,
the institution which had been conducted by the Jesuits naturally
remained; and as a matter of fact for the most part, too, the
same teachers remained in it; only up to 1773 these teachers were
Jesuits, and from that date onward they were no longer Jesuits,
but one spoke of the Fathers of the Faith as teaching in such
institutions. Therefore, it is not surprising that after Pius VII
had in 1814 withdrawn the decree of Clement XIV, these Jesuit
colonies were again reinstated — in Brigue the same year,
in Freiberg in 1818, in Schwyz in 1836 [Switzerland].
It is not my task to criticize these things, but I want you to
know about them, and I should further like to say this. From my
explanations you will have seen that from the 21st of July, 1773,
when Clement XIV issued the Bull “Dominus ac Redemptor
Noster” until Pius VII caused his Bull “Solicitude
omnium Ecclesiarum” to appear, the Jesuit Order was
officially suppressed. Now comes something extraordinary. There
exist memoirs written by a man who was called Cordara,
a Jesuit, one who had gone through all the grades of the Jesuit
Order. From his memoirs it is evident that he was not an
ignoramus like Count Hoensbruch, whose speeches and writings are
unimportant, for, of course, the Jesuits are clever and
Hoensbruch is very foolish. It is a question of not being asleep
over these things today, but of knowing how to distinguish the
important from the unimportant. I should like to mention one
point in Cordara’s memoirs, where he remarks that it was
strange that the Jesuit Order should have been suppressed by Pope
Clement XIV, who had a great liking for the Jesuits and was at
the same time an extremely tolerant man and no fool. Thus Cordara
gives Pope Clement an excellent character, almost lauds him to
the skies, in spite of the fact that he suppressed the Jesuits.
Therefore, Cordara naturally asks how it was that they had to be
suppressed by this kindly Pope. “One must ask,” says
Cordara, “What were the intentions of Divine Wisdom in the
suppression of the Jesuits and why it was permitted?” Now,
of course, Cordara was a Jesuit, but a man who had even been
taught by them to think logically, and therefore, he does not ask
abstract questions but very concrete ones. He said, “We
have to look for what was blameworthy in the Order,” and he
goes on to say, “I find that as regards morality, the
Jesuit Order has gone admirably to work; as to lack of chastity
or the like, we are very strict, nobody can deny it. But we are
very lenient towards everything of the nature of slander,
calumny, and abuse.” Cordara actually says that God
probably allowed the suppression of the Jesuit Order by Pope
Clement XIV because there had gradually crept into the Order a
certain tendency to slander, calumny, and abuse. Now I am not
criticizing this, I am only relating facts. I should only like to
add that the Jesuit Cordara further says: “One of our chief
faults is pride, which causes us to regard all other Orders as of
no account and worthless, and all secular clergy as worthless.”
Now, if one puts together everything in these memoirs which is
said, not as a reproach to the Jesuit Order but simply as a kind
of mea culpa, as an examination of conscience by a Jesuit, one
finds in the first place striving for political power; second —
pride, arrogance; third — contempt of other Orders and
secular priests; fourth — accumulation of wealth. But if
one gradually comes to know what it means to maintain dead,
withered truths by means of power, one cannot do better than to
use such an Order to provide for their maintenance. The Roman
Catholic Church in Pius VII well knew what it was doing. It
discharged its debt of gratitude to world history, history made
by Frederick II, King of Prussia, and by Catherine of Russia,
both now dead, when it reinstated the Jesuit Order. And among the
first ‘foreign’ Jesuits to teach here in Switzerland
again were many of those who had been protected by Catherine,
many who came back from Russia. You can read all this in the
relevant historical documents.
You can see, therefore, that Rome was wide awake and made in
advance her necessary preparations. Wide awake preparation was
made. Now comes the next step, the condemnation of all that
mounting tide of science — ripe for condemnation since
after four centuries of effort to drive out the spirit, it
remained void of spirit and mankind remained asleep. The next
step was the Encyclical of 1864 with its Syllabus. If the
definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception had already
been a break with all earlier custom of the Roman Catholic
Church, undoubtedly what was promulgated in the doctrine of
Infallibility constituted a far greater break. For all the acumen
of the practiced logic of the Catholic Church was needed to
justify the contention that the Pope is infallible after Pope
Clement XIV in 1773 had suppressed the Jesuit Order, and his
successor Pope Pius VII in 1814 had reinstated it. A goodly
number of such things could be adduced. But the logic which had
been so well cultivated was not applied to produce sharply
defined concepts. What was needed was a well-formed concept which
could justify infallibility. Not what the Pope expresses as his
private opinion is regarded as infallible, only what he says ‘ex
cathedra’. Then it was not necessary to decide whether
Clement XIV or Pius VII was infallible, but whether Clement XIV
or Pius VII had spoken ‘ex cathedra’ or privately.
Clement XIV must have spoken privately when he suppressed the
Jesuit Order, and Pius VII ‘ex cathedra’ when he
reinstated it! But, you see, the trouble is that the Pope never
states whether he is speaking ‘ex cathedra’ or
privately. That he has never yet said! One must admit that it is
difficult to distinguish in the individual instance whether it is
subject to the dogma of infallibility, but the dogma is there,
and with it a good blow was struck at what can arise as the
fundamental culture of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. It then
became necessary to draw the consequences and that was well done
by Pope Leo XIII, a man full of insight and of very great
intelligence. Pope Leo XIII sought to adopt the philosophy of
Thomas Aquinas as it was in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The
Church needed that philosophy which is so great but great for the
last culture epoch, for, of course, objectively everything in the
way of philosophy which has subsequently arisen is small compared
to what blossomed as Philosophy in Scholasticism. But what is
small is still a beginning, whereas what was in Scholasticism was
an end, a climax.
Now we must remember that mankind is nevertheless trying to
progress and therefore it happened that, both in the sphere of
natural-scientific research and in historical research, strange
vagaries cropped up among the Catholic clergy. Very well then, it
now became necessary to adopt strong measures in support of the
Catholic doctrine derived from St. Augustine. Hence the Oath
against Modernism.
Of course nothing can be said against all that if it is
pursued by any community out of a free impulse, but when in 1867
the Jesuits were again allowed into Munich, a Jesuit priest in
his first sermon then said that the Rules of the Order forbade
Jesuits to meddle in politics, that a Jesuit never has taken any
part in politics; then it appears to me that modern people are
not likely to believe that.
What I am really trying to bring home to you is that all those
who seriously want knowledge, progress and the good of humanity
will have to recognize the threefold nature of the social
organism. For how little political measures avail against the
Roman Catholic Church has shown itself in the course of the
German ‘Kultur’ campaign. But what I am primarily
trying to bring home to you is how slow people are to see what,
as the necessary consequence of spiritual-scientific endeavor,
must come into the world as the impulse for the threefold order
of society. That is what we need, a wide awake understanding for
the phenomena of the time.
Now I have plunged into a theme into which I would certainly not
have entered had it not been for recent events here, of which we
shall see further developments. You know that on Saturday I am to
give a public lecture on “The Truth about Anthroposophy and
its Defense against Untruth.” But in any case I must
contrive next Sunday to continue the comments which I cannot
complete today. So next Sunday at half-past seven we will meet
here once more. In these troubled times one cannot do otherwise, and so on
Saturday, despite the burning of our posters, the public lecture
also will take place here.
Lecture Three
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