The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We come today to one of the most important chapters in German cultural and intellectual history, the relationship between Goethe and Schiller. The attitude of the two of them is unique in the history of the world.

They approached each other from different sides. Goethe came from the side of Herder and all that could be associated with the unity of spirit and nature, while Schiller came from the Kantian philosophy and dualism. Besides that, Goethe's and Schiller's natures were fundamentally different.

If we take Goethe's Faust, we see how he tries to penetrate into nature, finding himself unsatisfied when he grasps something spiritual in abstractions and striving to create it immediately out of nature. To Schiller nature was at first something low; the ideal was something peculiar, born from the spirit and in opposition to the real. Both men were deep in quality and could only find themselves with difficulty. And thus, at the beginning of their personal meetings these two great geniuses were quite incapable of understanding each other. In fact, when Schiller came to Weimar, he felt himself repelled by what he heard about Goethe, and even a personal meeting could not alter things.

In 1788 Schiller could still write an unfavourable criticism of Egmont, that fruit of a mature artistic thought. He could not understand how Goethe could represent Egmont, not as a heroic enthusiast as Schiller himself would have done, but as a weakling who could be guided by given circumstances.

The Iphigenie too was beyond Schiller's comprehension.

At one point, Goethe and Schiller did almost touch. In an essay on Bürger's poems Schiller had said that Bürger's lack of idealism did not appeal to him; and Goethe was so much in agreement with the essay that he remarked that he would like to have written the essay himself. But there is still evidence how different the two courses ran, in Schiller's essay on Charm and Dignity. This essay shows us Schiller's whole striving after freedom. In what is necessary he can find nothing of charm; a work of nature cannot give any impression of charm. It is only in the work of art which is a symbol, a concrete picture of freedom, that we can speak of charm. And dignity is a word which we can only apply to the higher spiritual realm. Everywhere we see the old tendency to grasp the ideal as something opposed to the natural.

Even the professorship which Goethe got for Schiller at Jena is not to be taken as a service of friendship. This step was of great importance for Schiller. The study of historical character gave him a deep insight into the evolution of the spirit. Moreover, it made it possible for him to marry Charlotte von Lengefeld and start a household. History was just the subject which could help Schiller to reach maturity, as in his inaugural lecture “How should we study history in a universal sense?” In this way Schiller grew more and more into reality.

From 1790 onwards, after a visit to Körner who acted as intermediary between them, Goethe must have got a quite different idea of Schiller. But their friendship was not to mature by the ways in which average people come to feel sympathy with each other. This joint relation was destined never to come into being on the basis of personal interests. Nor, considering the difference of their personalities would their friendship have ever been of such a world-wide importance, if it had been based on that.

It was after a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in 1794—probably in July—that Goethe and Schiller began to discuss the lecture they had just heard, on the way home. Schiller said that he had only a mass of isolated and unrelated impressions; whereupon Goethe remarked that for himself he could imagine another form of natural observation. He then developed his views about the relation of all living things—how the whole plant kingdom was to be regarded as in continual development. With a few characteristic strokes Goethe drew the archetypal plant, as it appeared to him, on a piece of paper. “But that is not reality,” objected Schiller, “that is only an idea.” “Well, if that is an idea,” replied Goethe, “I see ideas with my eyes.” In this meeting the nature of both their thought can be seen. Goethe saw the spirit in nature. For him that which the spirit grasps intuitively was as real as what is sensible; for him nature embraces the spirit.

Schiller's true greatness as a man shows itself in the way in which he tried to discover the foundation on which Goethe's spirit was based. He wished to find the right standpoint. In unenvious recognition of all that thus came towards him, Schiller began the friendship which was to unite the two. The letter which Schiller wrote to Goethe after he had sunk himself in Goethe's method of creation, the letter of 24th August 1794, is one of the finest of human documents.

“For a long time I have, even though from a distance, observed the course of your spirit and with ever new wonder noted the path you have traced out for yourself. You seek for the necessary in nature, but you seek it along the harder path from which all weaker forces would shrink. You take all nature as a whole in order to illuminate a part; and in the totality of their appearances you seek the basis of explanation for the individual.”

In this way Schiller did Goethe honour, as soon as he had recognised him. There is no deeper psychological characterisation of Goethe. And so it remained till Schiller's death. Their friendship was impregnable, though envy and ill-will used the lowest means to separate them. They worked together in such a way that the advice of the one always had a fruitful influence on the other. Schiller, with a magnificence which has not been surpassed by any other aesthetic writer, by asking how this or that idea harmonises with Goethe's spirit, came to a realisation of the various forms of artistic creation, which he put down in his essay on “Naive and sentimental art.” An artist who still stands in relation to nature, who is himself still nature within nature, creates naively. That is how the Greeks created. An artist who longs for a return to nature, after being torn from her, creates sentimentally. That is the quality of modern art. There is something grand in the way in which these two conceived of art. An old doctrine which still lives in eastern wisdom, of the transitoriness of all appearance, of the veil of Maya, finds expression here. Only he lives in reality who rises above illusion to the region of the spirit. The highest reality is not external.

In every way these two men were forced to inner activity. Goethe, it is true, made his Faust say that “in the beginning was the deed.” But in Germany at that time things were not so far advanced as in France where they could produce external effects; there was only the longing for freedom. And so these two sought their deeds in the sphere of the beautiful, of the work of art. They aimed at a reflection of higher reality, of nature within nature, in life by means of beautiful appearance. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is of this type. Wilhelm Meister is to take us beyond what is illusion in our everyday life, to the fulfilment of personality. Thus it becomes the finest novel of education, to which Schiller's motto might be applied: “Only through the dawn of the beautiful can you penetrate to the land of knowledge.” The spirit out of which we act is the highest. In that period, it was not possible to show that the world of the spirit is born from within. Thus in Wilhelm Meister the liberation of the world had still to be expressed in the form of artistic beauty.

The continual collaboration and advice of Schiller helped to eradicate the personal element in Wilhelm Meister. On the one side we see what must be regarded as the deeper “cause” in man, what a newer spiritual science calls the “causal body”; on the other side we have the external influences. Nothing can be developed that is not there in the seed; but it needs the influence from without. This collaboration is seen also in Schiller's creative activity. His ballads and his Wallenstein would have been impossible but for Goethe's fertilising influence.

There was a sort of modesty, but combined with a real greatness, in the relation in which they stood to each other. They only became a whole by the completion of their separate natures, and as a result something of new greatness came into being. The depth and strength of their friendship drove all philistinism into opposition against them. They were pursued with envy and hatred, for the small has never been able to understand the great. It is hardly credible today what attacks were launched by pettiness against them. The Annals of Philosophy, for instance, spoke disparagingly of them, and someone, called Manso, described them as the “sluts of Weimar and Jena.”

They had to defend themselves against all these attacks and the “Xenien” of 1796 form a fine memorial to their friendship. In the Distichs, which were a sort of historic prosecution of all those who had offended against them or against good taste, we cannot always distinguish those that are by Goethe and those by Schiller. Their friendship was to make them appear as one person. Schiller and Goethe provide us with an example how greatness can defend itself against the everyday, and show us what should be the true attitude and bearing of a friendship which rests on the spiritual. And both were searchers after truth; Schiller in the heart of men, Goethe in the whole of nature.

We cannot talk of Schiller's view of life as we can of that of other men, for it is in continual flux and continual process of ascending. Lesser personalities find it easy to reach a view of life; greater struggle through with difficulty. This is because lesser personalities are incapable of seeing into the great riddles. For the greater every experience provides a new riddle; a new basis is given for the philosophy, which has to take on a new form. This was Goethe's experience all through his life and with Schiller it was the same. Schiller himself remarked that fundamentally he knew very little of the sphere of his own development; but his spirit worked incessantly to deepen and harmonise his ideas and experience of life. Very characteristic is the way in which Schiller carried on a conversation; in which he was the antithesis of Herder; and we can get a conception of his nature by that antithesis.

When Herder was in the society of interested people, he used to develop his own views, and there were seldom any objections; his position was so firm and clear that he could not have gone any deeper into a problem by a dialectic conversation. Schiller was quite different. With him every conversation became alive; he took up every objection, every aspect was touched on, and consequently the conversation went along all sorts of side-paths; everything was illuminated from every side. In his conversation, in the personal life that existed round Schiller, we can see best how his views were in a continual flux. There is the same striving after truth which is expressed in Lessing's words: “If God stood before me, the truth in one hand, in the other the striving after truth, I should beg of him: Lord, give me the striving after truth, for the whole truth indeed exists for God alone.”

We see similarly how Schiller, in all periods of his life, is engaged in a continual struggle for a higher view of the world; how he was driven, when he took up his professorship at Jena, to make his ideas living, how he strove to grasp the great forces which are effective in the world and to fructify them in really vivid lectures. The smaller essays on subjects of world history show us how he wrestled with these ideas. Apart from the above-mentioned essay on “What is, and how should we study history universally?” he tried to describe the significance of a law-giver like Moses. Then he dealt with the period of the Crusades; and perhaps, there is nothing finer and more interesting than the way in which Schiller depicts the conditions of ownership and vassalage in the Middle Ages. From his account of the Netherlands' struggle for freedom we can learn on what inner principles historical development moves. Then he comes to the Thirty Years' War, in which he is already particularly fascinated by the figure of Wallenstein, a man with the law of his will within himself, firm in his own person but fettered by a petty ambition, unstable in his aims and in the confusion of his ideas concerning himself with the message of the stars. Later on he tried to disentangle this puzzling character in poetry. But before then he had to clear things up by studies in the work of Kant. Nor did he approach Kantianism without philosophical preparation. There was something in him which could only come out by reference to Kant.

We have to understand this point in Schiller thoroughly if we wish to understand the greatness of his personality aright. There is a series of letters, “Philosophical Letters” between Julius and Raphael; and the philosophy which he develops there is something that is born in himself. The view which grew out of the depths of his personality, is represented by the man called Julius, while in Raphael we have to imagine a man like his friend Körner who had reached a certain completeness, even if without the same depth. For in life the less often appears the cleverer and the superior over against one who struggles higher. This struggling (philosopher) who is still living amid disharmonies, outlines his view, in the “Theosophy of Julius” somewhat as follows: “Everything in the world derives from a spiritual basis. Man also originated here; he represents the confluence of all the forces in the world; he is the epitome and unification of all that is extended in nature; all existence apart from him is only the hieroglyph of a force which is like him: thus in the butterfly which rises into the air with its youth renewed from the caterpillar stage, we have a picture of human immortality. Satisfaction is only attainable if we rise to the ideal planted within us.” This view he calls the “Theosophy of Julius.” The world is a thought of God, everything lives only in the infinite love of God; everything in me and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of the highest being.

As Goethe in his Prose Hymn to Nature had put it, that man is set by nature, unasked and unwarned, into the cycle of life, that nature herself speaks and acts in him, so Schiller comes in this theosophy of Julius, to some extent, to a similar standpoint. But he is still unsatisfied, for none but God could, he feels, regard the world from this standpoint. Is it really possible for the human soul, so small and limited, to live with such a picture of the world?

From Kantianism Schiller got a new world-picture which lasted till the middle of the nineties. The problem of the world has become a problem of man, and it is the problem of freedom which now concerns him. The question that now demands answer is how man can reach his perfection. Schiller's view of things appears before us in its clearest and finest form in his “Aesthetic Letters”: on the one hand man has a lower nature and is subjected to animal impulses; and nature is thus far necessity in the things of the senses which press upon him. On the other side there is an intellectual necessity in man's thinking; and it is logic to which he must subject himself. He is the slave both of necessity in nature and of the necessity of reason.

Kant answers this contradiction by depressing the necessity of nature in favour of intellectual necessity. Schiller seized upon this gulf between the two necessities in all its depth. To him it was a problem which extends over all human relationships. The laws which control men have come partly from the necessity of nature, the dynamic forces which are active in men, partly from asserted. That was not the case, especially with his Wallenstein. Schiller started from an inner musical mood, as he called it, not from ideas. The stream of complex forces in man appeared in his inner being as melody, and solved themselves in a harmony or collapsed in disharmony. Then he looked for the thoughts, the characters, the single moods; and thus there appeared before his eyes the conflicting soul-forces of Wallenstein which led him of necessity to a vast catastrophe. Unfortunately, we cannot reproduce this mood except with intellectual means.

There may be in one case a personality built upon itself which suffers tragic collapse. But the effect is truly tragic only if it collapses upon itself. What Hebbel demanded as the necessary pre-supposition of tragedy, “That things had to happen thus,” that nothing can be tragic which might have happened otherwise, was grasped intuitively by Schiller, though he never puts it thus in words. But there is another tragic idea under the influence of which Schiller stands which does not admit of solution and which was expressed particularly in Wallenstein. This is the consciousness that there is something higher acting within human life which cannot be solved within this framework. Not till the world's end when men have reached perfection, will man's eyes be able thus to survey their destiny. Till then there must always be errors, something insoluble, for which Wallenstein looks for the solution in the stars, something imponderable in his heart.

Wallenstein believes that he can read his destiny, firmly pre-established in the stars and yet he has to see how Octavio, contrary to the oracle of the stars, deceives him.

But man's freedom still remains the highest; an inner necessity makes him search for the solution in the stars: so he faces a new riddle:—that the stars have lied.

Yet again, the stars cannot lie; man, who offends against the most sacred laws of feeling and the heart, brings the harmony of the stars into disorder.

There can be no order in nature which opposes the laws of the human spirit.

If we look at the character of Wallenstein in this way, we shall see Schiller's own personality shining through the person of Wallenstein. Schiller wanted to look this contradiction in the face and show how man lives with it. There must be a truth in the world, he tells himself, and he has sought it as he does in the letters of Julius.

The contradiction lies in the single appearances; and here Schiller reaches to the knowledge, to what the old Indians and other wise men recognised as illusion.

He wanted to live in truth, and he regarded art as a gateway through which man must travel so as to reach the dawn of beauty and freedom. In his poem “Der Künstler” he calls on artists to take their place in the world-scheme and to help in the realisation of the ideal. He cries to them: Human dignity is in your hands. Preserve it.

The period at which Schiller wrote his Wallenstein, was for him a period of transition, a refining period in which he was trying to rise above his earlier “Weltanschauung” to the grasp of what he called the purely artistic. We have seen how Schiller found in the beautiful and artistic something which could raise man's forces of soul, bring them into a harmony—so that it is artistic creation which gives man freedom. Thus for him, as he wrote to Goethe à propos of his Wilhelm Meister, the artist was the only true man and the philosopher, compared to him, only a caricature. Here was a vital turning-point which reflected what Schiller had then experienced.

In Fiesco, in Kabale and Liebe, in Don Carlos some of the characters are sympathetic to him, others antipathetic. But at the height of his art he wished to get rid of such moral judgment and valuation; he wished to treat a wrong-doer with the same loving care as he did the hero; his work was no longer to be associated with what he himself felt as sympathy or antipathy. When the objection was made to Wilhelm Meister, that many of the figures offended against moral feeling, he wrote more or less like this to Goethe: “If one could show you that the non-moral originated in you and not in the characters, one might have some ground for objection.” For Schiller Wilhelm Meister is an education in aesthetic.

Schiller, having had a vision of human personality in its true autonomy, tried to raise himself to the sunlit heights of pure art. Hence comes a new form of participation of the artist in his art; we can see it already in Wallenstein. He was not going to have a personal part any more, nor judge and value morally; he was simply to be an artist.

This conception reminds us of a conversation of his with Goethe in which they were discussing architecture, and in which Goethe made a remark of deep significance, though it might sound at first somewhat of a paradox. Goethe demanded of a beautiful building that it should make an impression of harmony not only on the eye but on a man who might be led through it with bandaged eyes. When everything sensible has been abstracted, it is still possible to put oneself into it by the spirit. It is not fitness for a purpose that he demanded, but the ideal quality of the spirit. At first sight it may seem paradoxical: it was created out of the lofty view of art which Goethe and Schiller held. Round them there grew up a circle of artists whose judgments were similar: e.g., Wilhelm v. Humboldt, a fine connoisseur, whose aesthetic essays are important for the contemporary intellectual atmosphere. In this way Schiller was led into opposition to his earlier artistic views and to Kantianism, which practically only admits the supersensible where the moral is concerned. No artist could see like that; and in his return to the artistic Schiller found Kant inadequate.

Schiller's conception of the tragic conflict was that later formulated by Hebbel when he said that only that is tragic which is inevitable. That was Schiller's feeling, and that was what he tried to carry out in his Wallenstein; that was the way in which he wanted to depict the tragic. In Shakespeare's Richard III he saw fate breaking in with such inevitability; but before then he had had an earlier love for the Greek drama. In the Shakespearean drama the person of the hero takes the central place, and it is from his character that the inevitable development arises. Greek drama is quite different: there everything is predestined, and complete. Man is set in a higher spiritual order, but simultaneously, because he is a material sense-being, he is shattered by it. The decisive element is not the character or personality of the hero but the superhuman destiny and fate.

The Erinyes of Greek tragedy are not originally avenging Furies but represent the vague foreboding something which is not wholly soluble and shines dimly into human destiny. In his return to the artistic Schiller reached this conception of the tragic. If we are to feel tragedy in this sense, we must eliminate the personal and separate it from the merely human. Only then can we really understand Wallenstein.

There is something super-personal that has grown beyond the personal which hovers over Wallenstein. Man belongs to a higher order, a higher spiritual world—that is for Schiller the meaning of the stars which guide man's destiny. It is in the stars that Wallenstein is to read his destiny. Carlyle indicates this super-personal, when he points to the parallelism in the character of the separate personalities in Wallenstein's camp, which hints at the personalities of the leaders. Thus the Irish Dragoon, who puts his trust in the luck of war, points to his chief, Buttler; the first Cuirassier who reflects the finer side of life in war, to Max Piccolomini; the Trumpeter in his complete devotion, to Terczky; while the Sergeant Major, who quotes the sayings of his general, appears as a caricature of Wallenstein.

We have here then a great law which goes beyond the merely personal. The whole composition of the poem shows us the standpoint which Schiller believed he had achieved. We have first, the camp where Wallenstein does not appear at all; second, the Piccolomini scenes where Wallenstein practically does not enter but learns what has happened from Max Piccolomini and hears from his wife what is happening in the Viennese court. He allows events to take their course so that his generals unite and sign the famous document. The action takes place round about him. In the same way the idea of treachery is only grasped lightly, and then takes possession of his soul. Thirdly, Wallenstein's death; here he is driven into events by his own thoughts which have taken on an objective life, he is forced into a super-personal destiny. A monumental language marks the situation. He is set within an iron necessity; the personal—which has nothing particular to do with the great lines—is thrust into a corner. It does, no doubt, express itself in stirring tones, as, for instance, in the conversation with Max Piccolomini:—

Wallenstein (with eyes silently fixed on him and approaching him): Max, stay with me; leave me not, Max. When they brought you to me in my winter camp at Prague, into my tent, a delicate boy, unused to German winters, your hand was frozen to the heavy standard which, like a man, you would not let go. Then I took you in, covered you with my cloak; myself was your nurse, nor was ashamed, of the smallest service; I tended you with a woman's careful thoughtfulness, till you, warmed by me, felt the young life again pouring through you. When, since then, have I changed? Thousands I have made rich, given them lands and honours—you, I have loved. I gave you my heart, myself. They were all strangers, you the child of my house. Max, you cannot leave me. It cannot be, I will not, cannot believe my Max can leave me.

But it does not specially fit into the plot. Schiller's great achievement in this drama was that he kept the tragic and the personal apart, that he has shown how Wallenstein, after letting the thoughts play freely about him, simply cannot but stride onwards to the deed. He shows us how out of freedom there grows a kind of necessity; and this whole style of thought contains ideas of the moment which have only to be fanned to life in order to become fruitful.

The next play, Maria Stuart, is conceived in the same vein. Practically everything has already happened at the beginning, and nothing occurs but what has been long prepared. It is only the character, the inner life, which unfolds itself before us, and this inner life again acts as a necessity. In his later plays Schiller tried more and more to give form to the idea of destiny. Thus in the Maid of Orleans something super-personal is expressed in the visions in which her demon-spirit appears, calls her to her mission and opposes her when she is untrue to the command, until by repentance she redeems it. In the Bride of Messina especially he almost tries to give the Greek drama once more a place in modern life. There he expresses the super-personal by introducing the chorus.

What did he want with the chorus? Schiller was looking to the origin of tragedy, which arose from religion. In the primitive drama it was shown how Dionysos, the suffering God, finds redemption in humanity. (More recent research has revealed the truth of this.) When the Greek Mystery drama was secularised, there arose the first beginnings of dramatic art. Thus in Aeschylus we still have the echo of that out of which art had arisen, of the Mystery cults within which the world-drama of world-redemption was depicted. Edouard Schuré has described these Eleusinian Mysteries in his Sanctuaires d'Orient, a first example of the religious and artistic solution of the world-riddle. The world-embracing action of this original drama could not find in speech its proper instrument; for speech is too much the expression of personal relations. When drama began to use the word, it dealt with more personal relations, as in Sophocles and Euripides. There was a passage from the representation of the typical to the personal. Hence the old drama used a super-personal speech which was akin to music, and given by the chorus which accompanied the action represented in mimicry. Thus the musical drama developed into the later speech drama. Nietzsche has developed these ideas further in his Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.

For him the word drama is a sort of decadence; and hence comes his reverence for Wagner who wanted to create a new religious art, born out of the world of myth. Wagner was keen, not on the personal, but the super-personal; and so he took for the foundation of his dramas not historical, but mythical action; and where he has to represent the super-personal he does not employ the usual language but a language sublimated by music.

Schiller felt what was only discovered by research after his time, and developed Greek tragedy along those lines. He wanted to introduce a lyric element, so that, as he says in the preface, he might raise art to a higher level by means of the mood. Thus there already lies in Schiller what was worked out more radically in the Nietzsche-Wagner circle—except that those men did not deal with it so clearly as Schiller had done.

In Schiller we have already the great conception of leading mankind back to the source from which the spiritual sprang, of leading art back to the original basis from which religion, art and science all grew up. To him beauty was the dawn of truth. Even today we can find in Schiller what may guide us to the best we may hope, for the present and the future. And so he may be a prophet for us of a better future.

We have seen how Schiller tried, in each one of his later plays, to solve the problem of the dramatic. There is something sublime in observing how, after every success—and the success was considerable (he was recognised by the best men of his time, even though there was not a complete absence of hostility)—he tried with each new play to climb to greater heights. All the later plays, Tell, the Bride of Messina, the Maid of Orleans, Demetrius, are simply efforts to attain to the problem of the dramatic and the tragic in a new form. He never rested satisfied in a belief that he had exhausted psychology. In Maria Stuart we have seen him treating the problem of destiny, creating a situation complete in itself in which only the characters have to unfold themselves. In the Maid of Orleans, he dug still deeper into the human soul. He plunged into the depths of human psychology and set out the problem, in the sense that Hebbel meant, when he said that tragedy must have some relation to the irrational. Thus, in the Maid of Orleans we have the effects of dark soul forces: the Maid is almost like a sleep-walker, under the influence of what we may call the demonic and is carried forward by it. She is to stand far above humanity, and only because she is a maid, has she the right to pass through the ranks of her enemies, for her country's sake, like a destroying angel.

In the Bride of Messina, Schiller tries to get a still higher conception of the drama and to reach back to the primal drama—that drama, which came even before Aeschylus and was not merely art but also an integral constituent of a truth which included religion, science and art; that Dionysos-drama which put the suffering, dying and resurgent god on the stage as representative of all humanity. In such cases the action was not what we should nowadays call poetry. It was the world-drama that was set before man's eyes, the truth in beautiful and artistic form; it was meant to elevate man and fortify him religiously. Thus the Mystery drama contained, for the spectators, what developed later, in separate form, as religion, art and philosophy.

This line of thought which Friedrich Nietzsche developed in his Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, in which he regarded the primal drama as the higher form, was already alive in Schiller. Schiller's idea of raising the beautiful to higher levels by re-introducing the musical element, was taken up again by Wagner and received monumental expression in his musical dramas: Wagner harked back to the myth and chose music, so as to express himself, not in everyday but in elevated language. The direction which art followed in the Wagner circle was indicated by Schiller. In his short introduction to the Bride of Messina he gives it plastic and pregnant expression. True art must give a freedom of the spirit in the living play of all its forces. That shows what there was in Schiller.

We have seen how Schiller's spirit climbed upward by help of Goethe. He himself called Goethe's mind intuitive, his own symbolical; and this a significant saying.

Schiller always thought of men fundamentally as representatives of a type; he thought of them in a sort of symphony. We can see the drama growing out of a sort of musical mood, and hence comes that symphony of human characters, acting and suffering. So it became necessary to make single traits into symbols of great human experience. Hence Schiller became the poet of idealism: he used experience to bring the ideals to earth and to clothe them in his characters. The problem of the human I, the question how man works in his environment, was, for him, the central point.

In the Bride of Messina, he wanted to produce the Greek tragedy of destiny in a new form. There must be something in the human soul which makes men take their decisions not reasonably—else they would act more intelligently—there must be something dark in them, something like the “daimon” of Socrates. That must be working from the spiritual world. It is this something which the reason cannot grasp, which Schiller allows to play into his tragedy; and the way in which he does it shows him as quite a modern. The action begins with two dreams: The Duke of Messina dreams of a flame which destroys two laurel bushes. The dream is interpreted by an Arabian astrologist as meaning that the daughter, born to him, will bring destruction on his sons; and he orders her death. But the Duchess has dreamed at the same time of a child by whose side an eagle and a lion lie nestled together; her dream also is interpreted; a Christian monk tells her that her daughter will unite the two disputing brothers in love for herself; and so she saves the child.

In this way the dark and undetermined enters at the very beginning of the action. It is a fine point that the first dream should be interpreted by an Arabian, the second by a Christian; but Schiller does not take sides. If we take out all that is mystical and dreamlike, there remains only the quarrel of the brothers; and this rational action is still dramatic. The stroke of genius and of special art is that each element is a whole; even without the mystical the action is a unity. Thus Schiller has put into this with skill and art something which goes beyond human consciousness.—In this way he had reached a still higher answer to his question.

He uses the same human psychology in Tell. I am not going to analyse the drama, only to show what Schiller was to the Nineteenth Century and what he will still be to us. It is not to no purpose that he sets Tell apart from the general structure of the drama:

“Yet, what you do—leave me apart from your councils. I cannot ponder long, or choose. But if you need my too-determined deed, then summon Tell and he will not fail you.” He acts, not like the others, under the impulse of the idea of freedom, but from purely personal feeling, offended paternal sense. Two lines run together, the one which concerns Tell alone, the other felt by the whole Swiss people. Schiller wanted to show how things do not run, in man, always along the one line. We can see the same thing in Hebbel's Judith where her country's needs fall together with her wounded woman's feelings; the poet requires something which grows immediately from out of the human heart.

Schiller has no use for the merely moral or the merely material; the moral must descend and become a personal passion. Man only becomes free when he controls his personal feeling in such a way that it unites with the universal. He worked, step by step, on the completion of his psychology, and his idealism becomes more and more clarified. That is the magic which lives in Schiller's plays. His deep aesthetic studies were not in vain; not in vain his absorption in these problems.

Now all the writings in the Nineteenth Century of men like Vischer, Hartmann, Fechner, etc., important and true as they may be, always put the beautiful outside man. But Schiller always studied what went on within the human soul, how the beautiful acts upon it. For that reason, we are moved so deeply and intimately by what he says, and we can read his prose works with delight again and again. It would be a worthy way of celebrating the Schiller anniversary if these writings were published and read far and wide; they would contribute much to deepening the human spirit in an artistic and moral direction. We might also make a selection for purposes of education from his Aesthetic Letters; and a wholly new attitude would come into our pedagogic system. If we are to understand Schiller's plays, we must breathe the fine air of real education that lies in his aesthetic works.

If we want further insight into the way in which Schiller penetrated deeper and deeper into the human heart, we can get in by a study of the—unfortunately uncompleted—Demetrius. This might have become a play than which even Shakespeare could not have written anything more powerful and affecting. Many attempts have been made to complete the work but no one has proved equal to the task.

The wholly tragic conflict—though there is plenty of action, such as that for instance in the Polish Parliament—is centred entirely in the ego; that is the significant thing. We cannot say that our senses, perceptions and feelings are our ego; we are what we are, because the thinking and feeling of the world around us, press upon us. This Demetrius has grown up without himself knowing what his ego is. During a significant action for which he is to be executed, a certain token is found on his person. It appears that the inheritance of the throne of the Czars is his. Everything points in this one direction, and he cannot but believe that he is the heir to the Russian throne. He is thus driven to a definite configuration of the ego; threads, spun without, drive him onward. The movement is victorious; Demetrius develops the character of a Czar. But then, when his ego is concordant with the world around him, he learns that he has been mistaken; he is not the true heir. He is no longer the person as which he had found himself. He stands in the presence of his mother, who honours him; but so strong is the voice of nature that she cannot recognise him as son—while he has become that which he had imagined to himself. He can no longer throw it from himself; yet the preconditions of this ego fall from him.

Here is an infinitely tragic conflict. All is centred on a personality which is drawn with infinite art, and which we may believe “will not lord it over slaves.” The external also was added with all the skill of which only Schiller was capable. Thus Sapieha, Demetrius' opponent, indicates prophetically the character of Demetrius. Here also the symmetry is striven after which is achieved in the Wallenstein. The drama was never finished; death intervened. There is something tragic in Schiller's death; all the hopes that were centred on him found expression in the letters and words of his contemporaries. Deeply affected by the loss of one from whom so much more was hoped, men like W. v. Humboldt, for instance, allowed their feelings to find utterance:

“He was snatched from the world in the ripe maturity of his spiritual powers; there is infinitely much more he might have accomplished. For many years more he might have enjoyed the bliss of poetic creation.”

That is the tone which makes his death tragic—for in the ordinary course of things death does not bear this irrational quality. In such mood Goethe found for his dead friend the following words in his Epilogue to Schiller's Glocke:

Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

Behind him lay in unessential feint
What holds us all in bondage, the common trivial.

This mighty strain of idealism can be seen continuing through the Nineteenth Century. Men began to realise that Schiller's spirit was sublime enough to work as consolation and example to his people in all their struggles.

This continued activity of Schiller's idealism in the spiritual quality of Germany was described effectively by C. Gutzkow in his speech during the Schiller celebrations at Dresden on 10th November 1859:

“Here lies the secret of our love for Schiller. He lifts up our hearts; he gives us courage for action, a never-failing help which the nation finds in every circumstance of its life. Our memories of Schiller arouse in us courage and gladness. Deep, rich, intimate and delightful Goethe may charm us all in his creation which reminds us of home manners and custom, is like ivy which welds itself to the past, sadly and dreamily. But in Schiller everything lies in the future, the waving of flags or crowning with the laurel. For this reason, it is that we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his name, ringing and echoing like a blow on a shield of bronze. All honour to the poet of action, the bulwark of the German fatherland.”

I want to speak today of the way in which Schiller's influence was active during the Nineteenth Century and then to pass over to his significance for the present and finally to what he may yet be to the future. In my last lecture I will give a sort of summing-up of Schiller.

If we want to describe Schiller's place in the Nineteenth Century, we can certainly not go into details; and so we shall not pause over single incidents if they are not of symptomatic importance. Our business is with the whole cultural life of the century and Schiller's place within it. In general, it is very difficult to decide what is Schiller's influence on individual periods; we cannot follow each path in detail. Schiller's influence may be compared, in a way, to that of Herder at the beginning of the century when Goethe said in a conversation to Eckermann: “Who nowadays reads Herder's philosophical works? And yet everywhere we meet the ideas which he has sowed.” That is a more intense influence than one which is associated only with a name; and it is the case with Schiller also.

His influence cannot be separated from that of the great classical period. One thing we may emphasise, that his influence and the recognition expressed by the national celebration on 10th November 1859, did not come into being easily and unopposed. Schiller did not establish his position so smoothly. Much was necessary for the spirit of Schiller to have its effect, quite imperceptibly, on the young especially. Thus the Glocke (“Song of the Clock”) produced at first the most violent opposition in romantic circles. Caroline v. Schlegel, wife of W. v. Schlegel, called it the poem of a provincial Philistine.

But not only in those cases which we meet in the Xenien, but in general in the so-called romantic circles, we shall find active opposition to Schiller. The Romantics found their ideal in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and had raised Goethe to a pinnacle, at the cost of that friend of his, to whom Goethe had cried after his death:

Weit hinter ihm im wesenlosen Scheine
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

Schiller's great gift, to be able to raise the moral and the ethical to such heights, found no sympathy with them. Hard words were uttered by the Romantics against Schiller, “the provincial moralist.” People who have grown up in an atmosphere of reverence for Schiller, will hardly understand remarks like that of Friedrich v. Schlegel in his essays on Goethe and Schiller. He called Schiller's Imagination disordered. Here there is no sign of the quality which attracted all hearts to Schiller. About the end of the 1820's there appeared the Goethe—Schiller correspondence, that memorial set up by Goethe to his friend and their friendship. We can learn much from it and its importance for the understanding of German art is immeasurable. Here also the Romantics were bitterly contemptuous and cold. We can gather how hard it was for Schiller to establish his fame when we realise the megalomania of the chief people who were his opponents. A. W. Schlegel, the excellent translator of Shakespeare, wrote a sonnet about himself, which shows what his own view was of his importance in German literature; he talks of his poetic significance with a pride which strikes us very strangely:

What name the future's lips shall give to him Is still unknown, this generation recognised him His name was August Wilhelm Schlegel.

Nor does he present a unique phenomenon; he is typical of the romantic theory; we can only understand him if we can understand what the romantic school was after. The Romantics aimed at a new art, a comprehensive view of all art. Their theory had as a matter of fact grown out of what Schiller had said in his aesthetic essays; but it was a caricature. Schiller's aphorism that man is only truly man when he is playing, became a sort of motto of theirs. This was the origin of their romantic irony which turned everything into the play of genius. People almost began to believe that it lay in the power of a man's will to turn himself into a genius.

But when Schiller called art play, he meant the word “play” in full seriousness. The true secret of a master lay, said Schiller, in the conquest of the material by the form; but the romantics despised the form and demanded of the matter in itself that it should have artistic effect. This attitude, which I am not criticising but only stating, was fundamentally opposed by Schiller. Hence the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller was regarded by them as very tiresome; the art-rules there discussed they took as naive. A. W. v. Schlegel, under the stimulus of the correspondence, wrote some bitter epigrams. Among themselves the Romantics thoroughly admired one another.

All this will show how in the first decades of last century Schiller's life-work was greeted with bitterest opposition. On the other hand, his personality was so powerful that even among these men he received his due of recognition and admiration: for instance, Ludwig Tieck wrote, with understanding and respect, of Schiller's Wallenstein. Schiller more and more acquired his influence and made a home for himself in the hearts of his people. Theodor Körner is the most important, though not the only, instance of a man who lived wholly in the spirit of Schiller:—and he died, moreover, a hero's death filled with the ideals planted in him by Schiller. He seemed dedicated to it by the personal friendship which united his family and Schiller's. A close friendship existed between Körner's father and Schiller, who was godfather to Theodor Körner and bought him the “Tyre” which accompanied Körner everywhere. Schiller made his way slowly but surely into the hearts of youth.

If we follow out the development of style in these opposing romantics, we find the influence of Schiller even in the words he had coined.

It was thanks to Schiller that there was formed what we may call the German culture of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. It was permeated by the special note that was given to the soul by Schiller. Things which had their origin in Herder and the other classicists, made their way into the people by the pictures and didactic applications of Schiller. However, much men might bristle at the heights of aesthetic culture, Schiller has established his position increasingly. His influence grew steadily, and on the centenary of his birth, it is the best men in the nation who honour him. The speeches made at the time have been collected, and among those who spoke we find famous names like those of Jacob Grimm, Th. F. Vischer, the great aesthetic thinker, Carl Gutzkow, Ernst Curtius, Moritz Carriere and many others. The seed had grown which Schiller had planted.

Nevertheless, the language held at the celebrations in 1859 was quite alien to the new ideas which were appearing at the time. To emphasise Schiller's ideals in 1859 fitted strangely in with the other ideas which saw the light that year. There are four things of special importance which I want to mention that appeared in them. In 1859 there appeared Darwin's Origin of Species; and secondly, Fechner's Prelude to Aesthetic. Fechner has acquired considerable influence on one of the lines of modern thought. He started from the ideas of Hegel, who had himself defended Schiller against the Romantics. Vischer, who had begun his work in the Goethe—Schiller period and whose aesthetic was of idealist type, found himself forced into opposition to his own earlier views; and Vischer's mode of thinking was completed by Fechner, who wrote a sort of aesthetic “from below,” whereas until then the ordinary aesthetic had been one “from above.” The attempt was now being made to grasp the essence of the beautiful from below, from the small symptoms.

The third work, which treated of space conditions, was in a sense opposed to Schiller's manner: he had spoken as follows in his epigram to the astronomers:

Do not chatter, I pray you, so much of nebulae and suns.
Is no greatness in nature, save that she gives you to count?
What you deal with, my friends, in space is truly sublimest;
But the sublime has not its dwelling in space.

This third work was the Spectral Analysis of Kirchhoff and Bunsen, by means of which the sun could be seen in its constituent elements, and an analysis of the most distant nebulae was made possible.

The fourth work was Marx's Critique of Political Economy. There was a marked contrast between the thoughts developed at the Schiller celebrations and the ideas which were germinating at the time. It was a unique standpoint which Schiller, and the classicists generally, held towards world culture. We cannot picture Raphael or Michelangelo out of relation to their own times, in which they were born and worked. In the same way Homeric art is in intimate contact with something that lived in everyone; Homer had only to give form to something which permeated all his contemporaries as feeling and thinking. But with the German classicists it was quite different. Homer, of whom did he tell? Of Greeks he spoke to Greeks. Similarly, Dante, Michelangelo, even Shakespeare, stood wholly within their times. But not so our classicists. Lessing was enthused by Winckelmann and formed his artistic ideas out of Winckelmann's essays; he also went back to Aristotle. Schiller and Goethe faithfully with Lessing studied Aristotle. Hence came that abstracted ideal of beauty, an art so cut off from the life of the times, particularly as the poets grew older. For Schiller's earlier plays, the Räuber, Kabale und Liebe are still connected with his own life. Goethe had developed particularly in Italy. Art had become an end in itself, abstract and isolated from everyday life. Goethe and Schiller had become neutral toward their subject matter: thus Schiller looks for his material all over the world, he has risen from the world around him and established himself on his own feet. Nothing describes Schiller's influence so well as the fact that he was followed by Romanticism which assimilated everything foreign. Translations from every sphere of world-literature are one of the chief services of the romantic school.

Schiller's attitude to art is something which had decisive influence on his relation to the Nineteenth Century.

We must not overlook the fact that the relationship of the general public to Schiller was bound to become something quite different in the second half of the Nineteenth Century from what it had been in the first: if only because of those facts which I have mentioned. Schiller's feeling towards Truth was expressed by his saying that “through the dawn of the beautiful you may pass into the land of knowledge.” To him truth was the beautiful; a work of art was to give form to the idea, the idea by which the world as a whole is to be imagined as being permeated. It was an idealist view of the world, a fine and subtle view which can only be grasped by a man who can rise to subtle spiritual heights. To understand Schiller requires very definite conditions.

For this reason, there is something less intense in the second half of the century, in the honour done to Schiller; the growing natural science produced a cooler attitude in men. Truth was now seen only in what was tangible: which is what Schiller never did. His ideal was always truth, but truth on a spiritual basis. We can no longer grasp as true reality what lived at the time in men's feelings. Schiller had grown up out of the greatness and breadth of his spiritual horizons: the world of Goethe, Lessing, Herder and Winckelmann. When external reality thrust forward its harsh demands, there was no real relationship left between the true and the beautiful.

A man like Ludwig Büchner has been able to build up a purely materialistic philosophy on the basis of natural science; but Schiller is not for a materialistic age, and if we appeal to his views in such an age, we are only playing with words. Thus Schiller dropped into the background. Goethe could still mean something to the second half of the century because in him the artistic can be separated from a world conception (Weltanschauung): even Herman Grimm concentrates his eulogy on Goethe as the artist. True, if we are dealing exactly with Goethe, we shall see that in his case also it will not do to separate the Weltanschauung from the man; still a purely aesthetic view is possible with him, whereas with Schiller it is not. Nowadays art is regarded as something that deals with the realm of phantasy. That, in itself, is a rejection of the world-conception, Weltanschauung.

A gulf has grown up between the spirit of the age in which Schiller lived and that of our own age:—indeed a recent biographer of Schiller, Otto Brahm, could begin his book with the words: “In my youth I hated Schiller.” He only fought his way to an understanding of Schiller by his learning and the increase of knowledge. Schiller has had many learned biographers, but the feeling of the age has become a stranger to the truly Schillerian problems; nor can it understand how what we nowadays call knowledge can be brought into harmony with what Schiller stands for. As I said, the artists of an earlier age, a Raphael or Michelangelo, grew up out of the life of their time. That was no longer the case after Goethe's death. An artist, for instance, like Peter Cornelius, creates wholly out of his thoughts, being no longer in any relation to the spiritual content of his time. He felt himself especially a stranger in Berlin; attracted towards Catholicism in which he believed that he saw the basis for his artistic ideal, he stood face to face with the life of his time, unable to take any part in it.

The gulf between life and art becomes ever greater. And so Schiller becomes more and more a stranger to the life of the Nineteenth Century. Men like Jacob Minor may write large tomes about his youth, but everything shows really how Schiller's views have become out of touch with our times.

What we recognise as true nowadays, has grown up out of the attitude of natural science. Aesthetics also have passed from an idealist to a realist attitude. Indeed, this revolution was so violent that Vischer could not make up his mind to publish a second edition of his Aesthetics which he had written from an idealist standpoint:—the very views he had formerly supported had become unintelligible to him. The ideas of the first half of the century had become so foreign to the leading thinkers of the second half that we find men criticising themselves like that.

After such a development we shall understand how Schiller stands in the present. E. du Bois Reymond, for instance, who after all derived his diction wholly from Schiller, was able to say in a speech about Goethe's “Faust,” that it was really a failure, and that really Faust ought to have married Gretchen, made some valuable discoveries and led a useful existence. The real significance of “Faust” was thus unintelligible to an important thinker of the Nineteenth Century.

This attitude was the dominant one, and no one dared to oppose it or to emphasise the rights of the ideal. Even art called itself realist. Any idealist tinge failed to find approval with the public. It was only honest for men to admit that they felt no liking for Schiller. It was no longer admitted that the beautiful was an expression of the true; for the truth was regarded as that which can be seen by the eye or touched by the hand. Schiller had never believed that; he had always found the truth in great ideal laws. Art was for him the representation of the spiritual hidden in the actual, not of the everyday things. The true which Schiller sought is recognised nowadays neither by science nor by art; no one understands nowadays what Schiller understood by the true. Hence comes that opposition; for we understand by the true what Schiller called the indigence of the sense-world. It was in the harmony between the spiritual and the poverty of the sense-world that Schiller looked for the ideal of Freedom. What we call “artistic” nowadays can never be called so in the sense in which Schiller talked of it.

There is a further gulf between present-day views and those of Schiller. Our age has lost the intense passion to penetrate into the world's inner core. This deep seriousness which broods over all Schiller's views no longer exists. Hence in our times we try to compare, quite superficially, two so fundamentally different men as Tolstoi and Nietzsche.

Materialism has become a world philosophy, a gospel, an integral element of our times. Particularly, it is the great masses of people who think like that and admit no other philosophy; they will only admit as true what natural science allows them to call so. Let me tell you a little story to illustrate what that leads to: It was the last time when a philosophy appeared, which though pessimistic, had an ideal colouring; Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. The book was attacked a good deal; and there was one particularly effective criticism under the title of The Unconscious from the point of view of the theory of descent and of Darwinism. This book was anonymously published. The scientists welcomed it as the best refutation of Hartmann's work. In the second edition the author's name was given: it was Eduard v. Hartmann. He wanted to show that it is easy to drag oneself down to the materialistic view when one has reached a higher view. Men at a higher level can understand a lower level, but not vice versa. You will always find that men whose standpoint is that of idealism are ready to admit the materialistic view to a considerable extent. A man whose standpoint is that of Schiller can judge modern art in its materialist view, but the materialist cannot, contrariwise, understand the idealist.

Schiller was a believer in the ideal. There is a deep saying of his: “What religion do I subscribe to? None of all those that you name. And why none of them? Because of religion.” That is the greatness in the man, that his aesthetic creed is also his religious and that his artistic creation was his form of religious worship. The fact that his ideal lived in this way within him is part of his greatness. We should not ask if Schiller can mean anything to us nowadays; on the contrary he must come to mean something for us again, because we have forgotten how to understand what goes beyond the purely material. Then we again shall be able to understand an art which seeks to unveil the secrets of existence.

But there is a new ideal of freedom we can learn to understand through him. We hear a good deal of talk just now about freedom, and we all want to be free from political and economic bonds. Schiller looked at freedom in a different way. How can man become free in himself? How is he to become free from his lower desires, free from the necessities of logic and reason? Schiller—who wrote about the State and life in society—found a new aim and a hint of new ideals, which still he in the future. If we want to claim with justice, at the present time, that the individual should develop freely, we must understand harmony in Schiller's sense, het us measure the demands of today with Schiller's; let us compare what we expect nowadays with what Schiller demanded; take two instances, Max Stirner and Schiller. What could be more unlike, more diametrically opposed than Stirner's The Individual and his Property and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters: When Schiller's influence was declining, Stirner's was increasing. Stirner had remained neglected all the time until he was re-discovered in the 1890's and his work became the foundation of what buzzes about as individualism. There is a good deal of justification in this attitude of today, but the particular form which it takes must strike us as immoderate. In Schiller's Aesthetic Letters the demand for the liberation of human personality is put forward still more radically. Schiller's ideal was much less provincial than Stirner's. The ideal of men working together who have become inwardly free, appears to others as an exhortation. When men live in such freedom there are no laws and commandments.

Nowadays we seem to think that chaos must result where men are not hemmed in by police regulations; yet we must remember that an enormous proportion of things goes on without laws. Every day you can see how men make way for each other in the most crowded streets without our having to have a law about it. Ninety-eight per cent, of our life goes on without laws; and someday it will be possible to get on completely without law and force. But for that man must be inwardly free. The ideal which Schiller puts before us is one of infinite sublimity. Art is to lead man to freedom. Art, growing out of the substance of our culture, is to become the great educator of the world. Artists are not to provide us with photographs of the external world, but to be the heralds of a higher spiritual reality. Then artists will once more create, as they did formerly, from, out of the ideal. Schiller wanted to lead men through art to a new comprehension of reality; and he meant it very seriously.

If this age of ours is to understand Schiller properly, it must unite all that it has won of knowledge, into a higher idealism which shall in time raise that knowledge to spiritual reality. Then there will be men who can speak in the spirit of Schiller from the depths of their hearts. It is of little use to open the theatres in Schiller's honour if the people who sit in them have no understanding for him. Only when we have attained to such an understanding of Schiller will there be men, who, like Herman Grimm about Goethe, will be able to speak about Schiller from the depth of the heart.

In this last lecture I want to deal with a particular question which connects up with the lecture in which I discussed Schiller's influence on the present. The problem of aesthetics in Germany comes in here because Schiller stands in close relationship to the establishment of aesthetics as a science—the science of the beautiful.

We have seen what Schiller's attitude was to the beautiful at different periods of his life. Schiller saw in the beautiful something which had a peculiar cultural value. Now a science of aesthetics such as we know today is only 150 years old. It is true that Aristotle had written on Poetics, but for centuries these views remained stationary. We know that even Lessing harked back to Aristotle. No real advance was made until the Eighteenth Century when Baumgarten grew up in the Wolffian philosophy and wrote a book on the beautiful called Aesthetica in 1750. He distinguishes the beautiful from the true in that, as he says, the true contains a clear idea, while the beautiful exists in unclear and confused ideas. It was only a few years before Schiller's time that ideas like this could occur.

We have a sort of aesthetics even in Kant's Critique of Judgment, but in him we have nothing but theory; he never had a living idea of what beauty is, and never got three miles away from his birthplace at Königsberg, and never saw any important work of art; and so could only write from the standpoint of abstract philosophy. Schiller, in his Aesthetic Letters, was the first to grasp the problem in any living way.

What was the position at the time? Goethe looked longingly to Greece, and Winckelmann also cast a regretful glance back at the age when men copied the divine in their art. Schiller felt the same regretful longing during his second period, as we can see from his Götter Griechenlands. Again, in Greek drama, what is it but a religious feeling that lies at the back of it. It is based on the mystery, the secret of God who becomes man, who suffers as man, dies and rises again. What happened in the soul was regarded as a purification; and even through the Poetic of Aristotle there still passes a faint breath of it. The tragic was to consist in the “production of an action which aroused pity and fear and aimed at the purification of these feelings.” It was difficult to understand what was meant by that; and Lessing meditated a good deal about it. In the Nineteenth Century a vast literature grew up around the problem, and whole libraries could be filled with books dealing with Katharsis. The idea was not understood because men did not understand from what it had grown up.

In Aeschylus we can still see something of this “drama of the God.” In the middle of the action stood Dionysos as the great dramatic figure, and the chorus round about him accompanied the action. This is how Edouard Schuré has recreated for us the mystery drama. The dramatic cult-action had the definite object of leading man to a higher level of existence. It was seen that man is gripped by passions, that his lower life makes him kin to them; but he can rise above them if the higher that lives in him is purified; he can raise himself by looking at the divine pattern. This type of representation was meant to bring man more easily to ennoble himself than could be achieved by teaching. As Schopenhauer said, it is easy enough to preach morality but very hard to establish it. It was only at a later age of humanity that Socrates' view grew up that virtue is teachable. But virtue is something that lives in man and is natural to him, as eating and drinking are; he can be led to it, if the divine is awoken within him, by the picture of the suffering god. This purification by the divine pattern was called Katharsis. Pity and fear were to be called forth; ordinary sympathy which is connected with the personal was to be raised to the great impersonal sympathy when the god was seen suffering for mankind. Then the dramatic action was humanised, and in the Middle Ages we can see how morality separated off and appeared independently. Thus in Christianity there was produced partially what lived incarnate in the Mysteries. The Greek looked with his own eyes on the god who rose again from humiliation. In the mysteries virtue was not merely preached but put before the eyes of men.

Schiller felt very intensely the desire to give men back this knowledge to unite the sense-world and the moral. The core of his poetry is the longing to reconcile these two—the senses and morality, that morality which Kant had interpreted so rigidly that duty led men away from everything which appeared as natural inclination. Schiller, on the contrary, demanded that duty should coincide with inclination; he wanted passion to be so cleansed that it could become identical with duty. This is why he revered Goethe so much, for in him he saw a perfect union of the sense-world and the moral.

He looked for this unification in the beautiful. And since Schiller possessed to an unusual degree the German quality of an aesthetic conscience, he wanted to make art a means of raising man to a higher level of existence. During the classical period there was a strong feeling that the beautiful did not exist merely to fill up idle hours but that it was the bridge between the sense-world and the divine. Schiller pushed far enough to find freedom here. Inclination is no longer to be suppressed: he remarked that a man must be very low in the scale if he has to be virtuous in opposition to his own inclinations. His inclination must be developed so far that he acts virtuously of himself. Earlier in his The Stage as a moral Institution he had preached something very like the severe Kantian morality.

“In the conquest of the matter by the form lies the secret of the master.” But what is, in fact, the material of the poet? In what attitude can we find the right view of the beautiful? As long as we are interested only in a single face, we have not yet got the true artistic view; there is still a clinging to matter. (“Heed the `what' but heed more the `how'!”) As long as a poet shows that he hates a villain, as if this were a personal interest, he still clings to matter and not the form; he has not yet reached the aesthetic view. He only attains that if the villain is represented in such a way that the natural order, and not the poet, inflicts the punishment. Then the “world karma” is accomplished; world-history becomes a world-judgment. The poet disregards himself and looks at world history objectively. This means moreover that what Aristotle said is realised, that poetry is truer than history. In history we cannot always survey the whole event; it is only an extract that lies before us so that we often get an impression of injustice. In this way a work of art is truer than history.

Thus was created a pure and noble conception of art; the purification, the Katharsis, stands beyond sympathy and antipathy. The spectator should stand before a work of art with a pure, almost godlike feeling, and see before him an objective, divine image of the world, and create for himself a microcosm. The dramatist shows us within a limited framework how guilt and atonement are connected, shows us in detail what the truth is, but gives this truth universal currency. Goethe means the same thing when he says that the beautiful is a manifestation of natural laws which, without the beautiful, would never find expression.

Goethe and Schiller looked for a realism, but it was an idealistic realism. Nowadays we think that we can get realism by an exact copying of nature. Schiller and Goethe would have said that that is not the whole truth; the sense-world only represents a part of what is perceptible and lacks the spiritual; nor can we regard it as truth unless we bring the whole tableau of nature simultaneously into a work. The work of art is however still only an extract of the real. In that they strove for truth, they could not admit the immediate truth of nature.

In this way Schiller and Goethe laboured to awaken an idealism, which had actually existed in earlier times. In Dante we have got a representation not of external reality but of what passes in the human soul. Later on, men demanded to see the spiritual in external form. Goethe showed in Grosskophta how anyone who materialises the spirit becomes subject to delusions; Schiller also occupied himself with this materialisation of the spiritual. At that time, there was a good deal of investigation along these lines; and much of what we nowadays call spiritualism engaged men's attention. In this, lies the occasion of the Geisterseher, which treats of these things. Before he had struggled upward, by the help of Kantianism and the artistic, to higher views, Schiller depicted the dangers to which anyone who seeks the spiritual in the external world instead of in himself, is subject. That is the origin of the Geisterseher.

A prince whose faith has become alien to him and who is not strong enough to waken the spiritual in his own soul, is greatly excited by a strange prophecy which a mysterious stranger announces to him and which is shortly afterwards fulfilled. In this mood he falls in with some tricksters who skilfully employ certain circumstances to bring him into a state of mind in which he will be receptive for the appearance of a spirit. The business is proceeding when suddenly a stranger interrupts and unmasks the trick; but himself produces an apparition in place of that of the trickster, and this apparition makes an important pronouncement to the prince. The prince is torn by doubts, for this stranger is none other than the man who had just prophesied to him; and he soon begins to think that both parties are concerned in the plot since the trickster, though he had been locked up, soon escaped. New and inexplicable incidents make him strive for an explanation of all the secrets; as a result, he comes into complete dependence on an occult society, losing all moral stability. The novel was never finished. In it the struggles of a seeker after spirits are represented in a terrifying fashion; we see how the longing for the spiritual leads men downwards when he looks for it in the external. No one who clings to the material, even if he only seeks to find the spiritual appearing in sensible form, can penetrate to the spiritual. The spiritual has to unveil itself in the soul of man.

That is the true secret of the spiritual; that is why the artist sees it first as beauty. The beautiful, conquered and permeated by the spirit, is made real in a work of art. Hence it is the worthy material of the spiritual. At first the beautiful was the only means for Schiller by which it could reveal itself. He looked with longing back to the time of the Greeks when there existed another means for the awakening of the spiritual: when man raised himself to the divine while bringing god down, making god into man and raising himself by god's means. Mankind must now rise once more to the divine by conquest over the material. Schiller in his plays was always striving higher until the physical fell away more and more until the

Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

which Goethe cried to him after his death, became the full truth. The word “gemein” is not used here in any low, contemptuous sense; it is the common humanity, the common fashion of men that is meant, above which Schiller had raised himself. He had raised himself, as a true seer, to the vision of the spiritual.

He must stand as a pattern before us. That has been the whole object of these lectures; so far as it was possible in a few hours, to trace out this struggling soul of Schiller's, as it rises to greater and greater heights of spiritual insight, and seeks to grasp the spiritual, so that he may impress it upon the sense world. In this struggle we really get to know Schiller, and in him Goethe's words are in truth fulfilled:

Nur der verdient die Freiheit und das lieben
Der Täglich sie erobern muss.

Only he deserves freedom and life
Who daily must conquer them anew.

In this way Schiller fought his way upward, till he became the master of an etheric spirit-permeated form.

The following is a copy of the lectures which I gave between January and March at the Berlin Freie Hochschule dealing with Schiller. The copy is based entirely on the notes which two of the audience made during the lectures. For myself I have been quite unable to look through the notes; and it is only in response to an earnest request that I can agree to the printing of the lectures. I do not really believe that lectures can be reproduced in print. The spoken word is meant to be heard and not to be read, and on that its style depends. ‘Spoken’ treatises or ‘spoken’ books are a monstrosity; and so are books which have their origin in the manuscript copy of a lecture. Anyone who has a feeling for style will agree with me. But exceptions may be made in isolated cases; and this is one of the exceptions—which seems to me to prove the rule.

Rudolf Steiner.

Berlin, April 1905.

Another worldview current, which reaches up to the present, takes its starting point from Spinoza. He is a thinker who has an unconditional trust in human reason. What can be known, like mathematical truths, reason accepts as its knowledge. And the things of the world stand in just such a necessary connection, like the links of a calculation or like the mathematical figures. Everything spiritual as well as everything physical is governed by such necessary laws of nature. It is a childish mental image to believe that a human-like all-wise providence arranges the things. The actions of living beings, the actions of the human mind are subject to the laws of nature just as the stone that falls to the earth according to the laws of gravity. It is a mistake to believe that a creative power has created any beings according to certain purposes. One is mistaken if one believes, for example, that a creator gave horns to the bull so that it could push. No, the bull got his horns according to just as necessary laws as a billiard ball rolls on according to laws if it is pushed. He has the horns by nature and therefore he pushes. One can also say: the bull has not horns, so that he could push, but he pushes, because he has horns. God, in Spinoza's sense, is nothing but the natural necessity inherent in all physical and spiritual phenomena. When man looks out into the world, then he sees God; when he thinks about the things and processes, then the divine world order presents itself to him, which, however, is nothing but the natural order of things. In the sense of Spinoza one cannot speak of a dichotomy between faith and knowledge. For there is nothing except nature. Man himself belongs to this nature. Therefore, when he looks at himself and at nature, everything is revealed to him that can be spoken of at all.

Goethe was also imbued with this world view. He, too, sought in nature itself what earlier views had sought in an otherworldly world. Nature became his god. He did not want to know anything about any other divine entity.

What would be a God, who would push only from the outside,
In the circle the universe at the finger would run!
He wants to move the world within,
Nature in itself, to cherish itself in nature,
Never misses its power, never misses its spirit.

Thus Goethe says. Nature is God to him, and nature also reveals God. There is no other revelation. And there can be no other besides the essences of nature, which are to be reached only by faith. Therefore Goethe never wanted to have anything to do with the Kantian distinction between faith and knowledge.

And that everything that man can desire in truth can also be attained by the contemplation of nature and of man himself, that is also the conviction of the thinkers who in the beginning of the 19th century endeavored to create world views. This is also the conviction of the thinkers who in the second half of the 19th century want to build a worldview out of the insights of natural science. These latter thinkers, such as Haeckel, are of the opinion that the laws of nature which they investigate are not merely subordinate things, but that they truly represent that which gives meaning to life.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte places man's own "I" at the center of his reflections. What have earlier world views done with this "I"? They have lifted it out of the human being and made it a god. Thereby the human-like creator of the world came into being. Fichte leaves all such conceptions of God to themselves. He seeks consciousness where it alone can really be found, in man. Something that was formerly worshipped as God, such a spiritual being, Fichte finds only in man. Thus, when man seeks the relationship between the spirit and the world, he is not dealing with a connection of "God and world," but only with an interaction of the spirit, which is in him, with nature. This is the meaning of Fichte's world view; and everything that has been attributed to Fichte: as if he had wanted to assert, for example, that the individual human being creates nature out of himself, is based only on a very short-sighted interpretation of his thoughts. Schelling then continued to build on Fichte's mental images. Fichte wanted nothing else than to eavesdrop on the human mind when it forms its mental images about nature. For no God gives him these mental images; he forms them alone. The question for Fichte was not how God does it, but how man does it when he finds his way in the world. Schelling built on this the view that we can look at the world from two sides, from the outer side, when we look at the physical processes, and from the inner side, when we look at the spirit, which is also nothing other than nature. Hegel then went one step further. He asked himself: What is it, then, that our thinking actually reveals to us about nature? If I explore the laws of the celestial bodies through my thinking, does not the eternal necessity that prevails in nature reveal itself in these laws? What, then, do all my concepts and ideas give me? But nothing else than what is outside in the nature itself. The same entities are present in me as concepts, as ideas, which rule all existence in the world as eternal, iron laws. If I look inside myself, I perceive concepts and ideas; if I look outside myself, these concepts and ideas are laws of nature. In the individual human being is reflected as thought what rules the whole world as law. One misunderstands Hegel if one claims that he wanted to spin the whole world out of the idea, out of the human head. It will one day have to be counted as an eternal disgrace to German philosophy that it has misunderstood Hegel in this way. Whoever understands Hegel, it does not occur to him to want to spin anything out of the idea. Marx really understood Hegel in the fruitful sense of the word. That is why Marx looked for the laws of economic development where they alone can be found. Where are the laws to be found? To this question Hegel answered: Where the facts are, there are also the laws. There is nowhere else an idea than where the facts are, which one wants to comprehend through this idea. He who investigates the facts of real life thinks Hegelianly. For Hegel was of the opinion that not abstract thoughts, but the things themselves lead to their essences.

The newer natural science proceeds in the same way in the spirit of Hegel. This new natural science, whose great founder Charles Darwin became through his work "The Origin of Species" (1859), seeks the laws of nature in the realm of living beings just as one does in lifeless nature. Ernst Haeckel summarizes the creed of this natural science in the words: "The magnet that attracts iron filings, the powder that explodes, the water vapor that drives the locomotive ... they act as much by living force as man who thinks." This natural science is convinced that with the laws which reason extracts from things, it reveals at the same time the essence of these things. There is nothing left for a faith that is only supposed to give life its meaning. In the fifties, courageous minds, such as Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott and Ludwig Büchner, tried to reassert the view that in the things of this world their essence is also completely and utterly revealed through knowledge. Today it has become fashionable to fall upon these men as upon the most narrow-minded heads and to say of them that they had not seen the actual riddles of the world at all. This is done only by people who themselves have no idea of what questions can be raised at all. What did these men want other than to explore nature in order to gain the meaning of life from nature itself through knowledge? Deeper minds will certainly be able to extract even deeper truths from nature than Vogt and Büchner. But also these deeper spirits will have to do it on the same ways of cognition as they. For one always says: You must seek the spirit, not the raw material! Well, the answer can only be given with Goethe: The spirit is in nature.

What every God is apart from nature, Ludwig Feuerbach has given the answer to, by showing how such a conception of God is created by man, in his image. "God is the revealed interior, the expressed self of man; religion is the solemn unveiling of man's hidden treasures, the admission of his innermost thoughts, the public confession of his secrets of love." What man has within himself, he puts out into the world and worships it as God. In the same way man does it with the moral world order. He can create it only from himself in connection with his equals. But he then imagines that it is set over him by another, higher being. In a radical way, Max Stirner got to grips with such entities that man creates for himself and then sets over himself like higher powers, as a spook or ghost. Stirner demands the liberation of man from such ghosts.

The way, which frees from them, was entered only by the world views built on natural scientific basis in the second half of the 19th century. Other world views, as for example those of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard v. Hartmann are again only relapses into outdated mental images. Schopenhauer, instead of the whole human "I", made only a part, the will, the divine being; and Hartmann did the same with the "I", after he first promoted the consciousness out of this "I". Thereby he came to the "unconscious" as the primordial ground of the world. It is understandable that these two thinkers, from such presuppositions, had to come to the conviction that the world was the worst imaginable. For they have made the "I" the original ground of the world, after they have promoted reason out of it either wholly or in part. The earlier thinkers of this character first idealized the "I," that is, endowed it with even more reason than it has in man. Thereby the world became an institution of infinite wisdom.

The truly modern world view can no longer incorporate anything of old religious mental images. Its basis was already expressed by Schiller when he characterized Goethe's view of nature in his letter to the latter: "From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more intricate, in order to finally build the most intricate of all, the human being, naturally from the materials of the whole building of nature." If man wants to let his existence emerge from something, he can only let it emerge from nature itself. Man is formed out of nature according to eternal, brazen laws; but he is not yet in any way, neither as God nor as another spiritual being, already situated in nature. All mental images which imagine nature as animated or spiritualized (e.g. Paulsen's and others) are relapses into old theological ideas. The spirit has come into being, not developed out of nature. This must be understood first, then the thinking can form a view about this spirit developed within the natural order. Such a world view can only speak of a real freedom. I have shown this in detail in my "Philosophy of Freedom" and in my book "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert". A spirit that would have developed out of another spirit would have to receive from the latter, from the spirit of God or of the world, also its moral aims and purposes; a spirit that has developed out of nature sets for itself the purpose and aim of its existence, gives itself its destiny. A true philosophy of freedom can no longer speak with Adolf Harnack of the fact that knowledge is not able to give meaning to life; it shows rather that man has come into being through the necessity of nature, that he has, however, not been given a predetermined meaning, but that it is up to him to give himself a meaning. The old world views stand with the old economic orders, but they will also fall with them. The economically liberated man will also be a free man as a knowing and moral man; and if the economic order will bring to all men an existence worthy of man, then they will also make a world-view their own which will completely liberate the spirit.

We have seen that about eight hundred years before the beginning of our era an empire spread out from Rome, which originally took its origin from a kind of priestly kingship; how this priestly kingship then passed through about two and a half centuries into a republic. Then we see the Roman state spreading through five centuries over the whole world then under consideration. So we see about seven hundred years before Christ's birth in Rome a king ruling, who is clothed at the same time with the highest priestly dignity of that time. This office has been preserved. The bearer of it, to whom the royal dignity belonged in the older times, before there were secular kings in Rome, was called Pontifex Maximus. So we see a Pontifex Maximus standing at the head of the Roman state, in the rise of this state. We then see how the dignity of the Pontifex Maximus is gradually lowered, so that only the priestly forms remain to him. We see that the Rex, the king still exists, but is actually only a shadow of the original personality. Now we see the republic expanding more and more and in the time when Christianity is founded in the East, we see in Rome again a personality having all authority, all power in his hands in the emperor Augustus. He finds it appropriate, necessary at that time, to have conferred upon him, among other offices of the Republic, the dignity of Pontifex Maximus. Thus, at the beginning of our era in Rome, we again have the Pontifex Maximus with the supreme power. But this is a Pontifex Maximus, a high priest, whose power is not based on the priesthood, but whose power is based solely on his temporal power.

And we see a few centuries, about five hundred years later, this worldly power of the Roman ruler completely destroyed. But instead we see again a Pontifex Maximus, a high priest, a Roman bishop, the later pope, who again bears the dignity of the Pontifex Maximus. And about the year 800 A.D., the prince who is most mentioned, who ruled over those who overthrew the secular Pontifex Maximus in Rome, received the secular royal crown from this Pontifex Maximus. He completely subjugated the secular rule to the priestly rule, to the priestly power. And now begins the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire.

So we see a transformation taking place in history. We see that the only thing that has remained, that has continued, is the dignity of the chief priest in Rome. All around, changes of a world-historically drastic importance have taken place, which one must also look at from a higher point of view in order to understand them completely.

We will have to ask ourselves above all: how did this change take place at the time in which we are now, in which Christianity took its beginning, that is, at the beginning of our era? How did it come about, on the one hand, that a worldly ruler had complete dominion over the world of that time, and that this immense power was completely destroyed a short time later? that the people on whom this power was based ceased to play a role, to be a power? How is it that five hundred years after the beginning of our era the Roman emperorship was destroyed, and that in Rome the Roman priest sat as a prince, with as much power over souls as the Roman emperor, the Caesar, once had in worldly relations?

There are two great currents that bring this about, two currents of such importance and significance as few have in history. On the one hand, it is the spread of Christianity from the East, and on the other hand, it is the wandering wars of the Germanic tribes. The Roman Empire is threatened from two sides: in spiritual relation from the East and in worldly relation from the North. Everything that used to make up the greatness of the Roman Empire was no longer there in a certain respect. But something else was there. The outer forms of this Roman empire had remained. What had remained was that which constituted the actual significance of this Roman Empire, that which originally determined the greatness of the Roman world empire. The Roman thinking, the Roman world view with regard to the external institutions had remained. We shall see to what degree these were preserved. It is true that all former content had been driven out of this empire. But the mere form, the outer dress had remained. And poured into this form was something else, namely Christianity, which now appears in the same forms as Roman emperorship. That on which the rule of the Romans was based had been destroyed by the Nordic peoples. This is a peculiar story, because at least as much of the Roman empire has remained as has perished. And what has remained of it is told by the history of the Catholic Church, what has remained of it is told by what we can experience every day. Go into a courtroom and see how people are accused, defended and how justice is done. That is Roman law. This law was created in Rome and still exists today. We live in institutions that are completely permeated by the views of this Roman Empire. Everything that we still think about legal, property and ownership relationships, about family relationships and so on, can be traced back to the old Roman Empire, even though the people from whom all this emerged lost its external power and importance in world history five hundred years after the birth of Christ.

We have described the spread of Rome over the globe, we have seen how from this then center of the world Rome extended its dominion into all known countries then under consideration. But we have also seen on what actually the possibility was based that Rome became so powerful. We have gradually seen the Roman people in its whole development, and we have seen that with a certain necessity from the whole arrangement and the whole character of this people, the kind developed, how this people founded its world domination. At the same time we have seen how the decline of the Roman world dominion had to come out of this very way, and this is so closely connected with the origin that we have to use the same thoughts that we used when we spoke of the origin. We have seen that the Roman landed property, acquired in immense greed, had to increase the wealth immeasurably, and on the other hand had to produce a poverty, likewise increased immeasurably, so that we see luxury and wealth on the one side and discontent on the other side.

We have also seen on what all that was based, by which Rome became great. We have seen what it meant to be a Roman citizen. We need to get into that mindset. We have seen how the cives, the Roman citizens, had their interest in the state, how every Roman citizen felt called to have a say, to participate, how the voice of the individual came into consideration. This is expressed in the way Rome was governed, how all the offices were conceived in such a way that the power to govern was in the hands of the entire citizenry. Those who administered the empire during the republican period of the Romans were nothing other than administrators of civic power. They were entrusted, for a period of one year, but also for other periods, with what constituted the importance of their office. A Roman citizen never thought otherwise than that what the praetor did was actually for his benefit and that the praetor did it only as his representative. The Roman considered the consul, the quaestor, the praetor as a substitute. And on what was this based? It was based on the fact that the shortest possible election periods were introduced, so that basically no one ever held an office for a long time. There was nothing other than trust between those who were elected and those who voted. There could be no mistrust between a ruling personality and the people. Incidents could occur during the brief reign of a Tribune, but on the whole this government was entirely based on trust. It was a delegated power, and the Roman understood that. He understood what it meant that he was the master and that the other, to whom the power of government was delegated, conducted it only by proxy. This is evident from the way the Roman was the member of a legal people. Only in later times it became somewhat different. Try to ask an educated person today - he may even be very educated - what is the legal difference between the term "property" and the term "possession". These are two terms that come from Roman law. I am convinced you can go far and wide, even among people who have studied a lot, and they will hardly be able to tell you the difference. If you had asked a Roman peasant, he would certainly have known the difference between possession and ownership. Just as the Ten Commandments were learned in the Middle Ages, so every Roman boy learned the twelve tables of the law in school. The Romans were a people of law, and. in flesh and blood the law went over to them.

Now the Roman rule extended over immense areas and many provinces. You can imagine that such a state structure can only hold together in the way we have come to know it, as long as it does not exceed a certain size. But at the moment when the many provinces were conquered, this could no longer be so. The difference between the original Roman state and the provinces appeared. The Roman citizenship was denied to the provinces. The provinces have no rights, they are subjugated. This goes hand in hand with the other stages of development, with the expansion of large-scale landownership and the related problems of inheritance. It goes hand in hand with the emergence of an enormous proletariat. The proliferation of the proletariat is connected with the fact that the old army of citizens was gradually transformed into an army of mercenary troops recruited by individual leaders such as Marius and so on. Thus we see that next to the old Roman citizen a kind of military power developed, which is docile to the one who can just win the favor of this military power. We further see that people like Gracchus are trying to stop the fall of the Roman Empire by creating a kind of middle party. I have already described the Gracchian movement to you. Now it is still important that the younger Gracchus wanted to create a middle party. - This party was to consist of people who had been senators and had left. So it was a kind of knighthood. It was this knighthood that had been enmityed by the proletarians.

Now something very special had happened in Rome at the time when the Caesar power was coming up. This knighthood was to form a power against the great landowners, against the so-called optimates. The old agrarian laws were to be renewed. No one should have more than five hundred acres of land, at most two hundred and fifty acres for adult sons, and at most one thousand acres. The other land was to be given to this middle class as smaller estates. In this way, it was believed that a middle class would be created between the large landowners and the proletariat. This failed, however, because the proletariat had become suspicious and because it did not want to tolerate a party between itself and the actual owners. In the end, the middle party also joined the Optimates. Thus we now have the proletariat on one side and a kind of party of order on the other. This has emerged in recent times. The republican power has passed very gradually, almost unnoticed, into the Caesarian power. Octavius, the Roman emperor, was himself a kind of republican ruler, and he gradually rose to - one cannot say - dignity, for quite by necessity this peculiar fullness of power of Octavius-Augustus emerged from the Roman conditions. He simply continued the old Roman conditions, had all the offices gradually transferred to him. And that he was able to fill these offices as a kind of autocrat came from the fact that the difference between the Roman conditions and those in the province outside had become so great. In the province, people had long since ruled in a kind of noblemanly way. The Roman citizens did not dislike this at all. They felt themselves to be Roman citizens, and they were not at all concerned that those outside in the province should have the same right as they. So they were satisfied with the fact that from Rome a kind of absolute governmental power developed over the province. In particular, the Roman autocrats had all the so-called proconsular powers in the provinces transferred to them. Thus it happened that the first consuls were rulers of their own kind and power. In Rome they knew how to maintain the power that had been transferred to them as in earlier times, and outside in the sense of holding the provinces to the state. Thus developed, one can say with agreement of the Roman citizenry, the Roman violence.

And then, during the Caesar period, came the following. It was actually so that by the absolute power in the provinces the Caesars had appropriated the entire tax institution and the entire military power. Therefore, they were able to draw enormous revenues from the provinces. Thus, in addition to the Roman state treasury, a kind of imperial treasury developed. And with the Octavian power, the Roman-Caesarian autocracy developed in the following way: It was the Roman citizens who agreed that everything that had to be done in the province could no longer be done with the Roman treasury. These were often things that had become necessary. But even these could no longer be paid from the state treasury. The income did not flow into the treasury, but into the treasury of the Caesars. And so it happened that the Caesars could raise themselves to a kind of benefactors. Thus the Caesarian authority and power developed, and all other offices had to sink down to a kind of shadow offices. From within, the Roman Caesar power conquered the power in the state. And so we understand that basically only the first emperors were true Romans. We understand that later, basically, there were not real Romans sitting on the chair of the Caesars, but people who had been elected in the provinces, and who, like Hadrıan and Caracalla, were able to seize power. From the periphery, Rome was fed to absolutism. Thus, by a kind of inner necessity of development, what had been distributed among the Roman citizens passed into the hands of an autocrat. It is now quite natural that the whole Roman system of law and concepts is transferred to the one inner center. What was formerly the responsibility of the Roman citizens is now the responsibility of individual officials, not only in the provinces but also in Rome itself.

There is something going on that one must understand if one wants to understand the times correctly. If we look back for a moment to Greece and to Rome in the time of the old kingship, we will see that everywhere a direct relationship between the rulers and the ruled is involved. Whether this relationship of trust was formed in this or that way, it was a natural relationship from the older times, from which we started in the last historical consideration, because they were recognized in this or that way by the governed, so that one believed in them. In principle it was like this. The one who ruled had to acquire certain qualities, especially in the older priestly states. There nobody believed in divine powers floating beyond the world. But one believed in a kind of divinization of man, because one looked for the principle of development in man. The priest-king in Rome was recognized only if he had acquired spiritual and moral qualities of the gods, if he had developed inwardly. It was possible to acquire this, it was possible to become a kind of divinized person who deserved veneration. It was not a relationship of subservience, it was trust. That's what everybody who knows things has to say. That was based on something that was always there in the heart, and it continued to plant itself in the Republic.

But in the way Roman law developed, it was capable of completely erasing this personal, living relationship of ruler and ruled. It was capable of replacing the personal abstract, thought relationship. If you could go back to those times of Rome, you would see that he who sat in judgment as praetor at Rome, even if he had the twelve table laws before him, he could still do something based on trust through personal insight. Something still depended there on the personality. That became quite different later. Later, the whole legal system gradually became a purely abstract system of thought. The only thing that mattered was to interpret the law according to its paragraphs by logical sharpness. The jurist should be a mere thinker, a merely logically trained man. Thinking was the only thing that mattered. Nothing of the immediate life should flow into it, nothing of the mind and nothing of personal influence. Only the letter was to be followed. And the law was interpreted more and more according to the letter. It was only officials who had to handle the letter outside in the provinces and later also in Rome. There it was a question of studying the paragraphs and to decide apart from every immediate life only by thoughts - and this went over to the sophistic thoughts. The whole way of thinking, which expressed itself in the administration and government, had assumed something, which treated the whole institutions like a calculating example. This you must hold fast, and then you will understand what it means to say that the whole Roman life had been transformed into a system of dogmas. The Roman state, which had created a law out of the free decision, out of the soul of the citizens, had gradually transformed it into dogmas. At the time of the emergence of Christianity, personal government was no longer considered, but only written law. It was a real dogma law. The Caesars could be taken here and there, all that mattered to them was to squeeze the whole state into a legal system that could be stretched tightly from a center point. The whole Roman state was gradually dogmatized. We see it divided into smaller areas headed by administrators of a juridical nature. These areas were again grouped together into dioceses. Thus we see the Roman state gradually taking on a form that we later see again in the division that the Catholic Church adopted. It was not Christianity that created these forms; this was done entirely according to the template of the Roman dogmatized state.

Christianity transplanted itself from the East into this state, with the whole appearance that you know now. Of course, we have to deal with personalities. But we cannot deal with individual Roman emperors. Basically, this history is also rather boring. It is perhaps sufficient if we mention Caligula - Commissar Boots. But one thing is important. We have to realize what became of or with the Roman culture. This Roman culture had something that will remind you of the culture of another time. I would like to describe to you a personality who is typical, representative, and who can be cited here for comparison, that is Lucian. He came from Asia and is introduced as a very special light. He tells us about himself in a remarkable work "The Dream". I mention this, not because it is a significant literary product, but because it can be considered a characteristic sign of the way of thinking of the Roman Empire of that time. Two female figures appeared to him in a dream, one was art, the other was education. Art demanded that he strive for hard work. The education demanded nothing of all this. He only needed to acquire a few tricks of the trade, how to persuade people as well as possible. And in ancient Rome, talking meant as much as writing newspapers does today. So he said to himself, why should I follow Phidias, why Homer? I'll remain a poor guy. He followed the second female figure and became an itinerant speaker, a speaker of a very peculiar kind, a speaker with no educational basis. In those days, education meant speaking to people without knowing anything, without having studied seriously, just as one writes in the newspaper today.

That's how he went out into the world. And now we see how he talks about religion and politics, how he appears as a personality of whom history reports nothing, but who was able to lift the speech in a conversation, as in an editorial, up to heaven. Everywhere he was active in this way. He came as far as France, was a personality without support, without inner content and substance. This was the nature of education in the great Roman Empire of that time. These were the educated. The one who had a core, like Apollonius, a contemporary of Lucian, could not come to any kind of considerable importance. It was quite impossible at that time. But the whole wide empire sighed. It was the discontent and immorality from which one suffered. I cannot describe to you the kind of amusements of a gruesome and immoral nature. A third of the year was spent in gladiatorial games, in bullfights or in shows of the most boisterous kind. And this spread more and more. On the one hand we have extreme luxury, and on the other hand we have poverty and misery that is indescribable.

Now you see how it came to this, how in this whole Roman empire an element gained more and more spreading, which differed from all others in that it had more seriousness, that it had a deeper content. That was Judaism. The Jews could be found everywhere in the Roman Empire at that time. It would be quite unhistorical if you wanted to believe that at that time the Jews were limited only to Palestine. In the whole of North Africa, in Rome and in France, everywhere you can find the Jews already at that time. Their religion was still much more substantial than what the education of the Roman time offered. It existed next to the currents of lower spirit. By the fact that the Romans came into all world, they spread also the cult, the sacrificial acts, the holy acts of the different provinces. In Rome one could see Persian, Arabian, Egyptian services. This resulted in a tremendous externalization.

In the Roman Caesar period religion came to such a degree of externalization that it cannot be compared with anything earlier. The priest of the older times was a kind of initiate, after he had previously overcome everything lower. Then he was also called a divinized personality. This was achieved in the various schools of different countries. As far as this dignity was exalted - it was one of the most sacred of antiquity - it was now lowered. It was so that the Roman Caesars were revered as so-called initiates, even divinely worshipped. Lucretia even attained divine veneration, because with her, prepared by external actions and training, an initiation had been accomplished.

But this was entirely external. When Augustus had assumed the title Pontifex Maximus, he had outwardly assumed everything that had formerly been the inward sign of the priests. Because it had lost all connection with its origin, it had also lost all meaning and the right relationship.

This was the situation in Rome at the time when it received a complete renewal of its religious outlook from the East. A renewal of the religious view came, which we do not need to describe according to the content, because we are not presenting a history of religion, but a general history, but which we must describe according to the outer forms. Above all, a wisdom religion was transplanted. The first propagators of this Christian religion were indeed the most learned, the deepest and most significant men of that time. They had looked up to the founder of Christianity, from the whole ground of this learning. Read them: Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and so on, and you will see what they accomplished in wisdom in the scholarship of that time. They put all that at the service of this new idea. All they were trying to do was nothing other than a complete renewal of religious feeling, linked at the same time to a penetration of the whole human being.

Now imagine that while in Rome over there everything had become externality, all religiosity had been draped around Caesar like a cloak, and everything was talked about with admixture of mockery, as Lucian did, there the religious was to be renewed with renunciation of all worldliness, merely out of the innermost of man, of the human mind. And the religious is renewed in such a way that deeply disposed, most learned men are placed in the service of this idea. are placed at the service of this idea. It was so - this must not be misunderstood - that the people of the first Christianity were not people like the ordinary members of the masses of people, but they were the most clever ones of that time. This spread with lightning speed, because the whole religion had nothing of asceticism, nothing of otherworldliness about it. The people in the immediate everyday life took it up. Everything that had been perceived as Roman, everything that had led to luxury and well-being in Rome, was foreign to the core of this religion. You can see what was understood and grasped by the whole man, by the man of everyday life, through this confession, which spread with great speed, if you read the description of the Christian principle in Tertullian, who says: We Christians know nothing that is foreign to human life. We do not withdraw from everyday life, we want to bring something to man as he is everyday, we want to represent the world, we want to enjoy what is in the world. Only we do not want to know about the debaucheries of Rome.

And to show how these Christians lived together, where the Roman Empire had not yet destroyed the market dominions, I need only quote the words from the Acts of the Apostles, not as a sermon and not as an admonishing word: "But the multitude of the faithful were of one heart and one soul. Neither did anyone say of his goods that they were his, but all things were common to them . . . Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as had fields, or houses, sold them, and brought the money of the things sold, and laid it at the apostles' feet; and they gave to every man his necessities. But Joses, surnamed of the apostles Barnabas, of the family of a Levite of Cyprus, had an accker, and sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet." This is not a sermon, this is a description of what was intended, and in many cases realized. This was what was opposed to the Roman state life. That was one reason why Christianity was introduced with such speed. That is why Christianity so quickly entered the hearts of those who had nothing to hope for. Not only did they hear at that time that there was no dogma, it was the living word, the living action that they felt.

The one who spoke, spoke what he knew and had recognized as truth. He could say it today in one form and tomorrow in another. There was no established Christian dogma. It was the attitude, the inner life, that held this Christian community together. And that was what the first Christians preached. It was also why, in the early years of Christianity, people freely discussed the truth back and forth. There is no freer discussion, no freer debate than was present in the early days of this Christianity. There is only a little by little talk of a violence. The important thing to take into account, which then later leads to the rape, which leads to the emergence of the dogmatism of Christianity in the first place, is the fact that the Roman Empire was dogmatized. The whole Roman Empire was transformed into a dogma system. One could not conceive of anything other than matters of understanding, nothing other than stiff, abstract dogma. Thus it came about that the first Christians were persecuted, but that they grew more and more in importance, and that the Caesars, after Constantine's action, and the Constantines themselves, were forced to recognize the Christians. But how did they recognize them? They let them grow into the Roman state, into that which was filled with the dogma and temporal power that were founded in the Roman state. For this it had to put all its influence at the disposal of the Roman rulers; and the original division passed into the bishoprics and dioceses.

It is not to be wondered at that in 325 the Nicaean Council turned out as it just did. At that time, the two currents of Christianity were still opposed to each other in the presbyter Arius and Athanasıius, who was educated entirely in the Roman spirit. Arius believed in the gradual development of man. He saw it as unlimited; he called it divinization. Man can resemble God; that is true Arianism. This was opposed by the Roman dogmatist Athanasius, who said: "The divinity of Christ must be raised above all that is connected with humanity to the abstractness, the otherworldliness of the dogmatism that gradually developed in the Roman Empire. Thus, Arian Christianity turned into Athanasian Christianity, and the latter won. What was important for the Roman Caesar? Later, he himself converted to Christianity, but not to Athanasian Christianity, but to Arian Christianity. He knew, however, that Athanasianism could at least seemingly support the old Roman Empire. Christianity was to become a support of the Roman Empire; this was the important question that was decided in the beginning of the 4th century. At the same time, however, this was the period of world history when the Germanic tribes had become more and more powerful, and it was no longer of any use to support the old Roman Empire through transformation and remodeling; it was swept away by the Germanic tribes. We will talk about this next time, how the Germanic tribes overthrew the old Roman Empire.

Then we still want to show how the Roman Empire was still a power in the last death twitch. This was the task of transforming the doctrine of Christianity in such a way that this doctrine took on a political form and was suitable to be the carrier of a political system. Powerful was this idea, however, which at that time the leading Christianity knew how to take out of the original Christianity. Power was what it added to the Roman Caesar idea and the transformed Christianity. Power was. The political system was so powerful that when Germania destroyed this Roman Empire, when the Germanic land territory spread more and more, the so-called important ruler of the beginning Middle Ages, Charlemagne, received the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope, the Pontifex Maximus. Such were the effects when little remained of the old Roman Empire. You see how peculiarly the destinies of the world are interlinked, you see that we must know above all that we are dealing with a political power throughout the Middle Ages, because the Roman idea of the state flowed into the original Christianity. The actual Christianity was not inserted into the Roman idea of the state; and it was always the case that Christianity in monasticism rebelled against the political form of Christianity.

An idea is connected with it. It is an idea that is difficult to grasp because it was not based in the original Christianity at all. You will find nothing of monasticism in Christianity, because this kind of isolation, of withdrawal from the world, was completely foreign to it. To the one who took Christianity seriously, the form, the political form, was foreign. So, in order to lead the religion of Christianity, he withdrew to the monastery. Everything that has asserted itself as such associations, as monasticism, through the centuries - even if it degenerated, because the Catholic Church wanted to suppress every such attempt - that was a living outcry of Christianity against political power. Thus we have the development of power.

Now we still have to recognize what significance the Germanic element has in this time, to recognize what role Christianity plays in the Germanic element. We also still have to recognize what is developing out of the old Roman Empire and to see how this old Roman ruin is collapsing, but how something came out of it under which the peoples had to groan for a long time. It begins with the call for freedom and ends with the suppression of freedom. It is the call that everyone should respect each other as equals, and it ends with everyone being oppressed. It is strange that in our time historians have found themselves defending Caracalla because he gave the so-called equality to the whole Roman Empire. He, as one of the most insignificant and harmful Caesars, made those who were outside in the provinces equal to the Romans. But, he then oppressed them all together! This is the shape that the original Roman liberty took.

When we see that the destiny of freedom can be such, then we really gain from history what we can call a kind of education through history. Then we learn that there is a real rock, like Peter had, a rock based on the original founder, on which human development can really be built. This rock is and must be: human freedom and human dignity. These can be suppressed at times, so strongly suppressed, as it happened in the old Roman empire by the conditions, which can be compared with few. However, the education of man to freedom is given in history. This is an important fact, that when violence ruled in ancient Rome, in the summit, at the same time the foundation was submerged, and the whole structure collapsed, so that it must be said of freedom that, however deeply it is suppressed, to it and from it the true word applies:

The old overthrows, time changes,

And new life blossoms from the ruins.