The Rudolf Steiner Archive

For the way in which characteristic forces in the intellectual life of recent times, which so quickly transform “present” into “history”, have affected an idealistically minded soul, many things in Herman Grimm are - I would almost say - alarmingly indicative. I have experienced many such “alarming” moments while reading Herman Grimm. I would like to highlight a few of them.

In the essay volume Aus den letzten fünf Jahren (Gütersloh 1890), Herman Grimm had the lecture printed that he gave on May 2, 1886 at the first ordinary general assembly of the Goethe Society in Weimar. The title is Goethe in the Service of Our Time. At first, one follows each sentence with deep interest. It comes across ingeniously how Goethe's contemporaries knew little of what people educated in Goethe knew about him in 1886. But the change of feeling is also presented to the soul, which is due to the fact that for the contemporaries, Goethe was a living person, but for those later, he is not. There are sentences such as: “One never needed to have met Goethe or read more of him than was contained in his most distinguished works: the mere knowledge that he was alive filled one with the knowledge of his value and with the feeling of personal connection. ... I have wondered whether what has taken the place of this feeling in us today corresponds to what it could be. It seems to me that, despite the masses of material about Goethe's external and internal experiences that are available to us, our sense of spiritual connection with him is less effective than it should be.

And from such thoughts, Herman Grimm moves on to a discussion of Goethe's relationship with Winckelmann. During the period that can be called the pre-Goethean period, Winckelmann had struggled from a narrow intellectual background to a great, pure enthusiasm for art that drove him to Italy. He ultimately met a tragic death by being murdered. Now, in his writings, Winckelmann has literally resurrected ancient art for the understanding of people. Goethe has now experienced this revival in his own soul in Italy. He relived in his own way what Winckelmann had felt before him. This led him to create not only a literary monument to Winckelmann in his book 'Winckelmann and His Century', but to bring his figure, his entire intellectual activity to life, formed out of his own soul. Herman Grimm has the idea that it is Winckelmann, as created by Goethe, who now lives on in the development of the mind. Without Goethe, the world would have had the memory of the mortal Winckelmann; through Goethe, Winckelmann has been resurrected in such a way that he, as awakened by Goethe, has attained earthly immortality. Now Herman Grimm says that this is how those who seek the right connection with Goethe should do it in relation to him. “Goethe places him (Winckelmann) as a living, active element in the service of the present day of 1805, and it is Goethe's work if Winckelmann still stands among us today, alive and bestowing life. — This is what must now happen to Goethe himself on a larger scale if we are to draw from him what he contains for us."

All this and more of Herman Grimm's lecture is read with increasing excitement. One surrenders to the thoughts of a personality who, steeped in the spirit of her soul, experiences the question: what should happen so that people of the present go the right way in the further development of humanity. One reads by experiencing the emotional heartbeat of the writer. One feels immersed in the atmosphere of a soul striving joyfully towards the spirit.

Then you come to page 7; and you are suddenly as if torn out of the whole mood. There Herman Grimm writes: “No one, as far as I know, believes in Goethe's color lights today: for us today, the content of this book lies in Goethe's explanations of how opinions about the relationship between the human eye and colored phenomena are related to the whole way of life and thinking of those who hold them. Take Goethe's fight against Newton. Note how Goethe begins with the history of natural science in England. Note how he seeks to determine the position that Newton occupied within it. Note how he grasps what he calls Newton's error as a necessary consequence of these external circumstances in connection with his personal character! The achievement as a historical work is so brilliant that it makes the question of whether Goethe was mistaken here a minor matter.

You are on solid ground before you get to this point in the lecture. But then the ground begins to shake. One wonders: can someone treat as a secondary matter what he must make the basis of the judgment that Goethe has done a work of genius historically? One can state that there are two points of view in the theory of colors: Goethe's and Newton's, and can leave undecided which one one considers justified. If one then claims that Goethe has accomplished a work of genius on his, then the matter is quite understandable. But is it also somehow understandable when someone says: I don't care whether Goethe's point of view is erroneous; in fact, I must say that all authoritative people consider it to be such; but Goethe has ingeniously advocated the error? One can only say that if, instead of stopping to talk about the matter, as Herman Grimm does, one now begins to characterize how a genial error was possible with Goethe. And how can one, with such “indifference” to Goethe's genius, find the connection with him “as it should be,” since Goethe himself said in all seriousness that he had achieved much in the poetic sphere, but that he did not value this as highly as the fact that in certain areas of knowledge of nature he alone of his contemporaries knew the right thing?

For someone who admires Herman Grimm as much as I do, the question arises: did this outstanding personality not find that, within the intellectual life of his time, he could only present the spirituality to which he aspired to himself before the eye of his soul, as if it were an illusion, under a certain condition? This condition was that Herman Grimm did not concern himself with those elements in the intellectual life of his time which, if he had taken them seriously, would have had to be rejected by him if he wanted to maintain his own point of view. He did not reject them. He wanted to live with them in peace. But this meant that he was forced to live with his own opinions as if on an island, on which he erected idealistic buildings while the devastating waves of mechanistic-“positivistic” worldviews roared all around. — And if today we cast our eyes on Herman Grimm's “island of ideality,” in its often enchanting beauty, it immediately disappears from this gaze. The “mechanistic-positivistic” sea engulfs it. Such are the paths of the spirit that were trodden by a few select personalities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their spirituality was abstract even when they appeared as soulful and heartfelt as Herman Grimm. The period that followed demands a new relationship between man and “spiritual reality”.

In the next article, we will continue to follow what may “startle” Herman Grimm's admirers when they come across individual passages in his writings, and what reveals the change in spiritual demands in today's world.

From ^{1890 to 1897, I lived in Weimar. I had work to do at the Goethe and Schiller Archives. Herman Grimm came there repeatedly for short visits. For me, these days were special holidays. I had the feeling that when Herman Grimm was in Weimar, one understood the “Weimar of Goethe's time” better than usual. He brought a part of Goethe's soul to life. The smallest detail of these visits became important to me. I still vividly remember how Herman Grimm once talked about Goethe's Iphigenia in the archive. And so much more. Apart from the content of his speech, the way he spoke was always captivating. One could have the feeling that behind it lay spiritual connections that he had experienced and from which his words came.}

In 1894, however, his figure appeared before me in a very peculiar way in the archive, in his absence. The preface to the fifth edition of his Goethe book had just been published. In it, Herman Grimm had discussed how, while working on these lectures and also afterwards, he was in friendly contact with personalities whose interest was particularly focused on Goethe. They were the literary historian Julian Schmidt, who wrote the witty book on the history of modern German intellectual life, Gustav von Loeper, the meritorious editor of Goethe's works, and Wilhelm Scherer, the professor of German literary history at the University of Berlin. Herman Grimm felt completely in harmony with the first two, although he and each of the other two took different approaches to Goethe. It was different with Scherer. He maintained a friendship with him in public. After Scherer's untimely death, he wrote in this preface, after assuring us how well he had gotten along with Julian Schmidt and Loeper: “It was only much later that Wilhelm Scherer, called from Strasbourg, permanently settled in Berlin. He was decades younger than the three of us from northern Germany. Coming from Vienna. Due to his position as officially appointed professor of German literature, he was also our superior when it came to matters specifically concerning Goethe. A youthful, aggressive, ruthless spirit who, in contrast to the three of us, was most familiar with the teachings of the Lachmann-Hauptian school, not only applied the so-called 'scientific method' of this school with ease, but was also willing to defend it vigorously. The three of us older ones took as our starting point Goethe's personality, Scherer the manuscripts and versions of his works. Above all, Scherer demanded a 'clean text'. 'Every text', was his teaching, 'is corrupted: it is a matter of editing it so that it can be relied upon'. There were means to effect this editing, and he knew them well. The three of us didn't care about them."

This characterization of Wilhelm Scherer was the subject of discussion one day immediately after the publication of the preface, in the presence of several personalities who were visiting the archive at the time and who were mostly unconditional admirers of the literary historian in question. Erich Schmidt, Scherer's most celebrated student and his successor as a teacher in Berlin, was also present. It was quite a heated scene. Everyone was extremely annoyed. “Every text is corrupted: it is important to edit it in such a way that it can be safely relied upon.” That was supposed to be Scherer's teaching. People felt that this was nonsense and called it that. Well, in terms of content, there was really hardly anything to be said against what Erich Schmidt and the others said. They were right – not only from their point of view.

For me, the hour was painful. In my mind's eye, I saw the figure of Herman Grimm, the brilliant, spirited art historian, the creator of luminous ideas that I so loved. He had written something here that was rightly called “annoying nonsense”.

But what was actually at issue? A school of thought had developed in literary history that viewed poetic creations in their historical context in such a way that the “positivist-scientific” method, which had been so successfully developed at the time, was applied. A peak in human intellectual development was to be explored as one had become accustomed to doing in the natural sciences. Wilhelm Scherer was the most energetic representative of this research. Natural science was on the way to completely losing the spiritual in its statements; now the study of the human spirit was to follow its ideal. The research in literary history could only have to do with facts that were outwardly related to the true becoming of the human spirit. This was a path that could only be uncanny to Herman Grimm. He wanted to follow the development of the spirit, even if only in a way related to abstract idealism. But this way, like all abstract idealism, was unable to withstand the onslaught of the unspiritual methods of natural science. This was expressed in Herman Grimm's personal behavior. He could find no effective words to express his instinctive aversion to Scherer's method. He only had the feeling of something bad. And so he characterized Scherer's “teaching” by saying something absurd. As if he had wanted to say: I don't know what actually underlies it; but it seems to me so absurd, as if one had to make the poet's texts through all sorts of critical methods.

This is the attitude of the spiritual researchers of the second half of the nineteenth century towards a spirit-denying science. These spiritual researchers did not have the living spirit, but only its ideational thought-shadows. With this they could still talk about art, history and so on, but they could not form a thorough judgment about the value of the current science. A representative of this “current science” once said to me: Herman Grimm is not a serious scientific worker, but a spiritual walker.

Only a spiritual science that strives for the living spirit can rediscover the spirit in the study of nature and then also give it back to the study of art, history and so on.

With the beautiful, luminous shadow-form of thoughts, Herman Grimm stood, as if spellbound, between a spiritual and a spirit-denying world view.

In the chapter of his Goethe book in which Herman Grimm discusses Goethe's relationship to knowledge of nature, we find the revelation of this perplexity. He says: “The Mosaic story of creation culminates in man, who enters as the beneficiary of everything that has come before... and Christianity elevates man to the purpose of creation in such a way that without him the world would be meaningless. The natural sciences rose up against this view. Astronomy opened the fight by recognizing the Earth, which was thought to be the center of the world system, as only a secondary star, thereby degrading its ruling inhabitants... Herman Grimm only manages a kind of aesthetic indignation at the scientific way of thinking. He says of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis: “From the rotating nebula - which children already learn about at school - the central drop of gas forms, from which the Earth will later develop, and, as a solidifying sphere, goes through all phases, including the episode of habitation by the human , to finally plunge back into the sun as burnt-out cinders: a long process, but one that is perfectly comprehensible to today's audience, and one that no longer requires any external intervention to come about, except for the effort of some external force to maintain the sun at the same temperature. No more fruitless prospect for the future can be imagined than the one that is supposed to be scientifically necessary for us today. A carrion bone that a hungry dog would go around is refreshingly appetizing compared to this last excrement of creation, as which our Earth would finally fall back to the Sun...

Not so long ago, one was entitled to the opinion that the contemplation of nature could receive an impetus towards the spiritual through the further development of a way of thinking like that of Herman Grimm. Today, however, it is clear that the power of this way of thinking is no longer alive anywhere. And if Herman Grimm were still alive today, he would have to realize that not only natural science must be pursued to the point of contemplating the spiritual, but that all historical considerations must also be pursued from the mental shadows of the spirit to the living and active spiritual entities.

The aim of the remarks I have made in a series of essays following on from the works of Herman Grimm and others was to show how the search for a spiritual content of world view, taken up by many in the last third of the nineteenth century and continued to the present day, has led to a dead end.

More than others, this search is characterized by Wilhelm Jordan, the poet of “Demiurgos” and the “Nibelungen.” The whole tenor of his poetry is determined by the fact that his spiritual development took place at a time when science was preparing to become the decisive authority for the formation of a world view.

With hearty intellectual vigor, Wilhelm Jordan grasped what astronomy had to say about the origin of the solar system, what geology had to say about the development of the earth, and what chemistry had to say about the nature of the material world. In the 1950s and 1960s, he gave the world his large-scale poems. In them, the scientific thinking of his time was the soul-bearing stream that flowed through them. Wilhelm Jordan wanted to develop poetic power as a flower in the soul, which had a commitment to science at its core.

But he wanted more. He wanted to develop religious devotion as a fruit of this flower. He had penetrated so deeply into the spirit of science that he knew that science cannot lead to religion on its own. Man must find the religious in spite of the fully recognized natural science. There must be more life in the human soul than the power to develop a natural science. This forms the leaves of the plant. The flower and fruit are not yet visible in the leaves. But the power for their development is already in the leaves.

It was with this in mind that Wilhelm Jordan wrote his Andachten. These are the devotions of a seeker of God who stands on the foundation of natural science; but of one who, instead of seeking to distil the spiritual essence of the world from his knowledge of nature, sought it through a special power of soul independent of natural knowledge. But he sought it in such a way that he could still remain a believer in natural science in the possession of knowledge.

No wonder that Wilhelm Jordan did not please either the stormers of the type of the Straussians, who wanted to make a religion out of natural science itself; nor the believers in the old traditions, who did not want to admit that natural science demanded a new path to the spiritual.

Thus the “devotions” were met with objections from both left and right.

Wilhelm Jordan now opposed them with his book “The Fulfilment of Christianity”. It appeared in 1879, at the time when the waves of that faith began to rise particularly high, which assumed that a valid world view could only be gained from science.

In the “prelude” to this writing, Wilhelm Jordan speaks almost like someone intoxicated by the revelations of natural knowledge:

Your Isis veil has fallen,
Nature! We see you forming stars
From milky pale world haze.
We still ask: how does life germinate?
But your weaving has been overheard,
The riddle of your master art.

Now grins the proud world-ruler
At a tree-animal as an elder-brother,
As its ancestor, a poor worm,
As a primeval ancestor, a cell,
Germinated, when under a warm wave
The chaos-glow hid itself.

The priest's spell has become true:
“He will murder his happiness in life
Who removes this goddess's image?"
Is the impetuous truth-seeker,
Paralyzed and despairing,
Plunged after the veil has been drawn away?

Wilhelm Jordan answers with a firm: No. But he also does not want to join in the thinking of those who, using the old philosophical means of understanding nature, interpret world-weariness into it. He opposes Schopenhauer, who, during the time when Jordan was working, had just found the ear of the people, and his “follower” Eduard v. Hartmann. They had, or so Jordan felt, turned “Nature”, which had been thought of as having fallen away from the spirit for so long, into a being in which, after the “veil of Isis had fallen”, one could only see an Isis tormenting man.

The world, blinded by its own sense,
The world that scorns all wisdom and
Mocks all reason, now has found
Its favorite food: youth drinks from Schopenhauer
Grief for the brain, joy for the heart.

The schoolboy reaches for the powder death,
The today's popular cure method
To quickly consumed spinal cord.
In bitter seriousness, Mr. von Hartmann seems to mean
The negation
Of life and the world's quark.

How does Wilhelm Jordan want to come to a spiritual world view? He turns to the self-creative power of the human soul. As a poet, he lived in this self-creative power. And in his poetic power he sensed something of the creative power that in ancient times created the myths about the evolution of the world and the spiritual guidance of humanity. This power must not interfere with the knowledge of nature. But it may express in images the spiritual essence at work in human evolution, beyond the realm of nature. She may become the continuator of what was created in this direction in the pre-scientific period. Jordan says about this (in 'The Fulfilment of Christianity', page 213): 'Thus I have been able to compare the poetic, mythical, religious, theological world view with the present sum of scientific knowledge of the world in its entire historical development. The result was that the two are by no means as hostile and irreconcilable as zealots on both sides claim and as the greater their ignorance regarding the other realm and the more limited their own limited perspective in their own realm, the more intolerantly they defend it. Rather, they relate to each other as seeking relates to finding, as surmising and divining to recognizing and knowing, as wishing and hoping to attaining, possessing and being able, and are and remain indispensable to each other forevermore.

Wilhelm Jordan does not see that the power of the human soul to create myths, in the days when the content of myths was still convincing, also formed images of natural phenomena that were akin to the myths in their spiritual nature. But now that the natural sciences have taken on their modern form, they require not only a continuation of the ancient soul power to supplement them, but one that brings the spirit in the human soul just as close to the spirit in the world as the scientific method of measuring, weighing and counting brings us to natural things and natural processes.

Jordan writes (Fulfillment of Christianity, page 168): “Our cosmology, both the heavenly, that is, astronomical, and the earthly, that is, geological, as long as it is strictly limited to its own field and to its own means of knowledge, as long as it does not anticipate knowledge from other realm of knowledge, which only begins with the history of man, and only adds this knowledge as if by sleight of hand, in order to then act as if it could be found there – our cosmology must honestly admit that it knows nothing about God on its own, nor, in all likelihood, that it will ever be able to know anything about Him.

The scientist knows that in the physical realm he is approaching reality. The human being who goes with the scientist in this respect can do nothing other than strive for the breakthrough to the spiritual world from the soul. Wilhelm Jordan wants to develop the self-creative powers of the soul, but not to the point of penetrating with them to the real objective spirit. Thus he falls prey to the same fate as the personalities characterized in these essays: Carriere, Herman Grimm. He allows the spiritual power of the soul to prevail in him, so that it produces ideas beyond sense perception; but he cannot bring the objective spirit into these ideas, just as one does not make the objective physical content of the ideas in sense perception.

Thus even a mind as impetuous as Wilhelm Jordan's does not, in the realm of spiritual knowledge, come to create the real spiritual. So he too has reached the deadlock that so many before him had encountered in their quest for the spiritual beyond the material, but who in the end had nothing but the ideas they had produced in their own minds, and who were powerless to perceive the spiritual objectively.

Wilhelm Jordan's striving for the spiritual was also too weak not to be overwhelmed by natural science. The present and the near future need a spiritual science that takes the step beyond the old knowledge in the same way that natural science has done.

Around the mid-nineteenth century, the literary historian and historian Gervians published a history of German poetry. It offered something surprising. The development of German poetry is described with a haunting mastery of the mind. The abundance of material is lucidly organized; the individual poetic phenomena are individualized with a certain understanding.

But it is all presented as if the forces that worked in this poetry had died with Goethe's death. As if with Goethe everything had been exhausted that was contained in the source from which German poetry had its origin.

Gervinus made no secret of his conviction that poets who came after Goethe no longer had the full right that their predecessors had had to turn their minds away from practical reality to the regions from which poetic inspiration comes. The period that followed was to belong not to the creations of the imagination but to practical life. As if by a law of nature, poetry must pass over into mere epigonism.

What Gervinus had said had a strong effect. My dear teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Gervinus, published a history of “German Literature in the 19th Century” in 1875. He felt compelled to begin the book with an apology to Gervinus. As if it had been a sin to write about the poets who followed Goethe, he introduces his considerations in the following way:

"Gervinus significantly concluded his history of German literature with Goethe.

What may have been surprising at the time, even met with opposition, no one today would want to dispute. With Goethe, a period of literary blossoming came to an end for a long time.

If I now wish to give an overview of the development of German poetry from the beginning of our century to 1870, well beyond that conclusion, I do not want to part with those views or even go against them.

What led Gervinus to believe that poetic forces would wither away?

To answer this question, we must not lose sight of the tremendous upheaval in intellectual life around the mid-nineteenth century. It was the time when natural science declared itself the only authority on what should be considered the “true” world view. The independent striving of the human soul, which in its inner strength wanted to ascend to the experience of a spiritual world, was regarded with mistrust. On the basis of this independent striving, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had created the great idealistic world views. Such creativity was now perceived as delirium.

But this idealism was only the philosophical shadow of that light, from which Goethe, with art, did not want to achieve an arbitrary creation of the human soul, but another revelation of that which the knowledge of ideas also offers. - From this light, he had spoken thoughts like this: art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without it.

It was in this light that Goethe felt about Greek art when he said of it: there is necessity, there is God. He had first, together with Herder, sought this “necessity” in Spinoza in the development of ideas; he found it, which he sought as truth, in art. This light had been extinguished for those who felt certain that they were only on true ground when they followed the path laid down by natural science in the second half of the nineteenth century. — An opinion of truth was developed, which poetry could not aspire to. There is certainly no need to have a lower opinion of the outwardly real significance of natural science than those who make an overall world view out of it, if one admits the characterized.

Personalities such as Gervinus were pushed towards their views by the manifold impulses that entered the subconscious of people when the natural sciences were declared sovereign. Gervinus saw the streams of enthusiasm dry up, from which a poet like Goethe drew, who allowed his natural science to flow from the same spiritual sources from which his poetry came.

The powerful impact of the newly independent natural sciences can be seen in such phenomena. Idealism, which did not venture forth to the real spirit but only to its shadowy images, the “ideas”, was no match for these impulses. It sought to fight its way through in Wilhelm Jordan, Herman Grimm, Moriz Carriere and others. He did not succeed. (The previous essays show this in detail.)

Gervinus saw a spiritual current coming, which pushed poetry aside from the desired truth. He aligned himself with this current with his opinions. Some said: it is a flight of fantastic fancy if one wants to attain the truth from the soul. Idealism chases unreal shadows. These also lost the right impression of the light because of the misjudgment of the shadow images. And yet it was the same spiritual light that had cast the shadows of ideas, in which poetry also grew, and which stood at its height with Goethe. The

worshipers of “independent” knowledge of nature said: this light is nothing. And Gervinus said: the right to be enlightened by this light has ceased. Goethe was the last to be allowed to write poetry in his style; the epigones should turn to a different light; poetry, which had its source in gray prehistoric times and which became a broad stream in Goethe, must play a modest role in the face of other tasks.

For those people who are able to recognize that the soul must find the spirit again, all the facts that are connected with turning away from spiritual reality are significant. The way in which Gervinus presented his literary history is one such fact. And no less so is the reception that this appearance faced. The witty author of the history of intellectual life in modern times, Julian Schmidt, wrote about Gervinus' achievement: 'If a large-scale undertaking is to be effective, time must bring receptivity and a certain maturity to it. That was the case in the years 1838 to 1840. It was a turning point in German literature. There was a growing feeling that one had been moving in the ether for too long and too eagerly, that it was time to look around on earth... There was a sense that there was something wrong with poetry as it had been written before, the nation's greatest pride, - - —».

All those who spoke in this way had a sense of urgency that accompanied the opinion that one had to move from a fantastic view into “spiritual distances” to a secure step in the “scientific view of the world”. But today is the time to remember that the legs of secure vision need to find the direction in which they should turn in reality.

There is no moment when one is not in the most excited suspense while reading Albert Steffen's drama “The Quadruped”. The tension has its nuances, but it is always there.

For those who approach drama artistically, the tension does not arise from the external plot in the naturalistic sense. It comes from a higher spirituality that permeates the entire drama. It touches on the unfolding of the secrets of the human soul, which cuts deep into the heart of anyone to whom they are presented in the way Albert Steffen does.

Albert Steffen is the most earnest artistic seeker of these secrets. But he is also their born connoisseur. He shapes them as an artist by allowing his own essence to prevail in the dramatic action that life gives him, an essence that does not live where the action takes place, but in a more spiritual world, which, however, is directly adjacent to the ordinary world everywhere. In this more spiritual world, people are rooted with their souls. If you do not see this world of “soul roots,” then what people accomplish in the life between birth and death basically remains an incomprehensible activity.

When people meet Albert Steffen, they get the impression that it is second nature to his soul to look into this hidden world when they meet him. He does not just take what people say at face value. For him, everything spoken is, in addition to “expressing” something, still a gesture of the soul, a movement of the spirit. If a person expresses what he thinks, feels and wills through what he says, then his speech reveals what he is, as a being that is spiritually inspired and filled with spirit. And Albert Steffen understands not only human speech in this way, but everything through which a person reveals himself.

And so what the characters in the drama do appears against the background of a spiritual world in which this action has its roots. It remains incomprehensible to the ordinary mind; and it is raised into a world in which the question of such comprehensibility loses all meaning, because in this world one does not “understand” but “behold”.

It is against this background that the “four-legged creature” appears. The being into which ancient dream-knowledge has placed the origin of man. The bull, which in its organization is close to the forces of the earth. Not to the actually earthly forces, but to those which the earth, as part of the cosmos, lays claim to for itself. — The lion, which is less earthy in its organization. In its entire structure, it is emancipated from the earthly, like the human soul itself. It is in the flesh what the soul is in a soul-like way. - The eagle, which represents the human “I” in its corporeality. What is spiritually revealed in the “I” is material in the eagle. But because the spirituality in its nature cannot be directly represented materially, the physicality appears dried up and horny in the formation of the head, plumage, feet and so on. These three beings, seen as spirit forms, work together and yet are independent again in a spiritual world that directly borders on the physical world of man. Their interaction conveys a fourth entity, which is to be understood as a kind of angel.

When the spiritual gaze turns to this “Quadruped”, it simultaneously sees the world's time before there were humans and before there were animals in their present form. There were beings of the same kind as the “Quadruped”. They had no physical existence; they lived in a spiritual-ethereal form of existence. From this form of existence, man developed upwards, the animal downwards. They look over from the most distant past, the Quadruped animals. They were there before man and physical animals came into being. But they are still there. They have not yet died out. They have only changed their inner form. They have become even more spiritual than they were. This has made them very far removed from the animal world. All the closer to the human. Behind this is the 'Quadruped'. Through the course of the world, the physical body has attained its present form. It has reached human stature. It cannot be essentially changed by misconduct or aberration. But the soul can. It can be seized at any time by the “Quadruped” and transformed into something subhuman. Then the person develops instinctual impulses that are inferior to those of animals because they are borne by the higher humanity that has been cultivated.

This “Quadruped”, magnificent, as a sphinx, created by the unerring ancient dream-knowledge; it stands again as a truth before the scientific demands of today's researcher of the spiritual world. But it also stands before the artistic human being who really gets life into the creative imagination. Albert Steffen is this artistic person, with a fantasy that, radiating brightness of its own, finds the reflection of true spirituality in poetic creation and brings it to life.

In his drama, the “Quadruped” is just as much an “active person” as the others who live in the physical body; but it does not appear as a “symbolic entity”, as a “spirit” or the like. You cannot see it in the physical world because it does not have the conditions to be seen there. But it is always there when the state of mind of the “acting persons” takes on a form through which the supersensible world, immediately adjacent to the ordinary one, can be perceived.

And in the perception of the state of mind of his dramatic persons in this direction, Albert Steffen is a master. He feels with absolute certainty for a person: now there is a feeling, a passion, a will in him that breaks through the thin walls of the spiritual world and causes spiritual events to appear behind the physical.

Thus the “Quadruped”, in the usual sense “invisible”, is nevertheless, in keeping with the nature of its own activity, an active person in Steffens' drama.

The two main characters are: Großmann, a human monster, and Christine, an angel of good will, but justified only in relation to the spiritual world. For her will must break at the conditions of the physical world.

Behind Großmann rules the “Quadruped”. Intellectually, he is a well-educated person. But everything that lives in his soul and can be experienced by him is subhuman. Christine, under the influence of the “Quadruped”, falls in love with this subhuman. Brutality is almost the first thing he shows towards her ever tender love. This does not prevent her in her love. Yes, it strengthens her in it. When she recognizes him as “evil”, she wants to release him from “evil” through the power of her love. Just as he seems to have fallen prey to “evil” for this physical world, so she is incapable of being dragged into “evil” by the nature of her soul. For in her lives just as much as the “Quadruped” from one side, so does “Christ” from the other. And Christ is the essence that transforms the influence of the “four-beast” so that it is not something subhuman that comes into effect in the human being, but something that lifts the soul above what the human being can otherwise reveal through physical descent, education, social context, etc.

Christine's father, Professor Sibelius, lives off the fortune that actually belongs to Christine. Her mother had a marriage with the professor that was arranged by fate but did not bring her happiness, and she left her physical existence mentally destroyed. Christine feels fully justified in leading her father to give Großmann part of the fortune that actually belongs to her, so that the man she wants to redeem in love can do something business-related with his great talent. Then, she feels, the rest will fall into place in the right way. Through the influence of her Christ-devoted heart, Großmann will be led up the path of genuine humanity.

It is achieved that Großmann can have an interview with Sibelius. Despite the fact that Sibelius has the strongest antipathy towards his daughter's fiancé, despite the fact that he must consider him to be a very bad person based on what he has heard about Großmann from others, it comes about that he gives him money at the end of the interview.

But the further consequence is that during this first visit, Grossmann prepares for the second visit, which takes place that same evening, during which he shoots the father in order to take possession of Christine's entire fortune.

In the man whom Christine wants to lead up the paths of good humanity through her love, she must see the murderer of her father. She only feels that he must experience this case in the inner life of a murderer; and his soul would rise precisely through this from the deep ruin in which it is interwoven.

Großmann, through his subhuman impulses, has such an effect on the police officers pursuing him that, instead of arresting him as the murderer, they apologize to him for the disturbance they caused by appearing at his home after the murder.

And Großmann has already managed, while this is happening, to divert all suspicion of the murder onto Christine herself. She is arrested as the murderer on his say-so.

Christine has also been following her Christ-devoted path since the murder. The depth of her experience leads her mind, which has become clairvoyant, in spirit to the place on earth where Christ's grave is still today, and where Christ still “rises” today for everyone who, by taking him into their heart, performs Christ's deeds in the world.

This is where Christina's soul comes together; this is also where the soul of the murdered Sibelius comes together. Through the resurrected Christ, the power to transform Großmann's soul is to be found.

What Albert Steffen presents here in the most vivid drama is of unspeakable depth. The ascent of the father's soul in understanding the spiritual world; the terrible struggle of what the beast with four legs can do in the human being, with the true, thoroughly Christianized humanity before the soul's eye of Christina; all of this breathes true spirituality and allows one to touchingly feel the connection of humanity with this spirituality.

And while Christine is doing her best to save Großmann's soul, which she can no longer save as an earthly man, Großmann's bicycle whizzes by. He is making off with everything he has brought with him. Sitting behind on the bike is the chambermaid from the hotel where Großmann was staying, who he persuaded to go with him after he had already brought her there, to help him divert the police's suspicions away from him.

Christine now has to go through everything that a daughter can face who is suspected of being her father's murderer and who, moreover, makes an incomprehensible impression on the doctor, prison director and prison chaplain due to her particular state of mind and her connection to the spiritual world.

The plot is resolved in terms of life on earth by Grossmann's descent into the realm of subhumanity. His jealousy of the hotel chambermaid has led him to maltreat her in the truest sense of the word. She is delivered to the hospital with the skin peeled off at the front of her head, and is dying. Christine is also in the hospital, since it is likely that her mental state will be determined.

Now Großmann stands revealed in all his wickedness; he has reached the pinnacle of what a person can achieve when driven into subhumanity by the demonic power of the beast, whose secret essence is profound. For whatever radiates from him can make a man a devil; it can also, spiritualized by the light of truth, lead him up to the noblest heights of humanity.

Grossmann hangs himself in his prison cell. He wants nothing to do with the salvation of his soul. He wants this soul to dissolve into the nothingness of the universe through his will, which has been seized by the devilish.

Once again we find ourselves before the earthly place where Christ rises for the hearts that seek him in the right truth, but where the Quadruped also manifests its devastating power. “From the cruciform crack emerges the primeval beast: from the beam on the right a lion's head, from the beam on the left a bull's head, from the upper beam an eagle's face. From the trunk a dragon body.” – The dragon body is seen when the ‘beast’ turns into the path of destruction; otherwise, when it walks the paths of humanity, one has the angelic form before one.

The soul of Großmann is sought by the “Quadruped” with great thirst. The soul of Christine's father appears again. She is asked to “judge”. But Christine, asked by her father to judge, says: “Not I, but Christ in me.” Then the lion's head disappears from the full form of the Quadruped. And the father continues to ask to “heal”. Christine calls the Christ in her heart again. The bull's head disappears. And so the eagle's face disappears as Christine calls upon the Christ to “liberate”, and so the dragon's body when she does the same, as the Father's spirit speaks of “love”.

Christ Himself is spiritually present where the spiritual battle is finally brought to a decision. And when the news comes that Grossmann has hanged himself in his cell, then as the last word of the drama, Christine, through whose invincible power of soul in the good the Christ is present, says: “He (Grossmann) has risen in my heart.”

I have often had to think about what Ibsen was trying to achieve in some of his plays. A number of his characters are surrounded by an undefined, ghostly presence. This is deeply moving in “When We Dead Awaken”. But there it all remains in an incomprehensible “mysticism”. Ibsen does not find the moment in the human soul when vision breaks through into the real spiritual world. Therefore, the spiritual in his dramas does not arise dramatically.

Albert Steffen has found this moment in his “Viergetier”. He has thus brought the drama back to where it once was when it had just escaped the mystery story.

Steffen's very spiritually concrete imagination has achieved this. No matter how much one may penetrate into spiritual worlds through spiritual vision, nothing comes before one's soul like Steffen's “Viergetier”; one becomes aware that there are still places in the universe where the imagination, born of pure spirit, can penetrate. For it is from such places that the earth-human figures that Steffen forms come. What is full of light in these places, that is what Albert Steffen shapes. But from such places also come the real spiritual beings that move so realistically between the earthly beings in Steffen's drama. What Ibsen reached for with his mind, but grasped at nothingness; Albert Steffen's imagination and spiritualized artistic sense has grasped it. And in the face of this feeling, anything that wants to criticize the imperfections of this work of literature must remain silent. What stands before us is so full of life in intention and design that Albert Steffen's dramatic creation appears in such perfection in the reader's imagination, which is responsive to the poet, that all other things, such as critical judgment, are brought to a self-evident silence. Where such merits are present, the opposite faults weigh as lightly as a feather. For these merits fill the soul completely. — And everything that I receive as an impression while reading will emerge in a particularly vivid way in the stage production. For the drama carries the substance of reality within it, which proves its truth in the stage setting. —

I

Albert Steffen's “Four Beasts” has been felt by many to be a “pilgrimage” into the world of ideas of anthroposophy. Such a feeling cannot arise if the soul with its experience really penetrates into the drama. For in this drama, events flow from the external, sensory reality into the spiritual sphere through the deeper knowledge of the human being, which is inherent in the poet as the inner essence of his spirit. This poetical spirit, with the persons of his drama, rises in the right moments into a spiritual world, for this it does not need to rely on theory. It does not need to learn the path to the spiritual world from anthroposophy. But anthroposophy can help him to learn about the living “pilgrimage” to the spiritual world that is inherent in the life of the soul.

Such a poetical spirit must, if it is properly felt, be felt within the anthroposophical movement as the bearer of a message from the spiritual sphere. It must be felt as a good fate that he wants to work within this movement.

He adds to the proofs that Anthroposophy can give of its truth, the proof that in a creative personality, as a living spirit-bearer, he works like the light of this truth itself.

The appearance of a little book by Albert Steffen coincides with the public formation of an opinion about the “Four-Beast”: “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life.” (Verlag Seldwyla, Zurich).

A little book that lives. For when the reading soul unites with what speaks from the wonderful sentences, everything that one has before one is transformed. The impression spiritualizes; a person stands before the soul who sees through the intimate secrets of earthly nature, who is able to point to nature in such a way that it reflects its mysteries in his light.

Thus Albert Steffen's poetic spirit is behind the little book and appears spiritual when one feels the light that radiates from it.

"I like to receive my visitors in the garden. Each person who comes teaches me to look at the plants in a new way. The way a person strolls through the grounds with me, casting their eyes around, soon reveals to me whether they are a naturalist, painter, musician, farmer, and so on. Lovers show themselves in their most glorious bloom. Those in love with themselves remain dry and bare, even when standing next to an apple tree covered in blossoms.

Thus speaks he whose soul draws its life forces from the vastness of the stars; for what it receives in this way, it reveals when it looks at the creatures that surround man, so that through them he may receive life anew from the depths of his being in every moment.

And so the “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life” becomes a spiritual refreshing drink for the poetically receptive soul, and the mediator of an acquaintance with a poet spirit, who is able to reveal nature in its spirit-word.

What do words like these express: “If only we knew what goes on in a boy's mind when he picks up the first hay apple of the season, tests it with his thumb, bites into it with a crunch and, before eating it, looks at the seeds in the husk, which are still white or at most have a yellowish tinge! He feels it with a kind of natural conscience: Only when the seeds are dark brown have the sun and moon completed their work on the apple, making it suitable for my tummy. Before that, it is wrong to break it. And if the twig on which the apple hangs does not want to let go of it and has to be bent, the boy feels remorse. (Not so much for robbing the farmer...) Adults lose the ability to appreciate the divine alchemy. Why? Because they harden in their self-confidence.

But true poetic spirits are there in life to repeatedly introduce the hardened self-confidence to the divine alchemy.

My gaze is drawn back from this “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life” to Albert Steffen's debut work, “Ott, Alois und Werelsche”, with which he greeted the world in 1907. (S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin.)

For it is first and foremost as a greeting to the world that I perceive the book. It is the greeting of a human soul that has embarked on a pilgrimage after a full life of its own kind and that, filled with the impressions it receives, must speak to other people as one speaks when one extends a hearty greeting to another.

The poet of this novel has lived intimately with nature and human life. His soul had received the gift of being not only within himself, but above all in that which loving observation can bring to the life of the soul. But it is the secret of the human soul that the more it is absorbed in the external world through devoted experience, the more it sinks into its own interior.

Whether his work would become a “novel” was not yet of any concern to the young observer of the world. He is not yet “composing”; he is bringing the poetic light into the world that he himself has received.

You have to pause and savor every moment when you read “Ott, Alois und Werelsche”. For from the lines this poetic light rises as mild sparks. They are love that shines through the existence of a human heart. And “shining love” is indeed the revealer of true life.

Even nature does not “compose”; it presents its creations to the world. And spirit-nature is what the young Albert Steffen connected himself with; it led him further on the “pilgrimage to the tree of life”. Anyone who looks at life in the same way as the poet of “Ott, Alois and Werelsche” does, will, on this “pilgrimage”, come to the point where the creative world spirit radiates into the observed world of nature and people.

The poet of “Ott, Alois and Werelsche” sees what is revealed of the secrets of existence in the simple human gestures, in the everyday actions as a symptom. A symptomatology of the most beautiful kind is Steffen's debut work. But the symptoms, which still have to be interpreted emotionally – even if unconsciously – if the spirit is to become manifest through them, become transparent – and on the other side of reality appears what presents itself to the eye of the spirit in the “Viergetier”, without interpretation, speaking for itself. - - The soul's gaze must be able to rest lovingly on the spirit-interpreting symptoms of the Tree of Life, as did the young Albert Steffen's gaze; it must be able to penetrate the soul so fully of light if it is to grow into that feeling gaze that brings the “Tree of Life” to full revelation in the “four-legged creature”.

Anthroposophy seeks the all-encompassing nature of the Tree of Life; and it seeks Albert Steffen's poetic spirit. That is why the two have come together.

II

It was only in 1912 that Albert Steffen sent his second novel out into the world: “The Destiny of Crudity”. (S. Fischer's Verlag, Berlin.) Anyone who reads it and looks back at the one published five years earlier will feel as if they have had to search for this poet's soul on a journey into deep spiritual worlds in the meantime.

Albert Steffen's words speak from “Ott, Alois and Werelsche”, like the words of a soul to which the world has much to say, because it wants to listen with loving devotion to many things. How many small events, but which in their smallness speak of the greatness of the world, are revealed in Albert Steffen's luminous, soul-warm first work. But one has the impression that the world is speaking through a soul that, in the fullness of its impressions, abandons itself to the paths by which it is led by existence.

Now the same soul speaks in the novel “The Destiny of the Rough”. But something has broken into this soul. Precisely the impressions of a journey into deep spiritual worlds. A journey in which the human being becomes a mystery to spiritually inclined souls. But a mystery to which the powers of the seeing spirit can draw understanding and light.

The impressions of such wanderings of the poet's spirit are intimate. It would be indelicate to want to follow him on such a journey. For he only follows himself in a very specific way. In such a way that the impressions are not torn from the fullness of their revelation by the intellect.

Albert Steffen's soul knocked on many spiritual doors during its journey and found entry. There it learned to ask for the secrets of existence in hidden places.

The booklet 'Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life' has two parts. The first part is titled 'Preparation' and was written in 1910. Albert Steffen speaks from the heart during his soul's journey.

I see this poetical spirit at the beginning of his twenties, when “Ott, Alois and Werelsche” was created. Eyes that long to absorb everything beautiful in the world. Gestures that long to follow the gestures with which life speaks to man.

I see him again as he writes “the destiny of rawness”. Eyes from which the secrets of the world speak. Gestures in which the world gives its revelations through the whole person. But in between, the poet speaks in “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life”: “There is really no other way out: if we want to feel the infinity of space, we must feel an inexhaustible wealth within us. If the infinity of the spheres is not to fill us with awe and diffidence, we must know or believe that we can educate ourselves to similar power and greatness. We must acquire ideas that include an eternity and subordinate the ephemeral to them.

On his journey, the poet within has brought the second person to speak. The person who can ignite within himself the language of eternal becoming.

Thus standing in the world, Albert Steffen's soul must look at the riddle of “man and woman”. The poet feels how far apart what is experienced in the subconscious of woman and man as the human sense lies. Nowhere in the world does another contrast reveal itself among the many that are there, a greater one.

And at the same time this poetical spirit feels that a supreme event in the world's history must be able to take place in the physical existence on earth between “man and woman”. A supreme event because something of the kind is always being raised anew, not through concepts, but through the world's history itself, but also always brought to a tragic or happy solution.

Albert Steffen observes that there is something unconsciously provocative in the male essence, which is released in some form of coarseness in intercourse with the female. He may otherwise be of a delicate nature; there are moments when the man acts and speaks in such a way that the dignity of the woman seems crushed beside him.

But Albert Steffen also notes what effect this encounter with coarseness has on the woman. She experiences the man's coarseness as a kind of self-discovery, a strengthening of her consciousness.

Anyone who wants to enter such realms of life with the poet's genius must be able to absorb into his language something that removes the words from everyday life. He must be able to speak in such a way that the words he says stand there, but that something essential can live in the intuitive soul of the reader. Speaking in these matters as one speaks in everyday life is something that offends a person with a proper sense of feeling.

In Albert Steffen's novel, language takes on a different quality in places where this main enigma comes to light, where it moves away from the mode of expression of everyday life. In such places, the style becomes as if the poet's genius wanted to reveal itself to the reader in a confidential, subdued and suggestive language.

And this stylistic nuance is again stylishly distinguished from the style in the presentation of the novel's characters. Here is the portrayal of a soul that, on its journey into true life, has looked deeply into the weaving of the human being.

The personalities stand there after the spiritual and physical being. The sensitive reader must be able to give an answer when asked about traits of the outer and the soul. The characters in the novel emerge so vividly. One has the feeling that one can discuss even the most diverse things, which are far removed from Steffens' portrayal, with these people.

This stylistic nuance between vivid revelation, in which everything that is inside flows out, and the subdued speaking of soul secrets that people cannot fully come to consciousness of, is what makes the novel “The Destiny of the Rough” so irresistibly appealing.

The poet-genius occupies such a position in life, experiencing the moment in full, most honest inner perception, when he may say: “If the infinity of the spheres does not fill us with awe and humility, then we must know or at least believe that we have something in us that is equal to or even conquers it, that we can educate ourselves to similar power and greatness.”

In Albert Steffen's “The Nature of Brute Force,” a poet-genius speaks, for whom brute force reveals the important mystery that has otherwise occupied the age so intensely and that many perceive as the “battle of the sexes”.

Steffen, on the other hand, when he perceives the contrast between man and woman, immediately seeks to lead the soul out of the world of matter and into the world of spirit. From the spirit, light is to be shed on this riddle of life. — In the case of others, the problem is dragged down into the sphere where the soul turns to the material. But in doing so, it is transferred into the region of triviality.

As a result, Albert Steffen's poetic genius stands out so brilliantly in his time that he takes those who approach his art with understanding to regions of existence that he himself first enters in his own deeply serious human soul-searching.

But this is hardly what is expected of a poet today. He is supposed to descend into the regions where the trivial concepts of everyday life prevail, where everything that is not approved by a scientific way of thinking may be relegated to the realm of fantasy. — In this region, however, there is no understanding for the “Viergetier”.

In the “Determination of Crudity,” Albert Steffen's original path into the secrets of the human world is revealed in a significant way. — In this novel, too, the narrative does not follow the thread of a novel's composition. Small episodic novellas are woven into the plot, which is introduced from the beginning, and which, viewed purely externally, could also have a different content. And at the end, the reader is surprised by an attached story that appears in the novel as something completely new. Steffen introduces this story as follows: “The story of a person with whom Aladar came together is now to be told, so that from it one can sense how his whole being was raised to a high level by his new friend.”

Aladar is a character who deeply engages the reader from the very beginning: a main character of the novel. The new friend only appears at the end.

Albert Steffen's spiritualization of art can now be felt particularly in such a kind of “composition”. One feels immediately, when reading the “attached” story, the artistic necessity of this poetic genius out of its special nature.

For Albert Steffen, in 'Determining Crudity', the processes depicted are like the artistic means by which a spiritual world can be seen behind these processes. However, the interpretation is not a symbolic one, but one that unfolds in the same way as the colors of the plants, as the shine of the stones in relation to the spirit.

And from the world that one beholds when one allows the beauty of the image to take effect, the people emerge and stand before us in the art of Albert Steffen.

Steffen's style thus becomes that which is able to unfold a representation artistically like a physical ground, which the personalities that appear enter from the spiritual world.

This is what one already senses as the luminous originality of Albert Steffen in The Defining of Crudity

III

One year after the publication of “The Determination of Crudity” in 1913, Albert Steffen's next novel “The Renewal of the Covenant” was published (S. Fischer, Verlag, Berlin 1913). The poet's genius now penetrates into human life, as the soul strengthens the visionary power of the imagination both in breadth and depth. Into the expanse, by drawing into its realm the destinies of many people who are connected by their lives. Into the depths, by seeking to explore the powers at work in these destinies, where human life wells up from the spiritual sources of existence.

The imagination takes a legend as its starting point. A man and his sons had once migrated from the far north to lower-lying regions. The circumstances of the settlement led to a situation in which, after some time, some of the man's descendants lived in a bright, friendly area; others lived nearby, but in a miserable area of the earth where souls become desolate, spirits are humiliated and morals fall prey to the mire.

The poet presents a luminous image of where these people of common descent are led, some to circumstances in which life can flourish, and others to those in which it must perish. One of the descendants climbed higher and higher day after day, where he was able to absorb sunlight into his soul. He was thus far removed from the area where his relatives fell into the misery of life. But the ascent was dangerous. The miasma of the marshy region, which devoured life, spread upwards, and in the enjoyment of the sun the sea of fog penetrated, bringing death. During one of the ascents to the heights, the sun seeker's wife died. But dying, she left him a vision: herself with a child in her arms. And dying she said to him: paint us and set up the picture “under the lime tree”. So a friendly human settlement arose around the place, which was given strength by the picture. The mists of the neighboring moor avoided the area where the power of the picture was at work. The sun prevailed where this effect was present.

The poet's spirit wonderfully evokes how human intimacy pulses through nature's effects in deep-lying forces at the beginning of his creation.

This poet genius has found nature in the spirit-imbued search of his senses; he has found the divine-spiritual in the spirit-filled search of the soul through nature.

An ancient historian has the depicted saga in his collection. He is a member of the family to which the saga refers. It is his own ancestors who came from the north, who then developed in their further life in such a way that one part can have a dignified existence in a beautiful area, but the other part is condemned to a life in the moral swamp.

Thus neighboring groups of people find themselves in juxtaposition. Their living conditions have given them completely opposite characteristics in terms of body, soul and spirit. But life brings them into contact. Connections arise between the two groups of people. The poet observes what is experienced there and, with his broad outlook and deep, observant imagination, he presents it in such a way that, as a reader, one follows a performer who, where nature reveals itself in what it receives from the starry regions, takes in the spiritual in a lively and active way into the realm of his observation.

A picture of rare clarity presents itself. Marriage is described between a man who has sprung from an evil environment and a woman who comes from a good environment. This marriage unfolds in the most enigmatic transformations of character in both man and woman. With a penetrating gaze at what works its way up from the depths of being into human life, the poet's spirit pursues these enigmatic transformations, and what he finds in the souls of human beings from the sensuality of his observation of nature and from the intensity of his observation of the spirit is itself life that solves enigmas.

Marriage leads to the point where the woman becomes “knowing”, where she realizes - especially in the Easter season - how man is a “child of the sun”, how he takes his nature from the sun and only carries it into the earthly realm. The power of the image that the saga tells of becomes a living entity in the woman; such a living entity, when it takes hold of the soul, carries it off into the spiritual world.

A wonderful spiritual magic reigns over this passage in the novel. Novalis' “magical idealism” shines forth as it can shine through a true poet a century after Novalis.

Thus speaks the woman: “In these meadows sleeps a spirit, waiting to enter the hearts of men and become healing love there. How glorious it must be to be united with the beings who conjure up the green blanket of plants in harmony. All people will one day be such friends. Yes, you and I and all have the longing to come together, however much we think we are enemies... Why do we always accuse ourselves that we cannot give anything to anyone! Can the person we love look at the mat with the flower stars without becoming happier? Oh, could I be such a disciple! Is it possible to have any other wish on earth?"

And the poet-genius speaks, revealing the interweaving of his soul with this spirit-nature-language of those who have become knowledgeable, in the “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life” profound words. He is transported by the most vivid immersion in the weaving of nature. He says: “Now I suddenly understood the primal plant. I saw how the plant germinates, grows, flowers and bears fruit, in order to arise again and again from the seed, through a whole world age, according to natural necessity, and how it connects the earth with heaven in the process. I discovered a multifaceted rhythm in the arrangement of the leaves, in the formation of the flowers, in the rising and evaporating of the water, in the blossoming and fading of the colors: tones, counterpoints and chords, a dance of countless spirits.” Anyone who reads these words in “Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life” and then remembers the passages in the novel will feel, in this poetic spirit, how the light of Novalis' “magical idealism” and Goethe's “contemplative judgment” emerge from the depths of the mind.

The second half of the novel, “The Renewal of the Covenant,” can only be felt as a genuine spiritual pilgrimage of artistic imagination. A boy, who has his origin in the connection between the members of the light and the dark lineages, is portrayed on his educational path. His connection with the spirit gives Albert Steffen deep insights into the heart and soul of this boy. We find him as a gifted boy when he begins his school career. Then a devastating event occurs in the young life. A teacher punishes the boy. The boy sees in his soul the “withered bone hand” of the old schoolmaster. The whole being of the child changes. He absorbs what he has to learn, but when asked, he cannot bring anything out of himself. Albert Steffen was only able to describe the nuances in the transformation of this child's soul as he does because in “Renewal of the Covenant” he reflects the spiritual pilgrimage he was undertaking at the time.

There is Hartmann, the brother of the boy's grandfather. Hartmann is a man before whom destruction goes hand in hand. He does not consciously intend this destruction. A female being who dies because of him, the brother who becomes an untrue man because of him, and much more is tied to his existence and actions. He sees himself as the center of a world of destruction. All this can only be described by a poetic imagination that has clairvoyantly stood in the realm of the spiritual and looked at human hearts from this point of view. Since Albert Steffen's imagination is capable of this, even a character as complicated and extreme as Hartmann, who moves in the most unheard-of extremes of life, seems true inwardly. And he remains true to himself because he locks himself up in his estate like a hermit, in order to devote himself solely to the destruction of the world and life. For his life has led him to believe that the world has reached the point in its development from which it must proceed towards destruction. And since he bears within himself the sum of all human destructive powers, he would like to make himself an instrument of the process of destruction.

And yet again: this hard man can become pious when he is with the boy, whose educational path has been indicated, and the boy's little sister. The spirituality of the child's soul shines brightly in the interaction between Hartmann and the two children of his relative.

A blind man who has been harmed by Hartmann because the latter has closed his property with a dog that bites, and the blind man has entered the dog's range, is to be avenged by a crowd of wildly passionate people. While this crowd is preparing to destroy Hartmann, we hear the words from the blind man's mouth: “I see an army of souls taking flight upwards. I see another one streaming towards it and plunging it into the abyss in a confused mass.” Thus Albert Steffen's imagination introduces man to the spiritual world in order to illuminate his innermost being with the rays of this world. This appears more vividly in ‘Viergetier’; spiritually, one already feels it in full force in this second half of ‘Renewal of the Covenant’.

The novel's conclusion is deeply moving. The “blind man” speaks to another character from the group of depraved people: “Hear what just passed through my soul: the Redeemer hung on the cross; on his right and on his left, the two malefactors. From heaven, darkness descended in great circles on the peoples who were gathered around the rock of Golgotha. They shouted: “If you are the chosen one of God, help yourself.” Then the poet follows the conversation of the two misdeeds with Jesus. - And then the radiant image follows: “At the foot of the rock stood two old men, old friends. It seemed to them as if a being of light descended upon the cross of one of the murderers and gently carried his soul away. At the same time, however, a devilishly curled beast came riding by in a whistling wind and snatched the soul of the other murderer from his convulsing body.” The friends parted. In the days that followed, they underwent experiences that were hard on their souls. And what they now feel is expressed by one of them: “I feel just like you. So let's make a pact. We will vow never to follow the other into the beautiful spiritual lands, but to remain forever with the murderer in the darkness.”

They had realized how people like this murderer could not fall into error if they themselves were different. And while they believed that they had to stay with the murderer as atonement, “a third party” whom they did not know stood beside them and said, “Let me be in your covenant.” Christ was the third. In his kingdom of light, the tested souls are found.

With deep reverence for the powers of existence that prevail in the human being, one lays this novel out of one's hand.

Albert Steffen created it as the image of his spiritual pilgrimage. And what the imagination experiences on this pilgrimage is joyfully experienced by the poetical heart in joy. Spiritual worlds experienced in joyfulness are revelations of beauty. Albert Steffen's novel speaks of beautiful spirituality. For he who experiences the spirit as he does can describe what is beautiful or ugly before the senses. It becomes beautiful in the light he conjures over it.

(I will now conclude this presentation of Albert Steffen's early poetic period. I plan to continue the reflection after a short time, which will then extend to Albert Steffen's later creations.

I

A true work of literature that moves in the world of human spiritual experiences must arouse the deepest interest today. This can be said for Franz Werfel's trilogy “Spiegelmensch” (Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich).

The development of a human soul through three stages of world insight stands before what Goethe called the sensual-supernatural vision. Perhaps I can best convey what this vision presents through Werfel's writing by describing it freely. A person wants to leave the world in which life has placed him because he cannot truly be human in it. The way the world is, it stifles the essence of man, so he feels. It does not allow him to gain existence. He wants to enter a monastery. Those who already live their lives within this monastery, in order to develop the true one through being dead to the deceptive world, mean to him that he is taking on a heavy burden. He is advised not to take the leap into the unknown because he does not appear equal to the danger. He will not be dissuaded. He is told of three visions through which the human being works his way up to experiencing the spiritual world. He begins the path that leads from the first two stages to the third, on which the “spirit in man” reaches the “spiritual essence of the world” by beholding it.

In the first part of the trilogy, the soul's vision is transformed by the stimulus of external means (solitude, contemplation of one's own figure in the mirror, where it is physically similar, but spiritually dissimilar through the transformed gaze) in such a way that the seeker of the path learns to know that the world he has experienced so far is only a reflection of his own being. He comes to know what others do not know: that a person who does not undergo inner development believes that he has a world in front of him, but in fact he is only standing in front of a “mirror”. Behind the mirror is the world. What a person sees is only its own content, reflected back to him by the mirror. Man lives in deception about this mirror world as long as he does not learn to sense his own narrow human self as reality at least within the world of mirror images. 'Thamal, the pathfinder, is brought to this. From the mirror set up in his cell, his similarly unlike mirror image leaps towards the dreaming-waking as a real being. He is now “in himself”; but this “I-itself” is outside of him. In order to be himself, he first had to come to himself; but now this attained self leads him like an other.

In the second part of the trilogy, “One Thing After Another,” the Mirror Man, who is the Other and yet only truly himself, guides the Way-Seeker through the world in which he used to believe he really was, but in which he was only with his illusions. He meets again with those people with whom fate has brought him together; he undergoes experiences with them; but he experiences differently than before. He experiences like a human being who, in an increasing way, consciously sets his deeper soul content out of himself; his world becomes richer; the abyss between him and others ever wider. His consciousness condenses in experience. He becomes mature to become his own judge. He sees what must be judged in his soul. The new man, who can see the old, pronounces the death sentence on this old man, who could not see, but who has nevertheless acted so far.

In the third part, the Way-Seeker is again in solitude before the mirror, with the condensed consciousness of one who has wiped out his previous human self in self-righteousness. Around him are those in the midst of whom he wanted to be received. But the mirror is no longer a mirror. It has become a 'window'.

"Thamal (touches the mirror). Powerful magician's shake. In one fell swoop, the mirror has turned into a gigantic window. Raging daylight streams into the hall from all sides. Behind the window, a strongly moving, drunken world of colors and shapes, which for the spectator is supposed to signify that higher reality that is accessible only to the people on the stage. Monk: “Rise and see!” Thamal (turning away, dazzled): “The light! The light! I can never bear the bliss!” Monk (very solemnly):

Now you have awakened from the second life night
Tsar Schau of the morning reality
For behind you sank the mirror world,
Which confronts us with the grimace
Of one's own person in every being,
The world in which the fewest recover—
We all went through it, but what we saw
Was not what we thought we saw, what we loved.
For every being became our delusion,
We remained whole, but those victims wept.

(Pause)

We were once, all of us, such fools,
And here in an ancient night
the false self freed, the true self killed,
And finally lost our mirror image.
Now you too are born for the second time!
Your life nerve tenses anew and frees
From dull ambition, wild conflict.
You emerge from death, from uncertain suffering,
From everything that is cowardly and half and vague,
And learn with clear eyes to distinguish
The sick twilight from the pure day!

Thamal

(into the kaleidoscopically ever-changing landscape)

I see - I see - I see! —

Abbot

(steps up to him)

You are the youngest of the rebirth.
So take the office's golden belt here!
The head smokes dimly from human hours,
So you are still mostly connected to Maja.
First you have to

Then may you try to climb the rocky steps
of love, which have called you here
to finally find the last perfection
in sweet extinction and obliteration.

(strong)

Take then!

Thamal

(puts on the gold belt)

Abbot and monk

(bow before him)

The twenty-six monks remain seated, impassive and grinning benignly. The magical trilogy ends here.

II

A poem must be taken as a work of art. Werfel has great poetic power. Therefore, with The Mirror Man, one can begin by taking it as a work of art. But if one has done this with the very best of intentions from the outset, one is repeatedly thrown out of the artistic mood as one progresses. In the end, one would like to return to the poetry with the mood that one has gained from the twenty-six “unmoved, mildly grinning, cowering” monks, and take the whole thing humorously. But that is not possible either. The impermissible humor of caricatures arises, which, in their actions, forget that they are caricatures and play out realities.

But what does one want after all? One admonishes oneself: don't be a philistine, because Franz Werfel is a poet. One tries to grasp the “vivid images” of the poetry. Because the poet does provide such images, after all. But in the end, one is repeatedly confronted with bloodless abstractions that are clothed in human figures. One wants to enter into the poet's intuition – and at every turn one is urged to use one's intellect, which is supposed to symbolize and create a world that is not there. Construction of a house for which the building material is missing. Sketches that lack the germ of images. I am quite dissatisfied with myself. Because actually I am interested in this “mirror man”. But my interest is repeatedly dispelled by what I have described.

But maybe I still haven't grasped the whole thing at all. So let's start again with a fresh approach and a different – what do you call it today? – “attitude”. Of course, that means going through all the tastelessness, triviality and worse again, through the unmagical second part of the “magical” trilogy. But anyone who takes umbrage at such things today is just an incorrigible philistine. Therefore, I prefer to say that if the seeker Thamal is a fellow who, in his own way, already experiences Maja as tasteless and somewhat unclean, why should the playwright be prevented from dragging him through tastelessness when he tumbles out of the “one” of Maja around the “other” of spirit-reality?

So let's start again. There are so many “magicians” and “mystics” and even “occultists” walking around in the world today who, with their all-too-human soul tissues, love the Maja quite rudely, but who, rolling their eyes and twisting their chins, chatter about the exalted “paths of knowledge” for male and female dreamers, on which one climbs up to such dizzying heights that one's thoughts become dizzy. Could Werfel not have wanted to caricature one of these occultists? As an artist, he would have been right to depict such an abstraction, which only becomes concrete if observed, as a caricature that, for better or worse, must occasionally break out of its role. But then it is incomprehensible why the other people, who – from the Maya point of view – are perfectly good citizens and must remain in this unstable equilibrium between the abstract and the human. If Thamal falls over artistically every few moments, why do the others, who don't make a face, have to tumble and then get up with a shout of “Stand up and be seen”? It doesn't seem to work, even with the best will in the world. Even if you “tune in” with a satirical and humorous mind, Thamal's surroundings are disturbing.

And what about Thamal himself! If he is to be taken satirically? Then he could only be a caricature of the “magician”. But caricature or not, this Thamal “walks” through three parts of a trilogy and stands on his head. Even magical coquetry has had enough.

Thamal stands on the head of the intellectual allegory. And this is seriously modeled on what is described in mystical guides as the “path of human development”; so Thamal cannot be taken as a satirical-humorous figure after all. As such, he would have to wander his path through the world on his two Maja legs and reach the end as a pseudo-magician. He would then have to carry the allegory as a sham structure headwards; in the poem, however, he is placed on the allegory, which uses his head as a point of support.

It seems entirely justified that one should experiment with the “mirror man” as to how he is actually to be taken. Should unconditional admirers of him be found, they will say: he just doesn't know what matters, trying it this way and that. He just didn't understand the poem.

But let me reply: however this poetry is to be taken, a serious understanding of the spiritual world has not flowed into the artistic design of the persons and actions. And that is precisely what I wanted to illustrate by showing that one can think about the “mirror man” from different angles. One is stimulated to do so because all kinds of contrived ideas want to pass themselves off as works of art. If the poetic power of creation – which I admit to some extent everywhere – had not been completely atrophied by intellectual construction, one would not feel drawn to the “ifs” and “maybes” of the reasoning mind.

One might even be tempted to rewrite the whole poem by reversing the order of events. Thamal could look through the “window” first. A person without any mystical development does this. He has not yet found his true self. He takes the world he sees as reality. He then imagines a being, similar or dissimilar to him, entering through the “window” and initially incomprehensible to him. It leads him through the second part of the trilogy, “One by One”. He feels increasingly drawn to this being; in the end, he enters into it completely. He has thus found his true self. But this carries the spiritual world within it, and it transforms the “window” into a “mirror” that now reveals truth, because it shows what is an image as an image, while the true human being does not look at his being and with it the essence of the world through the window, but experiences it in front of the mirror. For those who develop in this direction, what is seen is Maya, whether it is seen in reflection in the mirror or directly through the window.

The actual spiritual development of the human being takes place on completely different paths than the one presented in this trilogy. It has a beginning and - not an end, but a continuation that is carried by inner necessity. And this is the necessity of an experience that can be shaped, that can become a work of art. But anyone who merely comes to the thought of this experience is subject to the fate of the thought. No context of thought coincides so completely with the experience that one could not also make the thought-symbol of the end that of the beginning, and vice versa.

And finally, in “Spiegelmenschen,” the “mirror” at the beginning is more of a “window” than the “window” at the end, which is really only a “mirror.” The scenic note reads: “Behind the window a world of colors and forms in intense motion, drunk, which is to signify for the spectator that higher reality that is accessible only to the persons on the stage.” It may be that Thamal sees through the meaning of this world of colors and forms, drunk. If it reveals a higher world to him, then the “mirror” can do so as well, holding its own countenance out to him.

I hope that this description is not interpreted as a “disparaging critique”. What I have written here is inspired by Werfel's poetry. This poet's artistic power is significant. It is estimable that he has immersed himself in the element of the spiritual development of the soul with this poetic power. But when the modern man approaches the spiritual and his life, then he becomes a conceptualizer, a symbolist, an allegorist. But in this way the spirit dies. Thought is the corpse of the appearing spirit. Humanity needed intellectualism to achieve intuitive life in freedom, which can only be alive in the inanimate spirit, in the conceptual spirit. But art needs the living spirit. When Homer speaks of the 'muse', it is not just a figure of speech. Klopstock still spoke of the 'immortal soul'. Goethe did not express it in words, but anyone who is familiar with his experience knows how he felt about it. A work of literature that penetrates into the spiritual realm needs experience in the spirit. This must come about if culture is to rise from its present dead center. What I have said does not contradict the fact that Werfel has indeed done much to further this ascent. I could only fully express my agreement with “The Mirror Man” through my objections.

In 1910, Fritz Mauthner published a “Dictionary of Philosophy”. In this book, he arranged in alphabetical order a variety of reflections on concepts that are commonly discussed in philosophy. The light in which these concepts are placed is the one that the author believes he himself and the world lit years ago in his “Critique of Language”. Now two volumes of a new work by Fritz Mauthner are available: “Atheism and its History in the West” (1922, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart and Berlin).

If one does not want to be unjust to Mauthner through the use of language, then when discussing his works, one must first see from them themselves the way in which he uses certain words. One begins to read “The History of Atheism”. The first sentences of the “preface” are: “So that the reader does not have to wait until the last section of the fourth volume to get to know the ultimate goal of this work, I want to make a confession right here; I would like to lead those who trust me to the bright and cold heights from which all dogmas appear as historically developed and historically transient human ordinances, the dogmas of all positive religions as well as the dogmas of materialistic science, from which heights faith and superstition are equivalent concepts. What I am trying to offer between the lines of this devastating book, my credo, is a godless mysticism that may compensate for the length of the path of doubt."

The ‘language critic’ Mauthner could give you a little tap on the knuckles if you were to make any comments about this ‘creed’ without further ado. He could say that one is simply “dependent on language”. And if, as he does on one occasion, he adds the sentence: “... language, which also includes shared customs and science,” then he could even give you a rap on the knuckles.

Therefore, I will first look up a writer who has written a “dictionary” to see what he himself has to say about “belief” before I comment on his “creed”. Now I turn to page 438 of the first volume of the “Dictionary of Philosophy”. This is where the article on “sex” ends and the one on “happiness” begins. There is nothing about “belief.” Belief is in a certain contrast to “knowledge.” So I look on page 582 (of the second volume). But there “feelings of value” are followed immediately by “miracle.” “Knowledge” and “science” have no articles of their own in this philosophical dictionary.

If I wanted to express an opinion on this, it would have to be pedantic in any case. I have opened this dictionary too often and read it again and again to know that the language critic Mauthner discusses “less important” terms with “more important” ones. And so I look up “truth”. And there it says on page 543 (volume 2): “The awareness that faith also refers to the absurd is perhaps most crassly expressed in a Catholic writing that quotes Paulus Sarpius... But this contrast between faith and knowledge of truth or knowledge is not bridged only by the word history of the English truth. I will note here that our glauben (old high German giloubon) is virtually identical with geloben, and that this geloben, in its oldest provable meaning, is a praise reinforced by ge, to approve. Perhaps a translation of probare. Yes, the only thing that is based on it, when you declare a judgment to be true, when you say yes to a sentence and not no, is already contained in this old vow or believe. In the Nibelungen, to praise, to vow means much the same as our to become engaged, that is to say, to solemnly say yes."

But now I am in the same situation that I have been in countless times when I have opened Mauthner's dictionary and read this or that article. I wanted to read about the “thing”; I was immediately referred from the thing to the word for the thing. One word discussion followed another word discussion. It went from the extraordinarily ingenious to the abominably philistine, from the certainties of established knowledge to the often comically daring. And then – the end. The “thing” was lost in a flood of word explanations.

While reading Mauthner's works, Nietzsche's book about David Friedrich Strauß, the philistine and writer, kept coming to mind. And I always forgave myself for this thought. I had something to “forgive”. Because I appreciate a lot about Mauthner: a great knowledge, an often healthy judgment, a courageous expression of what he means, and much more. But I could “forgive” myself, because Strauss, whom Nietzsche exposed as a “philistine,” was also a man worthy of esteem.

If I am not to think that Mauthner, in making his “creed,” actually means that he wants to—in the sense of the Nibelungen language—praise his view, “solemnly say yes to it, then I do not get very far with his own “explanation” when I am supposed to form thoughts about what he wants to say “between the lines of the devastating book” about a “godless mysticism”. But even then it is not easy, if one leaves aside for the time being the “building up” that is not in the book and sticks to the “tearing down”, of which there is so much in it.

With this “demolition,” Mauthner is only a child of his time. It has lost all power to move from abstract thinking to a truly experienced soul content. And only such a content also leads to a spiritual world content. One must first find the spiritual reality in the soul; then one attaches oneself with one's own spirit to the spirit of the external reality. If one knows thought only as abstract thought, which merely depicts a reality, then one must lose the spirit of the world. For in mere abstraction there is no path leading from the mental image to reality. Mauthner has now developed this disease of the time in his own particular way. He does not content himself with examining thought as other sceptics do and then showing that thought is powerless to grasp the “true world”; he fixes his attention on the words in which thoughts are expressed. He cannot find in words the “things” that others cannot discover in abstract thoughts. In his own way he can search for every thought in the words through which people have ever striven to approach a reality under the compulsion of experience. He finds the thought shimmering in the words, and can then say: everything slips your mind when you try to draw a “reality” out of a word.

But in doing so, one bypasses the entire experience of reality. You examine the labels of reality and say: there is no reality in these labels. — Yes, but couldn't Mauthner now reply: that's exactly what he wants to show. He wants to say: people think in words and thus believe they have “something” of the real. But they have nothing real in words.

I wonder whether Mauthner ever fully considered how miserable humanity would be if it had something real in words, or even just in thoughts, in his sense. You would see not the horse, but the thought, the word of the horse. And through this thought, this word, which one placed before the eye of the soul, one would be in the same position vis-à-vis the spiritual as someone who held an opaque disc in front of his physical eyes and thus could not see anything of the physical things. How good it is that one does not need to see anything real in the words; with their help, one can see what they describe.

Mauthner allowed his time to educate him to become a skeptic. Now he wanted to ground skepticism even more deeply than others. He did this by moving from the deeper region of the soul, the thoughts, to the more superficial region of words. He went completely in the wrong direction. He wanted to descend through an urge of his soul and let himself be driven upwards by the spirit of the time.

And in this sense, he has now really and truly decreed “God”, “soul” and much more away from “reason” in his latest book, if one understands it in the sense challenged by Mauthner, by criticizing the word-ideas “of God”, “of soul” and so on. On 1250 large pages, one experiences the words in which “God”, “soul” and so on were spoken in the Middle Ages, in modern times, and also in ancient times; and in the fabric of words, one is led everywhere over that which people experienced as “God”, as “soul”.

But Mauthner can also say: yes, that is precisely it, that one should come to reality in a different way than through words, or, as he likes to emphasize again and again, through word superstition. After all, it should not just come down to de-divinizing reality, but to prepare the way for a “godless mysticism” through this de-divinization.

Mauthner has written thick books in which it is important to be guided by what is written in the lines to what is written between the lines. A “godless mysticism” is supposed to be there. It is no wonder that nothing is there. For what should be there if not “words”? But these would have as little relation to reality as those written in the black lines.

I must confess that I have always sought this “godless mysticism” between the lines of dictionary articles. But I confess with shame that I have only ever seen white paper there. Because when I had finished an article about something or other, during the dance of words the ground had disappeared for this “something”; one no longer walked, one “flew”. But this “flying” was quite windy; because one noticed that one had lifted oneself up by one's own hair like a famous “personality”.

And so one flies through the 1250 pages of Mauthner's History of Atheism and also over most of the spaces between the lines. And in the end one realizes that the procedure described above did not lead to “flying” after all, but that one remained nailed to the starting point. But one has seen, even if only in the “reflection of the words,” many interesting, witty, courageous things. And one can do that even if one does not make any headway intellectually.^{1I am interrupting the publication of the reflections that formed the content of the French course at the Goetheanum with this essay. But I see in what has been said above an episodic transition from the considerations of supersensible knowledge to the presentation of the supersensible regions of the world themselves, which is to be the subject of the publications of the last four numbers. Perhaps, if one also reads this episode, one will find that what is to be said later does not hang in the air as it might seem.}

A writing,¹ I do not want to write a review about it. What I will say will be only words that express my subjective feelings when reading the writing and that may be directed from a deeply satisfied soul like a spiritual greeting to the author.

Only in this way can I speak about a writing that, from the point of view of my spiritual-scientific striving, characterizes Pastor Ernst.

I feel that, first of all, the writing expresses the deeply religious, but also the only truly plausible view, which knows that in the development of mankind nothing truly religious can arise or develop without a real intervention of the divine-spiritual into the physical world. Without a person or persons having real contact with the supersensible, nothing religious can come into the world: Edmund Ernst is quite clear about this.

That is why he starts from the reformers' supersensible experiences. He shows how Luther's whole life was basically oriented towards contact with the supersensible. How Luther was well aware of the dangers of this contact, how he knew that supersensible beings can sometimes appear in a good mask, while they are of a devilish nature. Ernst also shows how Zwingli, in a decisive point, made his behavior dependent on a truth that had been revealed to him from the spiritual world.

The spiritual-supernatural source is spoken of simply but forcefully in the book as a religious source.

In this way, however, the author's meaning is implanted in the book, which makes the religious man. The book proves to be one that is written from a spirit-filled heart living in the spirit. From such a heart-felt attitude, light-filled warmth always falls on the individual's execution. And with Ernst, this warmth is never channeled into the sought emotional exuberance; it remains objective throughout and seeks to get the “yes” and “no” for an assertion from the objective.

Given such conditions, should we not speak of the deepest satisfaction when Pastor Ernst courageously makes three main questions the content of his book? These are three questions that I myself should never have been allowed to speak about; to hear what is said about them from such a source, may be called an inner festival of life. “1. Is there a possibility, from the spiritual experience of the Reformation, to understand what presents? 2. Must the spiritually real element of the Reformation capitulate before what 'anthroposophically oriented spiritual science' possibly brings in the way of new ideas? 3. Must the results of the spiritual scientist's research be rejected from the point of view of the experience of the Reformation?"

It must be deeply satisfying to see these questions treated in a thoroughly religious way, after Ragaz, for example, has written about the spiritual science I have described: ”In this higher knowledge, God comes to Himself in man. The promise of the snake is fulfilled: Eritis sicut Deus, you will be like God. Thus Theosophy becomes Anthroposophy” (Leonhard Ragaz: Theosophy or Kingdom of God? Flugschriften der Quelle 3. Rotapfelverlag 1922, page 18). Or: “Woe to the world if it were to abandon the God of the Bible for the God of Theosophy – it would sink into dream and death, lose God and man.” Page 34. – Anyone who acquires knowledge of the human soul through spiritual research does not find a soul like Ragaz's in her dark storms against Anthroposophy incomprehensible. One can see through her in her conscious world of ideas, and also in the subconscious and semi-subconscious depths. And one recognizes how she cannot allow the feeling to arise in her from these depths: there is a path in anthroposophy to the spiritual world. Can this not lead to a renewed understanding of the biblical word of revelation, which also comes from the spiritual world? Ragaz' soul cannot come to this feeling because she has blocked the very path through the ways to the Bible that she has now chosen, through which the Bible itself - in accordance with the corresponding time - came about, and which has been recreated in anthroposophical spiritual research in a way appropriate to the responsibilities of knowledge in our time.

Now Ernst's statement (on pages 24f. of his book) is juxtaposed with a statement by Ragaz. I truly feel a spiritual blush as I transcribe the words here: “Insofar as Steiner represents the fact that it is possible to recognize the supersensible world and that it is possible to educate people to this knowledge, he presents himself as the recipient of a message from the spiritual world. Only that he also shows – and this goes beyond Luther – how others can also arrive at becoming such recipients through the path of seeing.

And Pastor Ernst understands in a clear way how I would like to apply anthroposophical spiritual knowledge to human life. It is far from my intention to appear in any kind of religious way or to interfere in any religious confession. I have no other aspiration than this: to communicate to present-day humanity, in a form of knowledge with the right sense of responsibility before today's science, what I am able to explore in the supersensible worlds. I present what I may say to myself is either appropriate for present-day humanity in its state of spiritual maturity, or something else for which individual groups of people are first acquiring the maturity in an (esoteric) preliminary training.

When the Christian Renewal movement came into being, it was not on my initiative, but on that of a number of Christian theologians who were seeking a new spiritual impulse precisely out of their genuine Christian sensibilities. believed that they could find this in the spiritual insights, especially those that are also possible through a cultus, of anthroposophy; and I was obliged to give this group of people everything I could give from my knowledge. I remained the one communicating the insights from the supersensible world; and the recipients and inquirers did what was necessary to establish the Fellowship for Christian Renewal.

My experience in reading this writing

A discussion of ¹ with the anthroposophy of Alois Mager could be of profound interest to me. This prompts me to write down here, as a kind of soliloquy, the thoughts that have arisen in me while I was studying Mager's writing “Theosophy and Christianity”. (I must confess that I have only now found the time to read the writing, which was published as early as 1922).

There are few people who believe that one can be fair to an opponent. But regardless of the reasons that such people have for their opinion, it seems to me that there are few conditions for me to be unfair to Alois Mager from the outset, even if he appears as my opponent.

He belongs to an order that I hold in high esteem and love.

Not only do I have many memories of noble, lofty, and far-reaching intellectual achievements that can be attributed to the order in general, without going into the work of the individual members of the order to whom this achievement is owed; but I have also had the good fortune to know and esteem individual members of the order. I have always had a sense for the spirit that prevails in the writings on science by such personalities. While I feel that much of what comes from other contemporary scientific works is foreign to me, there is not a little that comes from this side that touches my soul without any foreignness, even when the content seems to me to be incorrect, one-sided, or prejudiced.

And so I was also able to take up with much sympathy what Alois Mager wrote without reference to anthroposophy. This applies to his thoughts on the life of the soul in the presence of God, which are deep in mind and spirit, in particular.

I expected Alois Mager to be an opponent. For I know that from the side to which he belongs, either only silence about my anthroposophy can come, or opposition. Anyone who has illusions about this knows little about the world.

But what Mager presents had to seem significant to me.

And I would like to write down here the thoughts that have come to me about this, like a soliloquy.

The essay “Theosophy and Christianity” discusses in four chapters, essentially the Anthroposophy I have described. Mager admits this. On page 31f. we find the words: “I consider it futile to broadly present the goals and teachings of neo-Indian theosophy. We must devote a separate treatise to Steiner's Anthroposophy and its relation to science. There the essentials of Theosophy will be discussed as well.

The first chapter, “Theosophy in the Past and Present,” contains a spirited argument that what Mager calls Theosophy was revealed in a great spiritual way in the non-Christian world in Plotinus and Buddha. Mager sees the search of the human soul to come into contact with the divine in a way that naturally follows from the nature of this soul, most vividly realized in the two minds mentioned. For, what appears on Christian ground in this way, Mager does not judge, of course, as coming naturally from the nature of the soul, but as a result of the prevailing divine grace.

It seems unnecessary to me to point out here that, especially in earlier times, the state of soul indicated, even if not in the scientific formulation of Plotinus or in the religious depth of Buddha, was much more present in the spiritual life of humanity than Mager assumes when he orients his whole presentation towards the two personalities.

But what strikes me most is this: Mager wants to judge the anthroposophy I have presented. He wants to discuss what part of humanity is actually seeking by taking the anthroposophical path of the soul among many others. He wants to develop the content of what is alive in anthroposophy, otherwise what should give meaning to his investigation. Now the whole essence of what I have called anthroposophy is immediately distorted if, in order to explain its content, one refers to earlier descriptions of the spiritual worlds.

I have said that I am recording these thoughts as a soliloquy. I do this in order to be able to present unreservedly what only I myself can know with complete certainty from the subjective experience of the matter immediately, but which I must know in just this way.

And here I cannot do otherwise than to emphasize again and again that everything essential to my anthroposophy comes from my own spiritual research or insight, that I have borrowed nothing from the historical record in the matter or in the substantiation of the matter. If something I had found myself could be illuminated by being shown in some form or other as already existing elsewhere, then I did so. But I never did it with anything but what had been given in my own view before. Nor did I have any other method while I was referring to the theosophical society's own writings in my own writings. I presented what I had researched and then showed how one or the other appears in those writings.

Only the terminology has been borrowed from what already existed, where an existing word made such borrowing desirable in terms of its content. But this has as little to do with the essential content of anthroposophy as the fact that language is used to communicate what has been self-explored has to do with the independence of what is said. One could, of course, also assume that a well-known linguistic expression is borrowed when one uses it in a presentation of something completely new.

In the strictest self-knowledge, I have repeatedly asked myself whether this is the case, whether I can speak with my own exact knowledge when I say that what I present as a spiritual view comes from my directly experienced view, and that the historical given plays no role in this. In particular, it was always important to me to be clear about the fact that I did not take any details from what had been handed down historically and insert them into the world of my views. Everything had to be produced within the immediate life of contemplation; nothing could be inserted as a foreign entity.

In wanting to bring this into clarity within myself, I have avoided all illusions and sources of illusion with the greatest effort of consciousness. After all, one may rely on a clarity of self-awareness that knows how to distinguish between what is experienced in consciousness in direct connection with the objective being and what emerges from some uncontrollable depths of the soul through something read or otherwise absorbed.

I now believe that anyone who really engages with the presentation in my writings should also be able to see through my relationship to spiritual observation as a result. Alois Mager does not do this. For if he had tempted correctly, he would not have presented the content of anthroposophy with reference to Plotinus and Buddha first, but would have shown first how this content arises from the continuation of the development of modern consciousness on the basis of the spirit of science.

But what led Mager to write his first chapter leads him in the sequel (page 47) to say: “What strikes us most and most irrefutably about Steiner's Anthroposophy is that it is composed of pieces of thought and knowledge from all peoples and all centuries. Greek mythology, which Steiner became acquainted with at the gymnasium, provides him with the Hyperboreans, Atlanteans, Lemurians, and so forth. He borrowed from the oriental mystery religions, from the Gnostic and Manichaean teachings. The Kant-Laplacean Urn Nebula served as a model for his spiritual primeval world being...

This conclusion drawn by Mager about my anthroposophy is a complete objective untruth, in view of the true facts. It is dismaying to see that a fine mind, which wants to apply the means of its objective search for truth correctly in order to arrive at a true-to-life context, misses the truth and presents an illusion as reality.

This sense of dismay overshadows all the other feelings I have about Mager's writing, for example that it is antagonistic towards me, that it becomes quite strangely unjust in many places and so widens.

My consternation is heightened when I come across another objective untruth. In the second chapter, “Anthroposophy and Science”, Mager gives a commendable account of anthroposophical ideas, considering the brevity of the presentation to which he is obliged. Indeed, he proves himself to be a good judge of certain impressions that are given to spiritual perception as a finer materiality, for example, between the material and the soul. One can see that he has many qualities that enable him to engage with anthroposophy, if it were not for the inhibitions that come from other sides.

But now, in this chapter, there is another objective untruth. Mager first tries to put my way of spiritual thinking on the same level as spiritistic or vulgar occult practices. He even uses Staudenmaier's book “Magic as Experimental Science” for this purpose, which a sense of spiritual differences should have protected him from.

But now he comes to the following assertion: “The world view that Steiner presents to us, which at first glance appears imposing and seemingly complete, is not the result - as a philosophical world view is - of rational, scientific knowledge, but is gained through spiritual vision, anthroposophical clairvoyance” (page 45). “Steiner has all the knowledge he ever sipped and caught in his life, as he floated and wandered through all fields of knowledge, with an incomparable skill in clairvoyant threads into a bizarre unity.” Mager presents everything as if I had given my ideas about the spiritual world on the basis of an unchecked, unscientifically applied clairvoyance.

Is there nothing to be said against such an assertion, considering what can be found in my writings about Goethe, in my “Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's World View”, in “Truth and Science”, in my “Philosophy of Freedom” ? I have presented this as a philosophical primal experience, that one can experience the conceptual in its reality, and that with such an experience one stands in the world in such a way that the human ego and the spiritual content of the world flow together. I have tried to show how this experience is just as real as a sensory experience. And out of this primal experience of spiritual knowledge, the spiritual content of anthroposophy has grown. I endeavored step by step to use 'intellectual, scientific knowledge' with the precision that I acquired in the study of mathematics to control and justify the spiritual view and so on. I only worked in such a way that the spiritual view emerged from 'intellectual, scientific' knowledge. I have strictly rejected all spiritualism and all vulgar occultism.

Again, Mager's scientific approach does not lead to an understanding of the true facts, but to the assertion of objective untruths about anthroposophy and my relationship to it.

Indeed, one is bound to be dismayed when one sees that an 'investigation' into anthroposophy gradually erodes the very soil in which anthroposophy is to be found.

The anthroposophical spiritual researcher sees through the reasons for such mental states, which cannot come to objective facts, from his insights; but Mager is not to be presented here from the point of view of anthroposophy, but merely from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, which he indeed wants to assert in his writing.

I ask now: can it still be fruitful to deal with what an opponent presents, when one sees that everything falls to nothing, that he presents to the world about Anthroposophy? Can one discuss assertions that cannot possibly refer to Anthroposophy because they not only paint a distorted image of it, but a complete opposite?

(It is no wonder that Mager is unjust to me even in small matters. A clear misprint in one edition of my Theosophy, where the numbering of “mind soul” and “sentience soul” is incorrect – despite the fact that what comes before and after makes it quite clear that this is a misprint — he uses it to make the following comment: “It is characteristic of Steiner's scientific method that he places the intellectual soul before the sentient soul here, which contradicts his usual presentation.”

In view of what has been presented, there is no opportunity to enter into a discussion about whether, in Mager's description of Aristotle's psychology in the third chapter, “Soul and Soul Migration”, which Mager even finds quite stimulating, there is the seed for transforming ideas about the soul from what can be observed externally to what is seen spiritually internally; whether, then, the path from Aristotelian intellectualism to anthroposophy does not emerge as a more straightforward one.